[ aquarius records catalogue

IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion): Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps OUT OF PRINT/UNAVAILABLE notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock — or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us — please email our mailorder department for availability status — or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.

Showing results 1501 through 1550 of 1910.

I've always been into the concept of Tribes Of Neurot. The concept of a band starting another related band that experiments and expands on their original sound seems kind of cool. And ToN are cool, but their sound/visual/art/ambient onslaught has never

RealAudio clip: Adaptation And Survival 3
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Tribes of Neurot is the ambient, ritualistic side-project of mighty metal legends Neurosis. Grace is intended to be played simultaneously with the latter band's recent Times Of Grace album. So the doomily atmospheric drones and spoken words of this disc meld in with the hypnotic tribal chug of that one. A formidable combination! However, it's a fine listen all by itself (so don't fret if you don't have two cd players). Mixed by Tribes Of Neurot along with Dustin Donaldson of I Am Spoonbender and Neurosis' longtime sound engineer Dave Clark. Recommended!

'Tis more instrumental drifting drone from thee Tribes Of Neurot, in the "ambient outerspace backwards transmissions from the planet of feedback" genre. Meridian is a little bit harsh, a little bit lovely. We can imagine that if these guys weren't so well known (as an experimental side-project of the mighty metallers Neurosis), and if this was released as a limited edition cd-r in handmade packaging on some New Zealand label, there'd be dark drone fans in droves going gaga. But although they're not that obscure, they sound like it. Recognizable elements (piano, guitar, and what we're guessing is a bowed cymbal) and less-distinct sound sources (all manner of whooshing and whirring, and also something we know is not a purring cat, but must be some sort of electronic simulation) are all a part of these ten, interestingly varied tracks, several of which include some actual "music" moving in and out of the mix, amid the pulsing drones, spectral washes, and sun-arising synth-scapes. The only drawback is that this is perhaps a bit too "active" for those that like their drones purely as background, falling-asleep music.

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This record rules. Big dumb and fun. A little bit crunked, these jams will have your head nodding, you ride bouncing and your system booming. The track to get this for is of course "Let's Go", a massive party jam, where the main loop is the riff from "Crazy Train" complete with Ozzy's "Eye eye eye eye eye...". So fucking cool!

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Perhaps his best album? While he is credited as the founder of "trip-hop" with Portishead and Massive Attack, there is little to be found of the tropes of that genre here. Instead, broken hip hop beats are filtered through his dub infused production... But what makes the album, as with all of his albums, is the dualism between his voice and that of his female vocalists (one of which is PJ Harvey), which evolves into a increasing psychosexual tension.

When we first put this on, Jim and Jeff immediately thought to themselves "Hey! This sounds just like later period Einsturzende Neubauten!" And that it does, Blowback is also a highly polished smooth electronic downtempo funk record guested by the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cyndi Lauper and Live's Ed Kowalczyk. Need we say more? Should we tell you that one song sounds like

Four long awaited new songs from everyone's favorite trip hop icon. Dark drama not unlike Barry Adamson's recent work, with urgent beats made to enjoy with martinis and a sense of foreboding. One wishes the music was more challenging, instead of so obvious, cos Tricky's got the talent to do better. Anyway, each to his own -- many of you are certainly fans, so here's a sound sample for you to decide for yourself.

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A savage proggytrippypunkasfuck megablast in the form of Triclops!' Cafeteria Brutalia ep. This four song rager is the perfect blend of post-Jesus Lizardy mathy fucked up punk and spacey effects-riddled shreddyness. Hailing from right here in the bay area, Triclops! featuring John Geek From local punk heros The Fleshies on vocals, piece together a super interesting combination of weird rock elements. One moment angular and furious, while another blissy and tripped the hell out, and still at another just plain super rocking! The vocals are processed and effected, the guitar is furious and fierce, and the rythym section is just about as tight as can be, churrning out an ever-changing, multi-metric pummelfest of pure rock brutality. All the songs on this way too short document are great, to be sure, but the ONE for us is definetly the 10 plus minute epic, "Bug Bomb". Within this track, all the disparate elements that makes this band awesome perfectly coalesce. Super proggy acid-punk to begin with, breaking down into some suprisingly melodic pop, before getting heavy and crazy to round it out. Excellent! Triclops! are also one of the best local live acts we have here in SF, and they seem to play all the rad shows around these parts. In fact, most of us discovered them earlier this month at the killer Circle show at Bottom Of The Hill, which they opened. All in all, a really great ep! For anyone thats been missing that old 90's Touch and Go / Amrep sound, or people that just love proggy flipped out PUNK RAWK, this is definetly recommended!

RealAudio clip: Bug Bomb
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When Thomas Ankersmit performed in San Francisco a few years back while opening for Phill Niblock at 23five's Activating The Medium festival, he stood behind a Serge Modular Synth housed in a modified suitcase. At a rapid-fire pace, he tugged at the nest of patch cables before him, plucking just the right one that he would then move to a different input. Despite this frenzy of activity, Ankersmit mustered an intense, blossoming swarm of electrical noise, thrum, and buzz. We had known of his long-standing collaborations with Phill Niblock, as the stalwart minimalist had employed Ankersmit's circular breathing techniques on the saxophone for a number of performances and compositions; but this electronic side of Ankersmit certainly piqued our interest. This collaborative album with Valerio Tricoli (of 3/4hadbeeneliminated) finds Ankersmit in this electronic framework. Ankersmit and Tricoli have been making the rounds of the European festival circuit, making this album the refinement of their live presentations - working with that aforementioned modular synth, laptop trickery, overdubbed sax-driven minimalism, and some rather obtuse field recordings as well. Compositionally, Tricoli and Ankersmit adopt the decentering approach to structure that the Hafler Trio mustered on his most complex collage works, although Tricoli and Ankersmit give the impression that their jaggly spliced electronics could have been generated in a live setting. Eerie passages of dissonant tones crackle with electromagnetic static and puretone chirpings of vibrating signals, shifting from insectoid chorales to spluttering polyphonic bloop circa 1965. When the sax comes out, Ankersmit molds longform, harmonic drones into metallic planes of shifting timbres and tonal dissonance, much more in keeping with his work with Niblock than anything normally sourced from a sax. But especially when it comes to the electronics, there is a sophistication to all Tricoli and Ankersmit's arsenal of noises that's miles beyond so many of today's retrogarde synthesists, and Forma II is all the better for it! One of the best electro-acoustic records to come along in quite some time.

