Volume 017 in the "Korm Plastics Introductory Paperback" series of previously unknown artists discovered by the acclaimed Staalplaat label. Not surprisingly, there is not much background information provided on Retro A.K.A., though one guess is that this outfit hails from Iceland as Heimer from Stilluppsteypa contributes some production work on one of the tracks. Or Retro-A.K.A. perhaps is Dutch, 'cause the Stilluppsteypa folk live in Holland now. Some of the sterile laptop glitchiness characteristic of the Raster and Ritornelle labels appears, but Retro A.K.A.'s cavernous, windswept drones really resemble the haunted loops of Omit, resulting in organic noise overlaid with digitized blast and skitter. Cool.
The sticker on the front of this archival collection by the band Retsepti, from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, states that it's "dark punk / wave". But we had been lead to believe it was more of a garagey metal thing. And the distributor we got our copies from, happens to be those noted purveyors of soul and funk, Numero Group! So what's Retsepti (which means "Recipe" or "Prescription") actually all about? Well, some kind of darkwave post-punk is about right, with gritty guitars that can riff it up in rollicking fashion but take a backseat to nervy new wavy keyboards at other times. The vocals are coarse but dramatically expressive, melodic and emotional in a raw, rough hewn way, just like the music (though things get smoother as the disc progresses, even incorporating saxophone on one song near the end). And the vibe is definitely what you might expect, dark, desperate yet defiant, from folks making art under trying circumstances (civil war for one thing). So while they didn't turn out to be the Iron Curtain Iron Maiden we'd been mistakenly hoping for, Retsepti are still worthy of attention.
This disc contains their entire recorded output, carefully restored and remastered from their original cassette tape releases and other obscure sources. The cd's handstamped gatefold sleeve contains a 16 page booklet, with liner notes detailing the band's fascinating history, along with lyrics and vintage photos.
Our pals at Revolver distro said it best in their description:
"Take a load off, sit back, and let Tara Jane O'Neil (Sonora Pine, Rodan) and Cynthia Nelson (Naysayer, Ruby Falls) do the driving for a while. The latest in the duo's ongoing love affair with quirky and emotion-fueled pop comes floating with a somber and beautiful blend of banjo, flute, accordion, violin, and English ballad sounds, designed to intrigue, relax, and bewitch. Lovely on all fronts."
Record number three from electronic/krautrock/spacedrone/experimental soundscaper Reuber, aka Timo Reuber, whose fifth and most recent record was an aQ Record Of The Week a while back, and whose second record we reviewed just last list, and now as we work our way through his catalog, we've got his 3rd record, and it's just as great and all over the map as the two previous ones.
Kintopp is German for cinema, and on Kintopp, Reuber creates mini soundtracks, twisted little electronic vignettes that range from playful to brooding, noisy to minimal, dark and haunting to twisted and abstract, and more often than not some dizzying combination of all of the above. A quick sampling would reveal: a strange bit of cabaret, rubbery basslines, looped mechanical rhythms, and a strange high end melody that sounds like it's being played by releasing air from a balloon, pulsing almost techno style throbs buried beneath a dubbed out expanse of melodic shimmer, a looped bit of bassy riffage, like some sort of spy theme, laced with backwards sonic swoops, and little flecks of melody and shards of glitched out electronics, that same sort of spy theme bass riff is wrapped around deep mysterious Tuvan style throat singing, hushed melancholy strings, soar over a deep expanse of rumble and thrum, a kaleidoscopic avalanche of pizzicato notes tumble like a hazy glimmering sonic waterfall, swirls of pop ambience spread out in clouds of gauzy blurred soft focus haze, a pounding almost industrial groove that sounds like a techno-fied themes song to some Miami Vice knockoff, the whole thing peppered with strange percussion, and wreathed in sweeping streaks of warm whirling sound, a weirdly looped collage of chopped and looped African folk music, wrapped in reverb and delay, a tinkling bit of piano driven cinematic ambience, like a more woozy, washed out Chariots Of Fire, all dramatic and epic and majestic, but slightly warped and warbly, and on and on and on.
A fantastically varied collection of beautiful but brief electronic soundscapes, woven together into a strangely cohesive whole. Oh and did we mention the cover photo, of Reuber (we presume), wearing a leather jacket, a cowboy hat, American flag pants, with his foot up on some sort of sports car, with a personalized REUBER license plate, holding a spear gun, standing next to a stuffed elephant, that has been speared, and appears to be bleeding spaghetti in tomato sauce. Woah.
Even though this is record number FIVE from Reuber (aka Timo Reuber), who is also a member of electronic duo Klangwart, Ring is the very first thing we've heard from him, and it immediately became one of our new favorite records, a dizzying assemblage of loops and samples and textures and effects woven into a series of super varied soundscapes, from hypnotic kosmische krautdrone, to hazy murky pulsing techno flecked electronica, to super frantic spaced out new wave, to murky electronic drone dirge psych rock to woozy minimal sci-fi techno, all of it rhythmic and hypnotic, lush and layered.
Self described as Reuber's "motorbike album", Ring finds Reuber trying to evoke a 'Reuber Principle' using a selection of sounds designed to sound different during each performance, depending on the venue, the audience and of course Reuber himself. All but one of the tracks are created using just two synthesizers, experimenting with rhythm and texture, creating constantly shifting collages of sound, all 'Ring' variations, the first "Ring Ring", the most blissed out of the bunch, a minimal electronic pulse, a slowly shifting melody, a deep buzzing vocal that sounds like Tuvan throat singing, a haunting bit of cinematic kosmische drift that ends way too soon. The upside being that it leads directly into the 17 minute "Ring", which takes the sound of the first track and explodes it into something much more celestial and cosmic, a supernova of sound, all blurred and washed out, hazy and shimmery, underneath which various bits of percussion pulse and pound, a buried rhythm that gradually moves to the fore, and the song transforms into a gorgeously hypnotic tribal psychedelic workout that sounds almost like modern day Boredoms. This tribal churn is laced with strange melodic bits, twisted effects, a roiling swirl of sound, that soon returns to the washed out cosmic shimmer of the song's beginning, only to again explode into some heaving crumbling rhythmic crush, and then slip right back into a hazy dreamlike outro.
