Here's one of those beautiful drone albums that should resonate with anyone keen on something to follow Stars Of The Lid, The Caretaker, or Basinski. The Ingenting Kollektiva remains something of a mystery both to us and, so it seems, to the rest of the world. Some information about their ideas are available (thanks to the impressionistic "art of memory" blog run by the Kollectiva's M. Swiezynski), but much remains purposefully arcane, which suits their smoke and mirror approach to sound design. The Kollectiva's first album seemed an homage to Ingmar Bergman's definition of nothingness, in spanning the existential gap between the mundane and the eternal void. It also channelled a zeitgeist that threaded together various pieces of music and film from 1969, but the results of that project formed an ethereal set of dronemuzik that found a particular voice that transcended the cultural references.
The ghostly mood and nocturnal spell of their first album continues here on Lost Beyond Telling, tracking further back in time with references to Messiaen and Baudelaire. And again, the Kollecktiva finds itself making a slow, almost liturgical album of minimalist serenades through heavy processed instruments (guitar, cello, psaltry, etc.), field recordings, and manipulated pieces of crusty vinyl. A beautiful night sea music opens the album with pools of deep drones that gradually fracture into Basinski-like looping patterns phased through a refined use tremolo and delay. Comparatively scabrous textures churn through spiralling bird-song-like twitter on "The Dark Backward Abysm Of Time" all leading up to the somber, twenty-three minute conclusion of damp field recordings and backmasked bells dragging through a darkened loveliness of oceanic driftscaping getting close to a Salt Marie Celeste vibe. So nice!
The dvd portion of the program features two distinct visual aesthetics from within the Kollektiva. The first four short films come by way of Tarrl Lightowler, who operates with an intense stroboscopic flickering of ever magnifying, ever vibrant images. Thickets of wire, bright petals, chunks of ice, and piles of leaves are just a scant number of the images that Lightowler projects in his videos, all siphoning out of a violent vortex of pulsing light. For all of its natural source materials, his videos are quite violent, countering the hypnotic wash of the sound, much of which originates from the material on the cd. Brilliant stuff for sure, but please watch carefully, as retinal fatigue comes on very quickly with these films. The two latter films are from Matthew Swiezynski, whose videos are far murkier with whisps of fire and shadows of the landscape dominating the darkened field of vision. On both of his films, the sounds are wholly unique based on creepy sounding loops that could have been culled from Tibetan horns and harmonium.
Finally got a new batch of these amazing books, tailor made for us music geeks. Super in depth examinations of some of our favorite records! The cool thing is that they're not just the same old rehashed stories about the bands or artists, and who they slept with and where they grew up (although we like those too!), instead they're about the creation of those specific albums. The writers go really deep into every facet of the creation. The writing is often quite dense and so informative. Like a Mojo article expanded a hundred fold! We wanted to give each one an in depth review, but they are all so good and they keep coming fast and furious so we figured we oughta just list em. Basically, if you love the record, you're definitely gonna want the book! Also got the Joe Pernice Meat Is Murder book back in stock as well as Andrew Hulktrans's book about Love's masterpiece Forever Changes. And if you're anything like the music geeks here, you're gonna want all of em! Future volumes include My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, Radiohead's OK Computer, Jethro Tull's Aqualung.
It's a whole new world now, discovering music. MySpace, Youtube, people emailing MP3's and JPEG's. Easier maybe, but not nearly as romantic or as exciting as receiving some mysterious package in the mail, or stumbling upon some strange looking record in a dusty old bin and some tiny record store. And to be totally honest, almost all of the amazing discoveries that have ended up being big AQ faves, began life as a weird little package that just showed up in the mail one day.
None maybe weirder than the package we got from a band called, wait for it, Inh Halentropy. Yep. They had us at Inh Halentropy. It's a weird enough name, but it's two words?!? So inside the package was a cd with that classic image of Bigfoot, walking through the clearing, staring at the camera, and over the top, the band logo, very eighties metal looking, in the middle of a hand drawn spiderweb. Still we had no idea what to expect inside. But we did discover a note. Which read in part: "Dark Greetings. For your grimnatious becryptlement�" signed appropriately enough: "In ancient solemnity, none so grimm�"
OK. We were sold, now all that was left was to actually listen to the cd-r. And as with most things, certainly the most exciting and satisfying things, the music was nothing at all like what we expected�
Inh Halentropy seem to be a metal band, black metal more specifically, yet most of the disc is distinctly not metal. Or at least not typically metal. Beginning with the sound of surf on the shore, the calls of sea birds, the band crawls into action, a huge rumbling bass tone, clouds of electronic FX, a simple drawn out melody, clean guitars unwinding in an expanse of dark shimmer, when suddenly, a massive speaker destroying low end growl surfaces, and as far as we can tell, maybe those are the vocals. Church bells toll, the ambience gets thicker and more grim, the closest comparison might be funereal doom, but it's sort of ethereal. And sort of pretty. But definitely ominous and creepy. Like Low crossed with Goblin crossed with Esoteric. Elsewhere, the black clouded skies are filled with the clatter of chimes, strange harmonics ringing out, all over thick lustrous black ambience, the sound of rain, at times it almost sounds like a blackened new age, which sounds weird but is most definitely a very good thing.
"Golden Beast Altered Axe" might be the most trippy, a simple drum plod, spread out over a slowly squirming synthscape, everything wreathed in ephemeral clouds of twinkling electronic effects, a mournful melody drifts over the top, while running through the entire a track, a creepy ominous low end melody of buzz and whir, all beneath a constant sheet of rain. Very cinematic and evocative.
Our favorite track might be "A Door Is A Tomb", thee most propulsive of the bunch, but we're still talking a glacial crawl, more ambient forest sounds, water and wind, insects in the background, but here, flutes flutter over a backdrop of downtuned riffage, but smeared into a warm moaning blur, over the top, bells chime, mysterious vocals croak and growl, the drums a simple machinelike rhythm, everything eventually breaking down into a plodding bass-ic doom, wrapped in a midnight storm, and suffused with thick ropy drones and grinding minimal low end whir.
Really pretty fantastic, and totally baffling. New age doom? Black ambient nature music? Not sure what to call it, but it's completely killing us. Add to that, the fact that the date on the back of the disc says 1980, and other than the song titles and an email address (oh and a few more pictures of giant hairy beasts) there's really not much else to go on. But the music is plenty. A perfectly freaky, haunting cinematic slowcore new age black doom sprawl that should for sure hit the spot for those of you who could barely make it through that descriptor without thinking that this might already be your new favorite record. We are suitably grimnatiously becryptled. As shall you be, wethinks�
The long anticipated return of Inh Halentropy, a band we know very little about, other than they make a sound like almost nothing we've EVER heard before. A band who introduced themselves to us with a random package in the mail, containing a cd-r, and these simple words: "Dark Greetings. For your grimnatious becryptlement�" as well as the similarly mysterious sign off: "In ancient solemnity, none so grimm�".
