We've been beyond excited in anticipation of this one. Wild Flag is the super group of our wildest dreams. Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss from Sleater Kinney along with Mary Timony from Helium and Rebecca Cole from The Minders. A few of us got to see them live at a super small show last year at the Hemlock and we were blown away by their immediacy, passion and energy. In other words it reminded us so much of what it was like to see Sleater Kinney, one of the best live bands ever in our opinion.
Luckily the songs on this debut capture that live energy, and give us one of the most punchy, catchy and rocking albums of the year. Carrie Brownstein does seem like she's the leader of Wild Flag as her signature guitar and vocal stylings are felt on just about every song. And damn, what can't Carrie do? After Sleater Kinney called it quits she found herself the 'it' music writer, with her great thoughtful music column for NPR's website, and then she mastered television comedy, starring in Portlandia with Fred Armistead, pretty much the funniest TV show to emerge in the last several years. But there is no doubt she missed rocking out and being on stage, and with Wild Flag her and her badass bandmates have tapped into that golden sound of impassioned indie rock with punk spirit that Sleater Kinney perfected in the '90s. On songs like "Glass Tambourine", Mary Timony takes center stage, her vocals, and even more unique and recognizable guitar stylings have been a long favorite of ours. Overall the sound of Wild Flag takes from the more poppy and driving moments of Sleater Kinney albums like The Hot Rock, All Hands On The Bad One, and peppiest tracks from their swan song The Woods. Blast this one loud, and make sure to see them live if you have the chance!
In the long wake of Hurricane Katrina, it's good to remind ourselves of the amazing musical legacy of New Orleans. So what better time than now to get this 2 disc reissue of one of the more unique and underrated funk groups of the early seventies, The Wild Magnolias. The first Mardi-Gras Indian group to get signed to a major label (they're not real Native Americans, but African-Americans partaking in a long-time tradition of street�based competition with rival tribal factions fully decked out in elaborately ornate, feathered Indian regalia), The Wild Magnolias were known for their gospel like call-and-response vocal chants over driving funk rhythms provided by The New Orleans Project led by keyboardist Willie Tee. Compiling their 1973 self-titled debut, and 1975 follow-up, They Call us Wild, the Magnolias mix up original songs sung in native-sounding patois ("Handa Wanda", "Ho Na Nae") with interesting takes on New Orleans folk standards such as "Saints" and "Shoo Fly". Includes a PDF version of a 68 page book about their impressive history. An awesome reissue of some bad-ass funk and an amazing peek into one of New Orleans most unique street traditions!
It's come to that awesome point where just seeing the Captured Tracks logo on a new piece of vinyl from a band we have no idea about is cause enough to throw it on right away and check it out. We actually didn't even need the Captured Tracks motivation with this one as we could tell the A side was a cover of one of our favorite Kate Bush songs ever "Cloudbusting", so the many Kate Bush fanatics that work here wasted no time in finding out what the sounds of Wild Nothing were all about. So while we set the bar pretty damn high when it comes to covering Kate Bush (we did think The Chromatics did a nice job with "Running Up That Hill") Wild Nothing for sure respect the song and the male vocals and lo-fi synths give it a really nice hazy feel. The flipside "Two Promise" might have us hooked even more, a total slow burning late night bedroom jam somewhere between a hazier Neon Indian and a a male led version of Nite Jewel. Dark, catchy and seductive.
Latest from these aQ fave dreampoppers, and while on past records these guys have flirted with new wave, they haven't gone for it full bore until now. And we're digging it. The opener might be the only exception, a gorgeous short, sharp blast of prismatic fuzz drenched, piano laced, distorto pop, hooks galore, sweet crooned vocals, swirling strings, cool synth melodies, a little bit of an M83 vibe, but more sun dappled and dreamy, with some crunch too, and yeah, a little bit of new wave, the sound is more like something you'd hear on Merge or Slumberland. But then "Ocean Repeating (Big-Eyed Girl)" gets all angular, and super new wavey, reminding us a bit of The Fixx (!), but much more fuzzy and poppy, more swirling synths, angular melodies, handclap rhythms, and a main hook that will get lodged in your head like crazy. "On Guyot" might be our favorite track here though. A weirdly spaced out sort of psychedelic kosmische kraut-groove, all simple motorik rhythm, swirling processed vocals, and shimming, glimmering synths, super spacey and dreamy, thick swaths of synth drone laced with buried melodies and slow shifting textures, wish it went on for way more than its six minutes.