"Ringer" offers up a swirl of looped repetitive synth, mesmerizing and cyclical, cinematic and sci-fi, gradually growing more and more distorted and intense, until some of the sounds coalesce into beats, and the track becomes a supercharged synth heavy sci-fi blowout that wouldn't sound out of place on a Zombi record, although with a bit more of a techno twist. "Ring Frei" counters the previous track with some low slung synthbass, some skittery skeletal rhythms, streaks of feedback and squealing electronic glitchery, and most importantly some seriously fat fuzzy, murky melodies, a crunchy, buzzy muddy krautjam, propulsive and motorik, almost like some far out Kraftwerk / Suicide / Electronicat hybrid. And finally "Ringfest" finishes things off with some Kompakt style throb and pulse, starting out sleek and late night and minimal, before blossoming into something buzzier and more twisted, with shards of rave-y synth, more of those buzzing throat singing style vox and some squiggly spacey Theremin like melodies. Wow. We really can't stop listening to this, so mesmerizing and psychedelic and hypnotic and tripped out and most definitely a new unanimous aQ fave!
We made Reuber's Ring a Record Of The Week a little while back, the latest solo record from Timo Reuber, who is one half of the electronic duo Klangwart. Ring was fantastic, super varied, slipping from kosmische dronemusic to pulsing psychedelic techno to spacey new wave. We loved it so much, that many of us got a little obsessed, and decided to dig deeper and check out some of Reuber's other releases. Thus we have this, Reuber's second solo release, from 2001, the title translating to "Stay Cool", the bulk of which is made up of the two part title track, each part about 22 minutes. The first part, definitely in keeping with the album title, is an extended electronic dronescape, shimmery and crystalline, lush yet delicate, warm tones drifting from speaker to speaker, bathed in a hazy glow, meditative and dreamlike, new agey and a little bit krautrocky, soft flurries of notes dissipate into gauzy streaks, bits of electronic glitch and spacey effects surface here and there, like the score for some educational film about interplanetary travel. The sounds eventually coalesce into an almost rhythm, pulsing warmly, wreathed in strange atonal melodies, before quickly blissing out again, and spreading out into a barely there cloud of glistening, tinkling blur.
The second part of the title track is pretty much the opposite, a pulsing metallic buzz like rhythm, skeletal and mechanical, skitters and shuffles, the sounds growing more and more thick and buzzy, distorted and intense, eventually becoming almost Merzbowian, thick and corrosive, yet still somehow warm and melodic, a wildly buzzing chunk of hypnotic spaced out rhythm, the timbre constantly shifting too, from dense and layered, to brittle and tinny, finally to fully blown out and in-the-red. All the while managing to sound kosmische and psychedelic, under that coating of crunch and thrum and buzz and glitch.
Finally, the record finishes off with another bit of 'cool'ness, a relatively brief (7+ minutes), of hazy high end shimmer, a warm whirling drift of subtle overtones, slow shifting layers, of blurred melodies and glowing near static thrum, a perfect bit of tranquil mesmer to finish with.
Fantastic stuff, anyone who dug Ring will like this too, and anyone into kosmische drift, and spacey new age kraut drone, who is not averse to a little bit of crunch and buzz, this will definitely hit the spot.
And we continue to dig deeper into the catalog of Reuber, aka Timo Reuber, whose most recent, fifth record Ring we made our Record Of The Week not too long ago, and whose other records we've been reviewing one at a time ever since. All different, but all pretty fantastic. This one is record number 4, following Kintopp which we reviewed last list.
Sudpol translates as "South Pole", not entirely sure if there's any meaning, or if there's some South Pole theme running through the record, but like Kintopp, Sudpol seems to simply be a super varied, and totally hypnotic collection of sonic experiments, ranging from propulsive electro krautrock workouts, to droned out fields of glitch and pulse, hazy pop ambient shimmer to super distorted industrial flecked skitter, groovy almost post rock sounding loopage to fuzzy playfully melodic techno-pop, Kraftwerky robotic electronic funk to blissed out sun dappled soundtracky synth wave, culminating in the epic 12 minute dronescape "Steppengraskrieger", with its billows of distant buzz and haunting almost operatic barely there vocals, buried electro beats, sounding as if they're being blasted on the stereo in the apartment next door, lush gauzy streaks of hazy whir and thrum, those buried beats constantly surfacing amidst the swirl and shimmer, until finally, the track transforms completely into a softly slow swirling tangle of looped and warped melodies, strange metallic buzz and soft focus flurries of glimmering tones and muted streaks of smeared sound. So nice. Another winner for sure, and and yet another record that has us wondering why Reuber is not way more of a big deal�
Somehow this is nothing like what we expected, not sure what we actually expected but this definitely was not at all it. Rev has spent most of his musical life in the seminal group Suicide, creating the iconic musical backdrops for his partner Alan Vega, he's also released tons of solo records over the years, from pop to new wave, we've heard a handful of them, but none of them prepared us for this.
Stigmata is basically soundtrack music, all strings and synths and Rev's dreamy almost Antony like vocals, most of the tracks are short, and establish a musical theme, and then work around it, creating tension, establishing the mood, pizzicato string plucks, soaring stringed melodies, some ominous and haunting, others playful, and still others majestic and epic, all moody and dramatic, while Rev croons and coos, not singing so much as offering up almost falsetto sounding 'whooo's, it sounds strange, but in fact, it's pretty compelling, and moving, and intense. The music sounds classical, or operatic, while the vocals are weirdly distorted and way up in the mix, mostly wordless, as far as we can tell, almost like karaoke opera, which is a lot cooler than it sounds, check out the sound samples, not sure what it is, but we just can't seem to stop listening to this. Be cool to see what Rev could do with an actual score, seems like it might be pretty interesting...
Martin Rev without Alan Vega (the artist's other half in the mid-'70s minimal electronic punk duo, Suicide) seems like Oates without Hall, maybe even Donny sans Marie. But members of duos often make solo "me" time to try stuff they might not otherwise with their sonic partners, and synthesist Rev has been releasing solo records for most of his tenure with/since Suicide. In fact, we were really impressed with his 2009 Stigmata album. While Vega typically donned a rockabilly hat for most of his solo releases, Rev has tried on more than a few musical caps. This new vinyl reissue of his first solo venture from 1980 is one of his more minimalist efforts - think early Human League experiments like "Being Boiled".
