Thee latest blast of confusional sonic chaos from this sort-of black metal supergroup, featuring avant outsider axeman Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Ocrilim, etc.) and bass shredder Colin Marsten (Behold The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, etc.) is Krallice album number three, the follow up to the awesomely titled Dimensional Bleedthrough, and it's pretty much another opus of epic, soaring and majestic, yet convoluted and confusional black metal as only these guys can play it. There are moments, where you might, MIGHT think this could be some other black metal band, but those moments pass, and before long, when the band lock into their blazing blasting fury. As with the other records, the real surprise is how melodic Krallice can be, judging from the pedigree, one might be forgiven for assuming this would be incredibly difficult, and it is, in some ways, but it's also weirdly catchy, a pretty good mix of classic black metalisms, and the player's obtuse and obviously idiosyncratic take on the genre. The sound this time around actually seems a lot cleaner, and arrangements a bit more straight ahead, and the melodies much more pronounced, and it definitely suits them, but just when we begin to think that, the song we're listening to will fracture into some impossible tangle, or some super tripped out sort-of guitar lead, before slipping right back into more soaring buzzing melodic black metal. Which is just fine with us. Be sure to check out the epic 15 minute closer "Forgiveness In Rot", which is maybe the most melodic thing they've done, with some impossible hooks, and some subtle poppiness, all woven into the buzzing and blasting, almost like Krallice channeling Alcest AND some sort of epic post rock!
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That pesky 'dimensional bleedthrough' thing has happened once again, with the buzzing, super-teched out sounds of whatever weird astral plane wherein Krallice dwell making it all the way to our humble ears here on Earth, causing much headbanging and more mindboggling. Yes, indeed it's the fourth album of epick black metal shreddness from this NYC unit, which features the inhuman guitar chops of both Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Octis, Ocrilim, Oldest, Crom-Tech, etc.) and Colin Marston (Dysrhythmia, Behold�The Arctopus, Infidel?/Castro!, etc.).
Once again, if you want blasting majesty and grim complexity� you got it!! Just press play and give yourself up to the numbing force of these intense exercises in extremity, an hour's worth of Krallice's controlling chaos.
All we can say is, for this precise (and it is precise) style of black metal - music that's as difficult to play as most black metal logos are to read - at this point Krallice have nothing left to prove. And very little competition.
We've currently got the digipack cd version, self-released by the band this time rather than on Profound Lore like the three previous (on account of how PL's release schedule was a bit backed up), with the double vinyl version on Gilead Media on the way to us next week.
It has come to this. Just as we somehow suspected. And desired. Underground guitar maestro Mick Barr, he of such monomaniacal hypershred mosquito-like guitar and drums (or drum machine) bands as Orthrelm, Octis, and Ocrilm, has finally unleashed the bona fide black metal album that we always knew he probably wanted to do. And should do. After all, in our review of the last Ocrilm album Annwn released earlier this year on Hydra Head, we'd said that not only did Barr's guitar buzz remind us of black metal music, but that if it were a black metal album it would be one of the best (and most fucked up, too) of the year.
