Rainbow Ffolly? Sounds ffunny... maybe ffantastic! And it is, for what it is. For those who dig Sgt. Peppery British pop-psych from the '60s, what you've got here is a kaleidoscopic pop concoction whipped up in 1968 by some bright, Beatles-lovin' students who sent their demo in to Parlophone, hoping to score a record deal. The label ended up releasing their demo on vinyl just as it was, which is what we've got here, reissued on cd with a couple of bonus tracks. It's a bit like Yellow Submarine on a student budget, complete with bits of silly dialogue interspersed amidst the songs, but it has some fuzz bite to it as well. Definitely a colorful curiousity (and not just the cover) from a ffar-off but still ffabulous time, in the vein of the Beatles, Blossom Toes, Kaleidoscope, early Floyd...
Rainbows Are Free? Did they really name their METAL band that? Really? Well, they are on the psychedelic/stonery side of things, so that sort of thing kinda makes sense, just like the local band called Glitter Wizard, but still. You gotta really kick ass to pull off having a name like that. And, they do! Bottom heavy, fuzzed out, swinging riffage explodes out of the gate on opener "Slow Train". They don't really let ever let up, with wild, even more fuzz-filled soloing and a vocal style that surprises by morphing from a stoner drawl into what sounds more like a frothing rabid Rob Halford from Judas Priest! Really, on the second track the singer busts out a gruff, staccato style that's more metal than thou, over the top like Halford singing "The Ripper" with a frog in his throat, not at all what we were expecting but pretty damn awesome. That's actually when we knew we really liked this band, that they were willing to roam outside the standard stoner rawk template, the singer especially, screaming and/or crooning as the mood strikes, while the band RIPS right along. As a result, there's moments here that remind us of everything in the stoner/psych/doom/grunge realm from Kyuss to Reverend Bizarre to Skin Yard (or Gruntruck) to Goatsnake to Danava ... From their name on down, it's hard to peg these guys, but we like 'em and their chunky grooves and freaky ways. They get particularly far-out and bad-trippy on "Sinking Ship", and the singer's yowl on "Are You Dead?" even conjures up the shade of Saint Vitus' Scott Reagers.
Recommended to anyone into all the killer stoner stuff we've been giving the thumbs up to lately from the MeteorCity and Small Stone labels, for instance the Solace we listed last week. And, everyone who dug Freedom Hawk oughta dig the heck outta this too!!
Second full length blast of psychedelic stoner rock heaviness from these hippy heavies (we can only assume they're hippies with a name like that right?), and like their first, this is another batch of swaggery, Sabbath-y, pounding stoner psych riffery, with even more dramatic vocals that first time around. Give a listen to the awesomely titled "Speed God And The Rise Of The Motherfuckers From A Place Beyond Hell", which displays the band at their bad ass best. The main riff, a stone cold killer, with some seriously wailing leads over the top, the drums, bombastic and beefy, and when those vocals swoop in, totally over the top. Somewhere between the near operatic metallic howl of Mika from Finnish hypno rockers Circle, the classic metal vox of Judas Priest's Rob Halford, and the space lord motherfucker himself, Dave Wyndorf from Monster Magnet. And actually Monster Magnet is probably the best band to compare these guys too. While not quite as space-y, they have the same massive musical balls, every second here oozing major attitude, and maybe most importantly of all, they don't take themselves too seriously. It may be metal, and it may be heavy, but it sounds like these guys are having the times of their lives, and that sort of vibe is seriously infectious, and gives this a bit of a party rock vibe, which helps keep Rainbows from devolving into generic stoner rock, instead, the sound and the songs are loose and wild and wooly and fun as fuck, totally headbangable, groovy and crazy catchy too, there's also some Southern rock going on throughout, which of course reminds us of all time aQ faves Raging Slab, not to mention all the bands we mentioned in our review of the first Rainbows Are Free record (Kyuss, Reverend Bizarre, Skin Yard, Goatsnake, Freedom Hawk, etc.), and fuck, any band that lands somewhere between Monster Magnet and Raging Slab, gets a BIGtime aQ seal of approval!
This is SO GOOD, the Raincoats have not lost it at all, as you owners of their 1995 Smells Like EP already know. The gorgeous screechy violin is gone, but excellent synthesizer/moog flourishes more than make up for it, & there's a new version of "Don't Be Mean." Heartthrob ex-Tiger Trap drummer Heather is (was) the newest member of the Raincoats.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Essential 1980 debut record from this seminal DIY all-female post-punk quartet from England. Big influence on Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, who reissued their entire catalog in the early nineties. Fans of the Slits, Kleenex, The Shop Assistants, Girls At Their Best and Marine Girls, this is required listening! Comes with a download card for mp3's. Huzzah!
Rainer Maria's earliest recordings expressed what could be so right about emo. What was lacking in musicianship could be more than made up with raw emotion. Gosh darn it, you could just tell that Rainer Maria really meant it! But with each technical improvement (like learning how to sing or how to properly tune a bass), the band lost an inkling of that original raw feeling which made what they were doing so vital. After three or four years of steady musical improvement only to sound something like Cat Power playing Sleater Kinney, it hard to say whether it was worth it. Maybe they're trying to distance themselves from the 'emo scene' but emo was the one thing they had in spades. Not bad, but like the last few recordings not great either.
Here's a jam-packed audio/visual double treat for all of you Rainer Maria fans! Anyone In Love With You (Already Knows) features one live dvd (of a RM show at Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, NC plus bonus stuff like a video for their song "Ears Ring" and a photo gallery) and one full length compilation cd of live recordings selected by the emo-rock band themselves. Sure to keep y'all busy for a while!