The rest of the record returns to WN's woozy jangly new wave, from crunchy, fuzzy propulsive synth pop, to caffeinated synth soaked garage pop, to tripped out, angular new wave grooviness, replete with processed horns and all manner of keyboard blurt, until the final track, another more abstract drifter, this one all hazy and washed out, bleary and blurry and dreamlike, a twang flecked drift, drenched in echo and reverb, a soft focus finale, that finishes the record on a surprisingly dreamy melancholic note.
Housed in a eye popping, full color slipcase.
For some reason it's been hard to get this in stock for any period of time, which is a shame as it really is the kind of record we wish we could have been blasting all summer long. Wild Nothing make such breezy sun soaked pop, sort of along the lines of Beach Fossils but with much more of a shoegaze and dreamy feel.
Gemini is filled with such comforting songs that tap into '80s dreampop yet strip it all down to the essentials. We've been digging on how many new records have come out taking us to a Galaxie 500 kind of place but all taking us there in a different way (Cloudland Canyon, Altar Eagle, Lower Dens, etc.). Wild Nothing's songs aren't just about hooks or catchy choruses but instead they are about the swirling and sun soaked vibrations they create. Like if Swervedriver learned to get its feet wet in the ocean or if Pains Of Being Pure At Heart calmed down a bit and weren't so precious and instead were a bit more stoned and into the honey drizzled side of Jesus & Mary Chain. Makes us think of being in a car on a warm day with the windows down as college radio is blasting the good stuff and all that matters is the breeze brushing against our bodies and the scenery passing by and turning into seductive rushes of shapes and saturated colors.
Hot on the heels of their great debut full length that we've been playing to death, comes this new ep brimming with songs that are adding fuel to our Wild Nothing addiction fire. The title of the ep, Golden Haze, accurately sums up the sound here as well as the mood and vibe we find ourselves drifting off into when listening to these perfect '80s inspired dream-pop gems, that manage to keep a sharp focus while still allowing for plenty of shoegazing drift. They tap into so many of our favorite bands like Ride, Slowdive, and Swervedriver and just the right amount of sounds borrowed from groups like The Cure and New Order. And while so many other bands may share very similar influences, we've been taken with how Wild Nothing have been able to bring those influences together and create songs that already have a distinctive imprint and don't just come off as a lesson in nostalgia. Their songs make us want to be a passenger in a car with the windows down, wind rushing by with our destination unknown. So great!
Yet another collection of breezy, jangly eighties style dream pop from these aQ faves, the sound not too far removed from their last few records, the most noticeable difference this time around being the production, which is even more impossibly lush and expansive, the sound here is gorgeous, still hazy, and dreamily shoegazey, but the sound clear and clean, the songs laced with soaring strings and chiming guitars, the drums tribal and propulsive, the vocals wistful and way down in the mix, drifting on a bed of softly swirling shimmer. The songs too are fantastic. Where most bands doing the retro thing basically get the sound right and don't seem to worry too much about the actual song writing, or if they do, they just can't seem to pull it off. But Wild Nothing manage to both write songs reminiscent of those classic eighties jams, but craft killer hooks to boot, not to mention super addictive melodies. That, combined with the sound, make them top of the retro pop heap. Just check out the first track "Shadow", with its warm acoustic guitar strum, its woozy super melodic basslines, the main riff which will stick in your head like crazy, and the utterly divine string arrangements, it's a retro dream pop gem. But don't stop there. Dig deeper, there's a lot more to discover, strange little bits of fuzzy synth, weirdly proggy arrangements, more amazing strings, swirling vocal harmonies, all woven into WN's lush jangle pop tapestry, pretty much every song on Nocturne a swirly, shoegazy new wave pop gem.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
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 way over twenty years since Wild Style came out. No doubt, one of the freshest, most fun and stylish hip-hop films ever made. A few years ago it played at the Red Vic, a great co-op run theater in the city, and those of us who had never seen it before totally fell in love with with the charm of the movie and the great early hip-hop soundtrack (not to mention to jaw dropping fashion that still looks so damn hot!). While there was a cd reissue of Wild Style a few years back, these really are the kind of tracks you want to have on wax. Brings us back to that so missed fun filled, groove rich sound of early hip-hop that was really the soundtrack to breakdancing, graffiting, and ultimate endless block parties. Turntable wizardry, flawless raw MC skills, all under the musical production of Fab 5 Freddy. Still sounds so damn good all these years later. And any of you who love stuff like Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Doug E Fresh, Kurtis Blow, and the like, Wild Style is definitely the ultimate document of hip-hop's glory days. So fresh!