So, now Barr and equally tech-y cohorts guitarist/bassist Colin Marston (that's right, of mathy mindbogglers Behold...The Arctopus!) and drummer Lev Weinstein (Bloody Panda) have started the utterly blackened Krallice, releasing their self-titled debut on the respected Profound Lore label. And the rest of the USBM scene should take notice, these guys mean business. Sure, anybody with a MySpace page can have a black metal band, make a cool unreadable, thorny logo (like Krallice's) and come up with song titles like "Wretched Wisdom", "Timehusk", "Energy Chasms", and "Forgiveness In Rot" (as Krallice have done) but probably not that many can actually back up all those black metal signifiers so seriously with their MUSIC, music of such sheer power and perfection that we find here. Wintry winds are blowing here (i.e. it's not hot air), as majestic melodies ride the crests of tsunami-sized waves of distorted, buzzing guitar. The six mesmerizingly lengthy tracks found on this Krallice disc are quite technically complex, and buzzingly relentless, much as you'd expect from Barr and Co. It's a blasting blizzard, with raging vokills and hyperspeed drumming but most importantly, shreddingly gorgeous guitar leads, densely woven, that build and build always to new forbidden plateaus of melancholic, misanthropic triumph. Imagine maybe the epick grimnity of Weakling or Wolves In The Throne Room, already badass in the guitar department, with an extra dosage of divebombing fretboard squiggle, interstellar energies continually released in the form of six string shred... yes, Krallice certainly "bring it" as it were, and should appeal to both fans of Barr's previous quasi-metallic, mathy mindfucks as well as those looking for quality USBM, advanced structures or not. (Although, in regards to neo-classical shred, they haven't quite unthroned the true Yngwie's of USBM, the late lamented Windham Hell.)
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Pollock and Krasner were a couple, they lived in a house on Long Island and made paintings we hang in museums. This is a recording of them talking with William Wright (1950) and Marc Miller (1982), respectively. And you know it's got a nice cover.
Another weird and wonderful release from Moniker records, who have recently supplied us with not one, but two aQ Records Of The Week, the weirdo warped electronic downer pop of Jealousy, and the recent sci-fi synth outing from Stacian. Somehow, even though this sounds nothing like either of those, it fits alongside them pretty perfectly. We know next to nothing about Kraus, other than they're from New Zealand, and that this is a fantastically confusional collection of low fidelity, retro-futuristic sci-fi-scapes, slipping easily from murky, stumbling, analog synth dirgery, to woozy outsider space folk, and whatever fucked up stops lay in between.
The opener sounds like Amps For Christ, if he was obsessed with the sixties vision of outer space and the future, it's raw, and garage-y, primitive and spaced out, it's the musical equivalent to some cheesy Z-move epic with aliens and monsters, heavy on the reverb, and some ridiculous drum programming, something like the Shaggs crossed with Joe Meek. Whatever it is, it's awesome. And it only gets weirder. The second track, takes harp like guitar strum, dreamy and woozy, and wreathed in in a warped squiggle of insectoid buzz from some primitive analog synth, a dizzying abstract psych folk space ballad maybe? Who knows? We just know we LOVE it.
From there on out, it's like some wild ride through the cosmos, or at least through the cosmos as envisioned by a teenaged mad scientist who built a lifesize replica of the cosmos out of paper mache, and dressed his pets up like aliens, and offered the neighborhood kids tours of this 'other world'. THIS is the soundtrack, grinding buzzing melodies, over woozy warbly basslines, swirling malfunctioning electronics, warped swells, lazer blast blurts, totally inept drum stumble, the occasional burst of seriously fierce, super distorted fuzz guitar, plenty of percolating electronics and random percussion, detuned guitars, scrapes and hum, hiss and whir. Some tracks sound like drug addled, brain damaged surf rock, or caveman garage stomp, but with a twisted futuristic bent, while other tracks are straight up kitchen sink, weirdo mad scientist electronic experiments, all seemingly recording on a busted old tape deck, giving the proceedings a very Faxed Head like productions, constant warble and pitch shifts, drop outs, bleep and blurts. Some tracks coalesce into practically being real songs, but before they can become proper songs, it's as if something malfunctioned, machine failure, or brainmelt, either way, it seems the song implodes, and splinters, and is gloriously transformed into a fantastically demented slab of warped musical whatthefuck radness.
Another shoulda / coulda been Record Of The Week! You know what that means...
Traditional Seasonal FolkTunes from British banjo chanteuse.
Folk music from Oxford, England's Sharron Kraus, possesser of an airy yet resonant voice, accompanied by banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and an occasional whistle which gives the entire record an authentic old-timey, Renaissance Faire sheen. If you can handle the "oooh butterfly man" chorus in the first track ("Peacock's Daughter"), you'll like the rest of it. Think Shirley Collins, Anne Briggs, maybe even a little Sandy Denny.