"Baby Oh Baby" is the only one of the lp's six tracks that isn't an instrumental - and even there, the lyrics don't extend beyond what you see right there in the song title. The melody on the opening track, "Mari", carries an optimism you wouldn't associate with the dark and eerie downtown duo, and demonstrates Rev's exploration of other moods. It's so upbeat, you might expect Stephin Merritt's low croon to swoop in any second. The rest of the short album is filled with the synth washes and oscillations Rev basically patented as the vocabulary of the synth wave to come. Any fan in search of synth pop's origins will want to include this classic piece of cold electronic minimalism in their collection.
This is not really new, but it's one of our favorite freaked out black metal records, and it was reissued last year (originally released in 2002) although we only now managed to get in touch with the label (they also released the Vorak, reviewed elsewhere on this list) but now finally we can list and review, this amazing slab of bizarre blackness.
Those familiar with the Rev. Kriss Hades, probably know him as the guitar player for Aussie black death metallers Sadistik Exekution, who while weird in their own right, are pretty much furious grinding blacknoise, a sort of sloppy psychedelic black mess, awesome by the way, but more simple and fast than freaked out and fucked up. Which is why this first album from Sadistik guitarist Hades is such a mind blower. This is super abstract, noisy, buzzy, outsider experimental black metal, peppered with stretches of black ambience, industrial soundscapes and plenty of whatthefuck heaviness. This record has been described as a mix of Einsturzende Neubauten, Beherit and Pink Floyd, and while the sound here is probably much closer to Beherit than the other two, their are definite moments of tripped out psychedelia and industrial grind and whir.
But from the first song, it's easy to tell this is some freaky mind blowing stuff. Beginning with haunting acoustic guitar, weaving mournful melodies amidst whipping winds, when the band kicks in, instead of launching into blasting blackness, it's more a sort of murky blown out buzz, the guitars super washed out, the riffing just a blackened smear, underpinned by epic swells of super dramatic keyboards, the drums a buried blast, WAY down in the mix, while over the top the vocals are a confusional pile up of grunts and growls, of shrieks and howls, mumbling and singing in tongues, the whole thing smeared and seasick, buzzing abstractly, almost more experimental black ambience than metal, but there are riffs, and drums blasting away, reminiscent of Wold and Velvet Cacoon in some ways. The first track finishes off with more acoustic guitar, this time though draped delicately over muted black riffing.
And the weird thing is, that's about as metal as the record gets, that first track, from then on it gets more and more unhinged, more psychedelic, less riffy and definitely less 'metal', but no less heavy. The next two tracks are reinterpreted Sadistik Exekution tracks, and while we're not that familiar with the originals, these versions definitely twist the originals into new shapes. The first is a blazing black blast of buzz, but beginning with a tripped out psychedelic assemblage of backwards guitars and processed vocals, then the song itself is super convoluted, riffs slipping and sliding everywhere, squiggly leads, a total damaged black psych freakout, while the other is a sort of blissed out ambient Godflesh / Pitchshifter thing, all industrial rhythms, the riffs, way down in the mix and doused in FX, haunting vocals and all manner of swirling shimmer and crumbling drones...
Right after that is the super brief "Luciferion", a super distorted, ultra fuzzed out shred fest, just guitar, buzzing riffs and wild leads, the whole thing blown out and in the red, followed by "Meditation Of The Midnight Candle Practice" an extended soundscape of warped distorted guitars, strangled effects, huge washes of glacial guitardrone, super affected leads, glitched out minimal rhythms buried way down in the mix, drifting lo-fi ambience and super tweaked studio sounds, all woven into a seriously cracked world of black sound. The record finishes off with a creepy haunted house horror movie church organ jam that morphs right at the end into a super thick corrosive deathdronedirge...
A seriously demented slab of damaged psychedelic black buzz. Which obviously means WAY recommended.
The reissue includes a thick booklet with lyrics, photos, an excerpt from an interview with Hades, and lots of Hades' super intense artwork...
UK label Miskatonic, supporters of true underground doom metal, bring us this disc by the semi-legendary Revelation from Maryland (of doom). Featuring Revelation's 'new' line-up, this disc consists of eight demo cuts plus two live tracks circa their 1995 European tour supporting Saint Vitus and Solitude Aeturnus. It comes as a prelude to a brand new fourth album on which this long dormant band is now, at last, at work. To certain doom fanatics, these 'demos' are going to be more thrilling than many proper albums from other bands, such is the regard in which this band is held. If you've never heard Revelation before, expect doom metal (or, alternatively, depressive stoner rock) along the lines of The Obsessed and Place Of Skulls -- heavy, slow, Ozzified.
Field recordings and the sounds of activated environments (e.g. the crunching of leaves, the tactility of sand, the resonance of an abandoned warehouse, etc.) are the building blocks for the compositions of many a musician championed here at aQuarius. You could look no further than the Jewelled Antler bunch, who marched out in the woods to craft much of their rustic psychedelia crowned with lichen, twigs, birdsong, and rocks. This Revenant project may share the spirited tromps out in the forest and even the revolving door approach found in Jewelled Antler; the but the results end up being quite different. The members of Revenant for this recording were Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer), John Grzinich, Hitoshi Kojo (aka Spiracle), Yannich Dauby, and Olivier Fernaud, all gathered together on the Slovenia-Italy border surrounded by an old growth forest and a few confounded birds. The idea behind Revenant is site-specific acoustic actions, or activated environments with each action being a document of a specific moment in time in a specific location. The five brought minimal equipment, just a few violin bows and a couple of digital recorders, and scrounged around the woods for the rest of their soundmaking devices: leaves, blades of grass, seedpods, heavy stones, etc. The violin bows were employed to atonal use on the first track as these five each took up a particular branch on a particular tree to scrape rasping tones that would even give Tony Conrad the shivers. The following explorations of tactile abrasions, weird gurgles, and gentle swoops enjoy a deliberate pacing; and the concluding track features what must be Hitoshi Kojo chanting in Japanese amidst a chorus of mouth organ drones, which ends up more like an Akio Suzuki meditation.