Let's face it. Emo has become a commodity, as the music industry has recognized a vast market for selling earnestness through punk individualism and time-tested formulas of romance. The Wisconsin Emo trio Rainer Maria may have recognized the fate of their beloved aesthetic, and have made several swerving detours from the Emo template of boy / girl vocals screaming to the point of tears with melodic, minor chords of punk-pop. Their "A Better Version Of Me" album veered much closer to the Sleater Kinney camps; but "Ears Ring" takes an even bigger leap towards the sound of 80's female 'hard-rock' artists like Pat Benatar or even Patti Smyth of Scandal. Strangely prescient of the '80s obsessiveness within the 'electroclash' fetishism of New Wave.
A perpetual nostalgia runs through the work of Ranier Maria, whose first couple of recordings remain very strong albums in the history of Emo. In looking back not only to the embarassments and lost loves from adolescence (still the reigning subject matter for Emo), Rainer Maria have moved from loud / soft explosions to confessional power ballads to their current sound of '80s retro stylization of hard rock injected with emo, that comes across sort of like the corn ball stunt / party rock found on the "Fubar" soundtrack but done in all seriousness and earnestness without slighting on the theatrics. Smarter than the majority of MTV sponsored Emo though.
For this list, we don't just have one, or two, but three of the Early Blues' heaviest hitters newly reissued on vinyl from the always amazing Monk label: Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the "Mother of the Blues", Ma Rainey!!!
Yes, Mother of the Blues! Ma Rainey, one of the very first blues divas, already had a 20 year career under her belt, before she made her recording debut in 1923. Legend has it that she gave Bessie Smith singing lessons as she toured the South with her performing husband Pa Rainey as "Rainy and Rainey, Assassinators of The Blues". Hailing from Georgia, Rainy had a wide repertoire of blues, pop and minstrel songs, but her tough and heavy vocal delivery set her apart from the more cabaret-focused female performers. She was often paired with horn and piano jazz bands, but she also performed with guitar duos and southern jug bands too, often performing with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson and Coleman Hawkins. This collection covers some of her earliest material recorded in Chicago for the Paramount label from 1923-1924. Though her career lasted a mere six years, she recorded over 100 songs, many of them classics like "C.C. Rider" and "Bo-Weavil Blues" (included here). The lady knew how to have a good time!
Fans of dark electronic murkiness, and avant industrial minimal house, or fuck, whatever you want to call the sort of electronic music that creeps and oozes and lurches and lumbers, if you've yet to discover the black sonic joy or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (aka Dom Fernow, he also of about a million other projects, most notably perhaps, Prurient and Cold Cave, and most recently, Vatican Shadow and Christian Cosmos), here's another chance to catch up on some of what you've been missing. Two super limited cassettes, now available again as most likely equally limited 12"s, The Plant With Many Faces finds Fernow pushing his sound into more mysterious directions, the opener the oddball here, falling squarely in seventies soundtrack territory, with pulsing Carpenter like synths, arpeggiated bass pulsations and thick clouds of psychedelic blacknoise, before the sound quickly settles into the more minimal drift of previous releases, soft-focus chordal swells, wrapped in swaths of pixelated washed out thrum, a hazy barely there swirl of abstract sound, near ambience flecked with abject sinister sonic shadows. The flipside continues to sink deeper into whatever subterranean world these sounds emanate from, delivering a noisy industrial hum, slow shifting layers, buried melodies, all smeared into a grey-gaze atmospheric sprawl that sounds like a more desiccated Caretaker, which is precisely how the final track winds down, extending that hissy subterranean ambience, but adding some low end warble, some distant percolations, a buried rhythm that sounds like it's being broadcast from the bottom of the sea, the vibe a sort of sonar symphony of shadows, hauntingly abstract and bleakly ultra minimal, but still stunningly and obliquely beautiful.
Folklore Venom is the perfect companion for The Plant With Many Faces, opening with a heroin house creep, a slo-mo techno swirl that is soon enveloped in a cloud of hiss and softly caustic crunch, that relentless pulse, a motorik constant at the heart of the track's dense drift. The sound quickly shifts to something even more abstract and atmospheric, a sprawl of sonic dread, a high end haze draped over keening far away melodies, a wasted industrial dronescape, rife with strange sonic cascades and underpinned by deep rumbling throbs, blurred into near stasis, the whole thing a dense black thrum, laced with softly psychedelic overtones. The final track is the closest either of these reissues has come to the newer RSE records, weaving a tripped out softly noisy soundscape, constructed from what sounds like manipulated field recordings, bird song, animal calls, the result is at once strangely dreamy, and yet utterly and totally alien.
You can't go wrong with either, but if dark electronic weirdness, and murky psychedelic ambience is your thing, best grab both before they are gone for good...
Fans of dark electronic murkiness, and avant industrial minimal house, or fuck, whatever you want to call the sort of electronic music that creeps and oozes and lurches and lumbers, if you've yet to discover the black sonic joy or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (aka Dom Fernow, he also of about a million other projects, most notably perhaps, Prurient and Cold Cave, and most recently, Vatican Shadow and Christian Cosmos), here's another chance to catch up on some of what you've been missing. Two super limited cassettes, now available again as most likely equally limited 12"s, The Plant With Many Faces finds Fernow pushing his sound into more mysterious directions, the opener the oddball here, falling squarely in seventies soundtrack territory, with pulsing Carpenter like synths, arpeggiated bass pulsations and thick clouds of psychedelic blacknoise, before the sound quickly settles into the more minimal drift of previous releases, soft-focus chordal swells, wrapped in swaths of pixelated washed out thrum, a hazy barely there swirl of abstract sound, near ambience flecked with abject sinister sonic shadows. The flipside continues to sink deeper into whatever subterranean world these sounds emanate from, delivering a noisy industrial hum, slow shifting layers, buried melodies, all smeared into a grey-gaze atmospheric sprawl that sounds like a more desiccated Caretaker, which is precisely how the final track winds down, extending that hissy subterranean ambience, but adding some low end warble, some distant percolations, a buried rhythm that sounds like it's being broadcast from the bottom of the sea, the vibe a sort of sonar symphony of shadows, hauntingly abstract and bleakly ultra minimal, but still stunningly and obliquely beautiful.