This just showed up in the mail one day, and we weren't really sure what to expect from a band called Wild Wild Geese, or a record cover that looked like a kindergartener drew a picture of an octopus attacking earth with fingerpaints, but we were definitely pleasantly surprised. Some super hooky nineties style indie rock, reminding us of Sebadoh, The Memories Attack, Dinosaur Jr, Built To Spill, Afghan Whigs... Plus they're from North Carolina too, which makes lots of sense, Superchunk, Polvo, the gnarled riffage definitely smacks of Polvo, and pre Built To Spill outfit Treepeople (not North Carolina obviously), and the super blown out leads sound like they could be courtesy of J Mascis, but the band don't just skate by on their influences, they've honed a pretty killer sound, at once looking back to the good ol' nineties college rock days, but also, firmly rooted in the now, with plenty of fuzzed out guitars, lazy drawled vox buried in the mix, garage rock crunch, and a serious heft and heaviness. But those melodies, and the band's arrangements are so reminiscent of the stuff we grew up with, that it makes these jams hit the spot even more. We've been cranking this like crazy, and have no plans of stopping any time soon!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Formerly the guitarist for Northwestern garage rockers Federation X, and occasional collaborator with members of the Reeks And The Wrecks, Ben Wildenhaus has since transformed into a bit of an avant guitarist, now living on the east coast, and managing the Instrumental Quaalude blog, on which he weekly posts new recordings, always instrumental, always under 5 minutes.
Great Melodies From Around seems to be an extension of Instrumental Quaalude, as it is a cassette collection of similarly dark, gorgeously instrumental excursions, assembled from lush layered drones, Appalachian style steel string guitars, woozy twangy slide guitar, strange murky percussion, bits of vocals (NOT singing) employed as more texture, wheezing organ, sinewaves, minimal drumming, subtle electronics, bits of glitch and hiss, amp buzz, a little noise here and there, the occasional sample... The sound is smokey and dark and ominous, dreamy and hauntingly lovely, a distinctly Lynchian soundtrack vibe for sure, late night, lights low, everything dusty, and dark, and lonely, and lit by the streetlights outside, hazy, gauzy, fuzzy, and totally and fantastically lovely.
SUPER LIMITED of course. Full color photograph covers, blue cases, hand decorated tapes.
Endtroducing is still an amazing record, all these years later, fresh and weird and mysterious. Few (read:none) have even come close. Another killer book in this series that lets you read all about want went down during the making of DJ Shadow's hip hop / trip hop classic.
The metal label Stormspell's motto is "Old farts stuck In the '80s and proud of it". They're the folks who have been bringing us a lot of cool cd reissues of obscure, cult metal bands from the '80s (such as Max Planck, Xinr and Detest), some of 'em as part of Stormspell's ongoing "Red White and Heavy Arcane Collector Series For The Initiated" featuring long-lost demos from bands that are SO cult and obscure they never even got signed to make a proper album.
Well, the old farts at Stormspell have now found some young bands also stuck in the '80s, and have begun a new series of releases, putting these bands' demos out on cd but this time not waiting 30 years to do it. Fantastically dubbed the "Jewels Of Gwahlur" series (the Jewels Of Gwahlur being the macguffin of a Conan story of the same name), five volumes have now been released, and we're reviewing 'em all this list. It's a bit like something else Stormspell did some years ago, the "Thrash Clash" series of splits by underground thrash acts. But these bands are even more "old school" in sound.
Each entry in the series comes in nice trifold digi-wallet packaging, the covers pretty much identical except for the band logos, with a standardized "bejeweled ancient leather tome" look, a la the 3rd Edition D&D rulebooks if you're familiar with those; doubtless some of these bands are! However, despite the uniform design, each entry in the series gets its own unique artwork on the inside, as well as credits, liner notes, etc. Most of these discs are ep-length, around 4-6 tracks, but it should be noted that they're quite cheaply priced. So even though we're reviewing each one individually you might as well buy 'em all and let your cd player sort 'em out! As for us, we're looking forward to hearing more from all these bands (pretty sure we will!), and are curious as to what further Jewels Of Gwahlur will be uncovered by Stormspell in the future.