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Crunching clicks, beats and blips form the varied (noisy to noir-ish) setting over (or, under) which French female vocals sometimes reach our ears. Formed by formerly metal- now ambient/experimental- guitarist James Plotkin (OLD, Flux, Joy of Disease, Romance, many many collaborations) and some French friends, including the guy from Celluloid Mata. Dark electronic "surf" music? Six tracks, twenty two and a half minutes of mysterious electronica that Plotkin fans (like us) will enjoy.

We've been on a bit of a soundtrack kick here at aQ recently, listing Child's Play and White Dog last time, The Lion In Winter before that, etc. As we've learned, you don't have to have seen a movie to enjoy the soundtrack, in fact, you don't even have to have ever heard of the movie or care if it got thumbs up from the critics or not. Which brings us to to this list's soundtrack selection, a disc featuring scores to two recent indie thriller/horror films we're unfamiliar with by director Ti West, composed by Jeff Grace - whom we hadn't previously heard of either, though upon further research he gets some cred in aQ-land 'cause the Blackest Rainbow label apparently released a 10" of another of his soundtracks, we'll have to look for that now. Anyone into classic fright flick soundtracks, particularly the stuff Death Waltz has lately been reissuing on vinyl, ought to check this out. The first score, for a film called Trigger Man, is a moody, unsettling creep out, understated and atmospheric, the tracks unified by the composer's brilliant decision to utilize pretty much ONLY solo cello and echo-effects (and some percussion). The suspensefully echoing pulsations of the droning, sawing strings can be strangely lovely and captivating, while clearly leading to, eventually (in the movie) Something Bad Happening. Which, on the soundtrack, remains "off screen", so this is an enjoyable, abstract avant-classical inflected piece of music, suitable for late-night listening, which weirdly reminds us a bit of some of free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker's electronically processed collaborations with Lawrence Casserley, to bring up an obscure and oblique reference. There's plenty of calm yet ominous twilight moments, giving way to more agitated string-scrabble and rhythmically propulsive drives into heart-pounding terror. These eight tracks of this kind-of "chamber-dub" are fantastic enough, but wait, there's more - included here also is Grace's soundtrack to another film, The Roost, another twelve tracks done in explicit homage to the most classic style of B-grade Hollywood horror film soundtracks of decades past, starting off with plenty of spooky oooky theremin and much morbid organ chording in the old school, Carnival Of Souls style! So good. A very well done pastiche, with tremulous strings, urgent orchestral buildups into frenzied crescendos, heartbeat percussion, and eerie drones suddenly silenced, always sounding like some crazy killer with a knife is about to step into the shower with you!! While it starts out deliberately hokey, pretty soon The Roost's score will get under your goosebumped skin and become rather intensely scary indeed, demonstrating why the type of music being so effectively emulated here was used for vintage horror films in the first place. In fact, the string quartet music of The Roost ends up almost in an avant-garde, Zornified territory (of terror) by the end. Now we want to see both Ti West movies to see if they live up to these excellent soundtracks! So glad we discovered this, and at a bargain price too by the way - we only have a few, not too sure if we can get many more or not.

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From the same folks who brought us deliciously sleazy discs from Jet Fuel and Sinnerjizm, here's the debut album from LA's Trigger Renegade, a pretty potent heavy rockin' band in their own right. Trigger Renegade don't wander into the territories of kaleidoscopic psychedelia, bubblegum pop, or dusted glam metal, taking a much more workmanlike approach to the art of hard rockin'. The fist-pumping swagger from the grittiest elements of the NWOBHM is certainly where Trigger Renegade is drawing their inspiration; and Destroy Your Mind certainly succeeds in getting at sex, drugs (although beer and whiskey seem more appropriate) and of course rock 'n' roll. Musically, Trigger Renegade push forward a relentless backbeat of high-octane rhythms that might have a locomotive relentlessness complete with non-stop blastbeats on one track and then a blues-rock boogie on the next. On top of the rhythms, Trigger Renegade intertwine plenty of dynamic, twin guitar / Thin Lizzy-ish leads and alternating vocal styles between gravel throated barks and screeched falsettos ala Rob Halford. With plenty of nods to Cheap Trick, The Damned, Iron Maiden, and Witchfinder General, had Trigger Renegade been around some 25 years ago, they could have been huge.