Folklore Venom is the perfect companion for The Plant With Many Faces, opening with a heroin house creep, a slo-mo techno swirl that is soon enveloped in a cloud of hiss and softly caustic crunch, that relentless pulse, a motorik constant at the heart of the track's dense drift. The sound quickly shifts to something even more abstract and atmospheric, a sprawl of sonic dread, a high end haze draped over keening far away melodies, a wasted industrial dronescape, rife with strange sonic cascades and underpinned by deep rumbling throbs, blurred into near stasis, the whole thing a dense black thrum, laced with softly psychedelic overtones. The final track is the closest either of these reissues has come to the newer RSE records, weaving a tripped out softly noisy soundscape, constructed from what sounds like manipulated field recordings, bird song, animal calls, the result is at once strangely dreamy, and yet utterly and totally alien.
You can't go wrong with either, but if dark electronic weirdness, and murky psychedelic ambience is your thing, best grab both before they are gone for good...
The latest project from Dom Fernow, of noiseniks Prurient, and more recently a handful of various electronic/techno projects (Bronze Age, Christian Cosmos, Vatican Shadow) comes in the form of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, which finds Fernow exploring a murky sort of avant new age, equal parts Chain Reaction style Heroin House and ultra minimal digidub, the A side a sprawl of moody industrial murk, a skeletal four on the floor pulse, buried in the mix, over a backdrop of woozy chordal swells and looped rainfall, a blurry hazy wash of staticky shimmer, that enshrouds the barely there rhythmic pulsations.
The B side is even more abstract, spare and spaced out, a muddy expanse of processed field recordings, animal calls, birdsong, the distant hiss of a waterfall, all spaced out around deep low end thrums, and a hushed buried rhythm, the sound of dripping water, looped into another abstract rhythm, the sound a deep, dark blackened slab of shadowy new age ambience, tethered to the skeletal remains of some damaged and decayed techno.
Never seen this before, maybe it's the first time it's been reissued... a 1970 solo album from Frank Nuyens, who had been the lead guitar player with one of Holland's top '60s beat/blues/psych rock groups, Q65. We've never listed anything by them, but would if we could, they were a fantastic band, we'll keep an eye out for any available reissues. But we're certainly glad to have this Nuyens solo album, it's great too. Super melancholic and melodic, with gentle vocals and a rustic, folkish psychedelic vibe, but also flashes of psych guitar glory. There's snappy drum shuffle and lovely flutey parts too. We hear definite hints of the Beatles, also the Zombies and the Kinks, at their moodiest. We're also reminded of Roy Harper, maybe it's Nuyens' voice and guitar playing and the whole folky-proggy singer-songwriter thing. Check out the track "Vicious Circle" for evidence of that. Another song on here makes us think of Neil Young. And although Nuyens might not be as well known as any of those artists outside of his native Holland, he and Q65 definitely belong in such company. There's been a lot of great '60s/'70s psych/pop/prog reissues lately, and this is one of 'em!! So many good songs here. A really recommended reissue indeed - and it includes a bonus track, a song from a single that didn't originally appear on the LP proper.
"In The Devil's Kitchen." So translates the German title, the first that we've stocked from Daniel Lowenbruck, who both records as Raionbashi and runs the Tochnit-Aleph mail order service out of Berlin. He's also a long standing member of the Schimpfluch Gruppe whose provocative recordings and performances directly channel the Vienna Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwartzkogler. Where the Austrians were pushing their transgessive acts through art world channels, Schimpfluch has their origins in punk, industrial culture, and (at least for the case of Schimpfluch's Dave Phillips) metal taken to a Dada extreme laced with theatrical ultra-violence. So begin these deconstructed tapes and mangled silences.
Lowenbruck cites that the sources to his Devil's Kitchen include 'noises, instruments, body functions, and apostrophes.' The discernible sounds are a piano being struck by a hammer fist on the lower octave of the keys, a police whistle blowing out the condenser mic on a Walkman, and some downpitched vocal howls that come across as way more demonic than those wolf growlings on Ben Frost's album By The Throat. Between these recognizable elements, Lowenbruck cuts and pastes with monochromatic noises that puncture grey curtains of leaden hiss. Compositionally, certainly hits the mark with the guttural musique concrete from the Schimpfluch Gruppe, somewhere between the machined ruptures of Dave Phillips and the unsettled ambience crafted by the impeccable G*Park; or less self-referentially stated, somewhere between the sound poetry of Henri Chopin and the corroded tape work of Joe Colley. Limited to 500 copies and highly recommended!
When the fuck is Raionbashi going to release a proper album again? Daniel Lowenbruck (aka Raionbashi) has been releasing his work on various splits over the past couple of years following a 2006 lp on Hanson that nobody seems to have anymore. Even then, much of his output has been released in tiny editions, and this split on Senufo Edition is in an edition of 280 copies. Raionbashi operates within the transgressive art collective Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, and G*Park, all of which mine the nether regions of the id for intensely claustrophobic collages of grim noise and post-Viennese Aktionism. For this split, Lowenbruck slumps into an occult almost doom-laden piece of ritualist gong strikes that certainly look back to Coil's How To Destroy Angels, but Lowenbruck slowly ramps up a smoldering, hypnotic squallor of discordant strings and uneasy field recordings with snippets of muffled vocals which seem in the midst of an unknown criminal act. Brilliantly creepy.