The most unhinged band in metal, Canada's Revenge, somehow manages to even sound more insane on this, their fifth full-length record, despite the departure of founding member Pete Helmkamp (Angelcorpse). The aural equivalent of being dragged to hell, also the aural equivalent of any of their trademark abject 3-word album titles. One of the few bands left still pushing extreme metal further!!!
Comes with sick patch.
There's actually a goodly number of black and/or death metal releases on this week's list, and they wouldn't be here if we didn't like 'em. But if what you're looking for is something that's *really* evil-sounding, shredded, distorted, blackened, and fucked up, well, like they say: dude, Revenge is sweet. (Forget about the best served cold part, though.) Seriously, Canada's Revenge sure as heck here have made one of the noisiest, nastiest black metal records we've heard in a long time. Their second full-length, Victory.Intolerance.Mastery (how's that for an album title?) is, uh, extremely extreme. Utterly so. Roaring, rumbling, raw. Not for those concerned with such sophisticated niceties as polished production, or melody, or even, well, music. Nope, this is purely over-the-top hellish thrashing mayhem. Clattering drums, belching vocals, screaming guitars, all recorded past-the-point-of-pain. Really, we thought that Aufgehoben No Process was the Anaal Nathrakh of noise-rock...but now we think that Revenge are the Aufgehoben No Process of black metal...does that make sense? Truly cult stuff. What else to say? Well, this blasting brutality boasts the, ah, talents of bass warrior Pete Helmcamp (Angelcorpse, Order From Chaos), whom along with the other guy in the band (one J. Read on "bloodhammers" and "actrocity commands") is one of the reasons that our pal Drew from Matmos just came in and bought this disc -- he thinks these guys are cute! Bet that's the only time someone purchases this cd for the cuteness factor. Another selling point: Revenge have such a nice, spikey, negative-space logo.
We always talk about how something is super limited and sold out and out of print so we won't go into too much detail, but then we invariably do, but not this time. We have less than 10 copies, originally limited to 500, sold out and out of print. Once these are gone it's off to eBay with you.
Two covers, one recorded in 2001, one recorded last year, Saint Vitus' "Dark World" and Judas Priest's "Deceiver", both given a Reverend Bizarre makeover. With vocalist Albert doing his best "Vocal Impersonation" according to the liner notes. His Rob Halford is wildly over the top and pretty amazing. And he already sounded a lot like St. Vitus's Scott Reagers to begin with, as that band such a huge influence on Rev. B.! As always, heavy and doomy, the songs obviously classics, too bad we got so few of these.
Along with the post-Reverend Bizarre project we just got in and made our Record Of The Week (Sami "Sir Albert Witchfinder" Hynninen's ultra-doomy The Puritan, you already read about it above, right?), we also were finally able to get some copies of this, a MUST HAVE for all fans of these now defunct Finnish true doom metal legends. In fact, it's so good we would not hesitate to recommend it to any curious persons who have yet to hear ANY Reverend Bizarre. It's not an official "best of", actually this posthumous collection consists of uber rarities from various vinyl split ep's and other obscure sources, but it does still have some of their best stuff on it. And, since Rev. B. had fashioned themselves into one of the best "traditional" doom metal bands around (in part by not being TOO traditional) that means this is one of the best double discs of doom we've heard since, well, the LAST Reverend Bizarre album, the 2cd swansong that was III: So Long Suckers.
There's 15 tracks here, leading off with "Demons Annoying Me" from a long vanished split 12" with Orodruin, which happens to be a NON-boring nearly 18 minute epic, a true masterwork of heedless heaviness, built from raging riffs, distorted noise, and cathartic screams, one of the tracks that transcends this band's obvious influences and definitely deserves pride of place as the first track on this altogether awesome double disc. Other standouts abound, from the anthemic "Blood On Satan's Claw" (boasting some King Diamond-y falsetto in the vocal dep't.), to the brief and bludgeoning "Odinn's Men", to the seemingly Current 93 influenced "Apocalyptic Riders", to the also pretty darn epic eleven and a half minute "From The Void II", complete with slo-mo drum solo...
Then there's the two killer cover songs included here, both from a long out of print 7" we once stocked: Judas Priest's "Deceiver" and Saint Vitus' "Dark World". As the liner notes put it, it's as if Saint Vitus wrote that song for RB to cover. And while Albert's vocals are quite impressive throughout this entire collection, it's really amazing how well his wildly over the top "impersonation" of Rob Halford comes off on "Deciever", and with Vitus such a huge influence on RB to begin with, it's no surprise that Albert channels Scott Reagers perfectly on "Dark World" (heck he channels Reagers perfectly all the time, check out the track "The Tree Of Suffering" for another very good example). Wow.
RB's music can get pretty trancey, doing a dirgey drone at a creepy crawl, with the likes of the gloomy "Bend" (an unlikely "cover" of a track by Finnish electro artist Mr. Velcro Fastener, by the way, from a split they did!) and a bunch of others bringing in hints of black metal grimnity. But also some tracks are fairly uptempo and succinct, like the '70s Sabbatheque rockin' of "Broken Vows", which any Witchcraft fan is gonna love. And if you get at all bothered the Devil in your music (why are you reading this then?), beware the backwards shit going down on "The Gate Of Nanna" at the end of disc 2, that's Satan worship if we've ever heard it. So cool.
The cd booklet deserves mention as well, they didn't neglect the liner notes that's for sure. There's many pages of text in tiny tiny type discussing the what/when/where/why of each track in great depth.
R.I.P. Reverend Bizarre... and doom on brothers, Doom On!!
Reverend Bizarre is so worshipful of their obvious influences (Sabbath, St. Vitus, Cathedral, Witchfinder General, Pentagram, Trouble, Sleep, Electric Wizard, etc.) that it might be easy to dismiss them as being just fans instead of the real thing... but we've got to say, there's something just so darn charming about how much these lads LOVE doom metal. It's infectious. And their songs are even ABOUT doom! Sloganeering for doom, that's their thing -- sing-along album opener "Doom Over The World" is a doom-lovers anthem basically. And they've chosen stage names guaranteed to amuse: Albert Witchfinder (vocals, bass), Peter Vicar (guitar), Earl of Void (drums). Yup, they've got some sort of extra-special, amateur fanboy appeal that makes you root for 'em. And they've worked so hard at living up to the standards of their heroes that they're not half bad, in fact, we're darn impressed. They come across like a hybrid of Saint Vitus and Cathedral, with dramatic, clean vocals definitely owing something to original Vitus singer Scott Reagers.