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Unlike the Douglas Quin recording of Antarctica for Miramar, Bernie Krause's field recording "Green Meadow Stream" is a willfully self-evident production, documenting the chorus of chirping birds along a burbling brook in the distance. These recordings were made in the Lincoln meadow near Yuba Pass in the High Sierras, before that meadow was clear cut and yet to recover. Quite a nice recording.
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For "Kalimantaan," it appears that Bernie Krause has added a bit of post-production to his field recordings made in Borneo (whose ancient name is the title of the disc), but there's nothing that detracts from the recordings natural beauty, just a touch of reverb and narratively minded editing. The first track is dedicated to the sounds at dawn, starting out with a haunting choral duet for Gibbons, before being quelled by a cloudburst to quiet the variety of insects and birds that form the white noise ambience of the rainforest. The second track focuses on the heat of the late afternoon with more monkeys (orangutans and proboscis monkeys) hooting behind the polyphony of tree frogs, before rain falls again on the forest. This is a truly magnificent field recording!
Bernie Krause has had a broad ranging history in audio and music - having played with the folk group The Weavers as Seeger's replacement, studying music at Mills and collaborating with Paul Beaver in the sixties to produce several oscillator heavy electronic records. In the last 25 years, however, he's devoted his life to recording animals and insects around the world. This release represents a sort of best of collection of Krause's recordings, plus a very handsomely printed 95 page hard cover book - on recycled paper - of essays and journal writings by Krause.
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Another well-rounded recording of pure natural sounds by Bernie Krause. This time he's attempted to track down the site of natural echo reflection where a troupe of baboons have situated themselves to bounce echoes of their barks off of a 300 foot granite sheer face. While's never actually found that specific site, Krause was able to get solid recordings of those baboons as well as the serene dawn chorus of the forests innumerable birds.
In other words, Slapp Happy. "Camera" originated as an opera comissioned for TV, broadcast 1993. Singer Dagmar Krause stars "as a lone individual figure struggling against a nightmare of bureaucratic intrusion." With The Balanescu Quartet among other additional musicians. (Caveat: it's pretty mediocre, we'd recommended it primarily to Slapp Happy completists.)
Angel-voiced bluegrass singer with her most accessible album to date.
Smart Cory Brown says: 'Speaking of Unrest, Phil Krauth's Cold Morning is a bit of a surprise. I'd heard good things about it, but had no idea exactly what elements he'd brought to later Unrest. Y'see, I always figured Unrest (or Stereolab) could do a great version of the Association's "Windy." Then they broke up and Air Miami abandoned the '60's almost completely for the '80's. But Mr. Krauth goes on to write the lost Association demos (none of that flaccid production). I'm waiting for the "Love Is All Around" or "That Girl" b-side.'
Some of our favorite tracks on the most recent Ed Banger compilation of tripped out psychedelic dancefloor electro synth weirdness came from the awesomely monicker'd Krazy Baldhead, a Frenchman who just might give Justice and the like a run for their francs.
The B-Suite is in fact a nearly 50 minute continuous jam/mix, that takes everything we like about Justice, Ed Banger, the current breed of weirdo electro synth shit, and stirs it up into a massive outer space dance party.
Synths everywhere, that's a give, they buzz and how, and rumble, they get chopped up into throbs and pulses, the get layered into dense walls of sound, they get wrapped around beats, BIG block rockin' beats, skittery laid back beats, housey beats, hip hoppy beats... It's all about the beats and the synths, and they get all tangled up and mashed up and smeared and blurred into pounding late night grooves, druggy sci-fi cinematic slow jams, stuttery chunks of hiccupping hip hop, thumping space aged electro house, whatever the fuck Baldhead can come up with, he's called Krazy for a reason.