We expected black metal, and that's what we got. sort of. Their sound was most definitely black, but not metal in any way we were familiar with, instead they unfurled a cinematic new age-y black ambient doom, equal parts Esoteric, Goblin, and Low, a sort of mysterious blissed out yet grim slowcore. Or something. Their cd-r release disappeared in no time, and no word from the band until recently, a new cd-r just showed up one day, that familiar two part band name, an owl and all sorts of strange symbols, we were soooo excited. We originally thought it was a record called Dull Knife, but soon discovered Inh Halentropy were sharing the cds with another like minded horde CALLED Dull Knife.
So what has changed in the last two years, if anything? Well, the sound is still grim, and haunting, a swirling slo-mo mix of atmospheric doom and creepy crawly slowcore, an eighties horror movie soundtrack vibe infused with a shimmery drifty bit of new age ambience, two tracks, the first a plodding cinematic sprawl, with abstract programmed drums, dark swells of distant rumble, smears of almost cheesy sounding synths, what sounds like faux horns (also probably synths), deeeeeeep bass that throbs underneath, all wrapped up with super lyrical, haunting minor key melodies, definitely like the soundtrack to some lost 30 year old European horror film.
The second Inh Halentropy jam is even trippier and more spaced out, beginning with heavily effected falsetto vocals, that almost sound like wild animal calls or that little 'cooo' sound from Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie & Clyde" albeit way more evil, some woozy detuned guitars, and some shimmery squalls of warped warble, eventually spreading out into a slow burning sprawl of spidery guitars, hushed whir and glistening tinkles, and some seriously disturbing slowed down samples. So creepy and kick ass. Hate to think we might have to wait 2 more years for another full length.
Inh Halentropy set the bar pretty high, but Dull Knife are undeterred, and offer up their own sort of creepy ambience, deep warped low end tones, unfurling grimly in an expanse of muted buzz and crumbling distortion, reminding us quite a bit of Trollmann, in its minimal low end heaviness, over the course of the track, the low end grows more abrasive, and more active, fluctuating more wildly, like some weirdly distorted symphony for foghorn and black buzz. The second DK track's another bleak bit of minimal grimness, this time even more harrowingly dense, the sounds thick and corrosive, the swells coming faster and faster, eventually blurring into a single oozing slab of blackdrone, shot through with shards of crunch and strange bits of glitch. Wow. Guess we need to hear more from these guys as well.
Needless to say, anyone into sounds slow, low, grim and black, spaced out and atmospheric, haunting and heavy, should grab one of these right quick.
SUPER LIMITED of course. Each one hand screened, different colored ink, on different colored textured paper, every one different.
This was a warehouse find, managed to dig up 4 or 5 copies, been hiding away for 5 or 6 years now, which is a shame cuz this is some pretty bad ass black metal. Split records are always funny when both bands share members, but even more funny when both bands are one man bands, and that one man is the same guy. Thus we have this split from way back in 2004, featuring Inimical and Sect, both the work of J. Del Russi, who hails from New Jersey, and MIGHT be more recognizable under his other name, Xathagorra Mlandroth, which is what he used in another one man band, long time aQ faves, ultra funereal doomlord(s) Catacombs.
But before the blackened slo-mo tarpit crawl of Catacombs, Russi/Mlandroth was trafficking in some serious old school raw and grim black metal, all frantic riffing, furious drumming, and some sick raspy vokills, the sound murky and lo-fi, the arrangements repetitive and trancelike, very hypnotic and mesmerizing, in fact almost weirdly looped sounding, which only adds to the mesmerizing vibe.
Where Inimical was more murky and washed out, the sound of Sect was more brittle and buzzy, the sound blown out and buzz drenched and thickly atmospheric, but similar to Inimical, the sound is cyclical and repetitive and trancelike and again weirdly looped, few parts repeated over and over, almost mantra like, although Sect did mix it up, with some weirdly industrial rhythms, abstract droned out ambience, and some weird spacey song structures, often ditching the blackness entirely for something way more abstract and tripped out. Cool stuff for sure. And in Sect maybe hints of what was to come in Catacombs.
Got very few of these, not sure if it's even still available, but we're guessing not, so grab one of these quick before they're gone.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Vampiric emo-no-wave-techno-metal. Listen to them. The Philadelphian children of the night. What beautiful music they make. ...Take the weirdest keyboard black metal (Arcturus/Septic Flesh), the prog-post-punk & male vocals of Dischord band Circus Lupus, occasional Cradle of Filth style female vocals, and gothic corpsepaint (really) and add a little Autechre & you've got Ink & Dagger, more or less.
Long, long awaited final release from this now sadly defunct Philadelphia band, who blazed their own musical trail combining emo punk rock, math-core, electronics, and no-wave...that unique formula, not to mention their kick-ass guitarist and of course their band-defining obsession with vampires, made Ink & Dagger a big AQ favorite. This self-titled album, released after many months delay, sees them incorporating more of a riffy '70s metal influence, while still retaining their moody, complex mix of weirdness. For fans of Circus Lupus, Ruin, Coalesce, Fugazi, and, let's face it, Led Zeppelin! In other words, recommended.
We have no idea where this band is from, who is in the band, we could find nothing at all about them on the internet, but whoever they are, we like them. A lot. Ultra lo-fi midtempo black metal buzz, a la Burzum and about a million followers, but like many acolytes of the mighty Burzumic one, a handful of killer riffs, some strange sonic ideas, and some serious emotion and passion, and it's easy to transform that worship into something that stands up on its own. Inmitten Des Waldes starts things off with wild streaks of feedback, and maybe the most lo-fi drum recording EVER, with the guitars not far behind. This is definitely some serious boombox, garage / rehearsal space recording, but even with cymbals and hi-hats sizzling all over the place, and the guitars sort of washed out by the drums, it's still easy to feel the power of these riffs and what could be if these guys made it to a proper studio. That said, the sound is almost as much a part of what makes this so great as the music. The fuzz and hiss, the super intimate raw vibe. Plus it seems to be instrumental, or if there are vocals, the guy was shouting them NOT into a mic, so they are lost and buried, but that's kinda cool too, making Inmitten Des Waldes sort of like a black metal Gore!
This is one of those records that we always thought we were just going to hear about, maybe hear a song or two on some compilation, but never actually get to hear in its entirety. So we're THRILLED to see this pre-CAN album, a soundtrack to a film that never came out (how come those are always the best?!), finally seeing the light of day. And what a tripped out, acid soaked, free-pop-jazz-rock odyssey it is!