Their discs are always adorned with cryptic inscriptions like "Lohja Power" and "C.O.T.D" -- the latter standing for "Circle Of True Doom" something I think these guys invented, though I've seen it on other bands' cds. It also says "Apocalyptic Doom Metal" in big letters on the back cover of this one but when you first spin the disc, for the first few songs you'd think that "Party Time Doom Metal" or something like that would be a better motto since there's a definite headbanging catchiness to the first few tracks, the Rev. Bizarre boys rockin' out whilst dooming it up. As "into" doom and depression as they and their audience (you?) might be, the listener can't help but have their frown turned upside down when the band kicks into such rollicking, riffy, uptempo tunes as "The Devil Rides Out" and "Cromwell". It's heavy metal, and it's doom. But II: Crush The Insects ain't all fist-waving rockers. They do play slooooooow a lot of the time too. After the first three cuts, the album takes a turn into the realm of, well, apocalyptic doom metal, with track lengths in the double digits. Like the crawling epic "Slave Of Satan", which was apparently a number 2 HIT song in their native Finland!!! Hard to believe, as it's 13 and a half minutes long!! And that's the edited album cut, which is considerably shorter than the 21 minute single version!!! Torturously slow, anywhere else in the world it'd be a miracle if it made it into the Top 40 THOUSAND. The record continues in this vein, with some brief bursts of speed, through to the very last song, with the dumb/brilliant title of "Fucking Wizard".
The end is nigh! Heck here it is, at long last. The final tolling of the bell for Finnish apocalyptic doomsters Reverend Bizarre. Thus this album is titled So Long Suckers, and there's a sticker on the front that says: "Doom Metal Is Dead". What could be doomier than that? Funny how these guys, who started off as not much more than an enthusiastic fanboy tribute to their favorite doom metal acts, have now become almost one with the genre itself. Or at least their own, admittedly redundantly denoted, subgenre of "Apocalyptic Doom".
When we heard they were breaking up, that was a bummer, but we were eager to hear this promised swansong release. So, sad to see them go... but what a way TO go. A sprawling double cd, six slo-mo (like swimming in a moat filled with molasses) songs of super heavy repetitive riffage and lyrical lethargy, lasting over two hours total. Everything that we love about the bizarre Reverend sorta summed up right there. Spirited, eccentric and extreme, the sort of band that thinks nothing of writing 25+ minute long songs, like some sort of oppressive, epic, plodding prog, giving them all the more space to display their guitar blunt force trauma and deep voiced vocal drama... so massive and monotonous. Disc one starts off with the twenty nine minutes of "They Used Dark Forces / Teutonic Witch". Track two, "Sorrow", is a 25 minutes. Track three, "Funeral Summer", a mere 11:41... and that's the whole of disc one. There's a few shorter numbers on disc two (like the fuzz ripping instrumental "Kundalini Arisen"), but also another 25 minute bruiser (the majestic and martial "Anywhere Out Of This World"), which becomes psychedelically trance-inducing by the end, for us, almost like Om.
Of course, song length doesn't put the o's in yr dooooooooooom alone. Reverend Bizarre take their final shot here at the classic crush of heroes like Saint Vitus (also a big influence on their cleanly-crooning vocalist), Cathedral and of course Black Sabbath. The riffs they repeat forever and ever are forged from the heaviest of distorted tones, the overall atmosphere is one of weighty, weary, weirdness. This is one monolithic tombstone all right, an end to this band's 13-year career that itself seems rather endless while you're listening to it. Endless and eternal. Reverend Bizarre, R.I.P... and doom on!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Single from their new album Crush The Insects. Contains extended (20+ minute!) version of the album track. Aparently went to No. 2 in Finland. Huh? DOOOM!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Rev B do a song called "Rotestilaulu", Kuolema reply with "Kaljaa Nuorille".
Ratto Ja Lehtisalo are a weird band. Made up of half of aQ faves Circle, their sound is less krautrock, and more like some weird hybrid of eighties new wave faves, Oingo Boingo, The Fixx, Sparks, Talking Heads, but then Circle are pretty weird themselves, flitting from murky propulsive hypnorock, to bombastic metal to atmospheric drone to eighties style New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and back again. And the side projects, too many to name here, but needless to say, they are all pretty far out.
This here is the latest from Ratto Ja Lehtisalo, and find the band, doing what they do best, confounding and confusing, and even more confounding and confusing is that they are teamed up with the mighty late great doomlords Reverend Bizarre!! Sure they're both from Finland, and yeah, RB's Albert Witchfinder got recent aQ Record Of The Week recipients Quest For Blood signed to Jussi from Circle's Ektro label, but sonically, the couldn't be more different, and yet, weirdly enough, they sound kind of cool back to back.
Anyway, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo start things off with some demented court jester music, sounding very twisted and Renn Faire, before slipping into some moody almost Circle-ish drama, a weird almost-krautrock, but way lighter and jazzier, with chanted vocals that sometimes sound like Queen, sometimes like Circle, the first thing that came to mind was Cluster mixed with Shadowfax, which sounds bad, we know, but is more, just sort of, strange, it's like the music to some insane production of seventies mime troupe Mummenschanz, the band lock into a very Circle-like jam, but soft and fuzzy and jazzy, but just like the Circle mothership, easy enough to get lost in and carried away by.
The flipside comes from Finnish doomsters Reverend Bizarre, who like Tupac, just seem to keep releasing records post mortem, but heck we're not complaining ONE BIT.
A new track composed over an improvised drum track, and it's obvious cuz the drums steal the show. Huge roiling guitars, throbbing doomy bass, and those vocals, deep and resonant and soaring. This is, my friends TRUE DOOM! The track lurches and sways, grooves and swings, sometimes slipping into seriously dense tangles of angular riffing and freaked out drumming, near the end the band launch into a blissed out psychedelic space rock drift that devolves into a bizarre coda all bellowed vocals and wild drums, and yep, a DRUM SOLO!! Before slipping back into the riff and dooming their way to the very end. As always. awesome.