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Maybe you don't know it yet, but (IF you buy these Bobb Trimble albums) you have just been handed the key to a secret realm, an alternate rock n' roll universe of dark despair, fragile hope, and gossamer beauty, a haunting personal soundworld that will always stay with you, within you... these two albums are reissues of exceedingly rare, DIY pop-psych-prog holy grails from the unlikely time and place of early '80s suburban New England. Bobb Trimble is singer-songwriter and would be (shoulda been) rock star from Worcester, Massachusetts. Born in 1958, he was in his early 20s when he recorded the two self-released albums that constitute his obscure discography, and which over the years have developed a small but devoted cult following among those lucky enough to have encountered these gems. There's been bootlegs of one of them (Harvest Of Dreams), and a hard-to-find anthology that came out 12 years ago drawing material from both Bobb LPs, but now Secretly Canadian, bless 'em, have at long last brought out legit reissues of both amazing Trimble records, on compact disc and vinyl (unfortunately, the vinyl went pretty quick, we only have a couple copies of each LP left in stock at the moment, though we're told there will be a second pressing sometime soon, hopefully). As far as we're concerned, this is one of the most significant musical events of 2007! Influenced by the Beatles (on the back of his debut LP, he politely asks if he can someday become the 5th Beatle), Bowie, Pink Floyd and other psych and prog rock of the '60s and '70s, Bobb boldly brought that sound into "a world he never made", the malaise days of the late '70s and the new wave Reagan '80s, creating homemade timeless tracks that could just as easily have been recorded today, or tomorrow, too. We're reminded of those artists, yes, and also the disparate likes of Ariel Pink, Antony & The Johnsons, Richard Youngs, Ed Askew, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Roy Harper... but Bobb Trimble's music is also like nothing else we've ever heard. Both albums are highly recommended... though weird enough to perhaps not be for everyone, we'll admit. If you like 'em at all though, chances are you'll LOVE them. It's about time they were reissued, we expect that they'll do MUCH better today than they did when they were first (barely) released. The world, or at least the indie-rock scene, is finally ready for Bobb's unsung outsider genius, and it's nice he's getting a second shot at recognition now. And also especially nice for the new audience that's gonna flip out over this music (we predict). This record, 1982's Harvest Of Dreams, is the one with a grainy photo of Bobb pondering what appears to be a unicorn-goat on the cover, apparently found at some RennFaire petting zoo. Looks a bit like a Jandek album cover, doesn't it? It certainly is a wonderful indication of the magical mysteries and sheer oddity of the album's musical content. Of Trimble's two LPs, Harvest is where his dreamy visionary aesthetic reached its absolute pinnacle (at age 23!). Bobb has his helpers on various tracks here, several of 'em recorded with The Kidds -- a bunch of 12-year-olds from his neighborhood he befriended and taught to play! So maybe he felt there was more hope for the future. The mood here isn't quite so dark as side one of Iron Curtain Innocence, though certainly a continuation of that style, and just as emotional and moving, moreso even... Bobb, his high fragile pixie voice (one reason for the Ariel Pink comparison) caressing like fairytale kisses, takes you by the hand and leads you into his heart, on this masterpiece of bedroom recorded lovelorn proggy psychedelic weird gentle beauty. Track two, "If Words Were All I Had" is likely to be one of the best songs you'll hear all year. One of the most aching, affecting love songs ever, actually. It could make you cry. "Armour Of The Shroud" is another highlight. A nearly 8 minute epic woven from Bobb's angelic voice, chiming bells, guitar strum, a bed of electronic swirls, and such droning "environmental" sonic textures as a beeping disconnected dial tone and falling rain. It's not all as mellow as that -- for instance an outburst of distortion and swearing at the end of the otherwise lovely "Selling Me Short While Stringing Me Long" leads into the backwards-effected intro of this album's biggest anomaly, "Oh Baby", a primitive garage-punk number sung by one of the Kidds, with lyrics that seem to reference the Saturday Night Live character Mr. Bill. Backwards effects and children's voices are in fact all over the place here on this densely-layered disc, along with swirling psych guitar, distorted electronics, and Bobb's heartfelt lyrics and melodies. Yep, definitely there's an Ariel Pink vibe, also we're even reminded of the folky pagan weirdness of Comus at times, & also the damaged new wave psych of the Happy Dragon-Band, if you've ever heard them. Urgh it's hard to do this justice in a mere review. Words are all we have... This is the sort of album that it really seems that someone (a better writer than any of us here) could, should write a whole book about. Like one of those 33 1/3 volumes. It's that deep, that unique, that compelling. This reissue again includes enthusiastic, enlightening liner notes, this time from Florent Mazzoleni. And more vintage photos, including another one of Bobb sitting with the spooky unicorn-goat from the cover, this time serenading it with an acoustic guitar. And on this cd there's also another three bonus tracks of unreleased songs!! Nicely put together, way better than any bootleg version of course! So, again, both albums are highly recommended (obviously, as we made 'em both Records Of The Week) but if you're gonna buy just one, maybe start with Harvest Of Dreams... but we'd say get both!

MPEG stream: If Words Were All I Had
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Maybe you don't know it yet, but (IF you buy these Bobb Trimble albums) you have just been handed the key to a secret realm, an alternate rock n' roll universe of dark despair, fragile hope, and gossamer beauty, a haunting personal soundworld that will always stay with you, within you... these two albums are reissues of exceedingly rare, DIY pop-psych-prog holy grails from the unlikely time and place of early '80s suburban New England. Bobb Trimble is singer-songwriter and would be (shoulda been) rock star from Worcester, Massachusetts. Born in 1958, he was in his early 20s when he recorded the two self-released albums that constitute his obscure discography, and which over the years have developed a small but devoted cult following among those lucky enough to have encountered these gems. There's been bootlegs of one of them (Harvest Of Dreams), and a hard-to-find anthology that came out 12 years ago drawing material from both Bobb LPs, but now Secretly Canadian, bless 'em, have at long last brought out legit reissues of both amazing Trimble records, on compact disc and vinyl (unfortunately, the vinyl went pretty quick, we only have a couple copies of each LP left in stock at the moment, though we're told there will be a second pressing sometime soon, hopefully). As far as we're concerned, this is one of the most significant musical events of 2007! Influenced by the Beatles (on the back of his debut LP, he politely asks if he can someday become the 5th Beatle), Bowie, Pink Floyd and other psych and prog rock of the '60s and '70s, Bobb boldly brought that sound into "a world he never made", the malaise days of the late '70s and the new wave Reagan '80s, creating homemade timeless tracks that could just as easily have been recorded today, or tomorrow, too. We're reminded of those artists, yes, and also the disparate likes of Ariel Pink, Antony & The Johnsons, Richard Youngs, Ed Askew, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Roy Harper... but Bobb Trimble's music is also like nothing else we've ever heard. Both albums are highly recommended... though weird enough to perhaps not be for everyone, we'll admit. If you like 'em at all though, chances are you'll LOVE them. It's about time they were reissued, we expect that they'll do MUCH better today than they did when they were first (barely) released. The world, or at least the indie-rock scene, is finally ready for Bobb's unsung outsider genius, and it's nice he's getting a second shot at recognition now. And also especially nice for the new audience that's gonna flip out over this music (we predict). This one, Iron Curtain Innocence, with a striking photo-studio shot on the cover of Bobb armed with both an electric guitar and a Tommy gun, was his debut, a private pressing in an edition of just 300 copies! Side one, credited to Bobb Trimble with The Violent Reactions, was recorded in 1980 and represents the darker, more apocalyptic material on the album, the songs dramatic, melancholic, and laced with much mysterious sound FX. The very first track, "Glass Menagerie Fantasies", starting off with some shortwave static, establishes Bobb's special talent for fragile and melodic otherworldliness, utilizing weird "glitch" textures long before electronica made that a rock-crit term. His multitracked vocals, ranging high, are of translucent beauty throughout this record, yet so much of the musical mood is one of dread and psychosis, lyrics touching on fears of WWIII, the gothic likes of "When The Raven Calls" heavier with sizzling synth drones and volume-cranked psych guitar. Side two, designated Soliloquize, was recorded two years earlier, in 1978, and features what Bobb considers the more "straight" songs on the record, simpler perhaps, but with Bobb's vocals just as delicate and the mood just as melancholic... and definitely of psychedelic bent, note ferinstance the backwards guitar on "Through My Eyes (Hopeless as Hell: D.O.A.)". On side one Bobb is accompanied by a drummer and bassist, on side two just a drummer, Bobb handling vocals, guitar, and all other instruments, credited also with "interference patterns" and "hope". Hope? Maybe. Bobb dedicates this album "to a children of a dynasty destined to ruins who build their dreams on the darkness they buy... and steal." You can see where he's coming from, his despairing musical mood. It's fairly certain that back in 1980 he could have never imagined that his music would be being re-released in 2007, not just because such lasting "success" seemed elusive but also 'cause it seemed doubtful, in those days preceding the Ronald Reagan vs. "Evil Empire" face-off at the height of the Cold War, that world would survive this long. Thankfully, it has, but sadly, though, times haven't really changed that much regarding this civilization's and this planet's long-term prognosis, Mutual Assured Destruction replaced with global warming and WMD and another Evil Empire (ours, or Islamofascism, take your pick), so Bobb's sentiments on Iron Curtain Innocence still seem unhappily relevant as ever... but this reissue is also a token of hope, since we, Bobb and this music are are still here. This reissue also includes three bonus tracks, reverb-drenched solo demo versions of songs from side one, recorded by Bobb in his parents' basement. The cd booklet contains extensive liner notes by Eric Weddle, as well as lots of photos and a newspaper clipping of a review in the local newspaper at the time.

