Been meaning to review these for ages now, finally getting around to it, the first two records from this legendary Boston band, originally released on the legendary and now defunct Homestead Records label, and who are often compared to Husker Du and Mission Of Burma (the band that drummer / vocalist Peter Prescott played in before the Volcano Suns), the latter especially appropriate since Prescott's drumming was a big part of MoB's sound, as was his occasional singing, and it definitely sounds like some of Burma's songwriting stuck with him.
But Volcano Suns were much more of a pop band, meant to be more fun and a little bit more light hearted than Burma, the songs catchy, the riffs super memorable, but that doesn't keep much of the music from being brooding and intense and complex, super rhythmic, and hypnotic, with long instrumental passages butted up against super catchy choruses, like the Merge website says, these songs are so good, and so memorable, that they really do sound like greatest hits records. We hadn't listened to either of these in ages, but throwing them on recently, we remembered pretty much all of these songs, 20 years later! And they still sound pretty fresh considering how much indie rock has changed over the last two decades.
All-Night Lotus Party was the band's second record, originally released in 1986, and found the band getting a bit darker, and a little more aggressive, the guitars heavier, but without sacrificing any of the pop smarts that made the first record so awesome, and like that record, pretty much every song here is a could have/should have/would have been hit. Catchy as all get out, but super rocking and intense.
This is the first time either of these records has been available on cd. This reissue includes a ton of bonus tracks, B-sides, etc., including some really odd covers, including the Beatles' "Polythene Pam", the Amboy Dukes' "Journey To The Center Of The Mind" and Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins"(!!)...
Been meaning to review these for ages now, finally getting around to it, the first two records from this legendary Boston band, originally released on the legendary and now defunct Homestead Records label, and who are often compared to Husker Du and Mission Of Burma (the band that drummer / vocalist Peter Prescott played in before the Volcano Suns), the latter especially appropriate since Prescott's drumming was a big part of MoB's sound, as was his occasional singing, and it definitely sounds like some of Burma's songwriting stuck with him.
But Volcano Suns were much more of a pop band, meant to be more fun and a little bit more light hearted than Burma, the songs catchy, the riffs super memorable, but that doesn't keep much of the music from being brooding and intense and complex, super rhythmic, and hypnotic, with long instrumental passages butted up against super catchy choruses, like the Merge website says, these songs are so good, and so memorable, that they really do sound like greatest hits records. We hadn't listened to either of these in ages, but throwing them on recently, we remembered pretty much all of these songs, 20 years later! And they still sound pretty fresh considering how much indie rock has changed over the last two decades.
The Bright Orange Years was the Volcano Suns first record, and was originally released in 1985, very reminiscent of Mission Of Burma, a killer collection of classic indie rock, equal parts that classic Homestead sound, with a little SST thrown in for good measure, the songs range from jangly and hooky, to dense and rocking, to noisy and chaotic, but all of them super catchy. We loved this record back in the day, and we're loving it all over again now.
This is the first time either of these records has been available on cd. This reissue includes a ton of bonus tracks, B-sides, etc., including a pretty cool live cover of Prince's "1999" that transforms the original into a weirdly angular post punk jam...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Weird jazz. That's what your grandmother or 12 year old cousin might say this sounds like, some kind of weird jazz. Not quite though. True, horns trill, squawk and skronk here. But turntables glitch out as well, and electronics moan, and there's lots more going on besides, as Dadaist/Surrealist inspired sonic mischief-makers Volcano The Bear from England (featuring Daniel Padden) return with a very impressive, sprawling double cd set. With their kitchen sink instrumental arsenal they engage in some dense improv picture-painting (the kind of pictures with melting clocks in 'em) but also can get under your skin with "real" composed songs with a folky feel...and lots of not-so-folky distortion and weirdness on top (like in disc two's wonderfully droning folk-pop piece "Last Song Of Norway"). Elsewhere with scraping drones and toys and electronic fx, their music becomes a slow squeak on such tracks as "Ong Pate". This moody combination makes this an album of chaotic yet calm, ceremonial-sounding avant-acid folk, something sorta NWW, I mean new, for Volcano The Bear. Very cool and recommended to the (a)typical adventurous AQ customer, especially those who already dig the likes of Vibracathedral Orchestra / Richard Youngs / Devendra Banhart / Sunburned Hand Of The Man and want to follow that sort of sound down the rabbit hole...
More shambolic weirdness from this noisemaking, Nurse With Wound approved UK outfit. Recorded at a live show in Leicester, England June 2006, this starts off just as intense as they've ever been, with a wailing ceremonial-sounding piece, like some sort of 20th century classical freakout, or a droning witches' sabbath... then during subsequent tracks, things calm down into more improv-y regions. The drones become more broken, with "jazz" horns in the mix, clattering rhythms, and occasional vocal turns that suggest a twisted, psychedelic cabaret and/or damaged folk balladry. It's a disjointed mix of bedlam and beauty, with twilight soon approaching, the ominous darkness threatened by the first track being kept at bay for only so long...
Released under the guidance of Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton for his United Dairies label, Volcano The Bear has produced an album of such absurdist proportions that very few things (art, film, literature) can warrant comparisons. Volcano The Bear could
Holy shit! Record collector nerds and weird music obsessives might as well prepare to give up their first born or take out another mortgage on the ol' homestead, cuz this series of ultra limited 8" SQUARE lathe cuts is gonna break the bank, but it's so so so worth it. This is the first in a series that looks like it will include a who's who of noise rock / free rock / avant noise / free folk luminaries, including SO many all time AQ faves it makes our heads spin. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The first batch of these babies just showed up, three titles, each a custom hand cut, Peter King lathe cut, 8", and SQUARE!!! Packaged in gorgeous square and triangular die cut sleeves, super fancy textured paper, with a paste on front cover and a printed insert, each insert hand numbered, each release limited to 150 copies. Phew.
For those new to the lathe cut, it's a hand cut record, on polycarbonate not vinyl, they are more fragile than normal vinyl, and after repeated plays the sound quality can degrade a bit, but in our experience, in most cases it just makes them sound cooler. Peter King is THE MAN when it comes to super limited small run lathe cut releases, and pretty much every cool band you can think of has gone to him for some super rare or limited release or another.
So anyway, these are clear, they are 8"s across, shaped like a square, in super spiffy hand assembled sleeves, and are insanely limited, and thus, pretty dang expensive! This is the first in the series and features UK dadaist pop group Volcano The Bear who offer up two brief bursts of their off kilter absurdist pop. The first side is a nursery rhyme melody, all fuzzy and buzzy over pizzicato strings, with high clear Charles Hayward style vocals, the whole track sounding not unlike Camberwell Now doing children's music. The second side is also warbly and fuzzy, but the fuzz is in the backdrop, a warm whirring soundscape over which weird whistle melodies drift and dance. Simple percussion surfaces here and there, making this sound like some strange funeral march composed for kazoo and tin whistle. Weird and wonderful.
After an odd album on United Daries (a home to many an odd album), Volcano The Bear's third disc destroys perfect pop songs in the best way, blowing them wide open and letting all their grimmy guts fly free. For fans of Village of Savoogna, Shadow Ring, Sun City Girls, No Neck Blues Band, and other likeminded sonic transgressors.