A weird and wonderful, and did we say WEIRD, split of far out Finnish freakiness. Super limited. Pressed on thick swirled opaque white vinyl, with killer cover art by Albert Witchfinder.
Warning. Listening to this crap may cause you to grow up to wear huge garish hawaiian shirts, beat your wife, get stupid tattoos and listen to the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Not recommended.
Not surprisingly, the seemingly ageless and unchanging Reverend Horton Heat gets his brand new album goin' at a galloping psychobilly start. Not quite as blistering nor caustic as he used to be, but no less energetic. Of course, the best way to experience the Rev (and garage rockabilly bands in general) is in the unpredictable raucous live setting. On record, things just come across too clean and controlled. Well, you can sort of get a taste of both worlds with the first pressing of this disc 'cause it comes with a bonus dvd that features live footage and an interview too.
Everyone's favorite rockabilly Reverend returns. Song titles may contain the following words: "boogie," "woogie," "Jack," "Daniels," "whole," "lotta," and "daddy". Rockin'.
Like some dusty old 78, left in the basement for 20 or 30 years, wet and warped, gritty and scratched up, thrown onto the ol' Victrola as is, and allowed to unfurl a warped and warbly, rickety detuned slow motion blues crawl. That's exactly what this latest disc from the Reveries sounds like. Recorded live in Italy in 2004, the Reveries, fronted by Eric Chenaux (who for those of you up on your nineties indie math rock, fronted Toronto's godlike Phleg Camp), magically create this sound from another time. But there's more to it than that, the sound is strangely damaged, alien even, and for good reason. The band employ a technique as bizarre as it is brilliant. Each player, in addition to wielding guitar, harmonica, bass, saw, nose-flute and thumb-reeds (!?), holds a tiny cell phone speaker IN THEIR MOUTHS!!! WHILE THEY PLAY!! OR EVEN SING!! So each of the instruments is sent first to the speaker in the mouth of another player, who much like a Jew's harp, is able to shape and warp the sound with the shape of his mouth. So you're hearing guitar come out of the bass players mouth, the bass coming out of the guitar player's mouth, the flute through another player's mouth, and on and on...
Then there's the singing, which all three members do, and as you might imagine, it's pretty difficult to sing with a speaker in your mouth, and a speaker cable trailing out of your mouth to an amp or a bandmate's mouth. The result is a mumbled and warbly, mush mouthed drawl, fuzzy falsettos, a garbled croon, often sounding like a toothless old Nina Simone, but just as often, like some strange buzzing growl, perfectly complimenting the band's detuned twang flecked scrawl.
It's almost like the Starfuckers playing Django Reinhardt at 16 rpm, with a countrified Derek Bailey on guitar. Cracking, wheezing and skeletal, a demented yet lovely underwater slow motion Western Swing, plenty of downtuned buzz, scraping and shuffling, whispering and whistling, seasick and gorgeously woozy. There are stretches of garbled instrumental chaos here and there, but the majority of the set is spent slithering and shimmering, meandering drunkenly through some strange sonic haze, an old timey radio broadcast, from some strange musical alternate reality, bits of classic blues and jazz muted and smeared pulled apart and tangled up into haunting and perplexing shapes. So gorgeous.
The Reveries were indeed a revelation. A modern slow-mo, off-kilter, creaky rickety avant country combo, whose sound was a bleary blend of campfire twang, woozy slowcore, and most notably, a system by which each player holds a tiny speaker in their mouths while they play, with the various other players sending their sounds and signals into the mouths of the other players, letting the various musicians shape and twist and contort those sounds, often combining them with their own vocal parts.
The result was truly unique, haunting, mysterious, and gorgeously fractured. The last Reveries disc, was titled Plays The Music Of Sade. We weren't sure if that was some high concept thing, and it was in fact inspired by the Marquis De Sade, or if they were indeed covers of songs by the pop vocalist Sade (pronounced shar-day). It's perhaps a testament to the Reveries skill at reinvention that we were unable to realize that they were actually Sade covers (or it might speak to our being wholly unfamiliar with her body of work minus THAT song) Regardless, just like the record before, the Reveries created a wholly otherworld of moaning melodies, and creeping tempos, of strange voices, of detuned guitars, warbly basslines, shuffling percussion, all warped and funhouse mirrored by their circuitous journey from instrument to amp to speaker to mouth to microphone to recorder to compact disc.
On this first volume, in a proposed ongoing series, the Reveries tackle, as the title suggests, the music of country music icon Willie Nelson, and it's a pretty fine match. The first track is a surprise though, fairly rocking by Reveries standards, a rollicking version on "I Let My Mind Wander", with propulsive drumming, some serious riffing, and that strange whistle like melody that the band seems to lace each song with, a sort of falsetto croon. And the vocals as always are a sort of mush mouthed garble, due in no small part to the singe having to sing around the speaker in his mouth.
The rest of the record unfurls lazily, all creaking back porch blues, the guitars often drifting by in disembodied twangs, each arrangement spare and abstract and seemingly always on the verge of collapse, the drums shuffling and minimal holding it all barely together, but it's the melodies that make it immediately the Reveries, each one, each vocal line wavery and woozy, unfurled and filtered through a jew's harp like warble, keening whistle like tones tangled and ghostlike. Even the most recognizable songs, like "Crazy", become something totally and utterly different.
The overall sound is dark and drunken, mournful and mysterious, some tracks add harmonica, nose-flute, singing saw, and while those elements add to the lushness of the Reveries' sound, they're almost unnecessary, their core sound is so delicate and alien even at its most stripped down, so beautifully creepy, that all it ever takes to suck us in is that slow languorous twang, some warbly vocals, and a sweetly sad minor key melody...
Past record of the week honorees the Reveries return with this super limited live cd-r, and while we're not always huge fans of live recordings, this one is worth it for two reasons, one, we've been dying for more Reveries, we can't get enough of their soporific warbly alien blues, and second, their sound is so strange and woozy, that the various crowd sounds, and the lo-fi recording, only add to their mysterious ambience.