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Wonders never cease. About four or five years ago, the Secretly Canadian label did a big favor to obscure music lovers everywhere and brought out deluxe, at long last legit reissues of the two rare private press albums that obscure DIY psych pop genius Bobb Trimble released in the early '80s. We love those two so much, we made both reissues Records Of The Week. Trimble's Iron Curtain Innocence (1980) and Harvest Of Dreams (1982) are timeless, cult artifacts, of which we said: "...you have just been handed the key to a secret realm, an alternate rock n' roll universe of dark despair, fragile hope, and gossamer beauty, a haunting personal soundworld that will always stay with you, within you...", and favorably compared to everyone from Lennon/McCartney to Pink Floyd to Roy Harper to Marc Bolan to Richard Youngs to Ariel Pink. Well, we had no idea that those two albums weren't the entirely of Trimble's discography. But now, happily we learn that there was a THIRD even rarer Trimble lp, and it's just been reissued as well!!! And it too is a doozy. Turns out that a year or two after Harvest Of Dreams was released into an uncaring world, the 20-something Trimble teamed up with a local Worcester, Massachusetts gang of teenagers (some of whom we think had been in the even younger group, The Kidds, who are heard on some songs on a song or two on Harvest Of Dreams) called The Crippled Dog Band, named after the three-legged dog seen on the cover of this album, presumably. Who doesn't love a three-legged dog? Together, they played shows - and, better yet, for us today - made an album, this one, in '84, which captures the outsider psych-pop brilliance of Trimble's songwriting in exuberant collision/collusion with youthful rock n' roll energy. Yeah, compared to Trimble's two "solo" albums, this could be considered to be more rockin', more "punk", more band-like. And more '80s as well, if only 'cause of the sci-fi video arcade game sounds that appear here on the intro and outro tracks! The songs, while typically Trimble-poppy (and graced with his delicate, high and whispy vox) are also often loud and raucous and awash in feedback and FX. At times we're kinda reminded of The Dickies. Most are in the 2-3 minute range, though they do a version of one of our favorite Trimble songs, "Armour Of The Shroud", that stretches out for over six minutes, as per the epic original that appeared on Harvest Of Dreams. They also do "Galilean Boy", a demo of which appeared as a bonus track on SC's reissue of HoD. The other "cover" here is a reinterpretation of The Beatles' "All Together Now", which Trimble and The Crippled Dog Band really make their own, converting it into a theme song of sorts, near the beginning of the album: "Singin' the Crippled Dog anthem / ruff ruff / ruff ruff!" There's something so wonderfully charming about that, eh? And the teenage spark of Trimble's cohorts here is infectious, the band tearing it up, gritty garagey psych stomp style across much of this disc. Ferinstance, there's the distortodelic Eastern vibe of "Camel Song", and "Angel Eyes" is another that offers up some pretty heavy-duty, driving psych gunk for your earholes. And those are only a few of the punked up Pepperisms to be found on this delightful disc. Some songs are darker ("Undercovers Man"), others, pure fun ("Poker Game Of Life"). Apparently, the story goes, The Crippled Dog Band came to an end shortly after this was recorded, for whatever reason, and with no hope of selling 'em, almost all of original pressing of 500 lps was unceremoniously disposed of by Bobb in a dumpster! Good grief. Thankfully, the actual recordings weren't lost, and this reissue has finally arrived to allow The Crippled Dog Band to be heard again - it's certainly getting a lot of play here at AQ! Recommended, ruff ruff!!

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First we've reviewed from this Midwestern misanthrope, a one man, synth swinging, electro-punk, garage pop wrecking machine, who sounds little bit like some musical DNA splicing experiment gone fantastically wrong, equal parts Suicide, Thee Oh Sees, David Bowie, Fabulous Diamonds, Chrome... well, you get, seriously twisted and WTF, darkly sci-fi, a little bit droney, spaced out and psychedelic. Opener "Fashion Has Happened To Fashion" sounds like Bowie's "Fashion", and not just because of the "Fashion" in the chorus/refrain (although that helps), it's stripped down and refashioned into a psychedelic kraut-garage groove, and the follow up also sort of sounds like the same Bowie jam at first, but it's soon pulled apart and reconstituted by some sonic mad scientist, into something much more sinister, wrapped in pulsing, pulsating FX drenched guitars, and tethered to a hypnotic robotic rhythm, with a killer recurring melodic flourish that will get stuck in your head like crazy. The sound is all fuzzy, crumbling guitars, swirly sci-fi synths, skeletal Casio beats, and yelped, occasionally almost falsetto vox. It's dirgey and murky one second, frenetic and frenzied the next, the sound simultaneously spacey and futuristic, raw, primitive and retro. There's an awesome pic of Mr. Trin Tran himself on the sleeve, jamming on synths, guitar strapped across his chest, weird mic contraption hung around his neck, a strange sort-of-Batman mask (of course), with some cymbals, seemingly strapped to his synths, all set up in what appears to be the dingy corner of some run down bar, adorned with a sad little string of Christmas lights, and a closet filled with empty hangers in the corner. If we had to imagine what kind of weirdo was making this music, nothing we could have imagined would have been as perfect as that pic. A sonic space alien, stranded in some podunk town, sending these musical distress signals to his home planet hoping to be rescued. We're digging these jams enough, that we're intercepting those signals, in the hopes that help might never come...