Rappers pop up here and there, flowing over stripped down abstract hip hop or woozy groovy future funk, but those brief bits are surrounded on all sides by the aforementioned array of constantly colliding and swerving and shimmering synths, and the non stop avalanche of unlikely beatsmithery.
Insane and insanely catchy robotic electro from another planet, beamed down here in order to melt down dancefloors, soak the populace with sweat, and generally get the party started, even if said party is some next level, futuristic, intergalactic, alien synth shit. Awesome.
Anyone into Justice, Ed Banger records, metal house, and all that sort of far out dancefloor synth damage, this is for YOU.
Production, mixes, and all scratches by G-squared. New on Bomb Hip Hop!
New six song ep from Mr Krebs. This time out Pete chooses a stripped down format much more akin to pal Elliott Smith's early recordings of solo guitar and voice. Notable exception is the rocking final track.
Second album by these To Rococo Rot-connected neo-kraut-post-rockers, better even than their debut Weekend.
I've always been a fan of Kreidler's unique sort of post-rock take on electronica -- it reminds me of Fridge's epic Eph album, which many of you reading also love. Well, let me tell you that Kreidler's new mini-album is so great, and so clearly surpasses their previously released work (which was stellar to begin with) that it just takes my breath away. As deeply dramatic and stately as an Ennio Morricone score, the music features gorgeously plucked strings articulating arpeggiated chords over and over in a sort of Reich-ian style of repetition. Glassy, pleasantly chiming melodies bring to mind krautrock of the serene Harmonia / La Dusseldorf variety, and especially the charming driving synth experiments of Cluster's Moebius and Roedelius. Maybe even some Eno. These seven instrumentals sound instantly classic and should appeal to a wide range of listeners -- it's that undeniably good. The cover art is also pretty -- no sleeve, just a mint green woman's torso silkscreened onto the jewel case. Highly recommended! Windy's new favorite record.
Wow! This is great. Kreidler's latest album feeds us lovely instrumentals save for "Von Valerie", a sparse and pretty piano-laden number accompanied by a French girl's soft vocals. Almost like if Eric Satie made a pop song. Someone here said it reminds them of Mark Mothersbaugh's Musik For Insomniacs. I suppose this could be true, though it seems to be more like a lullaby. A beautiful, casio and synth-enriched lullaby.
It makes perfect sense that Bureau B has released this new album by Kreidler, if you were to hear this without having any idea who it was, and you were told it was a long lost early '80s electronic proto-techno exploration by Moebius and members of Neu!, you would have no reason NOT to believe it. These are dark, motorik, trance inducing sounds at their best. More than any of their modern day German peers, Kreidler really have been the ones to build on what their krautrock forefathers and mothers (don't forget Deutsche Wertabreit!) laid down the blueprints for. Mixing their instrumentation and electronics with organic ease, the album flows start to finish with a late night K-hole seedy sensation. Kind of like Villalabos remixing Jonas Reinhardt, Arp, or White Rainbow.
You can hear echoes of Cluster deep in these tracks as you can tell Kreidler have gained much inspiration from albums of theirs like Zukerzeit and especially the Moebius/Beerbohm outing Double Cut. We could also see folks who have been digging lots of the John Carpenter/Goblin inspired sounds by folks like Zombi, Umberto, Xander Harris, Black Devil Disco Club, and The Oscillation getting way into Tank. The live drumming really helps fuel the record and the undercurrents of such a dark and sinister soundworld have drawn us so deep into this recording. This is shaping up to be our favorite Kreidler outing yet!
Finally out domestically, for fans of To Rococo Rot, Mouse on Mars, and Tortoise.