2006 release from this surreal British experimental rock outfit, limited to 150 copies - we've still got 3 'cause we never listed it!
We've been meaning to list this for ages but we hadn't been able to get enough copies until now. On the same label that brought us the amazing Daniel Padden record, which makes sense since Mr. Padden just so happens to be a member of Volcano the Bear. We have to admit that occasionally in the past, Volcano The Bear has definitely tread dangerously close to the too purposefully weird. The musical equivalent of that old joke: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? A fish! Yep, a little too "Look at Me!! Isn't this stuff CRAZY?" But the fact is, they ARE weird, and the music they make is genuinely strange. On the Idea Of Wood, VTB has managed to make a record that is at once genuinely weird, totally damaged and utterly otherworldly, but at the same time absolutely hauntingly lovely. Delicate and subtly ominous. Clinking clanking percussion, creaking acoustic guitars, ghostly falsetto vocals, carnivalesque melodies, creeping lugubrious tempos. A haunting Eastern European alien gypsy folk music constructed from brittle acoustic instruments, wheezing and straining and warbling, crumbled trumpet melodies, warbling violins, snatches of ambient found sound clatter and choirs of insect like vocals. So nice!
When Nurse With Wound's "A Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table.." was first released in 1979, the response was one of bafflement. Volcano The Bear's first album for NWW's United Dairies is just as baffling. Ostensibly following the 70s art-rock damage of Faust (especially 'Tapes') and the willfull eccentricity of The Shadow Ring, Volcano The Bear (Byram refuses to call them anything but BJ and the Bear) plods through disjointed percussive riffs with alien droning, incongruous guitar work, and a crystal clear production which wouldn't be out of place on Too Pure. It's not hard to see why Steven Stapleton sought this group out after their Pickled Egg debut for a United Dairies release.
Been yearning for the '50s? You can always count on the folks at Dionysus to satisfy in that department. Unearthing and blowing the dust from these recordings, most of which have not been available for 40 years or more. The spotlight this time is on the
The sinewy, scary sounds of The Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Rapeman? All sorta rolled into one?? Yes, that's the kind of punch that this new German trio packs. And they're not shy about it. If you have a soft spot for that style of post-HC noise-rockin' heaviness, with whipcrack rhythms, angular guitars and rubbery bass brawniness, backing up some wretchedly angsty vox, you'll get a kick out of Volt. Indeed, they'll be kicking you in that soft spot with a steel-toed boot!
The noise-rock scene that apparently inspired Volt may have peaked way back in the early '90s but these kids (along with Noxagt) are bringing it back with a vengeance. This debut album exhibits an energetic, precise, metallic attack that grabbed us as soon as we heard it, and almost didn't believe it. Then we were like, cool!
Homebuilt kinda Lightning Boltish noiserock!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
It's been long enough since we've had anything new from this mysterious one man black metal band, that probably most of you out there have no idea who VO are, and thus, would very likely appreciate the Voltaic Omen origin story, so here it is, one more time...
It all began with two unidentified mp3's sent via email, no message, no anything, just two HUGE files. We were wondering if there was something wrong with our email, and then POW. Two songs, identified only by title, but nothing about what they were, the name of the band, where they came from. Our first impulse was to just trash 'em, but we thought what the heck? And holy shit were we immediately floored. Exactly the sort of buzzing warped blackness we love around these parts, lo-fi, tripped out, druggy, heavy, space-y, we had to figure out who the heck this band was and how to get MORE!! After a few emails back and forth, we discovered this filthy black chaos was the work of a one man band from the Northwest called Voltaic Omen, a little more digging revealed than not only did that one man have the most bad ass corpse paint, but his corpsepainted visage was an integral part of one of the VO logos, one of the best black metal logos ever by the way. So we were smitten, if one can be smitten by something as grim and fucked up and blown out as Voltaic Omen, and thus, ever since, we've done our best to track down every single goddamn thing we could get our hands on, which so far, has been a handful of tapes and cd-r's. To which we can now add this one, another chunk of twisted WTF outsider blackness, which if it's even possible, might be the weirdest thing we've heard from him yet.
Opening with a weird sort of orchestral fanfare, all bells and horns, and strings, weirdly warbly, and growing more and more atonal as it goes, speeding up too, before disappearing beneath a blast of weird mid-tempo lo-fi black buzz, lurching rhythm, belched vokills, wild shredding leads, stumbling and chaotic, the vocals echo drenched and WAY up in the mix, especially the weird goat grunts, which get all dubbed out and black out all the other sounds, before fading right back into the churning chug. The leads too, sore over the top, it's the twisted mix, that makes this as weird as it is. Dizzying and druggy and seriously demented, the two relatively short sides here delivering more than enough to overload your feeble brain, from galloping punked out blackness, beneath bellowed monster vox, wreathed in relentless metallic shred, to murky almost D-beat sounding pound, muddy and washed out, blurry and black, to weird soundscapes of samples and sinister pitch shifted laughter, chugging downtuned riffage, and more squiggly leads, to wild grinding over the top black buzz dementia, crooned demon vocals, over insectoid guitars, and loping drum pound, the whole thing twisted all up into some of the weirdest black metal you'll ever hear. WAY recommended for fans of twisted, outsider black metal, including such WTF geniuses as Benighted Leams, Goat Thrower, Furze, Necrofrost, Vondur, etc...
EXTREMELY LIMITED!!! As in 20 or 25 copies maybe, which means these are likely the last copies ever...
We told the story of Volataic Omen when we reviewed the Supreme Satanic Substorm cd-r a while back, but it definitely bears repeating:
It all began with two unidentified mp3's sent via email, no message, no anything, just to HUGE files. We were wondering if there was something wrong with our email, and then POW. Two songs, identified only by title, but nothing about what they were, the name of the band, where they came from. Our first impulse was to just trash em, but we thought what the heck? And holy shit were we immediately floored. Exactly the sort of buzzing warped blackness we love around these parts, lo-fi, tripped out, druggy, heavy, space-y, we had to figure out who the heck this band was and how to get MORE!! After a few emails back and forth, we discovered this filthy black chaos was the work of a one man band from the Northwest called Voltaic Omen, a little more digging revealed than not only did that one man have the most bad ass corpse paint, but his corpsepainted visage was an integral part of one of the VO logos, one of the best black metal logos ever by the way.
So we were smitten, if one can be smitten by something as grim and fucked up and blown out as Voltaic Omen, there is a tUMULt release in the works, and at the rate this guys kicks out tracks, there's bound to be an avalanche of grim blackness down the line, but for now, you gotta grab one of these filthy little gems while you can, this one is LIMITED TO 25 COPIES, and we got them ALL, but these are gonna fly outta here, so grimlords be quick.
Oh right, what's the fuss about this Voltaic Omen stuff anyway? More of that fractured fucked up lo-fi stumbling buzzy black weirdness we can't ever seem to get enough of. Damaged drum machines blast over woozy washed out black buzz, the vocals are insane, moaning and screeching, even though the drums are blasting, the music is slow and sludgey and lurching and lumbering, a weird, dizzyingly off kilter sonic squall. One of the tracks here begins all punk rock, but then gets all oompah, still shrieky and buzzy and bizarre, but wrapped around a weird 1-2-1-2-1-2 sort of rhythm, but flip it over, and things get all doomy and filthy and abject and blown the fuck out. So goddamn good. You like Furze, Striborg, Lonesummer, Amocoma, Anwech, Wrnlrd, Jabladav, Xasthur, Draugar, Vorak, Necrofrost? You probably like Volatic Omen. Way recommended and WAY LIMITED.