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Members of Enslaved and Fe Mail doing Neurosis-y avant metal!!!!?

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. This cd is a broad spanning collection of recordings - made from 1928 to 1951 - by Miguel Matamoros' most resilient of groups. Consisting of Miguel Matamoros (voice, guitar), Ciro Rodriguez (voice, maracas, claves) and Rafael Cueto (guitar, choir), it was this ensemble with which "Miguel was successful in combining to perfection all the melodic and rhythmic elements that the eastern son contained, and he brought to it the very typical charms of the purest 'creole' flavor." It is this genre that is the national pride of Cuba and it is this ensemble that impressed many young aspiring musicians including Compay Segundo of Buena Vista Social Club fame.

MPEG stream: The Wherewithal
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Celtic Frost is dead, long live Triptykon! Yes, this is the debut disc from the new project of Celtic Frost and Hellhammer mainman Tom G. Warrior (aka Thomas Gabriel Fischer), a band he formed after the recent implosion of Celtic Frost. It's billed as an "official" continuation of the CF legacy by other means, and it's even got an H.R. Giger cover painting to prove it. Well, that's not all that proves it, just listen! This album contains several songs originally written for CF's aborted followup to their 2006 highly-regarded comeback album Monotheist, and is much in the tradition of that excellent album: an oppressively heavy juggernaut of black/doom metal mastery with avantgarde elements. Parts are speedier than Monotheist, though others trudge with riffage on the slower side... While a long way from the raw primitive dirge of Hellhammer so many years ago (the subject of a lavish new book by Tom G., also reviewed this list), Triptykon IS plenty dirgey, just not so "garagey", with high tech production. And all Celtic Frost and Hellhammer fans will be relieved to know that Tom's trademark death grunts made the transition to Triptykon intact, along with his more gothic and guttural, spoken/sung/chanted vocal style. Furthermore, just like when we saw him on Frost's final US tour, he's still wearing that knit hat pulled down to just over his raccoon-painted eyes... The nine, mostly long songs on Eparistera Diamones (which means, uh, what's it mean?) are proof that even 28 years after Hellhammer's formation, and 26 after Celtic Frost's, Tom G. is still relevant to today's "extreme metal" scene, matching anyone out there for relentless density, negative expressivity, anti-religious artistry, and sheer heaviness. If we have to cite his previous band(s) as a reference point, that's no surprise. If CF didn't exist, or all we had ever heard was Triptykon, maybe we'd be comparing 'em to Neurosis or something. Heck, the female vox and classical grand piano that appear on track 7 "Myopic Empire", and the similarly moody experimentation that continues onto the entirely un-heavy, atmospheric track 8 "My Pain", is not only worthy of latter-day, trip-hopped Ulver, but in its Teutonic seriousness could be Tarwater or something, yet is followed by the pounding "You shall perish I shall live" metallic affirmation of "The Prolonging" (which also lives up to its title by being almost 20 minutes long!), ending the album leaving nobody wondering about Triptykon's place in the hierarchy of hell. Reverently packaged with a thick cd booklet that includes not only more sexy/scifi perverted alien H.R. Giger art, but also portraits of each band member by another equally disturbed artist, as well as lyrics to each song AND personal liner notes from Tom G. about each track too. While in these the sometimes self-important, self-absorbed nature of the whole Celtic Frost thing is evident, so is Tom's artistic torment and sincerity (if you're read his autobiography, Are You Morbid?, which we recommend, you know what we mean). Hail!

MPEG stream: Goetia
MPEG stream: Abyss Within My Soul
MPEG stream: Myopic Empire

Ough!!! Let's get that out of the way right off the bat. It only takes 30 seconds into the first track to get that trademark verbal expulsion, courtesy of metal's most uncompromising (and often misunderstood) artisan Tom G. Warrior. And that's worth the price of admission alone! But luckily there's plenty more bleak metal greatness to be found here as well. After already cementing himself a Metal Legend status with his early works in Hellhammer and Celtic Frost (not to mention 2006's superb CF reunion record Monotheist), Tommy G is back with the second full length of his most recent passion project Triptykon, and man oh man it does not disappoint. Sickening, slithering grooves are bent to their breaking point. Riffs seem to go in and out of tune even in the middle of a single note. The riffing is simple yet compelling - hypnotic and enveloping, like some musty lightless cocoon. Tom Warrior's vocals are as commanding as ever. He seems to be hurtling dogma from a pulpit with the passion of a mad zealot - his influence on vocalists like Satyricon's Satyr or Immortal's Abbath never more apparent. The drumming, freeform and almost jazzy at times, nicely offsets the vocals and the guitars, bringing something a bit more organic and human into the fold, but they still get very tribal and seriously heavy when they need to be. It's a rotting alien obelisk of an album. Even the brooding gothic balladry of "Boleskine House" with its ethereal female vocals, or "Aurorae" with its drifting reverbed guitar and lazy drum shuffle, seem to lurch and twist on a nauseous alien wave. And although occasionally we'll be assaulted with a thrashy downbeat pummel, Melana Chasmata is almost entirely a downtrodden affair - wallowing in the pits of mid-paced despair and dreadfully doomy inevitability. But for all its forlorn pallid squalor and slimy dissonance, it's still a bewilderingly catchy record - the chorus from opener "Tree Of Suffocating Souls" almost guaranteed to earworm its way into your psyche, whether you want it there or not! At over an hour, it's an exhausting, all encompassing experience, more akin to something like Swans' The Seer than your average metal record. And like that album, while it may not always be the easiest listen, it's more than worth the effort if you're willing to follow the dark corridors and shadowy labyrinthine passages of Melana Chasmata.