Daniela Fromberg & Stefan Roigk are multimedia artists hailing from Berlin, although little can be found regarding their intentions beyond their mutually crappy websites that only sport pretty pictures of their un-contextualized installations. Whatever these people are up to, it's a damn effective piece of acousmatic collage work, reflective in classic sound collage techniques found on Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, through the various bumps in the night and funhouse sound effects turned horrific and nightmarish. Arcane, oblique, haunting, and captivating. Fromberg & Roigk are an excellent foil to Raionbashi's dark ritual, and certainly should muster something else in the near future. Regardless, this is an excellent album of foreboding musique concrete.
We don't know if there's anything like an official membership form or some sort of fucked-up ritual one has to endure before joining the inner circle of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, but this Swiss / German collective of malcontent noise makers and tape splicers might just increase their ranks through the diabolical collage work from Krube. Schimpfluch (whose members include Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, G*Park, Raionbashi, and Rudolf Eb.er) began in the early '90s as an aggressive / primitive hybrid between the Viennese Aktionism of Hermann Nitsch & Rudolf Schwartzkogler and the sharp collage techniques of the French musique concrete pioneers. Performance is often a critical component to the Schimpfluch aesthetic involving all sorts of transgressive theatrics, audience baiting tactics, and maybe a dead fish or two; but the recording output of Schimpfluch and associates has been exceptional throughout their history. Perhaps with all of those performative gestures hidden in the recording process, the resultant squeaks, bangs, grunts, and scrapes begin to disassociate from their origins and become all the more bizarre, more obscure, and more damaged.
This is definitely true for the work of Krube, the project of a German sound-artist by the name of Alexander Schneider. His techniques begin in snipping various sounds from who knows what. The label Hronir tells us its everyday objects, body openings, and non-definable machines; but by the time Schneider is done with his digital razor blade, what's a fart and what's a piston is not terribly discernible. These sound are quickly jettisoned in squadrons of battering sounds that collide with each other in clusters of events that splutter and bristle like a punk version of Pierre Henry's classic Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir.
Raionbashi's side long composition is comparatively sublime affair, more in keeping with the underappreciated G*Park sound of atonal ambience, creepy as hell field recordings, and generalized disturbances. Daniel Lowenbruck is Raionbashi, and a relatively recent addition to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, having run the exceptional Tochnit-Aleph label and the rumpsti pumsti shop in Berlin. His track begins with a bellowing piano chord which elongates into a desolate drone, marked with scurrying vermin like noises, backward scrapings, and indeterminate swells of grey noise. That same piano returns throughout the piece with an incremental build of anxious black energy seeping through every quiet gesture and gurgling rupture. Like the work of G*Park, the more you let yourself into the details of this piece, the more terrifying it becomes. Truly exceptional!
The third album of ripping modern melodic thrash from these black-clad Swedish lads. Violent metal music with enough '80s derived cheesiness to be lots of fun. Wicked indeed. These kids probably still think about the Bay Area the way metalheads here think about Sweden now!
Having recorded a handful of albums for continously grim Cold Meat Industries label in Sweden, Raison D'Etre's sound is darkwave / industrial score for bleak artic netherlands with grievous keyboard bleakness, desolate noises from churning factories, and chants from Catholic masses.
There's a whole lot of history and a whole lot of meaning loaded in that title. The simple translation from the French is just "put in center" and its earliest etymology refers to the repeating pattern in a coat of arms as a symbol of the aristocratic / familial traditions being passed on from one generation to another. With this repeating formal motif, the phrase has become a term in critical theory to define self-reflexive structural forms and the potential for an instability of meaning, structure, reality etc. through repetition upon repetition. The results are the deliberate mindfucks of the play within a play, the dream within a dream where the dreamer is unaware of dreaming, and the infinite replication of images like the one found on the cover of that first Guardian Alien album (woah, so trippy, dude!).
The application of this phrase to the work of Raison D'Etre points to a gnosticism of darkness that compounds upon itself within the depths of the human soul. That seems suitable to Raison D'Etre's, um raison d'etre, as this has been the long-standing project for Peter Andersson who has recorded for now two decades under this moniker, almost exclusively for the now-defunct Cold Meat Industries. For all of the torturous death-ambient and grinding industrialisms of that imprint, Andersson (not to be confused with the other Peter Andersson on CMI known also as Baby Lina Doll of Deutsch Nepal) offered up a ghastly beauty through his haunted ambience that seem to echo with the maudlin sense of loss from Tarkovsky's lesser known film Nostalgia which ends with a scene of snowstorm quietly precipitating on the innards of the desicated Gothic cathedral. All of the Raison D'Etre albums have dreamily wandered through medieval chants and extracts of Germanic hymnal music, but these albums speak more of Andersson's position on the absence of God rather than a glorification. Mise En Abyme channels these thoughts into cold sweeping passages of melacholy ambience and cinematic overtures which glide along a stately trajectory in and out of cold silences. Machined rhythms and fabricated noise disrupt the ghostly ephemera about half way through the album, but this counterpoint is hardly a distraction. Recommended for those enamored by the work of Deathprod and Svarte Greiner / Deaf Center!
Another cd-r artifact from the dark and mysterious VHF vaults, this time documenting the live sonic mayhem of Virginia's Rake! Rake were always my least favorite part of the Virginia-UK-VHF free rock axis, but 'Fighting...' is a pretty great collection.
We definitely weren't expecting this from the Zeal label, who in the past have brought us the dark country of Timesbold, the folky pop of Isbells, and of course multiple records from apocalyptic folk one man band Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. While we were expecting something dark, maybe folky, what we got from these Belgians was a wild slab of sludgey, mathy, experimental noise rock, that KILLS. They had us by the first track, which sorta sounds like Refused's "New Noise" recorded onto a shitty old cassette tape, and played back at 16rpm, the riff is similar, and the shrieked vocals, not to mention the mathy main riff, but here it's all dirgey, and detuned, a lumbering noise rock doomsludge churn, laced with all sorts of weird sounds and effects that give it a sort of avant element. And that Refused comparison definitely surfaces throughout, the band perfectly capable of whipping up that sort of frenzied post punk, but more often than not, choosing to twist it all up into something much more fucked and confusional.