Third full album from this German electronica/postrock outfit. A bit fluffier than their last one, the excellent "Appearance And The Park". Doesn't help that before you even get past track two they've gone and enlisted British twee-popster Momus to do some singing. Of course, lots of people love Momus and so they'll not mind...but it doesn't work for me. I guess I prefer Kreidler's more serious krautrock leanings over the pop stuff, although the aforementioned "Appearance" was quite poppy... Anyway, may be up the alley of folks into Mouse on Mars, To Rococo Rot, etc.
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Record number two from the mysterious Kreng, aka abstract soundscaper / sonic surrealist Pepijn Caudron, and even more than the first, Grimoire evokes some impossibly haunted otherworld, inhabiting a world not that far removed from the land of lost memories that the Caretaker calls home. But that land is wistful and melancholy, whereas the world of Grimoire is abjectly terrifying, not merely haunting or ominous, this is the soundtrack to something or someplace truly frightening, a blackened ambience of disembodied voices, of creaking clattery percussion, hushed shimmer, deep blackhole swells of rumbling low end, swooping backwards melodies, echo drenched throat singing, tinkling chimes, wheezing drifts of chordal thrum, plink plonk piano, moaning strings, but all of those elements hushed and subdued, a whispery slice of soundtracky minimalism. Bits of glitch and crackle wreath a lumbering rhythmic thud, mournful melodies drift through fields of bleary blur, barely-there beats surface and fragment, horns bleat way off in the distance, thick impossibly low bass tones reverberate like pulsing black clouds, each track is like some spectral soundscape, equal part swoonsome classical music, grim black ambience, and minimal abstraction, the various tracks bleeding into one another, slipping from jazzy clatter, to symphonic bombast, to dark rumbling, to lurching looped rhythmic skitter, but always seeming to settle into a near static bit of black drift, this songsuite a lost soundtrack to some dark depressive mystery, a lost noir, a characterless black and white epic, these are the sounds of empty streets, of derelict houses, of dark defeating the light, of a world cast in permanent darkness, impossibly beautiful, but a beauty blackened by loss and decay, a descent into madness, a physical descent into the crumbling hidden world that lurks just beneath ours, a gorgeous sonic representation of what awaits us beyond the dark, on the other side, in the next world, the world of shadows.
Super intense, and harrowingly gorgeous. Most definitely for fans of The Caretaker, as well as other haunting Miasmah releases like Elegi, FNS, Jacaszek, Gultskra Artikler and all the various purveyors of dark minimal drift, haunting cinematic dronemusic and spectral black ambience.
Sombre and strange record of post-classical miniatures originally recorded to accompany various ballet and dance pieces. Sparse piano, Eastern-European strings, field recordings, eerie found sounds and electric-acoustic chamber drones with dark and haunting textures reference a kind of surrealist narrative that wouldn't be out of place in a film by Luis Bunuel. Perhaps not as somnolent as past Miasmah recordings from Elegi and Jacaszek, as the dynamics of the score can veer into some occasional, theatrical dramatics. Best not let it lull you into sleep, for fear of unsettling dreams or being abruptly jarred awake. Recommended nonetheless!
Sombre and strange record of post-classical miniatures originally recorded to accompany various ballet and dance pieces. Sparse piano, Eastern-European strings, field recordings, eerie found sounds and electric-acoustic chamber drones with dark and haunting textures reference a kind of surrealist narrative that wouldn't be out of place in a film by Luis Bunuel. Perhaps not as somnolent as past Miasmah recordings from Elegi and Jacaszek, as the dynamics of the score can veer into some occasional, theatrical dramatics. Best not let it lull you into sleep, for fear of unsettling dreams or being abruptly jarred awake. Recommended nonetheless!