And for those folks who want to get WAY into VO, we have a couple other releases, 2 tapes and a 3"cd-r, which we only got a very few copies of, but they're cheap if you want em, just ask, cuz as far as we're concerned you should get as much Voltaic Omen as you can handle...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ok, weirdo black metal obsessives, this is about as KVLT as it gets. Two songs, exclusive to this release, from reclusive, outsider black metal one man band Voltaic Omen, whose past releases we've gone nuts for in the past, not to mention a rumored eventual release on tUMULt, wrapped in textured linen like cloth, held together with a wax seal, the VO logo hand drawn on the cover, and LIMITED TO TEN COPIES. ONLY TEN COPIES!! Each one hand numbered. We've already sold a couple, still time to snag one of these, but trust us, if you want one, you better be quick...
It all began with two unidentified mp3's sent via email, no message, no anything, just to HUGE files. We were wondering if there was something wrong with our email, and then POW. Two songs, identified only by title, but nothing about what they were, the name of the band, where they came from. Our first impulse was to just trash em, but we thought what the heck? And holy shit were we immediately floored. Exactly the sort of buzzing warped blackness we love around these parts, lo-fi, tripped out, druggy, heavy, space-y, we had to figure out who the heck this band was and how to get MORE!!
After a few emails back and forth, we discovered this filthy black chaos was the work of a one man band from the Northwest called Voltaic Omen, a little more digging revealed than not only did that one man have the most bad ass corpse paint, but his corpsepainted visage was an integral part of one of the VO logos, one of the best black metal logos ever by the way. VO was only too happy to send us more, the result being several weeks of mp3's and downloads and demos and cassettes and 3"cd-r's and often a new track every few days as they were hatched. It's almost like we won the fucked up demented lo-fi black metal lottery! But now it's time to share our good fortune with you. Not only will there hopefully be a compilation coming soon on Andee's own tUMULt label, but we have a brand new proper cd-r demo, called Supreme Satanic Substorm, and crammed with the swirling, stumbling, off kilter, fucked up and freaky black metal weirdness that had us so smitten in the first place.
SSS starts out appropriately enough with Carl Sagan from Cosmos, his voice drenched in reverb, before the record stumbles into motion, a lugubrious tarpit blast, under some oozing riffage and bizarre echoey vocals, which suddenly switch gears into what sounds like some lo-fi noise pop jam gone black metal. And it only gets weirder from there, lumbering doomic blurred buzzscapes wrap around woozy minor key guitars, heaving strangled vokills drift over programmed beats, the vibe shifting from washed out Burzumy dirge, to total psychedelic outer space blackened skree, the third track "Blood Bound" is all growled vocals, over tinny high end swirls of guitar, and splattery blast beats, a sound less metal, and more sort of washed out grim bliss, then the low end kicks in and the track seems to ooze and sprawl and slip into even more chaos. Elsewhere, tracks drift into weird muted skitter, or are laced with dizzyingly out of tune synths, funhouse melodies, even some weirdly poppy jangle, but it always seems to collapse inward, into a swirling black cloud of gloriously outsider whatthefuck. This is not the sort of stuff for folks looking for super tight blazing black metal, or even Burzumic depressive blackness, no, Voltaic Omen is for the freaks, the folks who like their black metal as demented as it is black, who want their black metal records to sound like they were left on the dashboard of the car in a heatwave, the grooves all melting into one another, the result a warped, woozy, warbly weird as fuck ambient black space blow out. And even when it seems like he's going for classic black metal, a frenzied riff, flurries of double kick drum, soaring epic melodies, it only lasts for a few seconds, before it gets pulled apart, wrapped in a vocal that sounds like a dying foghorn, or sent tumbling through some spaced out stretch of demonic vox and whirring amp buzz, or pelted with off kilter D-beat drumming, or splintered into thick swirls of intense (but still twisted) black ambience, often slipping into abstract, almost funereal doom or even indescribable bursts of total blackspacepsychdrone freakout.
As the above review demonstrates, this stuff is super hard to describe. But think Abruptum, Lugubrum, Vondur, Striborg, Necrofrost, that's the sort of damaged delirium Voltaic Omen explores. So now all of you loyal aQ weirdo black metal obsessives can add Voltaic Omen to your fucked up freaked out damaged and demented outsider lo-fi space drone black metal pantheon!
It's been a while since we've heard from mysterious one man band Voltaic Omen, who we first discovered via a barrage of unlabeled emails packed with mp3's, and who, once tracked down, was more than happy to send us each new release as it was spawned, usually JUST for us, and in numbers that make most other limited releases seem bountiful. Well that definitely hasn't changed with this one, an email showed up saying "just sent you a box of the new tape, 23 copies, it's fucked, in fact it's called "You're Fucked". Needless to say we were pretty thrilled, especially considering the fact that when someone whose music is ALREADY totally fucked, proclaims a record to be 'totally fucked', well, it's gotta be good. And seriously fucked. which You're Fucked most definitely is. Another barrage of tripped out low fidelity buzz, wreathed in epic melodic swirl and druggy spaced out atmosphere, the songs lurching from epic majestic drum machine driven pound, to blurred flurries of tangled black buzz and garbled grunted gurgles, from almost punkish chunks of d-beat pound to dirgey psychedelic industrial dirgery, with all sorts of sonic weirdness, gloomy spidery melodies, hissy whispered vox, machinelike clatter, clouds of swirling black crunch, clean almost folky psych guitar, and dig even deeper, and it's easy to see VO has definitely progressed, with some of these tracks bordering on epic black prog, the drum programming (or maybe real drumming, hard to tell now), way more weirdly mathy, the arrangements too constantly shifting and transforming, and if that wasn't already rad enough, two covers this time around, Melvins and Nirvana. Hell yeah.
LIMITED TO 23 COPIES!!!! Might be the only copies we can ever get so act fast...
Ahhhh, yes, more Voltaic Omen, the one man black metal weirdo from the Pacific Northwest, who has been blowing us away with recording after recording of fucked up and fractured lo-fi what-the-fuck blackness. And it just keeps getting better, and weirder!
This time around Mr. VO is teamed up with a noisemaker called Fire Island, AK, who we'll get to in a second, but first, VO begins proceedings with a super creepy stretch of processed ambience, all haunting minor key melodies, backwards cymbals, fractured loops, mumbly speaking in tongues vocals, it may be black metal, but it also sounds a bit like some of the super far out Teenage Filmstars stuff. Then all of a sudden, the track kicks in, and it sounds like it's being broadcast from a speaker atop a pole, down the street, murky and muddy and lo-fi, but with a strange clattery, almost Muslimgauze sounding rhythm laid over the top, before slowing down and tripping out, and transforming into some sort of doomic black ritual, slow pounding percussion, groaned vocals, distant tarpit riffing, haunting minor key melody, super hypnotic.