Recorded in 1968 by a lineup that included Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit who a year later would make their debut as Can with the release of Monster Movie, listening to these sounds one for sure can hear the seeds of what would become Can's distinctive krautrock sound, but this also displays a much more fried, disjointed and mind altering side to these way ahead of their time music makers. While mostly an instrumental affair that at times reminds us of the equally colorful and fucked up Jean Claude Vannier concept album L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, there are a few tracks which have vocals courtesy of Irmin Schmidt, but the true show stopper is when Rosy Rosy, a film actress in Germany at the time, takes the mic for "Kamerasong", a track we imagine folks like Broadcast and Stereolab have played on repeat a billion times (like we have now!). While plenty of the songs here hint at the more song based Can records to come, lots of Agilok & Blubbo is much more about sprawling, scrappy, tripped out and fucked up delight, the kind of sounds modern day colorful noise makers like Kemialliset Ystavat and Sunburned Hand Of The Man would bow down to. What makes the record so enjoyable is how its paced, just when things have gotten way deconstructed and abstract they snap into more of a catchy, driving melody and then continue on in more bizarre directions and into outer dimensions. Warped, damaged and engaging in all the right ways!
The latest release from Pacific City Sound Visions, the label run by Spencer Clark, one half of the late great floorcore noise duo The Skaters. He's in Inner Tube, joined by none other than Mark McGuire of Emeralds, and the results are pretty baffling, but brilliant in their own way. The sounds of Inner Tube seems to hew much closer to those of the OTHER Skater, James Ferraro, with a wildly fractured recapitulation of the cheesiest music of the eighties, in this case, what sounds like the theme music from BayWatch or Miami Vice, but with more shredding guitar. What? Yep, imagine Joe Satriani via Ariel Pink, and you'll be getting warmer, fuzzy guitars, propulsive beats, synthy swirls, some seriously retro eighties pop, but with endlessly shredding psychedelic leads, total shredfest, but wedded to old school sort of electro pop synth rock. There are a few tracks, where things get a bit murkier and moodier, and a little bit soundtracky, but the majority of the record sets itself firmly in shredding eighties retro pop, but suitably warped and weird. Might shed some light on the proceedings to have Clark himself explain the impetus / genesis of Inner Tube:
"The bliss and ecstatic power of Australian beach music has kept me in this positive mental attitude that I wanted to communicate to everyone around me. Mark and I began to be in touch, and started to really connect in our exotic fascination with Australia and its surf culture. We decided to record an album together with impressions from these private movies and their tunes. Mark travelled numerous times to Pacific City Studios so that we could make this album together (and eventually moved here). At one point, a woman visiting Hotel California who I hadn't met before, mentioned she thought it was strange that I played so much Australian music. I told her about my fascination with Storm Riders, the sickest Australian movie of all time. She immediately told me that her Uncle had a big part in the movie.�The guy's name is Rabbit Bartholomew. He is a magical person in this Storm Riders movie and has been an inspirational to surfers everywhere. He wrote this letter to Mark and I: 'Hey Spencer, Great to get ya letter. Christel gave me a bit of insight. Really cool how you guys were talking about Storm Riders and our family connection, that's meant to be bra. For sure, send me a demo, I'll give ya some feedback. That's really cool about Inner Tube and the beloved zone, that's it mate, right on the money.' We then realized that we were to travel to the Gold Coast in Australia to record Inner Tube Part Deux, and play a Surf Festival put on by Rabbit Bartholomew's sister. The story just keeps on going, so Mark and I are really stoked to have you guys check this out with us..."
Ummm, yep. Doesn't make a whole lot more sense now does it. Or does it? Regardless, we dig it!
Comes in suitably garish dayglo surfer style jacket, and includes a huge equally garish / dayglo poster of Clark and McGuire.
Ultra limited, sprawling triple cassette collection of murky, mechanical hypnogogic loopscapes, from Belgian soundscaper and synth minimalist Innercity aka Hans Dens. While on his previous cd-r for Ruralfaune, he crafted a sound more in keeping with the current movement of blissed out synthkraut dronemusic makers, on Arupa Travels, Dens' sound falls more in line with the other Innercity releases we've heard. Gloriously tripped out lo-fi blisscapes, rife with decaying loops, streaks of blurred noise, buried rhythms, strange sped up voices, crumbling low end drones, field recordings, Jeck like skipping-record landscapes of dusty crackle and muted melody, ethereal expanses of gorgeous hazy ambience and heaving slabs of rhythmic crunch, lush swells of soft noise, peppered with mechanical creaks and layered whirs, a bleary eyed soft focus drift, rendered in chunks of low fidelity hum, mysterious bits of soundtracky post rock meander, gauzy clouds of sci-fi synth, haunting stretches of ominous cinematic shimmer, and deep dense slabs of otherworldly psychedelic minimalist drift. So fantastic.
ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 30 copies, we have about a dozen left. Comes in a cool oversized plastic clamshell case (like they use for language tapes), with a printed fold out insert.
One of two new releases this week from Belgian synthscaper Hans Dens. Innercity's In Fetal Aura, released on Oneohtrix Point Never's Upstairs label, was a dizzying assemblage of garbled and processed voices, fractured super distorted beats, and of course hazy washed out synth drones, and on the misleadingly titled Cop Killer, Dens offers up more of the same, but the sounds here, while an obvious continuation of In Fetal Aura, manage to be even more dense and layered and tripped out and chaotic.
Beginning with a tangle of sped up voices, the sounds soon veers into crumbling crunch, distorted and blown out, before slipping back into something a bit more hypnotic and woozy, sounding almost like a synthier Avarus, looped melodies, random clattery rhythms, layer after layer of pulses and shimmers and drones, the vibe definitely future retro, the sound super abstract, a little sci-fi, very mesmerizing, and then it slips even further off the rails, swirling squalls of franticly buzzing electronics, swirls of sped up sound and a return of those voices that opened the record (and again intoning comically sped up profanities).
The flipside starts out much more mellow, a sort of nursery rhyme style space age music box, unfurling corroded melodies over thick rumbles and metallic groans, slowly shifting, the melodies seeming to drag, as if the track was gradually melding before your very ears, only to eventually morph into a gorgeously murky muddy pulsescape, warped and warbly and hauntingly beautiful, almost like some sort of Chain Reaction heroin house filtered through a more modern lo-fi psych-drone-synth-wave aesthetic. Cool.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Full color covers, each with a tiny numbered insert...