WILDHUNT are an Austrian hesher duo playing "Teutonic power/speed metal", basically heads-down, old school thrash, with elements of even older, more traditional heavy metal styles. The five tracks on this demo disc are full of ripping but melodic guitar leads, some bass leads too, rough but not too gruff vocals, and TONS of raw energy. Headbanging is job one! Pretty solid and enjoyable, will put a smile on your face and a crimp in your neck, if nothing more. Crack open a beer while listening to this and you might finish off the six-pack before you're done spinning this five-song disc (be careful!). Good times.
Goddamn we love this band. And goddamn they're hard to pigeonhole or review. They're the sort of band that leaves critics throwing their hands up and saying weird things like "Animal Collective playing metal", or finds us comparing 'em (on past albums) to everyone from MBV to Redd Kross to the Swans to Gaye Bykers On Acid to the freaking God Bullies...
They sound like a lot of things, but ultimately their own special Wildildlife thing - and we don't have enough hypens handy to describe all the genres they glom together into that. Yeah they're heavy and noisy and fucked up, palling around with Harvey Milk and other sludgey/doom metal types, but also have an almost glammy, "buried pop" side to 'em that's become less and less buried from record to record. This new one is perhaps their poppiest, catchiest yet, without sacrificing any of the delicious distortion, noisiness or heaviness, though.
Details, its front cover bearing appropriately demented, deliberate eyesore cover art scrawlings (the back of the sleeve is even better - a drawing of a cat in corpsepaint), is awash with spacey swirling FX, stonery druggy vocals, and sinuous grungy riffage, making for some seriously psychedelic fuzzed out noise pop that's maybe still somehow sorta metal - definitely mental though. Take some Butthole Surfers, some Dead Meadow, some '90s alt-metal (Nudeswirl, anyone?), some slowcore and shoegaze and old school Sub Pop, and you're getting close to the idea of what's going on here.
We suppose we could just mention a few highlights among this album's seven tracks, but it's tough to choose. The short-and-sweet blast of the excellent opener "Dub 1"? The majestic keyboards of "Water Underneath"? The sleazy riffage cranked out on badass rocker "Conditioner"? The tripped out, lumbering awesomeness of, uh, everything??? Yeah we love it all. You should just get this and listen to it yourself, and let it sink into you and you into it, that's our recommendation. Oh, but speaking of sinking into it, let's also mention how the second side closes out with not one but two 8+ minute hypnorock epics. There's the big roiling drums, droning keys and almost bagpipe-like guitar soloing of "Love Hums", and then the even heavier/dirgier "Edge Of The Apocalypse (Forever)", the latter with a pretty little come-down electronica bit at the end, as the song gently fades out... Nice.
We may be a bit biased of course, 'cause Wildildlife singer/guitarist Matt Rogers is an aQ alumnus, but honestly, we had no expectations, in fact we were surprised this even came out, 'cause we thought the band had basically broken up long ago, the guys living in different cities, Matt more into techno DJing than playing rock music, but here it is, and if it's their swansong it's a damn good one, but hopefully the release of this record might spur 'em to get their shit together and get back on stage and play live again 'cause they KILL and it would be great to see Matt writhing around with his guitar again (and the other guys going off too) and hear these tunes super LOUD in person.
Vinyl-only (grrrr) but it includes a download!
Warped druggy psychedelic metallic noise rock trio Wildildlife, who just so happen to features a former aQuarian amongst their ranks, always had a bit of pop in their sound, even at their most tripped out and damaged, when they were channeling Butthole Surfers and Gaye Bykers On Acid and God Bullies and Lubricated goat, their wild rhythmic blowouts were always laced with primo hooks and loads of melody, and it was that subtle poppy undercurrent, that kept them from being just another noisy rock band. But the thing was, before now, it seemed that it was mostly about the heaviness, and they were indeed heavy, sidling up alongside outfits like Harvey Milk, spitting out churning elephantine riffage and skull caving flurries of drum damage, if we had our way, we wouldn't have changed anything about Wildildlife. That is until we heard this.
It's like they're a whole different band. Not sure if it's a natural progression or if it's the influence of their new producer, Jennifer Herema of Royal Trux, but the new sound is downright GLAMMY, swaggery, and power poppy, the vocals, which used to be distorted and sped up and processed into strange chipmunk squeals, is now actual and proper singing, and as if to drive that whole glam thing home, there's sax now, and we generally HATE sax, but this is like Stooges / Hanoi Rocks sax, which means it rules, and it somehow just makes things sound even cooler.