The Reveries, for those of you who missed their AQ record of the week a while back, are a minimal blues trio, who take their somewhat standard instrumentation, guitar, bass, harmonica, musical saw, nose flute, and augment them with what the band calls 'mouth speakers', a tiny cell phone speaker, that each member holds in his mouth while they play, the various instruments being fed to the speaker in one of the other players' mouths, where the sound can then be altered by that player changing the shape of their mouth, or singing along to another instrument. The result is so gorgeous and so completely strange. The sound is off kilter and abstract, woozy and druggy, and totally beautiful. This live set finds the band augmented by a drummer, and various members playing stuff like streetsweeper bristle bass and thumb reeds, which only serves to give these songs a bit more propulsion, not quite as languorous as their last disc, a bit more 'rocking', with some simulated wah guitars (using their mouth speakers we figure) and more of a focus on the vocals, gorgeous mournful melodies, plaintive falsetto harmonies, all draped over the band's blurred bluescapes.
Folks who dig Bonny Prince Billy and Iron And WIne and the like should definitely check this out. It's that sort of modern blues twang, melancholy and melodic, but the Reveries, take that sound and twist it all up into something much stranger, and somehow much more moving.
SUPER LIMITED. Totally over the top packaging, a screen printed cardboard box, each one individually augmented by various glued on pieces of paper and art fragments, inside the box is stuffed with various inserts and found paper debris, flyers, newspapers, pictures cut out from magazines, and all manner of other strange visual detritus.
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From the archives of Channel 1 recording studios in Jamaica comes another fine collection of dubs from circa 1976 featuring house band The Revolutionaries, featuring Sly & Robbie, Tommy McCook, and Skully. Really nice and minimal dubs, many of them stripped
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We definitely don't always know everything there is to know about dub (especially now that Byram, our dub expert, has left us), you know, the studios, the players, the history, but heck, we do know what we like, and what we like most is that spaced out, blissed out, reverb drenched dub, just dripping in delay, every snare hit skittering into infinity, all over huge warm throbbing basslines, with simple guitar melodies surfacing here and there before dipping back under the swirl of burbling bass and echoing rhythms. Barely any vocals, but when vocals do appear, they are immediately chopped up and sent spinning into a celestial echo chamber, along with those reverberating snare hits. Occasional horns too, even flutes, all warm and wrapped in a gauzy studio haze, lurking dreamily beneath the dubbed out skeleton of each song. So good! The Revolutionaries (featuring Sly Dunbar on drums) were the Channel One house band, and had played on just about every great reggae and dub record you can think of. For Earthquake Dub, Ossie Hibbert, arranger and session boss for Channel One and Joe Gibbs, manned the board, smearing those perfect reggae rhythms into gloriously dubbed out bliss! This is the first release on relatively new reggae / dub reissue label Hot Pot, and features liner notes as well as plenty of info on each track.
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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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There are very few contemporary jazz ensembles that get us excited, that remind us of the good ol' days, you know, Jazz Actuel, free jazz, REVOLUTIONARY JAZZ, so it should come as no surprise really, that one of the new bands that does do it for us, is made up of players from the old days, still making music as exciting, powerful and emotionally charged as ever.
Revolutionary Ensemble is Leroy Jenkins on violin, Sirone on bass, and Jerome Cooper on drums and a variety of other sound making devices, and Beyond The Boundary Of Time, captures the trio's 2005 final performance, live in Poland, recorded 2 years before Jenkins' death.
We've long been obsessed with Sirone, ever since the Chicago Art Ensemble days, one of the few players who could mesmerize and entrance us with an hour of solo bass, and he gets to do his thing here too, opening the set with 4 plus minutes of scrapes and drones and rumbles, until the song kicks in proper, and violin is such a strange non traditional jazz instrument, but Jenkins makes it sing, so melodic and haunting and mysterious, soaring over the strange rubbery basslines, and the abstract percussive skitter. The opening track gives us chills every time we hear it. The playing so lyrical and emotional, it's definitely jazz, but with elements of classical music, chamber music, intense, but also raw, and loose, and so free. Utterly beautiful. And that's just the first track.
The whole record is magical and mysterious, and sonically unique, Jenkins' violin and Sirone's bass are perfect foils, tangling and sparring, sometimes in perfect harmony, other times exploding into different directions, but the result is always the same, lush, expressive, otherworldly, some alien strain of jazz, that just seems to unfold and flower and splinter into all sorts of different shapes and sounds as the set progresses, seeing this in person must have been incredible, cuz recorded, it's pretty breathtaking.
The set ends with two lengthy improvisations, and the players go for it, the first, an endless avalanche of strange tones and layered skitter, lots of space, but also strange sonic molecules darting to and fro, the band occasionally locking into some serious droney dreaminess, but just as quickly breaking down into near chaos. The final track, lush and abstract, seriously melodic, until what sounds like some strange drum machine kicks in, and the track is transformed into some almost new wave free jazz freakout, fucking AWESOME.
Definitely one of the best performances from one of our favorite, and sadly now defunct, modern free jazz ensembles. Dedicated, as it should be, to the memory of Leroy Jenkins.
Reissue of this 1975 classic featuring the Art Ensemble Of Chicago's Sirone on bass, Jerome Cooper on drums and piano, and ensemble leader Leroy Jenkins on the very un-jazz violin and viola. Treading similar musical ground as the Art Ensemble and the A.A.C.M. this is abstract, and very free. And while it may be Jenkins' group, it's definitely Sirone's party. Sinewy fretless bass pervades every dark nook and cranny of the recording. Wandering and slithering under and over Jenkins' wild sawing and Cooper's splattery drumming. So cool and free. So free in fact that some of you folks who aren't all that psyched on jazz might even give this a shot. There's lots of drone and NNCK / SHOTM tribal clatter that might just change your mind about jazz. Maybe.
Yes!! One of Creation Records best and most mystifying bands finally gets the anthology treatment (Thanks Rev-ola!). Releasing only two records (Off To Heaven from 1987 and Mother Watch Me Burn, from 1989), and two singles (all compiled here), no other band on the Creation roster has been subject to such wild conspiracy theories, extreme denial, rumor and hearsay that have, uh, revolved around this group. And those seeking answers will definitely not find them here.