It's a relentless barrage of twisted noisiness, from the driving, distorted groove of "Louis" (all the songs bear people's proper names), with its tense synths, and jumbled, progged out breakdowns, to the drum heavy psychedelic bombast of "Judith", which flits from Melvins-like downtuned heaviness, to little melodic flutters and back again. "Henri" is a killer too, all crumbling distortion, and fierce heavy crunch, not to mention some rad progged out melodies, super swaggery and intense, but then part way through the song collapses into a series of warped audio experiments, rife with sound effects and weird voices, sounding a bit like classic Butthole Surfers, fused to something much more rocking and heavy. "Eva" also fuses tribal drumming and warbly synths to grinding mathed out noise rock and lumbering downtuned doomsludge weirdness. The vocals are shrieky and unhinged one second, murky and processed and garbled the next, occasionally bellowed monstrously, sometimes mewled disturbingly. The songs are dense with multiple parts, ever shifting sounds, the mood consistently dark, but the vibe in constant flux, harrowingly heavy one second, droned out and hauntingly hushed the next, with most tracks a wild schizophrenic sonic chaos, all held together by some warped ineffable logic, known only to the band, which makes for some unnerving, and fantastically unsettling listening. Check out the closer, which sounds like some long lost Tool track slowed way down, and transformed into some sort of psychotic psychedelic drone ballad, that eventually erupts into a final stretch of whatthefuck heaviness.
Holy shit is this amazing. Our new favorite warped, weirdo, heavy rock / noise rock / outsider metal jam for sure!
Disturbing, verrrrry disturbing.
You might expect that something from Circle and Pharoah Overlord members going under the names Krypt (Jussi) and Rudimentor (Janne) might be sorta metallic (especially after that Krypt Axeripper ep reviewed last list). This silver-on-black screenprinted package certainly looks dark and evil: the illegible logo, the band photo (long hair, spiked armbands), the song titles -- there's just two of them, "Transylvanian Error" (17:45) and "Ultimate Sword" (16.34). And the album title is a nod to Jussi's favorite '80s "metal" act, Jesters Of Destiny.
But we also know to expect the unexpected from our Finnish friends. So while this IS dark and evil, there's not a metal riff in sight. Rather, this duo utilize percussion, voice and effects to create a psychologically sick, rhythmically fucked drone-zone. The two long tracks are black, bottomless abysses both, caverns echoing with monstrous processed vokills and clattering pipe-fights, awash in a dense, drifting electronic miasma.
The label press info references Z'ev (the percussion), Faust (the weirdness), Wolf Eyes (the noise), Darkthrone (the evil) and we hear all that for sure. We'd further compare Rakhim's improvised blackness to black metal experimentalists (and AQ ROTWer's) Abruptum, with some of the screaming sounding like the insane-asylum inmates from a Staalagh record! Maybe like Staalagh on a broken boombox, being played the the corner of a room where spaced-out Circle side project Dr. Kettu are jamming with the Black Boned Angel.
Actually, last year we reviewed an expensive Qbico import LP by Rakhim (weirdly enough, we still have a few copies, if you act fast...) and ever since experiencing the mesmerizing psychedelic murkiness of that debut we've been wanting to hear more.
Disturbing, yes. But we like being disturbed like this!!
ATTENTION CIRCLE OBSESSIVES AND FINNISH MUSIC FREAKS. THIS IS A CIRCLE SIDE PROJECT, IS LP ONLY, AND is VERY VERY LIMITED!!
Okay, now that we got that out of the way, let's dig in. Circle freaks are obviously gonna want this no matter what, it's a single sided half hour jam from Jussi and Janne of Finnish drone rockers Circle. But don't expect this to sound anything like Circle. Well, okay, it sounds a little like that live Circle record Mountain, droney and dark and minimal. What it really sounds like to us is like Circle side project Dr. Kettu with all the bones removed, leaving some sort of dark and tribal ambient krautrock. Rakhim is a super stripped down primal tribal duo, just drums and vocals and tons and tons of effects, which the duo employ to effortlessly kick up quite a dense druggy fug. Swirling clouds and sonic squalls, a murky dronescape lo-fi and dubbed out, strange guttural grunts, freaky whispers, drums-down-the-stairs clatter, dubby FX, wordless vocal melodies, all doused with reverb and distortion, and tangled up with some abstract percussive tribalism. Some sort of Finnish space aged pagan ritual. Vast expanses of whoooosh and whiiiir and swooooosh over chaotic free jazz drum splatter and subtle shuffling skitter. Very tripped out, druggy, super muddy, mega freaked out sososo psychedelic. Could almost be some long lost, recently discovered Faust jam caught surreptitiously on tape way back in the day. Awesome.
One sided heavy marbled white vinyl, packaged in a cool, very Dead C looking black and white sleeve.
This hitherto unknown Russian black metal band has quickly gained some converts here at Aquarius with this disc. Of course, we're suckers for folky, flute-heavy pagan forest metal! You might laugh at the jig-dancing potential of this disc, and sure, we like it
SF's Ral Partha Vogelbacher unleash their boyish indie rock charms right from the get go on this their third album. Mainman Chad Bidwell sings his deeply personal lyrics in the drollest fashion that reminded us of cross between AQ faves Casiotone For The Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth and Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields. The musical backdrop (provided by local pals Thee More Shallows and a guest appearance from Odd Nosdam on the track "New Happy Fawn") though is unlike that of either of those artists. As far as we can tell despite the album's title Shrill Falcons, neither piercing sounds nor feathered friends can be found anywhere. What it is filled with is very slouchy yet perky distorted jangly guitars, hazy droning keyboards and infectious hummable melodies. Another reason to get that fuzzy well-worn cardigan out of storage!