The first release from Kreng since 2011, but well worth the wait. While the sound sources on The Summoner are quite the departure from his 2011 release Grimoire, the dark and disorienting atmosphere is still here. Here Kreng (aka composer Pepijin Caudron of Belgium) conducts a dozen string players, creating a twisted and droney orchestral mass that explodes and dies without warning, bringing to mind the terrifying works of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. The song titles here, too, tell Caudron's story as the five stages of grief, going from "Denial" to "Acceptance". The first four tracks are dark, twisted, orchestral soundscapes, dynamic and haunted that slowly goad you into Caudron's warped world. The climax of the album is without doubt the titular track, sandwiched between "Depression" and the somber "Acceptance". The 15-minute long track features Belgian doom band Amenra (whose album Mass V we reviewed back in 2013) providing the slow, crushing trudge (with maybe the slightest, SLIGHTEST hint of uplifting melody) to bring the whole piece to a bombastic, epic zenith. Very few out there can capture the range of emotion and atmosphere that Kreng can - terrifying, cathartic, bleak, and maybe just a little bit uplifting. For fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, The Caretaker, and anything on the Miasmah label.
Final black and bleak missive from metal misanthrope Imperial and his black metal horde Krieg. Practically an institution, Krieg spew a particularly hateful and depressive strain of black metal, falling somewhere between the old school (Judas Isacriot) and the new school (Xasthur) of US black metal. A buzzing chaotic blur, mostly plodding midtempos, guitars a droning hypnotic whir, the drums a splattery framework way down in the murky swirl, the vocals squirming tentacles of howl and shriek, tangled amidst the buzzing riffs and the careening rhythms. Not nearly as harsh as past efforts, this final album is downright melodic at times, some classic sounding thrash riffs surface here and there, huge expanses of droning doom metal share the spotlight with the grim black thrash, the melodies minor key and truly sorrowful sounding, some tracks trail off into ambient stretches of white noise guitar, sounding a bit like Total or Hototogisu here and there. Blue Miasma is hate fueled and harrowing, harsh but weirdly mournful and melancholy, even the ultra fast parts end up sort of blissing out into droning doomy miserablism. Fucking Awesome.
Word of warning, Krieg and Imperial have been know to espouse truly abhorrent views, political, racial and otherwise, sort of comes with the black metal territory a lot of the time. It's a personal choice, whether you can enjoy the music and ignore the politics of its creator. You have been warned.
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This is about as raw as black metal can get. Overblown, superdistorted, chaotic, thrashing buzzing brutality. Vocals so loud that at their peak they overload the speakers, and begin to crumble, pushing all the other sounds out of the way. Very creepy and disconcerting. This is supposedly the last Krieg record ever, and what a way to go. An homage to Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, and the Patrick Bateman that lives in all of us, bloodlust, greed, selfishness and violence. Two dense tracks of head splitting ultraviolence, one which splinters into a creepy militaristic march, with heavily reverbed drums, and the most anguished howls of fury imaginable. The other three tracks are samples taken from the movie of American Psycho, which seems to be Krieg's perfect filmic muse.
- MPEG stream: II
- MPEG stream: IV
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We're so used to seeing Scandanavian black metal records with photos of forests, and fjords, and burning churches, and Viking ships, or corpse painted guys lurking in the dark with torches, or huddled over a fire. All the things that are part and parcel of the Nordic pride / black metal package. So what would be the image or images one would associate with American Black metal? Until now it's been mostly ghastly gory paintings or European woodcuts depicting demons or some borrowed Nordic imagery. But the new Krieg album, The Black House, perfectly encapsulates the darkness and depression of American black metal with a stark black and white cover image of a dilapitated house beside a leafless tree under a dark and forboding sky. You see thousands of houses like this all over the United States, but every one of those houses represents some sort of misery or depression of tragedy. Which is what black metal is all about. And what Krieg has been all about for the past nine years. Along with this perfect image comes what is probably the best Krieg album yet. A suffocatingly dark and depressive masterpiece. From crushing midtempo dirges to buzzing melancholy waltzes to crushing nightmarish blasts of frosty black metal, to a surprising cover of the Velvet Underground's "Venus In Furs", handled quite deftly, keeping the original's droning hypnotic jangle, but adding more darkness and despair through extra ambient sounds and unholy demonic vocals. The result is surprisingly effective and emotionally charged and adds a some surprising depth to Krieg's already ultra personal and truly grim black metal onslaught. NB although the album doesn't have any overt Nazi-ish stuff on it, you might want to look for the used if you're worried about the political views of your black metal purchases...