The opening track might just be our new favorite jam, right out of the gate, it's total soaring fuzzy pop, chiming guitar melodies, warm synth swells, and then when the main riff kicks in, we're in classic Kiss territory, suddenly the picture on the back of the lp, that has the band all in white, the lens all vaselined, looking like seventies rockers Angel, makes WAY more sense. And actually, after more listens, it sounds less like Kiss, and more like Redd Kross cover Kiss, which is even better, slithery and swaggery an snotty and hooky but still heavy, but so glammy, right down to the little sexy exhalation of breath in the super short break. And somehow it seems appropriately self defeating that their catchiest and most accessible song is titled "Fuck That".
The follow up "I Want You Out" even furthers the whole Redd Kross / Kiss thing, but we're talking old Redd Kross, circa Teen Babes From Monsanto, when they were still heavy and a little dark, and way drugged out and psychedelic, "I Want You Out" is all big tribal drumming, downtuned riffs, even some handclaps, and more of those new vocals, and lots of bleating/skronking sax, that once the song gets going sounds like a glam metal version of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk". Not sure what the hell happened, but we most definitely want some of what they're having.
And the rest of the record unfurls in a similar fashion, classic rock riffs, are all wound up in a glittery haze, hooks are doused in fuzz and buzz and sent spinning into the space rock ether, but the band continue to mix it up, to confuse and confound. "Sometimes" is a folk ballad, dubbed out and drenched in low end synth buzz, acoustic guitars wrapped in reverb, the result a sort of apocalyptic doom folk, glitter style, only to lurch right into "Give In To Live", another Kiss/Thin Lizzy style glamrock groover, but here underpinned by some serious double kick drumming. "Stormbringer" (possibly a Deep Purple cover?) is an epic slow build of distorted vocals, gurgling synths, big drums, but instead of launching into full on glammed out noise rock mode, they lay back, and groove out, a sort of old school Hawkwind style space rock brooder that KILLS, and should have gone on for another 6 minutes. "Shiv" is a low slung, super distorted fuzz heavy churning creep, laced with glammy filigree, and finally, "Permanent Vacation" is the ultimate send off, you can almost imagine these guys on a huge stage, lit from behind with blinding showers of pyro, the drummer standing on his seat, winding up the crowd to clap along, the vocals gnarled and twisted, the guitars chiming and soaring, but instead of launching into the song proper, these guys stretch it out, adding weird rhythmic shifts, bits of mathy weirdness, all the while building and building, totally epic and majestic, before all the sounds are stripped away, leaving a weird warped melody, and some twisted drum machine skitter.
Remember about 1000 words ago we said something about never wanting these guys to change? What the hell were we thinking, sure we might miss the sheer heaviness and drugged out crush of the old Wildildlife, but it seems like a more than fair trade for the new, glammed out, super catchy, weirdo noisepop Wildildlife. Fuck yeah.
While they last, we have the super limited version on AMAZING colored vinyl, they are mostly clear, with weird spurts of color in the middle, mine looks like a bloody egg or something, and all the lps include a download coupon for a digital copy of the record as well!
While we were sad to see our coworker Matt leave us a while back, if it meant helping unleash the true force of the wild beast that is Wildildlife upon the world, then we're happy to have done our part.
As kick ass as their most recent full length was, playing live is where Wildildlife truly destroy, three mild mannered hairy dudes transformed into a fierce six legged, six armed, long haired, face melting, tripped out drug addled behemoth. And while their most recent tour was rife with drama, broken bones, stolen equipment and extortionist cabbies, the shows that did take place were the sort to not be soon forgotten. And while they were on the East Coast, they got to play live on the radio, on Brian Turner's show on WFMU, and this is the proof that it did indeed take place. Hard to imagine a band can kick up such a shitstorm with no crowd to react to, holed up in a little glass room, but Wilildlife bring it, hard.
They open with "Metal", from their full length, and manage to make it sound even more freaked out, the effected little girl vox have them channeling the Butthole Surfers even more than usual, the extended free-jam outro goes on for minutes, letting the band explore the outer reaches, before launching into another downtuned tribal workout. The sound is surprisingly clean, a few folks here like it even better than the record proper. Some of the songs are oldies, revamped and supercharged, some are altered versions of tracks from 6, those creepy high pitched vocals return throughout, and the band is on fire, the songs complex and convoluted but hooky and catchy as fuck, folks who bought the full length will for sure dig this. And if you've yet to discover the mysteries of Wildildlife, this is as good a place to start as any�
Plus there's a pretty funny interview with the trio at the end...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, in a cool full color, three panel oversized cover, featuring some pictures of the band on tour, including an awesome shot of Matt perusing porn in the van, as well as a band member's button that says it all: "Let's face it... I'm cute!"