Psst, the band enlisted the fine seamstress skills of AQ's very own Pam to stitch a flag version of the album's cover art.
A deep thrumming drone announces the beginning of William Hutson aka Rale's obliquely titled album I Sit By The Window And Watch Walls And Ceilings. Maybe a reference to Alvin Lucier? Maybe a reference to "I Was No Longer His Dominant" by Nurse With Wound during particularly choice NWW period in the early '80s? There is a conceptual and composition rigor to this album that is considerably stronger than on Hutson's previous recordings, as he's incorporating far more acousmatic and electro-acoustic strategies to accompany the sinister post-noise synthdrone which he mastered earlier on. While the album sports seven tracks, they all blend together into a seamless 51 minute piece marked by passages of distended minimalism, magnetic crackle, spluttering tape noise, and more than a few moments of buried melody dialed into the haunted melodicism of Tim Hecker at his most ephemeral. "Golden Hydra Chokers" snatches transient radiowaves through an ill-advised chain of effects pedals whose crumbling drones lead into the aeronautical soaring of the aptly named "Swimming Beside The Plane" with its unstable tone-float ambience. "Abnatural Burnings" accelerates through a series of tape decks and microcassette recorders spinning wildly to the point of collapse, pocked with bursts of erratic tape noise that terminate in a smoldering, ominous hum which opens up into a dour powerdrone from Hutson's flanging synths that undulates deeper and deeper toward the album's conclusion. Excellent work!
Another fantastic slab of hushed drone synth minimalism from William Huston, aka Rale, this time around, two epic sidelong sprawls, the first balancing deep string like swells with absolute silence, building a super dynamic dronescape that is at odds with past recordings, which seemed more crackly and rumbly, tapping into the sort of gauzy dronescapery of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck, but this is much more controlled. The sounds lush and smooth, the swells literally separated by fields of near silence (if not complete silence), each set of tones seeming to emerge from some bottomless black hole, it's not until nearly the second half, when streaks of high end enter the picture, bell like tones, a hushed field of metallic shimmer that drifts and hovers before being overtaken by waves of warm whir and soft focus buzz, and then finally the crackle and haze come in, a deft merging of synthdrone and field recording, into something warm and wonderful, but slightly ominous, and a little bit alien, the sound moving continuously from washed out melodic blur, to barely there ultraminimal drift.
The flipside is a thick wall of sound, a deep thrum wreathed in textured ambience, which gradually peels away, leaving a warm muted buzz, that fades again to near nothingess, a distant shimmer in a sea of crackling sonic motes, gradually building to something almost industrial, but still woozy and washed out, the crumbles and distorted crunch smoothed into textured drones. The crackles and various bits of noise growing in intensity, until finally the drone follow suit, exploding in a soft cacophony, which itself burns brightly, before fading out, only to burst into sonic flame once again. So nice.
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Multi-cultural folk-prog-rock from this unique Czech band. Male vocals in a hushed French voice, wild female vocals a la Bjork, bombastic arrangements incorporating strings and guitar, plus ethnic instruments and percussion. Quite dramatic.
After a few super limited tape releases (so limited we were unable to get any at all), comes this brand new 2 song 12"s from the Bay Area sound dude William Hutson known simply as Rale, whose abstract modular synth dronescapes should absolutely appeal to all the dronelords out in aQ land.
Exploring similar sonic territory as fellow sonic obfuscationists Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz, Tim Hecker and the like, Rale unleashes a soft stream of ultra minimal crackle, draped over murky barely there melodies and deep gauzy rumbles, a sound haunting and hushed and super minimal, even a little distantly doomy. The track slowly gains momentum, growing ever more distorted and crunchy, eventually the hushed low end drift is overwhelmed by a super processed stuttery stretch of distorted glitch, which after building to a frenzied coda smooths out into a crumbling crackly drone, that finally fades out leaving just strange disembodied sounds and mysterious voices.
The flip side is a similarly slow burning slab of dronemusic. A deep cavernous drift, softly textured, hushed and whispery, an underground sound, underwater, that sound grows warmer and and deeper and more dronelike before gradually transforming into something more brittle and buzzy, but no less blissed out and mesmerizing.
Some seriously gorgeous, hypnotic and occasionally noisy dronemusic, a two song teaser which has been getting repeat plays since we got it in, and most definitely has us wanting more more more...
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The Swedish contingent of the New Wave Of Old School Heavy Metal sure is picking up steam, and being picked up by the Metal Blade label, who've recently signed such slayin' Swedes as In Solitude, Portrait, Ghost, and now RAM. As you may recall, we were big fans of RAM's previous, import-only album, Lightbringer, from 2009, and thus eagerly anticipated this, their domestic Metal Blade debut. And we were NOT disappointed.
The album starts off with its title track, a pensively pretty, eerily plodding synth-laced instrumental that proves RAM are not bound to any formulaic "true metal" aesthetic limitations, 'cause here they really sound a lot like, say, Zombi!!
That unusual intro tune past, the album launches into galloping metal mode proper with "Comes From The Mouth Beyond", a surefire stormer that will get heads banging and fists waving within seconds, while also over the course of its 6+ minutes demonstrating that RAM have depth and sophistication and melodic chops that belie this disc's simple, generic title of Death.
RAM's vocalist/mastermind/graphic artist Oscar Carlquist is is capable of shrieking into the stratosphere (reminding us of the dude from Metal Church back in the day), as well as singing in a lower range with more restraint though no less passion. He's got a raspy edge to his voice that also brings to mind the singer from power metal's finest, Blind Guardian. Meanwhile, his band kicks out the catchy riffs and glorious guitar harmonies with plenty of power... damn they're good. This is now their third full-length album, and they're clearly at the top of their game.