MPEG stream: Tree Of Suffocating Souls
MPEG stream: Boleskine House
MPEG stream: Aurorae

Tom G. Warrior is definitely BACK. First there was the successful (until they broke up, again) Celtic Frost reunion. And then, the debut from his new act, Triptykon, also almost universally praised by metal critics and CF fans alike. Now, not so long after that full-length, Tom & Co. bring us a new ep, Shatter, featuring 3 new songs plus two bonus live recordings, running close to about a half an hour total time. The new songs are in the vein of Eparistera Daimones: dark, doomy, disturbed, with a slight gothic/industrial vibe. The first two are both chunky, sluggish to mid-tempo offerings of Teutonic heaviosity, with the opening, title track offering up a tad more melody, while the lengthier "I Am The Twilight" is an epic, heads down grind, that kinda bridges the likes of Isis with black metal. Tom's vocals switch between angrily gargled vokills and a Type-O Negative croak, accompanied on "Shatter" by female vox as well, in a sort of Hammers Of Misfortune mode. Those two are followed by the other new song, "Crucifixus", a quietly haunting, ambient metal (mostly-) instrumental. Eerie and engaging enough, that if Triptykon were to do an entire extended album of just that sort of thing, we'd surely sell a bunch, it could maybe be released on Miasmah or Editions Mego! Then there's the live tracks. Not just any live tracks, but Triptykon versions of two old Celtic Frost classics, "Circle Of The Tyrants" and "Dethroned Emperor", recorded at Holland's Roadburn festival earlier this year. Death grunt in full effect. And, there's a special guest Nocturno Culto of Darkthrone singing on one of 'em! Hey wait a sec - Allan was at Roadburn, caught part of Triptykon's set, but doesn't remember seeing that. Must have gone off to see another band on another stage. (Kicking self....)

MPEG stream: I Am The Twilight
MPEG stream: Crucifixus

Another mysterious black metal horde from the great white North, hailing from Quebec, Canada, Triskele, like many of their French Canadian black metal countrymen, have much in common with their actually French brethren, owing much to the Black Legions and the various groups and scenes that brief movement inspired. Les Murmures is not new, it was actually released way back in 2003, and there are two more recent records, but as those two were SUPER limited and both seem to be out of print now, we figured that probably some of you, like us, managed to miss out on this, which is a shame, as this is some seriously blown out, buzz drenched, miserablist black metal. Supposedly Les Murmures was recorded in a forest (Like Ulver's epochal Nattens Madrigal) and it definitely sounds like it could have been, after a brief ambient keyboard / chanted intro, the band spews forth a churning torrent of crumbling black distortion and blasting drums, almost totally obscured by the sheet of hiss and buzz that envelops the proceedings. Almost more than a forest, this sounds like it was recorded in a cave, or at the bottom of a well, or in some massive concrete bunker. The vocals are a harsh glass gargling howl, inexorably tangled up with the buzzing reverb drenched guitars, and those drums that sound more like a wall of cymbal sizzle punctuated by barely audible rhythmic pulses, but don't get us wrong, it sounds AMAZING, super lo-fi and totally raw, slipping from chaotic stumbling blast, to lurching doomic creep and back again. Some tracks are explosions of furious white noise buzz and relentless drum splatter, but when the band locks into a groove, and slows it down a bit, the depressive genius shines through, the vocals transforming into an hysterical shriek, all manner of melancholy and mournful melodies rising to the surface, before being obliterated by another frosty white blast of black fury. Then there's the title track, a nearly 12 minute stretch of buzz and drum ambience, the drums pounding out some tribal rhythm, while all around it streaks of whir and buzz swirl and swoop, the drummer also managing to incorporate some unlikely percussion, there's even some primal wailing at one point, it's actually nearly impossible to imagine this track NOT being performed in the forest, lit by firelight, the mysterious haunting sounds holding the woods' wild beasts at bay. WAY recommended. Essential for fans of outsider depressive blackness and grim blown out black forest buzz.

MPEG stream: Reverence
MPEG stream: Tenebre
MPEG stream: La Foret Noire

Not to be confused with the much more prolific Czech depressive doom-ed black metal Trist, German one man band Trist is the ambient drone side project of Benjamin Konig, who is also the frontman for Lunar Aurora, an amazing black metal band we love, but have yet to list here (which will be remedied as soon as possible, we promise). Initiation comes via the same label that has been gradually re-releasing all the Paysage D'Hiver demos over the last couple years, and is a collection of various long out of print and even at the time barely available demos, recorded between 2000-2003. Nothing black metal here, but plenty blackness nonetheless, Trist explores slow, hazy, otherworldly ambience, black drones and delicate Lustmordian soundscapery, a sound that falls somewhere between the gauzy digitized smear of folks like Tim Hecker and Aidan Baker, and the abject electronics and post apocalyptic sonic sprawl of groups like Wolf Eyes and Emeralds, infusing it with that distinctive 'black metal intro' vibe. Not obviously synthy, and definitely not overly guitar based, the sound on Initiation is blurred and washed out, melodies exist but are only glimpsed fleetingly, the longform drones and extended drifts are heavily textured with, warm whooshing whir, distorted crumble, ethereal fields of hiss and click and pop and rough sandpaper like buzz, definitely very dreamy and moonlit, but also ominous and grim, very cinematic, evoking some alien wasteland, burnt and ruined beneath a smoke filled sky, something lurking in the shadows, the ground littered with death and destruction. Folks who loved that Cities Last Broadcast from last list, will definitely dig this too, as it mines the same sort of wasted unpopulated barren planet vibe, and take the more abstract dronescaping of folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX and Xela and Aun and Svarte Greiner somewhere much more cinematic. Bits of new age seep in here and there, chunks of slow motion doomdrone now and again, mysterious loops and bits of glitch surface throughout, giving many of the tracks an avant turntablist vibe, like Strotter Inst or Jeck, this is certainly not what you might expect from a grim black metaller, instead Initiation plays out more as a dense and varied and layered work of tense instrumental minimalism, of gorgeous and harrowing experimental dronemusic, and of course bleak black ambience, maybe too abstract for metalheads, but folks into drone and doom and drift and all that cd-r floorcore rumble and shimmer would do well to grab one of these right quick.