Fire Island, AK, who we'd never heard before, are way more of an experimental free noise outfit, exploring textures and tempos, patterns and layers, reverbed electronic squiggles wrap around bits of scrape and glitch, looped and repeating, gradually growing more dense and frantic, never quite attaining total Merzbowian overload, which is a good thing, even at its most impenetrable and chaotic, there still lurks some texture and rhythm, giving form and propulsion to could otherwise become pure noise. Cool stuff for sure. Buy this for the Voltaic Omen, stick around for the Fire Island. Definitely recommended.
Cool full color inserts, photocopied insert, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, each one stickered and hand numbered!!
While the last few Voltigeurs records found the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Hototogisu, Sunroof!, etc.) and Samantha Davies (Skullflower) in a distinctly black metal direction, this new lp see the BM pushed way into the background, the sound here much more of a guitarnoise record, albeit with some black buzz lurking below the surface.
Four extended tracks, the opener titled "Morning Raga", but that title is a bit misleading, as the sound is less raga, and more a dense cloud of caustic grinding guitars, buried synths and unrecognizable piano, woven into billowing swirls of crumbling caustic distortion, shot through with shards of rib cage rattling low end and underpinned by a roiling sea of tangled melodic squiggles, barely audible over the din above. The second track reimagines the same sound as a more murky buzzy industrial framework, weirdly and subtly rhythmic, again buried beneath and avalanche of grinding, crumbling heaviness, but again, this is not simply a wall of guitars (and synths), within this noisy onslaught lurks all manner of weird droned out buzz and strange spidery melodies, all of which seem to ooze from Voltigeurs' blacknoise murk.
The flipside begins with a heaving landscape of metallic buzz, and an undulating low end rumble, all smoothed out into something more droney, and downright hypnotic, strangely cinematic in its own way, still noisy and abrasive, but haunting and harrowing, laced with keening minor key melodies, and infused with mysterious electronics (or something that sounds like electronics). The final track dials back the noise a bit, and sculpts what's left into a minimal sprawl of crumbling static, this time, there seems to be some black metal buzz churning away underneath, but so low in the mix as to be just another layer of buzzing thrum, the sound here reverby and cavernous, the aforementioned black metal elements distant and abstract, all swirling behind a gristly wall of grinding high end hiss, and weirdly glitchy hum, again transforming abstract guitarnoise/synthnoise into a mesmerizing slab of droned out mesmer.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!
Latest blast of blackened buzz from Matthew Bower's Voltigeurs project. Bower and partner in buzz Samantha Davies (who also does time with Bower in Skullflower) continue to take the sound of Voltigeurs in a distinctly black metal direction. Sure past records definitely hinted at the blackness that informed them. We described their sound at one point as sounding like "a symphony of black metal cassettes unspooling in zero gravity", which actually sort of still applies, but if anything, the sound of Voltigeurs seems to be bucking the trend of Bower's other projects. While Skullflower seems to be rapidly (d)evolving into something much more akin to pure noise, the last few records growing increasingly harsh and chaotic, on Nazi Ponies the sound seems to be approaching something much more obviously black metal, albeit via Bower's cracked sensibilities. The sound of Nazi Ponies is still a swirling cloud of chaotic noise, of blurred crunch and layered skree, but within this roiling black cloud, Bower unwinds mournful, depressive melodies, almost folky at times, as if someone removed the melodic skeleton from a Drudkh or Arckanum jam and dropped them into a swirling black cauldron of Bower's grinding post industrial freenoise soundscaping, the results are pretty divine, and again sound like some loose approximation of black metal, as if some strange force was pulling apart the very molecules of buzz and blast, into whatever this is, an amorphous sprawl of blurred buzz, and creeping ominous minor key buzz. The second part basically sounds like a supercharged even more distorted version of part 1, the buzz cranked way up, the low end thick and viscous, that same folky blackened minor key melody, now barely audible beneath heaving waves of crumbling greynoise crunch and churning pulled apart riffage, a glorious blown out smear of caustic and chaotic blackness.
LIMITED TO JUST 77 COPIES!!
Full length number two (or three, counting the recent Carrion lp) from this Skullflower offshoot, which finds SF mainman Matthew Bower once again joined by his partner in recent Skullflower outings Samantha Davies, and once again, the two deliver some sort of warped ritualistic black noise experimentation, even further removed from past Voltigeurs outings, no distinctly black metal buzz, or perhaps not gone, but buried and blurred into almost unrecognizable shapes, and much of the 'guitarnoise' seems to have been reshaped into pure noise. The opener here is like the Caretaker via Merzbow, a long stretch of blunted white noise, cascading sheets of gristle and hiss over murky melodies, and what sounds like a metal band playing down the hall, all record surreptitiously and recorded onto a wax cylinder. The level is low, the sounds weirdly hushed, and not overly harshed, but cranked, one can catch glimpses of what must be going on within Voltigeurs' psychedelic sonic squall.
The second track is much heavier, and the guitar returns to the fore, but instead of riffing, just emits noxious clouds of buzz and grinding low end, at least in the beginning, but part way through, the tone changes dramatically, and the sound shifts, and morphs into some seriously dense black buzz, occasionally coalescing into strange sonic shapes, a shadowy impressionistic avant black metal ambience, doused in blacknoise buzz.
The rest of the record follows a similar path, soaring frenzied fast picked melodies, are laid beneath, a crackly chaotic cloud of crumbling blackness, which on the surface sounds like pure noise, but reveals itself as strangely soothing and hypnotic, blissed out buzz drifts through pockets of blistering freenoise shimmer, underpinned by heaving weirdly melancholy melodies, full on psychedelic guitarnoise blowouts unfurl ever shifting layers, the guitars tangled and serpentine, and finally, a blast of black metal buzz, blurred into an ambient noisescape, that again, mirrors the Caretaker, if the DJ in his old time ballroom was spinning old scratchy Darkthrone 45s and limited Merzbow lathecuts. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
Second release from this Skullflower side project, fronted by (of course) SF mainman Matthew Bower, who in Voltigeurs teams up with SF cellist Samantha Davies for a bit of Skullflowery blow out. Their M.O. seems to remain the same as on the self titled disc on Turgid Animal, a head splitting rib cracking wall of crumbling super distorted noise, but a noise shot through with more texture and melody than one might expect. As with most music like this, a glancing listen, or hearing it as background sound, will do nothing for you, a white noise vacuum cleaner Merzbowian blowout. But crank the volume a bit, strap on some headphones, and you will gradually become able to parse these caustic sounds.
Not sure if it's the presence of cello, or if Davies brings out Bower's softer side, but the sounds within the sounds here are surprisingly melodic, little tangles and squiggles, fragments and shards, but it's not just the inner sounds, the constantly coruscating frenzy of blown out guitar buzz, is warm and textural, layered and dense, a rich sound that seems to be constantly shifting and changing hues, timbre and tone, slipping from warm whir, to grating skree, to crumbling crunch, to in-the-red frenzy, but at every step along the way, the sound is much more than just NOISE, it most definitely IS 'noisy', and when we go on about Bower's softer side, it is of course, all relative, Bower's softer side is still about a hundred times harsher and heavier than the next guy's, but since we are not really big fans of harsh noise at all, it definitely takes a special touch for us to enjoy something this noisy, and Bower and Davies most assuredly have it.
From the most recent Skullflowers to this (and the previous) Voltigeurs disc, the duo have figured out how to harness noise, hot to sculpt and create with noise, the sort of noise than in lesser hands would be uncontrollable, and would overwhelm, here becomes sound, which in turn becomes music, a heavy, harsh, hellish, blown out music, no doubt, but from these two we would expect nothing less.