Another fantastic collection of murky, sci-fi, new ageish, synth-wave, soft-noise dronescapes from this Belgian audio alchemist. Low fidelity mad scientist concoctions of muted mechanical crunch, woozy myopic shimmer, hazy soft focus whir, buried hypnogogic melodies, sonically similar to countrymen Dolphins Into The Future, as well as folks like High Wolf, Skaters, etc. Innercity, aka Hans Dens, takes all those elements and blends them into retro-futuristic miniature soundtracks, each track evoking some strange alternate universe, some long lost and buried civilization, decaying tape loops unwind crookedly, bunching up into warped soft squalls of blurred melody, cacophonous collisions of metallic crunch and layered thrum, bleed into each other, and are seemingly viewed through broken panes of frosted glass, everything gorgeously shadowy and indistinct, fractured rhythms stutter and stumble beneath clouds of Eastern melodies and effects drenched squiggles, occasionally locking into total Goblin/Carpenter sinister synthscaped ambience, or lurching machinelike robo-funk, the motorik pulses skittering over buried slowed down vocals all wreathed in a fuzzy haze, sometimes overtaken by heaving walls of crumbling shoegazey crunch, other times gradually blissing out into barely there swirls.
The lp comes with a cassette, featuring nearly an extra hour of music, parts 3 and 4 of Innercity's Future Life songsuite, one part washed out gauzy minimal drift, a darkly meditative sprawl of hushed shimmer, the other a futuristic bit of ultra lo-fi loopage, murky and blurred, which eventually gives a way to a fantastically lysergic bit of hypnotic electronic minimalism.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
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Another of three new releases this week on the Upstairs label run by Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Innercity, the work of Belgian synthscaper Hans Dens, sounds right at home here, in fact, had we not known, we very well might have assumed this was Lopatin himself, as Innercity traffics in the same sort of spacey futuristic sci-fi synthscapery, although Dens has a few tricks up his sleeve. Like taking sampled sped up voices, and adding a flurry of looped beats, creating a dizzying minimal abstract dance music, stripped down and skeletal, but it's around track three that Dens stops messing around and gets down the the business of crafting some murky synthy weirdness, fuzzy crumbling bits of clipped synth are lopped into warped seasick rhythms, the tape threatening to crumble, as the drop outs and hiss add all sorts of texture to the proceedings. Other tracks take murky almost heroin house sound throbs, and douses them in fuzzed out muddy glo-fi warble, the sweet melodies barely audible through the haze, but the sum total gorgeously hypnotic. Elsewhere, seventies cop show meets eighties late night cable thriller via a melted synth with a malfunctioning motherboard, reminding us of James Ferraro or Monopoly Child Star Searchers, total lysergic hypnogogic pop. The disc offers up all sorts of variations on outer space / inner space synth damage, bleeps and bloops, distorted low end thrums, warped chordal whir, twinkling prismatic and cinematic pulses, and in the last track, some serious Carpenter / Goblin / Oneohtrix retro soundtrackery. Weird and wonderful, and definitely a new favorite.
LIMITED TO LESS THAN 100 COPIES. We got a handful, but those will probably disappear pretty quick.
Of all the currently operating cd-r microlabels, we're tempted to pick RuralFaune as our favorite, no offense to any of the other labels we love, but Bruno P. and his weirdo label have unleashed some serious and awesome sonic strangeness over the last few years, all sorts of free folk and drone music, outsider soundscapes and minimal abstract weirdness, but then he went ahead and launched Faunasabbatha a RuralFaune offshoot specializing in extreme heaviness, the fringes of ultra doom and damaged black metal, blackdrones and grimnoise, and if that wasn't enough, there's now a new series, the Synth Series, or as the label puts it "the new new synth age", which makes sense, all of these blossoming and burgeoning krautdrone synthscapers need a home, and why not Ruralfaune, with a whole stable of synth unknowns, but among these unknowns, lurk some serious aQ faves, like Innercity, aka Belgian synthscaper Hans Dens, whose sound is like a twisted, more fractured take on groups like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, case in point, the twisted dizzying synth driven freakout that is the Cop Killer tape reviewed elsewhere on this list, but for his contribution to Ruralfaune's Synth Series, Dens has dialed back his penchant for freakiness, and delivered some seriously hypnotic and mesmerizing synth minimalism, not at all like the above mentioned groups, instead, a strangely gnarled synthesized dronemusic, lush layered loops, stretched out into gorgeous hazy warped landscapes of sound, some like weird processed burbling brooks wreathed in softly static whir, others like tangles of complex melody looped into stuttering rhythms, almost like Avarus samples collaged into alien dronefolk, while still others sound like the buzz of swarming bees, others like some sort of woozy ambient chamber music, and others like twisted IDM filtered through super lo-fi heroin house. Somehow Dens has managed to craft a sound that bucks all the conventions of the current kraut-drone-synth craze, while creating a unique sound that somehow still manages to fit into the very same movement, albeit awkwardly, which continues to situate Innercity as outsiders in an already outside sonic subculture. So great.
LIMITED TO JUST 70 COPIES!!! We got 20 of those and that's it!!!
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A lot of people are going to say that this is great... A lot of people are going to say that the label's proclamations of this as Detroit Techno Meets Free-Jazz represents the perfect culmination of two seemingly disparate genres... A lot of people are going to say that the African-American science fictions of Sun Ra's cosmic exploration and Carl Craig's futurist wastelands will find common ground... Well, a lot of people say a lot of things...
The Innocence Mission have been around the block a few times - since 1982 actually in some shape or form. Problem is, so much time passes between each of their releases that their fans have often been left fretting that the band is no more. This collection
Innode is the project of Stefan Nemeth, an Austrian electronica engineer aQers might be more familiar with as a member of glitchily elliptical, post-rock trio Radian. Here, he's working with Steven Hess (that jetsetting percussionist who seems to be everywhere these days) and Bernhard Breuer (responsible for the drums in the shockingly good 'live' techno ensemble Elektro Guzzi). The idea behind Gridshifter was to incorporate live drums as counterpoints to a rigid latticework of electronic patterns - hence, the title. But the results from Nemeth and his drummers totally transcend any formalist concept, as Gridshifter is full of some serious noise crunching swagger. The live and / or electronic breakbeats stalk through all of the tracks on this fantastic album with glistening waves of controlled, tonal feedback, jarring bursts of whipcracked noise, and ominous rumbled pulsations. In otherwords, it sounds just like Pan Sonic or Alva Noto played with a 'live' drummer. Even some of the analog synths have a bit of a warmer hue as well as if there could be something akin to a chord organ or wurlitzer tossed in for good measure. This would actually be an incredible performance to see live! Let's hope Nemeth can pull off a tour and not just of the European festivals, but into the US as well. Kudos to Editions Mego once again for a killer record.