MPEG stream: In Die Schwarze Nacht
MPEG stream: Toter Raum
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Some�of you folks who took advantage of the black metal cassette grab bag might have been lucky enough to nab Stiny, the 2006 full length from Czech blackdoomlords Trist, a gorgeously bleak slab of plodding doomy blackness. Falling somewhere between�Burzum, Nortt, Make A Change... Kill Yourself and Hypothermia. Thankfully, Ars Magna, the label responsible for the mind blowing black miserablism of Animus'�Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated and the clinical black blast of Black Hole Generator, has swooped in to re-release that tape on compact disc, so now all you black hearted frozen souled metalheads who ditched the walkman years back, can still dig into this intense collection of bleak black misery.� Four ultra long songs, the first clocking in at 16 minutes, the last at 11, Trist traffic in ultra repetitive, hypnotic looped riffage wreathed in frosty ambience, the sound is all guitar, the bass barely noticeable (if there is any bass at all), just grim sheets of keening riffs, sometimes soaring and epic, other times tangled and furious, dripping with reverb and not all that distorted, a sort of dirty clean sound, perfectly complimenting the buried vocals, an abstract screech that ends up sounding like another layer of buzzing sound, which serves in some ways to make the drums a focal point, surprisingly busy, going from simple plod to intense squalls of almost mathy drumming, bursts of double kick, some wild fills, but it all fits really well, the songs often veering from doomic trudge to almost groovy midtempo, and once in a while almost full on blastbeats. And while the sound is plenty hateful and miserable and depressive, it still manages to be pretty at times, with little melodic bits that wouldn't be that out of place on an Alcest or Amesoeurs record... Way recommended. Fans of any of the above mentioned bands will find Stiny to be an essential addition to their library of sonic sorrow and musical melancholia.

MPEG stream: Samota
MPEG stream: Modry Zal

The return of one of our favorite one man weirdo (post) black metal outfits, Lonesummer, who hails from Philly and who teams up here with another aQ fave, another one man band, Trist, from the Czech Republic (not to be confused with the German Trist!), both of whom offer their own twisted take on black metal. Trist is up first with a single 20+ minute epic, a slow depressive blackened dirge, all fuzzed out and dreamily buzzy, rife with melancholy melody, barely any vocals, and when they do surface, they're buried WAY down in the mix, the drums simple and buried in the mix, the guitars thick, the distortion crumbling, it's the sort of black metal for people who might not like black metal, since it's usually the vocals that drive people away, but even more, the sound here is washed out and shoegazey, we hear Sonic Youth and Bailter Space and My Bloody Valentine way more than Immortal or Darkthrone. Darkly mesmerizing, and dreamily hypnotic, even at 20 minutes odds are you'll find yourself setting your player for repeat. Lonesummer is up next, and we never know what to expect, after all our favorite Lonesummer jam found LS mixing some old African record with his black buzz, but here, we're presented with what we've come to dig about LS, a mix of indie jangle, folky strum, and heavily melodic black buzz, the vocals here shrieky and hysterical, definitely of the Bethlehem variety, cranking up the weirdo factor for sure, cuz otherwise the music is darkly melodic, with some strange off kilter rhythms and soaring guitars. The second track is even poppier, sounding almost like Dinosaur Jr. or something, SUPER melodic, fuzzy and dreamily distorted, the vocals just pushing it over the top, and back into black metal land. And that's pretty much how the rest of the tracks play out, a sort of black buzz infused, fuzz guitar, indie rock, albeit on the blacker and buzzier side, with those vocals wild and shrieked, culminating in kick ass closer "Mundane Dreams About Flash Floods", which is the perfect mix of clean guitar strum, churning blackened heaviness, melodic jangle, vokill shriek, and even some almost mathy noise rockiness. Hard to describe, but then the best stuff usually is.

MPEG stream: Vabeni Pokojne Tmy
MPEG stream: Regrettably, Our Harvest Never Grew
MPEG stream: Mundane Dreams About Flash Floods

San Diego's favorite five-piece melodic instrumental slow-core post-rock ambient drone sleep-core chiming blissful yadda yadda yadda... This is their follow-up to the popular "Spine and Sensory" album from a couple years ago. This record breaks no new ground in the grand scheme of things, but it does find the band experimenting more with subtle electronic flourishes to add more flavor to their sometimes grating dueling harpsichord-sounding guitar tones. The repetition becomes a novelty after a while, but fans of early 4AD and less dynamic Mogwai will probably really like this.

More blissed out post rock from San Diego's Tristeza! Word has it they've been working on a new full length with Pall Jenkins (Black Heart Procession). In the meantime though, their newest release is a 7-song long cdep (or is it a 7-song short album?!). There's nothing jagged or jarring about Espuma, everything swirls, swells and soothes in the most gentle fashion. Compared to their recent more heavily electronic laden releases, this strikes more of a glistening balance between that and their former more guitar centric sounds. Nice!

MPEG stream: Living Stains

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Four songs from this Tortoise-y post rock band, also a part of Insound website's budget "tour support" cd series. We're a little skeptical of Insound's motives ($, it seems) but fans will want this.

San Diego's post-emo heartthrobs, posterboys of heartfelt, emotional atmospheric Windham Hill Records-esque post-rock get in bed with Windy & Carl, Fridge, Simon Raymonde (of the Cocteau Twins), Marumari, Randomnumber (ex-Hood), Scientific American, Styrofoam, Yellow6, Astorria, DJ Jims (of Tristeza), Lackluster, Diagram Of Suburban Chaos and Snodgrass. Beautifully packaged in

Emo driven instrumentals with hints at space rock popping up. Leaning more towards the spectrum of Sunny Day Real Estate & Rainer Maria.

Hot on the heels of their remix collection "Mixed Signals" comes this EP. It seems that recently this mellow instrumental quintet have been moving further from their gentle guitar-dominant post-rock tracks into more gentle electronic-accented post-rock sounds.

RealAudio clip: Stop Grass
RealAudio clip: Auxilio Mate

Reissue of the first single from the highly acclaimed San Diego pretty post-rock "supergroup". Three songs: "Foreshadow", "Smoke Through Glass" and "Cinematography (Original Version)".