Essential for Skullflower obsessives obviously, and a pretty perfect second movement in the ongoing Voltigeurs sonic saga...
The latest project from the mighty Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Sunroof!, etc.) is not all that far removed from more recent Skullflower records in several ways. The first is the lineup, Voltigeurs is a duo of Bower and one of his newer SF bandmates, Samantha Davies, the second is the sound, which once again finds Bower exploring his own little dark corner of black metal, an admitted recent obsession for him. Much like the SF "black metal" discs (including the most recent, Malediction, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Bower's black metal is a whole 'nother twisted noise slathered beast than what we're used to. Sure the sound is raw and grim and buzzy and heavy, but this blackness is more concerned with texture and tension, with drone and density, than proper riffage, no drums, so the songs don't blast or pound, even at their heaviest, they still drift, the guitars, possibly the thickest and crunchiest we've heard from Bower in ages, do seem to be unfurling some sort of black riffage, but here the blur and smear into thick clouds of FX drenched buzz, of howling feedback and string strangling crunch, Davies, who plays cello in Skullflower, must be doing terrible things to her cello here (assuming she hasn't switched to guitar), because it's nearly impossible to differentiate who's who and who's playing what in Voltigeurs' big glorious tangle of heaving fractured heaviness.
It almost sounds like a symphony of black metal cassettes unspooling in zero gravity, a swirling mass of a million mobius strips of sound. The strange thing is, for being one of the heavies things we've heard from Bower, it also seems to be one of the loveliest, and most melodic. Not always mind you, but here and there, the furious fug clears, and reveals some woozy mournful soaring bit of melodic doominess, the opening of "Pearlescent Abyss" sounds like some lost early doom jam, slathered in noise and tape hiss and amp buzz, but still, the sound oozes with emotion and anguish. And those moments do surface throughout the record, giving Voltigeurs' noisiness a definite black doom vibe.
There's also a distinctly dronedoomdirge feel to a lot of the songs, Bower's guitar more obviously a guitar, the sounds he's conjuring up more obviously riff based, SUNNO))), Fear Falls Burning, Vulture Club, it's like that sound but more feral, more fierce, less composed, more loose, more instinctual, and somehow more alive, a constantly expanding ball of buzzing smoldering abstract riffage, the sound organic and lush, while remaining fuzzy and abrasive and intensely heavy.
The record finishes off with another bit of melodic mystery, the 9 minute "Condor", is a slow buzz drenched crawl, the guitars crumbling, wrapped around a lurching slow motion pulse, a dense blackened throb, but swirling throughout and within that main guitardrone, spidery tendrils of melody burn white hot, shards and streaks of warm shimmer, a lugubrious bit of glacial downtuned beauty.
Voltigeurs debut full length seems like the perfect foil for the new Skullflower (maybe it was intended to be just that), it's like that other record's shadow, its less evil twin, where the other is noxious and corrosive, this one is effulgent and luminous, where the other is blackened and chaotic, this one seems to glow with some long buried beauty, it almost sounds like the two could be played simultaneously, to create some intense multi part, blacknoise dronedirge epic, but each, on its own, is fantastic, each one in its own way psychedelic and heavy, blackened and buzzy, but Voltigeurs might be the slightly prettier of the two, but still somehow manages to remain as heavy and as intense as any guitardrone record we've heard. WAY WAY recommended (As is the Skullflower!)!!
Killer new split from Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies of Skullflower in their Voltiegeurs guise, which this time is not that far removed from the Skullflower mothership, in fact, a glancing listen, one would most certainly be forgiven for assuming it was a Skullflower jam proper, a dense field of pulsing, pulsating blackened psychedelic drone-noise, a sprawl of layered guitars, buried melodies, shifting textures, gristled and crumbling, but blurred into something almost tranquil and meditative, a heavy drone-guitar blowout, smoothed out into what ultimately sounds like a more washed out blissed out Skullflower which is not a bad thing at all.
The flipside comes from UK knuckledraggers Dark Bargain, who deliver a serious sonic wallop in the form of some blown out, ultra distorted noise rock crush, dirgey and in the red, a Brainbombs sort of death march churn, rife with buried melodies, and some subtle hookiness, but overall, it's more a bludgeoning sonic anvil to the skull, which will most certainly hit the spot for fans of BB, Rusted Shut, Violent Students, Drunkdriver and the like.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
Winner of the dumb/awesome band name of the week award! A "Volture" being kind of like an electric eel, except that it's a bird, who, uh, shocks its prey like the album title says. What kind of band would name themselves something like that? Well a '80s styled heavy metal band, of course. Indeed, the "Volture" concept is kind of an homage to the cover art of Judas Priest's Screaming For Vengeance, in a way. And Volture do a good job paying tribute, complete with wailing vocals (hitting some King Diamond-y falsetto highs), widdly guitar solos and rampaging riffage. There's six ripping, rockin' songs on this 22 minute ep, including "Night Walker" that originally appeared on a limited edition split 7" with Enforcer on Earache. And they do deliver the goods pretty darn convincingly. Not bad for what we assume was a "drink beer, think up a funny name/concept, and start a band" scenario!
This band is actually a side project of highly popular retro-thrashers Municipal Waste (specifically, bassist Ryan Waste), and also features members of Cannabis Corpse and Twisted Tower Dire.
On the same label that brought us Enforcer's debut, another band that would feel quite comfortable with song titles like "Heavy Metal Machine" and "Cheap Thrillz".
Volumen traffic in a weird sort-of peppy happy mod / brit pop. Reminiscent of The Housemartins or The Jam, and sometimes even Dexy's Midnight Runners. Now that might tantalize some of you but BEWARE. This record has some insanely cheezy lyrics, brutally bad vocalising and even some funk breakdowns and ska sassiness, yeeeeesh. It occasionally just sounds like bad college rock. Occasionally there's a good riff or keyboard line, and your think 'oh this is kinda rad' but then BAM!!! some horrible singing starts and embarrasses us all. Too bad.
The music world sure is packed with "whatever happened to?" mysteries, isn't it? And while VH1 has answered quite a few of 'em for us, there's still countless others who've left us hangin'. Well, if you were a fan of the late '70s/early '80s Pacific Northwest / Brit-influenced pop punk new wave sounds of bands like the Pointed Sticks (who were signed to Stiff Records, and heavily inspired bands like the fab power popsters the Fastbacks), the obtuse octet UJ3RK5 and the raw female punk trio The Dishrags from Vancouver, the aforementioned question might've crossed your mind at some point. Former Pointed Sticks guitarist Bill Napier-Hemy has returned to the performance side of pop music after years of academic pursuits (he's a music teacher) and production work. He's joined by fellow guitarists Jade Blade (also an art history professor, and former Dishrag), and Rodney Graham (ex-UJ3RK5). The catchy, slightly world-weary female vocals come courtesy of multimedia artist Shannon Oksanen, and together with the trio of crunchy guitars, they swiftly brought to mind the Rondelles' The Fox album (a very good thing!), not to mention the cult classic flick "Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains". Still retaining some of the ol' spit and spirit of their past bands, but with a more powered up rock sound. Sound good to you? Me thinks this would make a great punky addition to your summer soundtrack, right alongside Portland, OR's Epoxies. Recorded by John Collins (New Pornographers) at his JC/DC Studios.