Mostly known for his deep space, ambient work that was released on Pete Namlook's Fax label, Tetsu Inoue has collaborated with Andrew Deutsch for an uncharacteristic album of recombinant computer music on par with the current algorithimic procedures of Kim
This is for everyone who flipped out about Inquisition's latest album Magnificent Glorification Of Lucifer, the one we highlighted on our last list (and which, unfortunately, we're all out of already, though more are on the way from Germany, never fear). We've just managed to get in a few copies of the band's earlier output, of which this is their debut disc, originally from 1998 (repressed in 2003). Compared to MGoL, it's equally super Satanic and weird, but a bit rawer in production (something that a certain sort of black metal fan would perhaps prefer). Their uniquely monotonous, croaking, creepy style is fully evident already, and the music surely suits their lyrics about black blood, chalices, red eyed beasts and horned moons. Ah yes, it's creaky crushing droning doomed demon moon moan metal at its best, or soon to be. And now I want to see all the terrible old black magic movies they sampled their song intros from...
True black metal fanatics know this band, whose album on No Colours, The Magnificent Glorification Of Lucifer, was Allan's number one black metal pick of 2005, for sure, Satan help me. Well here's the hard to find second Inquisition, the 2001 record that preceded that slab of infernal genius that Allan likes so much, and which cultish aficionados of plodding, aching black metal should delight in as well. It took us forever to get (just a handful) more of these to list, and they probably won't be around for long. As we've said, this one is Wrest from Leviathan's favorite Inquisition opus, and not only just because it features guitarist/vocalist Dagon croaking the immortal line: "Touch me with your magic hoof"!!
Can the No Colours label do no wrong? Inquisition's Magnificent Glorification Of Lucifer is definitely Allan's favorite black metal release of the YEAR. So grim, so eerie, so very metal, and weird in a weird way. That is, there's nothing else out there quite like this band. They do that thing that the best black metal bands do: they're both totally of their genre (a formulaic genre, to be extra-redundant) yet manage to be utterly their own thing too. Fans of the elite likes of Burzum, Graveland, Mutillation, Xasthur, and Immortal ought to immediately bow to Inquisition whilst also recognizing just how different a band they are. And it's also the sort of black metal I might spring on an extremity-friendly music fan even if they were unaware of the above mentioned artists.
Although this was the first I'd heard of Inquistion, it's actually the third album from this American (Seattle-based, but with Columbian connections?) Satanic black metal band. Redundant again? Sure, all black metal by definition is supposed to be Satanic. But these guys are so SERIOUS about it (well, I don't know for sure... the Inquistion duo of Dagon and Incubus do look kinda silly in the cd booklet photos...but I don't think that's intentional). That they go so over-the-top in their Satan worship is part of what moves them beyond mere stylistic formula and into a realm of obsessive uniqueness.
This record works so well 'cause it's simultaneously weird as fuck (hypnotically croaking vocals, the aforementioned Satanically overloaded lyrix, and strange, keening high-end guitar parts that make this the EERIEST black metal I've heard in aeons) while being fully metal with a rock n' roll backbone: slow-to-mid tempos, memorable riffs, and killer old-school fuzz guitar tone. Indeed, were it not for the love of Lucifer they express with every breath, Inquisition could just has easily have opted to call this album The Glorious Magnificence of Fuzz (though a strain of fuzz quite different from the '60s garage fuzz as heralded elsewhere on this week's list in our review of the Plastic Cloud reissue)! Sonically, that's a big part of what satisfies here, a crucial factor in of Inquisition's equation of extremity. It's truly a heavy, buzzing, trance-like blurr.
It's got to mean something when I (Allan) play something over and over and over again, considering how much (too much) music I'm getting every week. But this was -- is -- in heavy rotation in my home and even though I put it on my iPod I still took the cd itself along with me on vacation as a talisman/token/icon/fetish object just to look at... good thing I don't actually believe in Satan! I even had to go and track down their harder-to-find first two albums, also both excellent, though I do think this is their best... and if you want someone to back me up, note that Leviathan's Wrest himself is a big Inquistion fan, partial to their second album but also of the opinion that this one is brilliant too. So, an AQ black metal rave, make no mistake! Mesmerizing, crushing, gloomy, fucked up, beautiful, genius.
Ready to be touched by the magic hoof?!
Two years ago, we just about sold our souls to Satan in tribute to the glorious magnificence of this band's Magnificent Glorification Of Lucifer album. Allan's favorite black metal record of 2005 by far. Now this two-man cult is back with a new album for No Colours and we're sacrificing babies over here in celebration. Well not really but guitarist Dagon and drummer Incubus would probably like to hear that. And if anyone was gonna convince us through the power of stabbing riffage, flashing battery, and croaking vox that Satanism is the way to go, these are the dudes to do it!!
What makes the storming black metal of this Seattle duo so special? Certainly not just their love of Satan, though they do seem more sincerely devoted than most. No, they're just -different- from the hordes of hordes out there. For one thing, Dagon's vocals aren't the usual high-pitched anguished rasps, nor are they deathly grunts. They're more like droning crypt-creakings, layered and insidious, truly "nefarious dismal orations", an integral part of Inquisition's trance-inducing doomic atmospheres -- along with the varispeed velocity of their attack, seemingly simultaneously plodding yet blurred with speed. Then there's the RIFFS. You can't argue there. Inquisition understand old school heavy metal hookiness without being overtly retro, y'know? And this stuff oozes METAL as much as it gives off a sinister shine of actual originality and serious Satanic faith. Pure metalness plus weirdness (in the arcane, occult sense of "the weird"), yeah! We're spellbound. And what the heck is going on with the buried, backwards masked munchkinisms we think we're hearing at the end of the amazing title track?
Clearly Germany's No Colours, a label with lots of staggeringly excellent, evil bands, is well aware that Inquisition is indeed a cut above and deserving of special treatment. They've produced a limited edition initial run of this cd, a thousand copies packaged inside a black cardboard slipcase with a die-cut pentagram!! If that wasn't enough, there's also a full-colour poster folded up and inserted inside the slipcase too. We got a bunch of 'em but don't know how long these will last.
It would be wrong and misleading to say that this sounds like Om meets Watain, but somehow it we think it has the EFFECT of what such a indescribable hybrid would sound like. But if we did have to compare Inquisition on this album to anybody, we're reminded the most of good ol' Immortal. Recommended as if you couldn't tell already.