I (Scott) remember back in my high school days hanging out in the only British Import record store in Orange County (Hyde Park Records in North Irvine) and my friend picking up Off to Heaven with its cryptic liner notes about a late night telephone call and cab-ride to the studio, finding smashed instruments, pink swastikas on the wall and the smell of a bonfire full of clothing, guitars, recording tape and a note "We are invisible...we cannot see you". According to legend, the tapes of the band arrived out of the blue at Creation, with rumors of members (never identified) being seen in various parts of the world in inebriated states of mental recklessness, acid burnout, and inappropriate undress. Needless to say, My friend and I were intrigued. We took the record home and our young minds were blown. Fuzzy, and darkly druggy sixties-sounding psych pop with Phil Spectorish arrangements, jangly guitars, alternating male and female vocals, burning farfisas, backwards tape collages, noisy feedback, and of course tambourines! Yet the songs were performed in a manner that was beyond pastiche or merely a re-tread of the early eighties paisley underground sound. Ever hear of the story of the La's obsessively recording using machines with "sixties dust", to get that distinct vintage sound? Well, RVP sound like they injected that dust deep into their veins, ripped off the drum break from Tomorrow Never Knows, turned their amps all the way up then lit them on fire, walked into the sea, never to emerge. This is the band Brian Jonestown Massacre wish they were.
Of course I wore through my dubbed cassette, and not many I have talked to since had ever heard of them. Rumors have since circulated that Revolving Paint Dream was actually a secret side project of Andrew Innes from Primal Scream, and maybe members of the Pastels as well as Creation Label head, Alan McGee. But even Nicole Garcia who wrote the liner notes for this anthology was unable to get a straight answer on exactly who Revolving Paint Dream were. After affable interviews from all the major players of Creation Records for a French Radio Programme, she received nothing but closed doors and cease and desist letters from mysterious lawyers when she tried to follow up on questions about this enigmatic group. Were McGee and Innes still sticking to their elaborate hoax? Or was Garcia just playing along? Was it a hoax at all? Perhaps some mysteries are better unsolved. At least we have the music. Absolutely Recommended!!!
3rd full length from moody quartet is definitely a step forward, not as immediately catchy as their prior release but upon further listening reveals itself as beautiful, darker, more lush and textural.
Rex's truly wonderful achievement is what the Wilco record should have been, we rather cruelly proclaim. Emotional and epic, slow and dark with a bit of twang. Reminds us sometimes of a slow Meat Puppets, sometimes of a less angsty Palace Brothers. Made the best-of-1996 top picks lists of probably everyone who works here.
We've been getting so much cool new music from China recently, the White+ we recently made our Record Of The Week, as well as the Boyz & Girl record reviewed on the same list, the Pairs cd-r from a while back, not to mention a whole bunch of titles we have in stock that just haven't made it onto the list yet. And here now is another. Sent to us direct from the band in China, who oddly enough has a sort of Icelandic name, and of course the record is called Iceland, and the man behind Reykjavictim is not in fact Chinese, but is Canadian, living in China. Phew. Needless to say, another piece of the puzzle that is the current underground / indie rock scene in Shanghai. Reykjavictim is part electronic flecked new wave rock and part homebrewed experimental pop. Fuzzed out crunchy guitars, pulsing synths, crooned vox, ping ponging melodies, the opening track fuzzy and crunchy before partway through, the drums transform into skittery drum machine, and the song becomes a sort of brooding electro pop. The second track is more of the same but stripped down. But then on "Feng Huang Qin", things get really interesting, a buzzing, Eastern sounding melody, sounding like it's being played on some traditional instrument, over a crackling bed of static and hiss, a swirl of short wave hum and pulsing whir. We wouldn't have minded if the whole record was more of this! The next track takes that Eastern melody, chops it up, and makes it into a stuttering base for some moody new wave mesmer, before the rest of the record unfurls similarly, a sort of home brewed electro wave, all fuzzed out synths, percolating rhythms, the final track a sort of Silver Apples by way of New Order.
Cool stuff for sure. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Packaged in super swank, hand screened and hand written sleeves.
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"The rampaging skew-whiff nature of nearly every song could almost be called a hybrid between the B-52's, Sonic Youth, and the Boredoms, a dance party for death metal screamers and riot grrls alike."
We've got some serious catching up to do. We can barely keep up with the flood of new releases, especially when there are loads of amazing microlabels putting out disc after disc after bloody brilliant disc. So it is with Antony Milton's PseudoArcana label, and this gorgeous disc from Ben Reynolds. Five tracks, 30 minutes, of ultra dense, super lush droned out bliss. Reynolds weaves massive washes of near static sound, like Sunroof! or Vibracathedral Orchestra but smoothed out and stretched out into even more blissful realms, slow flowing rivers of warm warble and thick chordal thrum. Part way through there is a brief and delicate folk interlude of fingerpicked steel string guitar and tinkling chimes, very Fahey-esque, but it quickly segues into perhaps the heaviest track on the disc, the nine minute "Howlers", another extended Ur-drone, but this time augmented by the previous track's chimes, and strange alien chirps that sound a bit like bird calls (Howlers?). Truly gorgeous stuff.
The last time we reviewed a Ben Reynolds disc was way back in 2005, and even then we were sort of lamenting our inability to keep up with the constant deluge of amazing cd-r's and the proliferation of cd-r microlabels. We're still trying, but it's fighting a losing battle.
And with Reynolds, we've fallen even further behind, this being only the second release we've managed to review out of the probably twenty or so we've missed, but what the hell, let's make the most of it. Thankfully this is a real cd-r not a cd-r, which is a god thing as this is way too good to only be heard by a handful of folks.
Reynolds weaves a magical lower case world of buzzing synths, strange percolating rhythms, disembodied psychedelic guitars, simple folky strum, and dense sheets of processed drone and whir. Occupying a sonic space somewhere between the freaky forest folkies and the spaced out drone-y drifters, Reynolds wanders freely back and forth often pausing with one foot in each, wrapping sweet little bundles of buzzing steel strings in tripped out sci-fi buzz and bleep, while conversely taking washed out smears of outerspace ambience and spreading them out beneath melancholy acoustic guitar melodies. Fans of all thing Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, PseudoArcana, Digitalis, Last Visible Dog and the like will absolutely want to get a hold of this....