RAM have the rare knack among bands in their retro-minded genre of coming across as fresh and vital while simultaneously being obviously & joyfully inspired by ye olde '80s greats like Mercyful Fate, Iron Maiden, Dio, Armored Saint, and Judas Priest. Instantly classic stuff. There's even a doom-laden power ballad of sorts here, in the form of "Frozen", also the longest song on the album.
Easily one of the best traditional (but original) heavy metal efforts of the year so far (though we expect it will face some stiff competition soon when the new Christian Mistress comes out). RAM gets the horns up all right. Recommended!!
Been wanting to list this for a while, one of Allan's top "true metal" faves of 2009, now finally available via domestic distribution channels at a non-import price! We first became fans of RAM thanks to the inclusion of their track "Sudden Impact" on the excellent Earache comp Heavy Metal Killers a year or two ago. This is their second full-length, the first RAM we've been able to track down for the store. And it's quite a piece of work. While they're definitely inspired by a lot of '80s metal, and have recorded covers of songs by the likes Black Sabbath and Venom, RAM tend towards a more original, less overtly retro sound than some of their peers - like, for instance, fellow Swedes Enforcer, the slaying second album from whom we highlighted on our last list. As good as Enforcer is at energetically and enjoyably emulating their favorite '80s speed metal masters, RAM manage to do them one better by putting their old school melodic metal chops in service of something a bit more serious, and darker, and dare we say artistic. While we haven't delved deeply into all the lyrics, we get the idea that RAM's songs have a bit more to 'em than the usual metal cliches, they seem to be opining on occultic or philosophical concepts worth of the more erudite of black metal weirdoes, "religious" ones like Deathspell Omega. Or maybe it's just the stylish and meticulous glyphic art and graphic design, done by RAM's expressive vocalist, and evident visionary, Oscar Carlquist, that gives us this notion of unique genius. Well, the bottom line is the music, and there we're mighty impressed even without reference to the cd booklet (which, by the way, informs us that "this album is dedicated to the glory of the relentless truth").
Including a strikingly eerie and intense, mostly instrumental intro entitled "Crushing The Dwarf Of Ignorance", and similar outro "Prelude To Death" (both featuring text written and recited by Mexican poet Adelaida Caballero), you get ten tracks of varied and powerful metal, surging forth with stellar production values, super heavy, sometimes quite speedy, boasting vocals that soar high, but remain vicious, atmospheres arcane, and raging riffs that are worthy, oh so worthy of your headbanging attention. They do justice to the legacy of such assumed influences as Mercyful Fate and Manowar, Iron Maiden and Metal Church, yet while successfully striving to be their own (and more modern) band entirely. And without succumbing to any of the cheese endemic to the genre, they pump out pure power metal majesty, with tracks like the nine-minute epic "Suomussalmi (The Few Of Iron)" reminding us quite favorably of the melodic bombast of an old AQ fave, Blind Guardian. There's lots to capture one's imagination here, while also, as we said, causing heads to bang.
In a word, RAM rule!
We've been geeking out on, I mean rockin' out to, a bunch of the '70s and '80s hard rock/heavy metal reissues coming out on the UK's Rock Candy label... Plasmatics, Armored Saint, Billy Squier, Ted Nugent, Riot, a whole bunch of old favorites, done up all deluxe with nice packaging and copious liner notes. We've reviewed a few already. Here's another we like a lot.
First-time-on-cd for this 1978 album, the second and last from one-hit wonders Ram Jam. That one hit was their high octane cover of Leadbelly's "Black Betty" from their first album (do yourself a favor and look up the video on Youtube!!). So what has Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Ram got to offer? Well, though it didn't produce any hits, it's the better of their two records by far. With a revamped line-up, Ram Jam's hybrid bubblegum / biker blues roots are a thing of the past, the band now a lean, mean, polished, hard n' heavy rock outfit that fans of other, more popular commercial late '70s American rockers like Aerosmith, KISS, Foreigner, and Starz should dig... though at the time they apparently didn't, this record sales-wise spelling the end of Ram Jam's career. Dunno why, people must just not have heard it, as it's quite the party platter, full of kick ass lead guitar, powerful vocals, and energetic, catchy tuneage that would sound great blasting from your souped-up Camaro or custom-painted van...
But now here's a chance to hear this again (for the first time, if you're like us!) and give Ram Jam's swansong its due! Recommended to all rockers.
What awesomeness has EM for us this time? The Japanese reissue label rarely lets us down, digging up only the most interesting and unusual gems from long ago and far away. Recently they've brought us the "modernized" Thai music of Son Of P.M., and the spiritual bamboo flute playing of T.R. Mahalingam. Like the latter, this release is also from India, and furthermore ostensibly in the Carnatic (Southern Indian classical music) tradition, as per its truly fabulous title... but liberally mixed with Western jazz! Pretty neat, since we've heard plenty of albums doing the "jazz raga" or "Indo-jazz" thing (Don Ellis, Alice Coltrane, Joe Harriott/John Mayer, Gabor Szabo, etc.) but those are all by Western musicians looking to the East for inspiration, not the other way around. Whereas what we have here is a bit different in origin.
This album, from 1969, is an utterly gorgeous set of exotic, melodic Indo-jazz fusion masterminded by one T. K. Ramamoorthy, a prolific film composer and director. According to EM, it's the first recorded instance where serious Indian musicians delved into jazz territory, juxtaposing traditional Indian instruments and musical structures with those from jazz tradition too. Improvisation being a significant element of both styles, it was doubtless an interesting and exciting session for these musicians. It certainly is for the listener.