Not to be confused with legendary Bay Area black metal horde Von, although Vom's sound does sonically link back to Sixx, the post Von, gothic deathrock combo we reviewed a while back. These grim Scots spew out a depressive, atmospheric, super distorted sort of gothic cold wave, the label suggests the sound falls somewhere between Scream-era Siouxsie And The Banshees, early X-Mal Deustchland and the first Killing Joke lp, which is definitely pretty right on, but for the aQ faithful, we might also throw out some recent list faves like Soror Dolorosa, the aforementioned Sixx, Ye Olde Maids, Second Decay, Factums, even Cold Cave, but imagine all those bands if they were way more heavy and harsh and hateful, raw and rough and intense, and you'd be getting closer to the sound of Vom.
Pounding pummeling drums, grinding crunchy guitars, throbbing rumbling bass, howled vocals buried in the mix, hooks all over the place, but somewhat obscured by the bands furious deathrock onslaught, this stuff is gloomy and heavy and catchy and harrowing, and so goddamn good. Anyone into the recent wave of cold wave revivalists or goth rock wannabes, who found themselves hankering for something way harder and heavier, these guys might just be your new favorite band.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
We were pretty into Vom's Primitive Arts record from a while back, which we described as a "depressive, atmospheric, super distorted sort of gothic cold wave", and who we likened to groups like Soror Dolorosa, Sixx, Factums and Cold Cave, but whose particular version of sound was a much more raw and primitive beast, sort of crusty and filthy, from the production to the actual instrument sounds, even the atmosphere, it was as if a metal band or a noise band or somehow both, decided to make a gloom pop record, and failed spectacularly, and came up with something way meaner, weirder and more amazing.
This brand new split teams Vom up with another group of sonically like minded Scots with the awesome name Gummy Stumps, each group taking a whole lp side. Vom offer up more of the same, their sound driving and darkly post punky, the guitars thick and jagged, the bass fuzzed out and super distorted, the drums almost like some weird strain of motorik krautpunk, the vocals an effects drenched bellow, the group locking into long stretches of buzzing, snarling, minor key hypnorock, that sound like a goth rock Circle, pounding away relentlessly, the guitars unfurling slippery slithery melodies, over churning riffage and gloomy gothic bombast. But it's an epic, so the band sort of cobble together a songsuite, equal parts crash and burn, drift and smolder, shimmer and creep, the sound managing to be surprisingly lush while retaining its raw power. At one point haunting soundtracky synths drift in and transform the sound completely, before the band works its way up into another psychedelic cold wave gloom punk blowout. These guys are so fucking good, it's a crime they're not more well known.
With a name like Gummy Stumps, these guys had our hopes pretty high, and while they're not as grim or gloriously noisy, they're definitely a good match, their sound more of a Messthetics sort of post punk, all jagged angular guitar crunch, frenetic rhythms, and dueling call and response vocals. But again, like Vom's side, there's lots of space to fill, so the band stretch way out, slipping from murky psychedelic shimmer, to something that sounds like way more punk Arab Strap, to blown out drum heavy noise rock crunch, to surprisingly catchy punk pop and right back again to the angular post punkiness that started it all off.
Housed in super swank silk screened covers, with printed insert, cool lyrics booklet, and we're guessing it's pretty dang limited too...
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We had never heard of these experimental German black metallers before, and even though this, their double disc debut comes from the same label that brought us recent records from Echtra and Fyrnask (you can read about both elsewhere on the site), unlike those bands, the sound of VFDU harkens back to the sort of nineties Moonfog sound, when bands were first beginning to push past the traditional tropes of true grim black metal, getting weirder and proggier and way more experimental, strands of post rock and other distinctly non-black metal musics woven into the band's blast and buzz, and in the case of FVDU pretty much taking over entirely. Cuz the music of VFDU is definitely all of those things. A dizzying and twisted progged out epic, the tracks long and multi-parted, the band flitting from twisted post rock lope, to grinding black blast, and from doomic creep to gnarled Deathspell-ish avant blackness. Just check out the first song, "Filterlose Trunkenheit", right out of the gate, it sounds more nineties noise rock than black metal, although the weird lurching pound and skree is underpinned by a furious blast beat, and soon explodes into a woozy cloud of swirling psychedelia, before lurching into some mathy blackness, only to immediately switch gears again, and get all clean guitar and almost fusiony and proggy, and then back again. and this is all within the first minute. As the song progresses, the sound expands, the band seemingly setting themselves no boundaries, and when they do settle into some more 'traditional' blackness, the band add in some weird yelped/shrieked vokills which seem like they would sound more at home on an Urfaust record, which of course suits their constantly shifting, totally off kilter sound.
And the band give themselves plenty of room to work, two discs, sixteen songs, nearly two hours, the tracks epic and complex, with the band exploring pretty much every sonic variation they can conjure up, the sound shifting constantly often settling into long droned out psychedelic blasts, but just as often into blissed out ambience, peppering the proceedings with shorter blasts of experimental synthscapery, tripped out electronics, hushed haunting drones, in fact almost the whole of the second disc ditches the metal completely, building a strange sonic world of collaged soundscapes, fracture rhythms, programmed beats, bizarre processed voices, with many of the track slipping into industrial pound or weird electro skitter. It's pretty far out stuff, and when combined with the more buzzing blackness and experimental heaviness of the first disc, it makes for a seriously twisted listen.
Gorgeously packaged, in an beautifully designed and laid out A5 hardcover book, packed with lyrics, and disturbing images and photos. The first hundred copies actually came with a "jar of rat preparation", sadly, these come without. SUPER LIMITED!! We get these direct from China strangely enough, so when we run out, it might take us a little while to get more.
Blurrggghhh... Vomit!!! Believe it. That band name is perfect for these guys, who flourished (or should we say festered) in Norway for a short while at the end of the '80s, never putting out a proper album, but recorded several tape-traded demo/practice cassettes, all of 'em collected here on this archival cd release. Imagine a teenage Venom, recording in a dank basement, trying to outdo themselves at both the extremes of low-fidelity and vile Satanic shock. Some typical song titles include "Armies Of Hell", "Boiling Puke", "Orgie Of Piss", and "Rotting Flesh"...
Apparently two of the Vomit dudes were briefly members of the legendary Mayhem, early on, thus accounting in part for the cult of Vomit (being called Vomit is also probably a factor... not to mention the wretched appeal of their music). So the Lyderhorn label has rounded up Vomit's Rot In Hell demo and four even rarer rehearsal tapes, circa 1986-'87, had 'em remastered by James Plotkin, and put this out for us to enjoy today. There was also previously a vinyl version, now sold out. But this cd has more tracks than the LP anyway: twenty two vomitous cuts in all, of some truly underground late '80s metal of death.
Vomit's crude and hellish bludgeonings are captured in the raw, complete with the feedbacky plug-in-the-guitar, turn-on-the-boombox-recorder bits in between songs. Which we like! Good stuff of its ilk, easy to see why Mayhem's Euronymous hung with these dudes and why Fenriz of Darkthrone considers 'em an influence! None more Vomit-y.