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

MPEG stream: Ove Il Mio Odio Trovera Sempre Nuovo Vigore
MPEG stream: Il Volo Dei Corbi Imperiali

Ever hear of the TRMRS? Neither had we. Not until a couple scruffy looking dudes came into the store and dropped off a copy of their new cd-r, a hand painted, home made little gem, that definitely had us wondering what might be inside. And shit, if what's inside doesn't make these guys the next big thing, then we'd be pretty goddamn surprised. Think Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Sic Alps, Waaves, Surfer Blood, Soft Pack, that sort of jangly, super hooky, slightly surfy psychedelic garage rock, and while there is definitely a glut of folks going for that sound, these guys do it way better than most, and totally make it their own. Self described as 'trash pop', that's pretty much what this sounds like, trashy and poppy, and loose and super rocking, the guitars are crunchy and jangly, the vocals a melodic yelp, the drums propulsive, reverb all over the place, and the songs are hooky as hell. More garagey and raw, than purely poppy, but that raw garage is infused with plenty of poppiness, reminding us a bit of a slightly more song oriented Coachwhips, you can definitely tell that live these guys probably have the crowd bouncing and sweaty and losing their shit. And it's easy to hear why. Definitely a new favorite. And we'd be shocked if these guys didn't get snapped up by Mexican Summer or In The Red or Woodsist or even Captured Tracks or Woven Bones, and if any of that stuff is your jam, then these guys just might be your new favorite band. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Each one in a super fancy hand painted, silkscreened, collaged cover, every one unique, and all hand numbered!

MPEG stream: Shorter Days
MPEG stream: Hello Self
MPEG stream: Green Machine
MPEG stream: Come In

These guys kicked out asses recently with the distortion drenched blown out garage rock jangle pop of their debut Sea Things, positioning them firmly alongside sonic brethren like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Sic Alps, Waaves, Surfer Blood, Soft Pack, and all the rest. This new tape offers up a handful of new songs, paired with a selection of tracks from Sea Things, so for those who somehow missed out on that gem, or who were waiting for the cassette version (?), well here's what we had to say about Sea Things (the rest of you can skip this part): Jangly, super hooky, slightly surfy, psychedelic garage rock. And while there may be a glut of folks going for that sound, these guys do it way better than most, and totally make it their own. Self described as 'trash pop', that's pretty much what this sounds like, trashy and poppy, and loose and super rocking, the guitars are crunchy and jangly, the vocals a melodic yelp, the drums propulsive, reverb all over the place, and the songs are hooky as hell. More garagey and raw, than purely poppy, but that raw garage is infused with plenty of poppiness, reminding us a bit of a slightly more song oriented Coachwhips, you can definitely tell that live these guys probably have the crowd bouncing and sweaty and losing their shit. And it's easy to hear why. The new tracks here, are as you might have guessed, more of the same, cut from the same sonic cloth, with maybe a bit more production polish here and there, some cool backwards effects, a slightly less lo-fi sound, but then the sound is as much of this music as the songs are, so the sound stays appropriately fuzzy and washed out and reverby, and in places gets even more noisy and crunchy than before, the 4 jams here offering up another heaping helping of gloriously buzzy Sixties influenced surf rocky fuzz pop that could have (and probably did) come straight from the same sessions that produced Sea Things, but hell, we're not complaining, more TRMRS is what we were hankering for anyway, so here it is. And the new songs do kill, hooky and rocking, sweat drenched and distorted, and catchy as all get out. And like we mentioned before, we're surprised these guys haven't yet landed on some big label (Mexican Summer? In The Red?) yet, but we're guessing it's only a matter of time. Comes with two stickers, one of which has a download code for a digital version of the whole tape! Sweet occultic skull artwork too!

This Pathless Land contains five moody latenight multilingual tunes, and certainly leaves you craving more! Subtle, smoky and just a little bit mysterious and trippy. The second song "Western" is a definite stand-out bringing to mind the wonderful duets of Serge Gainsbourg and Francoise Hardy or Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. In-store play never fails to draw more than a few customer queries. A very impressive follow-up to their Que Son los Trolls y en Que Nos Ayudan? cd from a couple of years ago!

MPEG stream: Western
MPEG stream: Tex Bossa Redux (Aero-Mic'd Remix)

Local quintet Troll has made a delightfully ambitious record. The flavor is sort of Pizzicato 5 meets Os Mutantes meets Amon Duul, and each song is a minor gem, albeit a little rough 'round the edges', with multiple vocalists, epic harmonies, intensely simmering guitar, and well-written, unpredictable songs, dynamic pieces that grow and develop within themselves. Being smart folk with wonderful taste in music (we should know: they're AQ-customers!), Troll describe themselves quite accurately: "The sound is a combination of hard Nordic and Spanish garage, mellow blissful euro-tinged psychedelia, Japanese tropicalia and ambient jazz. The languages sung on the album are Danish, Spanish, Japanese, French and English." Nice.

RealAudio clip: Blue Skies
RealAudio clip: Silver Mountain
RealAudio clip: El Vampiro

Troll stars Nagash (of Kovenant, Dimmu Borgir fame) and drummer extraordinaire Hellhammer (Mayhem, Kovenant, Arcturus, and about two dozen other bands). These Norwegian black metal vets have tied their long hair back in ponytails and traded their medieval blade weapons for pistols and shotguns, thus giving their Satanic image a Tarantino style makeover. But the music is still

RealAudio clip: Sannhetens Plagiat

To dedicated readers of the New Arrival list, there can be no doubt that goth and industrial sounds from the eighties are back in a huge way. But rather than riding the nostalgia train, most of the groups we love who are mining this sound and putting their own spin on it, adding unique elements to distinguish a sense of honest and progressive devotion from a mere genre exercise. Case in point is this debut tape from Austin-based heavy gloomers, Troller. Coming out of the same fervent scene that was birthed from the ashes of Silver Pines: Pure X, Survive, Sleep Over, and Thousand Foot Whale Claw (for a good overview of this scene, check out the Brain Club Vol. #000001 LP compilation), Troller mine classic death rock, but slow it down with a heavy shoe-gazing doominess. You can tell the female singer has a voice as big as Zola Jesus, or Siouxie, but what we like most about it is that she restrains her delivery from overwrought passion up front in the mix, instead letting it moulder at times in a dour misanthropic mire with the chilly synths and the booming plod of the drum machine patterns. In between each proper song is an untitled instrumental that shows the band's knack for sculpting dark ambient soundscapes that are alien, pensive and luridly bleak. To check it out: http://troller.bandcamp.com/releases The band dropped these off while on tour, so we have about ten. We probably can get more, but be prepared to wait for a restock until the band return home.

[ aquarius records catalogue — T ]