Is this, like, the fourth straight album in a row now from Inquisition that we are compelled to proclaim a top contender for Black Metal Album Of The Year? Hell yes it is. Guess that's no surprise. The duo of Dagon and Incubus, originating in Columbia, South America, now based in Washington State, North America, are on top of their game; Obscure Verses For The Multiverse is yet another jewel in their crown. We hope even the non-black-metal fanatics among you are paying attention, 'cause this is one of those records that we'd suggest to try to get you INTO black metal, it's that good. Part of Inquisition's genius is that while they deliver evil, grim vibes galore, and cosmic concepts too, they also don't forget that black metal is METAL, which means it's also rock n' roll, and so their grim musick seriously rocks, impressively so for a two-piece (even live - when we've seen 'em they've been amazing, couldn't believe two guys could pull it off like that). They are also just original enough to be undeniably their own thing, while proudly upholding tradition at the same time.
On Obscure Verses, Inquisition once again deploy the chop-chop-chop of blizzard force drum battery, suddenly easing the pace to unleash perfectly lurching mid-to-slow tempo riffage, played with seasick "bent" guitar tones, fuzzed and frozen, all adorned by the distinctive rasping croak of the vocals and majestic leads of Satan-glorifiying, vertigo-inducing virtuosity. As the album oozes forth, or hurtles onward, as the case may be, from moment to moment, each and every one of those moments - whether the crush of a catchy riff, a springy, spiraling guitar lick, a miasmatic atmospheric interlude of subterranean ceremony - EVERY molecule of Inquisition's music here contains and conveys their utter original metal mastery and evil intent in full, there's nary a wasted moment, nothing that doesn't usefully contribute to the totality of effect and stand on its own as well, either to cause a headbanging frenzy or thrust you into melancholic, nauseated trance.
Despite their origin in this hemisphere, definitely up there with the most celebrated Norwegian elite, this album (and several preceding it) belonging alongside our favorites by the likes of Enslaved and Immortal in particular. If you're into black metal, we expect you're already an Inquisition fan and know you NEED this; if you're not (yet) into black metal, well you couldn't find too many better albums to point you down the left hand path of no return.
Available as a jewel case cd, or double vinyl with bonus track. (There's also a deluxe, specially packaged import cd box edition that also includes that bonus track, and also comes with a goat-leather key ring, but we've sold out of those, not sure if they'll ever be back...)
Time once more to touch the magic hoof! As we mentioned in our write up of Negative Plane's long awaited new one last list, we're also basking in the evil radiation of a new release from another cult back metal fave of ours as well, and finally have enough copies of 'em in to not only review, but make Record Of The Week, as our Lord Satan commands, and this incredible musick deserves, laced as it is with killer riffs and curious weirdness. That'd be the latest from the duo known as Inquisition, who, although they sound like they hail from some alien Hell, actually currently dwell in the grim fog of the Pacific Northwest, originating however from the jungles of Columbia.
Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (a great title, and one that makes this review itself perhaps not seem so verbose and purplish of prose) is again full of what we expect from Inquisition: blazing battery, buzzing guitars, and most crucially the bizarre croaking of the "robot frog" as the Invisible Oranges blog so pithily describes the vocal stylings of guitarist Dagon. His unique voice, unlike any else in black metal (though most closely akin to Abbath of Norwegian blizzard beasts Immortal, whom they remind us of in other respects as well) is one of the main things we like about the idiosyncratic Inquisition. In a way, his rasping ribbetting and our reaction to it is representative of the whole of what makes Inquisition so great. It's absurd, it's eccentric, it's evil, it's impossible to forget once you've heard it. Likewise with their eerie guitar tones and occult atmospherics, no one else sounds quite like them even within the highly formalized realm of black metal. Furthermore, the eccentric and otherworldly elements of their music are like 1000X more brilliant because Inquisition are simultaneously rooted in pure old school metal, meaning memorable riffs, indeed actual, quite catchy SONGS. Which has a lot to do with why we were so blown away when we finally got to seem them play live on tour last year. If you saw 'em too, you know it was one of the best 2 piece performances by a metal act ever. Very very metal, a churning maelstrom of axes and spikes and swords given musical form. Listening to this album, it's all here, the keening guitar soli that burrow into your brain, the riffs like the lashings of a whip, and the vokills such stern Satanic admonitions. And moments of majestic melody amidst the buzz and blurr, including one cheery passage we might have to play 'round Xmas time, hahaha.
So, another one to worship from Dagon and Incubus! And once again, adorned with excellent Antichrist Kramer artwork, more third eye skull psychedelia of morbid metalhead fantasies, something which we could also say of the music itself.
Oh man, that just made us think of something insane, what if Daniel Higgs teamed up with Inquisition someday, a la one of our other Records Of The Week this list, by The Skull Defekts?! That would be awesome.
This former Record Of The Week, now issued for the 2nd time on vinyl via Hell's Headbangers, this edition being all super deluxe and stuff, more expensive too but you're getting laser etched artwork on side D, a poster insert, and custom trifold 'tome' style packaging, which features the original Antichrist Kramer artwork on an inner fold out, while the outside now is black, with a big metallic blue die-cut "I" affixed to the front cover. Neat-o. Here's our original review of the music portion of this release:
Time once more to touch the magic hoof! As we mentioned in our write up of Negative Plane's long awaited new one last list, we're also basking in the evil radiation of a new release from another cult back metal fave of ours as well, and finally have enough copies of 'em in to not only review, but make Record Of The Week, as our Lord Satan commands, and this incredible musick deserves, laced as it is with killer riffs and curious weirdness. That'd be the latest from the duo known as Inquisition, who, although they sound like they hail from some alien Hell, actually currently dwell in the grim fog of the Pacific Northwest, originating however from the jungles of Columbia.
Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (a great title, and one that makes this review itself perhaps not seem so verbose and purplish of prose) is again full of what we expect from Inquisition: blazing battery, buzzing guitars, and most crucially the bizarre croaking of the "robot frog" as the Invisible Oranges blog so pithily describes the vocal stylings of guitarist Dagon. His unique voice, unlike any else in black metal (though most closely akin to Abbath of Norwegian blizzard beasts Immortal, whom they remind us of in other respects as well) is one of the main things we like about the idiosyncratic Inquisition. In a way, his rasping ribbetting and our reaction to it is representative of the whole of what makes Inquisition so great. It's absurd, it's eccentric, it's evil, it's impossible to forget once you've heard it. Likewise with their eerie guitar tones and occult atmospherics, no one else sounds quite like them even within the highly formalized realm of black metal. Furthermore, the eccentric and otherworldly elements of their music are like 1000X more brilliant because Inquisition are simultaneously rooted in pure old school metal, meaning memorable riffs, indeed actual, quite catchy SONGS. Which has a lot to do with why we were so blown away when we finally got to seem them play live on tour last year. If you saw 'em too, you know it was one of the best 2 piece performances by a metal act ever. Very very metal, a churning maelstrom of axes and spikes and swords given musical form. Listening to this album, it's all here, the keening guitar soli that burrow into your brain, the riffs like the lashings of a whip, and the vokills such stern Satanic admonitions. And moments of majestic melody amidst the buzz and blurr, including one cheery passage we might have to play 'round Xmas time, hahaha.