Folks went a little crazy for the Vomit Orchestra on the last list. A little surprising given the sort of distasteful monicker. But the name fit. Macabre Paradigm was a collection of sounds, meticulously arranged into a black symphony of gurgling low end, buzzing bleak ambience, damaged percussive clatter and some seriously frightening atmosphere. A gorgeous collection of miserablism and musical misanthropy for sure.
While that 2 disc set was a collection of long out of print and unreleased material, Antecrux is the newest Vomit Orchestra full length, recorded in 2006, and the two couldn't sound any different. Granted, the mood and meaning are similar, a sort of deep dark hatred and disdain for life and the living, an abstract spiritual malaise, but if anything, Antecrux is actually pretty. For the most part at least. The first two tracks are lilting minor key drifts, processed guitars that float and flutter, everything blurry and dreamlike, thick reverbed guitars unfurling jangly melancholy riffs. Sad more than depressive or hateful. From there on out it gradually gets creepier and creepier.
"Dance Ov The Sugardrugged Feary" is a wash of fuzz and static that over some strange warbly 78, a fuzzy murky twisted sort-of show tune that bursts into white noise before fading into starry sky twinkles. The next few tracks drift lazily from buzzing minimal shimmer to loping mopey slow core to glistening outerspacescape, murky reverbed tones set adrift in a jet black sky shot through with fuzzy streaks of muted hiss. Some strange electronic rhythms surface, skittering through some laid back downtempo dreaminess, before the guitar returns, emotional and melodic, insistent and intense, sounding a little like Roy Montgomery.
Antecrux culminates in the 10 minute final track "The Lotus Of Denial". That by now familiar guitar returns to meander through an expansive field of glitch and static, an army of record players, needles in the run out groove, letting loose clouds of clicks and pops into the black night sky, far below lurks an ominous field of low end rumble, the whole thing incredibly creepy and evocative. A gloriously record-crackled minor key slow core coda that is both lovely and mysteriously sorrowful. Much like the rest of Antecrux...
It seems like only yesterday... well, hell it was actually on the last list, when we listed the first proper full length release from strangely named East Coast audio ambient terrorists Vomit Orchestra, and here we are not two weeks later with a BRAND NEW full length.
It's sort of unclear why VO gets lumped in with the metal crowd, or even the black ambient crowd, the name maybe? The misanthropic intent? The blackened past? Whatever it is, it's a bit misleading, because the sound of the Vomit Orchestra couldn't be further removed from metal. And it's not really all that mean or frightening. It's dark, sure, mysterious and ominous maybe, but hardly overtly evil sounding. If anything, it's more of some sort of fuzzy abstract ambience, there are guitars here and there, but they mostly pick out simple sad melodies or are smeared into blurry streaks. For the most part, the world of VO is a dark deliriously dreamy, electronic organic hybrid, haunting soundscapes that veer from whispery drone and whir, to caustic abrasive crunch, but spending most of its time in the former.
The record opens with a maniacal mechanical toy orchestra intro, that quickly gives way to a dreamy looped ambience not unlike Jeck or Basinski, with a distinctly fuzzy sepia toned old timey feel. The rest of the record plays like a midnight wander through some strange funhouse, room after room of bizarre sights and strange sounds, disembodied female vocals drift and hover over snippets of a man speaking, her voice like a Theremin, weaving minor key melodies in a wide open black space, stabs of atonal organ, warble and whir amidst a fluctuating field of reverb and damaged delay, a downtuned guitar and what sounds like a harp play some sort of angular funereal duet, lovely but slightly off sounding, fuzzy guitars are looped into odd harmonies and hypnotic rhythms, the record finally closes with an epic 23 minute trawl though a dark tunnel, surrounded on all sides by creepy sounds, obscured melodies, buzzing noise, jagged shards of crumbling drone, mysterious fragmented riffing, with occasional stretches of simple strummed tranquility, lasting only seconds before some other ghastly sound or soul stirring sonic spirit wraps its bony fingers around your neck...
So great!
Ahhh, Vomit Orchestra. Brings to mind the most unpleasant of images. Thoughts of tuxedo clad men hurling through tubas and trumpets, women in their best evening wear, puking onto timpani's. But fear not, this is nothing of the sort. Although it is a collection of sounds virulent and vile, violent and vicious. Vomit Orchestra are a mysterious outfit who traffic in a sort of black ambience, but their sound is far from ambient. Lengthy stretches of rumbling drones and disembodied voices, growled super distorted growls, blown out percussion, sort of tribal, sort of industrial, dark and creepy and seriously fucking scary.
Macabre Paradigm collects rare and unreleased tracks from the first few years of VO's existence, the first disc is the long out of print cassettes, the second disc is unreleased rarities from the Vomit vaults. The more we listen to this the more black it sounds, like some strange disembodied black metal, with the blasts and the buzz sucked out leaving weird bloated corpses of grim hellish beats, wallowing in pools of black blood, emitting a lonesome cry that sounds a bit like free jazz black metal, or, here's an obscure reference, Aussie what-the-fuck black metallers Vorak, guitars squiggle and screech, drums stumble and splatter, underneath drones rumble and whir, vocals are whirring rasps. Similar to how Abruptum explored black ambience, VO seem to be stalking the same skull encrusted catacombs. A hellish brew of audio experimentation, damaged and desiccated black metal, and deep dark drones. The sound may be drone based, but this is in no way soothing, this is still heavy, and fierce, and way blacker than most black metal, ominous and menacing, grim and cult and true, and pure audio evil, like being trapped underground in the pitch black, surrounded by demons, by death, and by despair.
Completely amazing. Essential listening for black souled, iron eared, strange sound obsessed audio warriors...
We have to admit, we almost didn't listen to this, which we know is sorta hypocritical, considering the ridiculous bands we dig, many with even more ridiculous monikers, but something about the bandname Vomitface had us expecting something else entirely, and something we thought we might not dig. But dig this we do. Lots. Basically, these guys sound like they were cut from the very same cloth as Nirvana's Bleach. Fuzzed out grunge, plenty of quiet/loud, the same sort of minor key clean guitar, and explosive choruses, with some killer distorto leads, and warmly vocals that sound a lot like Kurt Cobain, especially when in the early days and on those old demos, or when he was just going for it and shredding his voice live.
"Sloppy Joes" is the most Nirvana-ish of the bunch, with its loping chugging verse, and blown out chorus, the warmly keening vocals, the main hook a killer, the drums blown out too, the whole production super hot and in-the-red. it's pretty tough to resist, the vocals in the verse are a dead ringer for the Grifters too, which is most definitely a very good thing.
And hell, once you get done playing that track over and over, "Bill Me Later" explodes into some serious noise drenched post-grunge heaviness, with plenty of slither and swagger and crunch, and a distinctly nineties verse with weird spidery guitars, some 'oooooh' background vox, more wild drumming, and yeah, another bad ass hook. We were pretty blown away when we played this the first time, and within minutes we had already sold one! The other two tracks are just as ruling, total grunge radness, that takes the Nirvana/grunge worship of Roomrunner, maybe even further, but if that's a sound you love, nobody does it this good anymore, and hell, these guys do it now, better than lots of bands back in the day too. We can't stop listening to this, and are really hoping there's a full length on the way.
LIMITED TO 133 COPIES! Includes a download with a bonus DL only track!