There's ten tracks here, and listening it's fascinating how it seems to subtly shift from the Indian and "exotic" to more familiar feeling jazz sounds, depending on what you listen for. The drummer lets loose on the traps one moment, while the zing of the strings of a sitar is heard at another, and it all works together so pleasingly, for fans of both Bollywood and Brubeck. Quite wonderful!
A few weeks back we made Andy Votel's amazing mix of prog/funk/jazz/acid rock from the Vertigo vaults our Record Of The Week. Now we're reviewing this, a recently-reissued-on-cd Vertigo album from, ta-da, 1971 that (we don't think) made it onto Votel's disc, thereby demonstrating that even by cramming dozens of little snippets of songs into a mix, he certainly couldn't fully encompass everything awesome that was ever released on Vertigo! This one's not heavy rock, nor is it freaky jazz fusion. Rather, Ramases was a unique one-album-only obscurity playing a kind of mystical pop-prog. I guess it reminds us just a little bit of Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come albums. But it's definitely its own thing, as you might expect from a mysterious psychedelic visionary from South Africa who (perhaps) believed himself to be the reincarnation of an Egyptian pharaoh, who performed these Space Hymns together with his wife Sel, and the assistance of others, including production and guitar licks (and sitar and Moog) courtesy of 10cc's Godley and Creme. The results are really rather catchy and quite strange. Maybe what the second Comus album would have sounded like, if it was a lot better than it was!
This new reish in Repertoire's Vertigo series (we hope to bring you some other titles soon) is nicely deluxe, packaged in a gatefold digipack cd jacket, adorned with Roger Dean's great church steeple/rocketship cover art. It boasts four bonus tracks as well (alternate mixes and b-sides). Recommended if you want to check out some unclassifiable cult tuneage, weird and folkish and electronically Eno-arty, with sci-fi hippy themes perhaps worth puzzling over.
The son of one of Sweden's most beloved musicians, Ramel meticulously recorded this psych folk rock album almost completely on his own, dumping mixed tracks onto one track, adding another track, dumping those down, etc.
Oddly, Ramel at times shares some of the exuberance and playful unpredictability of Brazil's similarly psychedelic Tropicalia sound (Os Mutantes, Caetano Veloso). Cool!
More pastoral beauty from this UK outfit, two discs this time, one of originals, record live and in rehearsal, the other discs, remixes and reinterpretations by Robert Horton, Keith Berry, Gregg Kowalsky and Neil Campbell.
The originals disc is maybe the breeziest and airiest to date, guitars are wreathed in reverb, releasing glimmering notes like blowing the white fluff off dandelions, the notes swirling and drifting, hovering over smooth glassy landscapes of warm whir, smeared synth buzz, minimal muted melodies, warm fuzzy pop ambient style drifts, like some free folk band covering The Orb, lilting free folk, the musical equivalent of dewy grass, autumn leaves falling through from a grey sky, sun dappled hillsides, soft slow shifting clouds, the day's first light, the sun making the moist grass sparkle like diamonds, viewing everything through a frosty pane of glass, rendering everything blurred and dreamily indistinct.
Well worth the price of admission for that disc alone, but there's a whole 'nother record, four long tracks, each of the above mentioned artists re-envisioning the originals. Robert Horton begins with a sprinkle of angelic high end, before bringing in the lows, a series of warm overlapping tones, barely shifting, all intertwined, into one slow organic swell, a near static melody unwinding in slow motion, over the course of nearly 8 minutes. Keith Berry's take is much more gritty, a gentle whirl of fuzzy streaks, muted into dreamlike murmurs, floating within a delicate landscape of glacial lowend and buried melody. Gregg Kowalsky turns his Rameses III source material into something jubilant and majestic, a sort of softened Sunroof!, all bells and chimes and bell-like tones, a glorious cacophony transformed into something less noisy and chaotic and more dense and layered, almost like the sound of a thousand orchestras tuning up stretched into some strange sunlit raga. And finally, Astral Social Clubber Neil Campbell stretches out Rameses III into some blissed out spacedrone, rife with distorted guitars, long drones, high end squalls of feedback, druggy effects, all slithering and squirming just below the surface, a surface which is a seemingly endless Niblock-like drone, the notes and layers beating against one another creating all sorts of subtle rhythms and strange harmonies, simultaneously static and in motion, a roiling writhing inner space ritual.
An archival release from UK bliss folk drone combo Rameses III, released way back in, well, a long time ago, apparently long before the band started experimenting with tripped out production and field recordings, hazy washes of distortion and delay, and long sprawling dronescapes. Just like the title suggests, these are indeed Folk Hymns, very intimate and hushed, whispery and stripped down, often just acoustic guitar and voice. Plaintive and melancholy, the guitars lazy and sun dappled, the melodies relaxed and gentle, the vocals a bit raspy, definitely world weary, some of the songs are embellished with bits of extra guitar, slide, super subtle atmospherics, distant buzz and the like, but for the most part this is a gorgeously minimal modern folk record. Rameses III fans should still dig, but folks into stuff like Palace, Bonnie Prince Billy, Iron And Wine, Appendix Out, Songs:Ohia, Supreme Dicks, Alasdair Roberts, Sufjan Stevens and the like should definitely check out. Might be a gateway record to trippier and blissier things. We can hope...
We only got a handful of these direct from the band, so no telling how long this will be around.
Such pastoral bliss is on display within the cozy confines of this ep by the UK's Rameses III. One of the prettier discs we've heard all year, these mostly instrumental tracks (there is some hushed vocals on a couple songs) glisten with glimmering guitar ambiance that had us thinking of a slightly twangier Robin Guthrie or Durruti Column or even the wonderful instrumental guitar albums of Tom Verlaine. Timeless and mellow like a late summer sunrise. Makes so much sense that this was music recorded for a film, as it's so easy to close your eyes and visualize wide open landscapes of long winding roads, huge blue skies and fields of shimmering wet green grass. So so nice...