So, another one to worship from Dagon and Incubus! And once again, adorned with excellent Antichrist Kramer artwork, more third eye skull psychedelia of morbid metalhead fantasies, something which we could also say of the music itself.
We first heard from Insect Factory on a recent split with NZ droneguitar master RST, the Insect Factory side of the split a gorgeous sprawl of woozy collaged psychedelia, not all that far removed from Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World, with a similar knack for taking multiple layers of sounds, and dizzying rhythms, and somehow fusing them into something more organic and blissed out. We dug those tracks like crazy, and were super excited to discover there was in fact a full length, which essentially takes the sound from the 7" and recasts it as something more longform, which is ideal for this sort of soundscaping, allowing the sounds and textures to gradually change shape and remain in constant motion.
The record opens with a brief bit of warm washed out pulsating shimmer, all overlapping swaths of buzz and hum and smoldering blur, heady and darkly psychedelic, it could have easily been stretched out to fill up the whole side and we would have been please as punch. But instead, the sound shifts to sky full of sine wave tones, drifting in and out, minimal swells, that seem to blossom like some time lapse nature film, glistening and glimmering, the sound laced with little melodic flourishes, little percussive high end blips, it's not until about 8 minutes in, that some low end surfaces, adding some lush heft to the proceedings, letting those glimmers and shimmers, drift atop subtly undulating sprawl of smeared sound. The sound grows gradually rhythmic, before splintering into prismatic distortion drenched ur-drone, a blow out of white noise sculpted into something much more dreamlike and shoegazey.
The near 20 minute "New Incision" begins with a spacious expanse of near silence, and shimmering dreamily dubbed out tones drifting to and fro, swooping backwards guitars drifting in and out, a dreamy melodic tangle, that seems to grow more and more dense, softly noisy, becoming a sort of soft focus shoegaze Reich/Riley style workout, before slipping back into a woozy bit of backwards drift, rife with warm buzz and streaks of high end shimmer.
The record finishes with a strange sort of lo-fi dreamfolk coda, a super lo-fi recording of a guitar, unfurling a lush and lovely bit of spare balladry, wreathed in tape hiss and wrapped in a cloud of crystalline metallic tinkles.
Gorgeous stuff. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Pressed on 140 gram vinyl.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"Insect Noise In Stored Foodstuffs" appears to be an industrial document produced by the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection. This cd presents the sound investigation of the French team of Bunsel and Andrieu who used sensitive microphones with narrow frequency responses made to detect and identify the sounds of insect larvae which may be inhabiting otherwise quiet containers of grains and cereals. A handful of examples of the sounds including the grain weevil, the Indian meal moth, and the Lesser mealworm are accompanied by a running narrative both explaining the techniques used and the identification of the insects. And in case you missed the first 30 minutes of the document, the kind people at the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection repeat the program in French. Hey, if that Smithsonian / Folkways "Sounds of North American Frogs" rocked your world, wait til this little gem comes your way!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Inside is Kiwi soundmaker Sandy Schaare and Celestial Telepathy is his debut. Twenty minutes of gorgeous psychedelic solo guitar. But don't be expecting any sort of wailing shredding freakouts, Schaare takes the guitar and manages to make some of the most beautiful un-guitarlike sounds you've ever heard. Soft billowy drifts, gentle shimmering clouds of sound, and what sounds like Tibetan bowls or distant chiming bells, a resonant ringing that spreads delicately like tiny ripples in a still pond. So gorgeous and tranquil.
Limited to 100 copies, packaged in a full color mini sleeve with original psychedelic artwork by Schaare himself, in a mini PVC plastic pouch with a printed insert. Already sold out at the label, so once these are gone, they are gone for good.
UK DIY lo-fi avant-punk, with home-made synths and drum machine, utterly distorted guitar n' bass, and some rather clever, sardonic lyrics pertaining to both society at large and their friends in particular -- yup, it's another one from the Messthetics vaults, as it were (see our reviews of Messthetics Greatest Hits and Animals & Men on our last two lists). Lincolnshire's Instant Automatons got their start as a schoolboy band in 1974, with early influences like Hawkwind and Kraftwerk, and suitably futuristic "instruments" sourced from their school's physics lab! The punk rock revolution of '77 came along just as they left school and pretty soon they'd picked their "vaguely self-mocking" name (out of a hat) and started recording in earnest, becoming pioneers of the nascent cassette music scene -- they were one of the first to advertise that if you sent 'em a blank cassette, they'd dub their album onto it and send it back, free of charge... the pre-internet precursor to downloading it seems. They kept at it for a few years, and so here's a sort-of "best of", consisting of 26 tracks, some previously unreleased, others compiled from various rare cassette and vinyl releases circa 1978-1982, including such numbers as "Short Haired Man (In A Long Haired Town", "Violence", "New Muzak", and "Gillian Is Normal". Lots of wise-ass wisdom to be found in the words to these and other songs. The Instant Automatons surely liked to take the piss, which makes for an entertaining listen. For instance, the atonal, spaced-out track "Electronic Music", with lines like "electronic music is the curse of the working classes" and "electronic music makes you unfit" is still pretty amusing today.
The aftermath of an earthquake in the near future. Mission District residents as viewed by an eighteenth-century journalist. An ill female bank robber. Even mutant cowboys and vampires! Local San Francisco literary journal, Instant City is back with its 8th installment of unusual literary explorations of our fair city. The brainchild of cultural producer, Gravity Goldberg (who also organizes events for LitQuake and the Contemporary Jewish Museum) and started at Adobe Books with designer Mitch Manitou, each volume features great local writers and artists. Including a painting by our own Scott Hewicker, this issue features stories by Alvin Orloff, William Poor, Sean Taylor, David Corbett, Loren Rhodes, Alia Volz, Richard Jay Goldstein, Atom Wong, Trent Tano, India Mandelkern and Alia Volz.
Institut Fuer Feinmotorik are a German collective of techno / turntable engineers with the misleading motto: "to produce from almost nothing almost nothing." It is true that their turntablist source material may qualify as 'almost nothing' culled from
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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'The Institute for Precision Motoricity' manipulates the run out grooves on 6 to 8 records with rubber bands, adhesive tape, toothbrushes, etc... to generate acoustic signals from what should simply be the empty pops of the stylus in an infinite termination of its course. The resulting pulses resemble a super lo-fi yet quite successful reconstitution of Thomas Brinkmann / Mike Ink's minimal techno.