First and only offical release from the mighty VON, a legendary black metal band from right here in the Bay Area. Never heard of 'em? Not surprising. Not only did they never release an actual album, but they were spurned by the scene at the time for playing sloppy fucked up, super simple and repetitive metal, unlike the technical thrash that was popular at the time. Von took their sound from
Hellhammer, Bathory and Venom, playing very simple trance-like riffs, over and over, with barked, super-affected gutteral vocals, and very little melody. Simple and raw and way more Satanic than most bands of the time. This droning grimness would become the blueprint for modern primitve black metal, but at the time, Von were pretty much it. Certainly around these parts. This disc collects everything, the Satanic Blood demo, the Satanic Angel demo, and a live show at the Stone in San Francisco from 1991. Wow.
Early '70s krautrock stylings by way of Canada circa 2009, all the while channelling the visionary plainsongs from the 12th Century abbess Hildegarde Von Bingen! This Von Bingen began when two members of an East Coast psychedeliclatter project called Hildegard moved to Canada, met up with one of satellite members of Jackie O Motherfucker, and rebranded themselves. While the nature of the earlier band has escaped us, this Von Bingen has emerged fully formed, crawling out from the same primordial soup that spawned the likes of Amon Duul II, Hawkwind, Psychic Ills, Bardo Pond, and The Wooden Shjips. Yeah, they're pretty damn good!
A subdued yet motorik rhythm sets the stage for the opening track circled with interlocking guitars, electronics, and bass right out of the songbook of Faust IV, all of which are brought into relief with a sporadically used melodic jump out of the dronerock mentality. A paranoiac piece of incidental music links these grooves with droning lament for flute, giving way to a subterranean plod that almost sounds like a Throbbing Gristle piece remade a decade earlier as a transgressive piece of psychedelia laced with weird horns and Arabesque guitar leads. The flipside begins with an extended piece of cosmic ritualism through sustained mod synth drone and church organ tones twisting along side more of that wistful flute and gradually coalescing into a proto-Suicide pulsation of psychedelic electronics and downer melodies. The finale of the album centers upon a dazed guitar riff coming in and out of focus amidst the druggy atmosphere of synth drones, simple bouts of percussion, freeform flutes, and squeals of electricity. To say this is a trip is quite the understatement. Do not let this one pass you by!
Up until now, the Von Bondies were best known as the band whose singer got his ass kicked by Jack White of the White Stripes. You could do worse as far as free publicity goes I guess. But let's not get distracted from how seriously kick ass this record is. Not sure what it is exactly, but this record is just so catchy and so goddamn rocking we can't stop playing it. Hard to describe, but imagine the White Stripes with Glen Danzig on vocals, or maybe some demented hybrid of the Hoodoo Gurus, the Rock-A-Teens and Samhain. Super well-produced (by Jerry Harrison of The Talking Heads) garage rock with super wailing throaty vocals, catchy songs, occasional snotty girl vocals, tribal drumming and cool unlikely arrangements. The vocals are actually reminiscent of Modern English or the Fixx in a weird way, but the music is all heavy three-chord grunged out garage rock, but with some serious major label production sheen! This is definitely one of our favorite records this year!
What more do you really need to know? Goat, frontman for legendary Bay Area black metal horde Von, teamed up with Wrest of Leviathan, recorded by John Gossard of Weakling, Asunder and Dispirit. That's some serious black metal firepower for sure. Von Goat is not merely the sum of its constituent parts though, nor is it simply some sort of Von rehash, no, this is something completely different, and plenty twisted.
A murky muddy raw primitive blackness, shot through with all sorts of woozy guitar damage, rumbling growling gurgling vokills, pounding blasting drumming, all wound into lurching lumbering outsider black brutality. Just take album opener "The Gathering", which on the surface sounds like some old school blasting black metal, but it's weirdly melodic, not obviously so, and then there's this constant extra guitar laying these warped keening high end sort-of-leads over the top, that make everything sound detuned, or like the instruments are slowly melting in the hellish heat, the effect is odd, but it's that oddness that makes this stuff so compelling and fucking genius.
"Poison Bottle" is a fantastic dizzying dirge, a murky slow motion death metal churn, all tightly wound riffage, lurching start/stop tempos, more guttural bellows, convoluted and mathy, the whole track oozing blackness, a chugging black creep with brief streaks of minor key melody, and occasional bursts of grinding crunch. "Thru Your Skull" is another muddy blur of deconstructed black riffage, pounding jackhammer beats and monstrous demonic grunts, not to mention another head spinning squall of detuned lead guitar that ends up sounding seriously psychedelic. As does the whole record. This stuff is so dark and twisted and out there, some sort of seriously damaged psychedelic blackness, that should definitely appeal to both the true grim hordes, and folks who like their black metal as fucked up and far our as possible.
As for us, we might just have us another contender for black metal record of the year...
The Swedish conceptualist took a trip to Harar, Ethiopia at the behest of a director for a theater in Sweden who was going to be putting on a play based upon the life of Arthur Rimbaud and asked Hausswolff to compose the score. Harar was one of the last stopping points for Rimbaud in his peripatetic and often debaucherous life; and Hausswolff used that particular location as the jumping off point for his composition involving little more than field recordings, his trusted oscillator, and drones culled from a krar, a tradition Ethiopian lyre. The piece follows Hausswolff's signature ultra-minimalist strategies found on many of his earlier recordings, but the use of the krar as a sound source has proved to be a major find for Von Hausswolff. On the three part "Day And Night," he's built a series of subtle modulations from the sonorous low tones of the krar whose rasping dissonance gives more than a passing resemblance to the work of Eliane Radigue and Phill Niblock, accompanied by the field recordings of wind, insects, rustling leaves, and water. The final piece "The Sleeper In The Valley" is sourced from the Rimbaud poem of the same name, but fear not, this is not a spoken word piece as Von Hausswolff tells us that the morse code blips that run through the layered arcs of low-end sine tones are a transcription of that poem. As common as this is within the Hausswolff vernacular, it's hardly the dead-line drone that Hausswolff will sometimes produce in installations. Instead, this is much closer to the more composed (albeit minimally) of his classic collaborations with John Duncan and his Operation Of Spirit Communication album. Excellent stuff.
Following the meticulous realizations of absurd propositions such as the ongoing "Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland" project and the attempts to communicate with the dead on "Operations of Spirit Communications," Swedish interdisciplinary artist C.M. Von Hausswolff presents "A Lecture On Disturbances In Architecture" as an open letter to architects and engineers, imploring that they consider how sound functions within urban space. This album which won an honorable mention at the 2002 Ars Electronica opens with a few remarks from the late maverick / crackpot architect Buckminster Fuller. His eccentric visions for a utopian society of geodesic domes and floating blimps parallel the subtext in Von Hausswolff's work that glorifies the saboteur as king. Aside from the introductory remarks from Fuller, Von Hausswolff's lecture is a non-verbal one, arguing its case through a series of modern-day mantras of urban life. Electric field discharges and rushing air from radiators have been filtered / amplified to achieve a din similar to Francisco Lopez' 'absolute concrete music.' Von Hausswolff contextualizes these sounds within a transition from the claustrophobic to the expansive / potentially transcendent spaces. In the end, "A Lecture On Disturbances In Architecture" is an incredible conceptual rebus, which insists upon leaving all of the loose ends untied.