Krieg are like a USBM institution. Going on 15 years now, with an insane number of lineups, and close to 30 releases, yet they somehow remain so much more underground than their USBM brethren, Krieg are indeed, truly KVLT. Krieg mainman Imperial's public persona definitely got a bump recently with his involvement in the black metal supergroup Twilight, and some of that band's experimentalism has definitely bled into Krieg, a little, and the new line up reflects that, with Leviathan's Wrest on bass and Woe's Chris Grigg on drums, not to mention Sanford Parker of Minsk (among others) on "grinding synthetic nausea. With that sort of roster, you might in fact be expecting some tripped out psychedelic blackness, or some sort of droned out grim blacknoize, but Krieg remain TROO and offer up some seriously grim and buzzy blackness, furious blast beats, howling hellish vokills, and some dense gnarled riffage, the sound grimy and gritty and filthy, the way true black metal was meant to sound.
Sure there are moments that deviate a bit from the black path, "All Paths To God" is practically poppy, a moody and melancholy dirge with a surprising hook, there's the tripped out spaciness of "Depakote", and the blown out glitchy staticky dronefield that finishes off "And The Stars Fell on" as well as a couple shorter tracks that ditch the buzz and blast altogether, offering up instead stretches of moody melancholic meander, and the last track blasts wildly until it seems to slow down, melting into a droning black morass, but for the most part this is Black. Metal. Heavy on the black. And heavy on the metal. Dense, and dark, black and buzzing, ominous and sinister, harsh and hateful, brutal, grim and fucking awesome.
Super limited (500!) picture disc reissue of these two slabs of black brutality. One side features Bael, who spew forth an ugly, super blown out, ultra distorted black thrash, furious and so fast it often slips into a black blur (reminds us a bit of Diamatregon). Super lo-fi and recorded way too hot (in a good way), all the levels in the red, you can practically feel the evil seeping through the speakers. Originally released in 2003, features a bonus track with Imperial from Kreig on vocals! The flipside features the mighty Krieg, and it's a vinyl reissue of The Church mini cd from way back in 2001. Mega murky and also extremely lo-fi, but where Bael are blasting and blinding, Kreig are muddy and murky and mournful. Plodding midtempo depressive black metal, blasting drums over fuzzed out riffs, hateful and harsh. Also includes an exclusive bonus track, a cover of Earth's "Charioteer" which is awesome. Clean guitars picking out a majestic melody, a spare melodic dirge, meditative and hypnotic, with creepy snatches of conversation mixed in, not heavy as in huge guitars and pounding drums, but heavy like ominous and subtly dark. Cool. Weird that Nachtmystium covered the same Earth track as a bonus track on a recent cd. Hmm....
Black and white picture disc, one side is a blurry washed out photo of some ruins or old church, the other side features a creepy diseased hand.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
There are three types of folks who will want one of these. Fans of the Brainbombs, which makes sense, considering the fact that Krig I Hudik includes two of Brainbombs amongst their ranks. Or fans of classic Finnish punk, as in anyone who bought that rad Finnish Punk boxset we listed a while back, or anyone super into bands like Totalitar (who coincidentally also count some Brainbombs as members), and of course, the folks who are both. Which we would guess is a lot of you.
Krig I Hudak jam 10 tracks onto this 7", a head caving, ear splitting barrage of snarling, crusty, pounding, thrashing, late seventies / early eighties style Finnish punk rock, blown out and heavy, practice space drums buried in a haze of crunchy riffs and bellowed vocals (even some strange chant-like backup vox now and again), super hooky and anthemic, raw and intense and totally kick ass, from midtempo grind, to frenzied chaotic thrashing, the majority of these tracks are in fact covers of super obscure punk rock bands from back in the day, who hail from the same hometown as Krig I Hudik, although two are originals, but you might not ever know it.