Upon entering into this downtempo 'Ward (which if you don't count the vocal samples is indeed entirely instrumental), you'll encounter a loose and laidback sample-heavy assembly of drumbeats, swirling harp, snippits of French dialogue, and later on some trumpet and choral flourishes too. This is the duo's second full length release and it comes from the label who served up the moody atmospheric downtempo cd-r by Angle Of Repose earlier this year. Although I.W.'s rhythm sampling could be a bit tighter in spots, Physiology, Hygiene, Narcotics does have its groovy moments, particularly the third track "The Other Heartache" and a bunch in the second half of the album such as the seventh "Here I Go" with its stutter almost percussive vocal samples and the skittery ninth "I Dreamed".
Another warehouse find (or closet find, since we don't really have what one might call a warehouse), this one, the 2005 full length from Russian funeral doom duo Intaglio, whose sound is a ponderous downtuned plod, a blackened, sprawling slo-mo creep, the guitars oozing and droney, the drums a spare thud, the vocals a guttural gurgle, the sound melancholic and mournful, this is the sort of doom that is tranced out and meditative, not sick and sinister, trafficking in a vibe similar to Skepticism or Thergothon or Evoken, these guys create epic expanses of slow, smoldering heaviness, no extreme dynamics, no blasts of black buzz, instead, simply, an ever expanding black cloud of sound, woozy and washed out, the chords ringing out, the notes fading into blackness before the next chord crashes in and takes its places, the melodies unwinding almost dreamily, minor key, darkly melodic, this may be heavy and 'doom', but to these ears it almost sounds like perfect late night drift off music for metalheads.
Only a few copies of these in stock, once they're gone, we might not be able to get more...
We just got done raving about the brand new record from weirdo garage-pop punks The Intelligence, when what should show up, but ANOTHER new record, well, not actually new, but new to us! Originally released in 2009, on the French label Born Bad, and only showing up here for the first time in the last few days, but we're not complaining, in fact it's like some sort of garage punk Christmas. And like Everybody's Got It Easy But Me, Crepuscule With Pacman is another killer chunk of whatthefuck garage pop that manages to be catchy and jangly and fuzzy, and yet totally bafflingly bizarre. Crepuscule is much more raw and low fidelity, but it definitely suits them, the songs super stripped down, and repetitive, a but minimal, a little murky, but still impossibly catchy. the more we listen to these guys, the more we're surprised so many people dig em, cuz they are definitely difficult. The songs here run the gamut from frenetic angular almost new wave, to Velvets-y dronedirge, from crunchy atonal post punk noise rock to stripped down classic sixties style jangle pop, but really, whatever these guys are doing, they're just a little bit off, a little bit twisted, making the tracks here sound like some sort of alternate universe garage pop band, whose very existence and interruption of the space time continuum, cause their music to warp and warble, but every time we begin to think that (and yes, we think that a lot), they'll slip into some totally perfect pop, or unveil a ridiculously masterful hook. Mixing synths and surf rock, twisted guitars, and warped outsider pop into something that we can't get enough of, and should definitely appeal to fans of groups like Thee Oh Sees, Bare Wires, Ty Segall, White Fence and all the rest, who like their garage pop on the seriously skewed side of the sonic spectrum.
Brand new record from these aQ beloved lo-fi garage rock noise poppers and right off the bat they're in full-on confuse mode. Instead of a wild rollicking blast of crunchy guitars and pounding drums, we're treated to a woozy bit of druggy minimal drum machine driven folk, all steel string strum and Casio skitter, laced with tinkling melodies, it's actually pretty cool, definitely a dramatic shift. But there's more going on that meets the ear. Soon the song devolves into a repetitive groove, the drum machine rhythm now sort of fucked up and skipping and glitching out, with a single strum every measure, over which the vocalist sings a number, starting with one, then two, and he keeps counting, and we honestly had no idea when he would stop, but he does, at 44 for some reason, and then says "Ladies and gentlemen, the band", at which point the band proper kicks in, playing a properly garage rocking version of the song, and suddenly it's all perfect. and that weird whatthefuck intro only makes us love these guys all the more.
From there on out, the band kick down another clutch of twisted garage rock weirdness and warped jangle pop noisiness, but barring a few seriously far out jams, the band are surprisingly polished, as are the songs, fuzzy and hooky and jangly, slipping occasionally into strummy folkiness, or soaring epic shoegaziness, but always returning to some crunchy catchy pop, that for all it's outwards normality, is still quite twisted, whether it's bizarre arrangements, strange effects, maddeningly repeated parts, new wave-y angularity, all deftly woven into a seriously addictive slab of outsider garage pop that while crunchy and fuzzy and jangly enough to appeal to the whole Thee Oh Sees / Bare Wires / Blasted Canyons crowd, might just be a little too weird and warped for heavy rotation with casual listeners, but because of that, seems to transcend the classification of simple 'garage pop', and becomes something much more fucked up and weirdly arty, which makes this a new fast fave.
To the list of lo-fi noise popping shit gazing garage rockers, Thee Ohsees, Mayyors, Psychedelic Horseshit, Times New Viking, Blank Dogs, Wavves, and the like, you can now add the Intelligence. We've seen some live footage of these guys on YouTube, and they kick up a pretty crazy racket, but on record, they're much more subdued and trippy, crafting dark brooding echoey gloom pop, with muted drumming, soft focus jagged guitar crunch, woozy weary vocals, everything surrounded by a haze of delay and tape hiss and amp buzz, positioning these guys closer to groups like Ariel Pink, Holy Shit, and the like, but then when you think you have 'em pegged, they kick out a surfy, groovy hand clappy jam, that sounds surprisingly like "Walking On The Sun" by Smashmouth (we know, we know, but it's true!) although somehow in their hands it sounds WAY cooler. Crunchy guitars, distorted vox, big booming drums, clanging and chiming chords, warm whirring organ, it's also the closest the Intelligence get to sounding like Thee Ohsees weirdly enough. The rest of the record is a much more twisted lo-fi jangly proposition, with many of the songs sounding like creepy sixties garage rock (Fuzztones?) or skiffle-ly reverbed soft pop, but even then, the songs sound fragmented and twisted, with circusy keyboards adding a definite haunting vibe, and some really odd, but oddly catchy hooks. Acoustic guitars, rubbery basslines, trashy practice space drums, and weary deadpan vocals, all woven into some cool, laid back garage jangle, occasionally exploding into a bit of pounding crunch chug, but usually slipping back into something more washed out and groovy.
Not sure what it is, but we just can't stop listening to this. Which is pretty much the best recommendation we can give...