Folks looking for purely misanthropic dirgey sludge, a la the Brainbombs, might be a bit disappointed, but for the rest of you, in the market for some bad ass blasting punk rock, and filthy furious Finnish crush, this shit is unbeatable.
Super swank sleeves, printed inserts with lyrics, LIMITED TO 500 copies, seemingly already out of print at the label!
When Allan said that we were getting a CD of recordings of the "Hawaiian guitar of India", I had visions of Gabby Pahinui being backed up by fast and furious tablas. In reality, the music of Gopal Krishan and the vichitra (or strange) veena is nothing like Hawaiian music, so clean that out of your head. No, the reason why Hawaiian guitar is mentioned in connnection with this strange veena instrument is due to the fact that, unlike the sitar, this zither has no frets and instead the performer utilizes a pieces of stone (glass, or wood), much like a Hawaiian guitar, over the strings to reach the proper pitch. This slide guitar like way of performing allows not only for much longer sustained notes -- the decay resulting from bending a pitch via applying pressure to the string on a sitar or sarod is much quicker -- but greater precision and variability of pitch: hence, greater possibility for expression. Another item that apparently makes this veena particularly strange is that, unlike other instruments in the veena family which don't generally have sympathetic strings, it does. And not only that, because the plucked strings are quieter than normal, the sympathetic strings sound much louder relative to the melody. As far as performers of the vichitra veena, Mr. Krishan is pretty much it. The guy has an unintentional monopoly on the instrument and as such, gets to travel far and wee to play it for fascinated crowds. Each disc contains one track, that divided into three parts: a solo prelude by the veena and then two sections accompanied by tabla, the second faster than the first. Beautiful and sublime. Comes with a heaping portion of liner notes in French, English and German.
Look out, it's the fifth album from Brazil's most deadly death metal band (you know 'em, you love 'em). Rollercoaster, lightspeed guitars and drums (mixed a little too loud, unfortunately) in the service of Satan!
Another blast from these Brazilian death metal lunatics!!
The Brazilian death metal maniacs are back. Not exactly with a new full-length album though...this is more of a mini-album's worth of new tracks, but additionally stacked with some out of print early stuff. There's eight over-the-top tracks from 2004, plus four raw rarities from the band's Unmerciful Order ep of 1993. Makes a nice package for Krisiun fans, eh? As with all their recordings, this is a hyper-speed roar-de-force that should conjure visions of machine guns firing full-auto and shark feeding frenzies and moshpits named Yngwie. Between the 1993 and 2004 material the biggest difference is the latter's improved production. And we also love the droneily ambient outro track, which proves that they don't *always* sound like Morbid Angel on 45.
Is it making fun of poor English skills to note that it says here "All recording here are 100% analogous"? That's great news for reviewers like me, who'd like to drawn an analogy between these Krisiun tracks and...uh...well let's say that Krisiun is to regular death metal what Michael Jackson is to ordinary eccentric millionaires. No, no, no, I'm not saying that Krisiun are pedophiles, just that they're really...extreme.
Brazilian death metal madmen Krisiun return with their first domestic release (fourth album overall). Those who saw them play here on their last tour tell me that Krisiun are perhaps the fastest and most insane death metal band ever. Certainly they take the instrumental portion of the death metal experience to the extreme that all bands in the genre really should aspire to; it's like they're the Nitro of death metal (Nitro being the uber-epitome of LA glam glass-breaking screamin', hyperspeed guitar soloin' hair metal who were so laughable yet so amazing that even today they have a cult following). Fans of the baroque brutality and sinister speed of Morbid Angel (whose guitarist Eric Rutan produced this rippin' disc) must hear Krisiun!