A new ep from San Francisco's Wildildlife serves as a more concise and slightly less abusive introduction to the band than the dense and unremitting Six, December's Crucial Blast full length release (see review on list #281). Whereas Six showcases the band's expansive capabilities, Peas Feast demonstrates a band equally willing to direct their songs more pointedly. Simply put, this is the sound of a bunch of stoned Hessians taunting Tatiana the tiger (R.I.P.)...
The opener, "White Eyelidz" starts with Chrome like distorted vocals that slowly give way to a groove that is simultaneously long-haired and atonal. The vocals are treated with such reverebarance that they may have been recorded in God's icy womb. The guitar line swirls effortlessly while the band locks into circular Neu! like syncopations. The deep-sea diver finds his hidden treasure; a sludgy walk along the ocean floor. Darby Crash drops by for some tea; for the record he wants Darjeeling, fill his cup 5/4th's full.
"Violent", keeps it super slow and heavy. Picture My Bloody Valentine on 6.66 RPM. Harmonies shouldn't work but they do, possibly accidentally. Every sound feeds back grossly. Like a too full stomach. But the food's just so good, how're you gonna stop eating? Yet the song only gets slower and slower and now your burrito weighs seven pounds. Gentle Californian psych licks expedite the digestive process. Still, you're gonna shit blood.
If your crusty friend P-Nutty let his dog stick his head out of the window of a car he didn't have, "The Shining Son" is what it would sound like inside his doggie's brain. This is easily the catchiest song Wildildlife has ever written. Vocals wretch triumphantly, trying in vain to disgrace this gem of a pop song. Not gonna happen. The final track, "My Song", which had appeared earlier as an acoustic track on the bands self-titled EP, mixes an urgent sing-songy dementia with timpanic bass and drum blasts. This review has yet to mention the constant presence of the shrieking guitar, and this track is jammed with it, beginning to end. The epic track eventually melts away into a into a lalaland that channels a desperation not heard since the coda of Leonard Cohen's "One of us Cannot be Wrong." It should also be said that the experience of seeing Wildildlife's live show can range from pseudo-intentional beer-on-amp pouring to psychosexual hypnosis to telekinetic skull-bashery. Buy this ep it is HIGH-ly recommended.
(Thanks to aQ pal Amitai for the killer review!)
We dug the first ep from SF transplants Wildlife, who just so happened to feature our very own Matt in mailorder on guitar and vocals. A blown out tripped out heavy as fuck space rock psychedelic freakout of the highest order. Since then, not only have the band changed their name, to the much weirder and somehow more appropriate Wildildlife but also honed their sound into something somehow more blown out, more tripped out, heavier, weirder, but more importantly, WAY catchier. Hooks and melodies that most bands would kill for, but Wildildlife play it like it's no big thing, burying that stuff under avalanches of processed guitars, throbbing howling bass pedals, metallic Iron Maiden like riffing, insane chaotic drumming, and a fierce white hot wall of sound.
We were pretty much sold from the first track. Beginning with some simple Adam Ant drumming, tribal and pounding, before the glistening reverbed Big Country guitars come in, all swathed in delay and drifting over the tangled rhythmic chaos below. The guitars build into a serious chordal frenzy, and then a strange haunting, and very eighties sounding hook, and that's when the vocals come in. Distorted but melodic, a dangerously catchy hook, that somehow reminds us of Gaye Bykers On Acid. Druggy and tripped out, with a cool guitar/vocal "la� lalalalalaaaaaaa" refrain that sticks in your head FOREVER. Wildildlife are usually described as Butthole Surfers meets Black Sabbath, which while flattering, and maybe to a certain extent accurate, hardly do justice to Wildildlife's cracked pop flecked noise rock heaviness.
Yeah, they're heavy, but there's no massive doom riffing or downtuned metallic pummel, and they are definitely trippy, but not in the same way as the Buttholes.
Take the second track, beginning with a wicked tangle of distorted guitar, when the drums kick in, and the band locks into an angular almost new wave melody, and those vocals return, sort of raspy and crooned, echoed by either a high wavery guitar or a falsetto vocal, and they repeat, mantra like, mesmerizing and hypnotic, relentless and seriously tripped out. The drums a constant rhythmic lock beneath the strange poppiness of the vocals and the guitar, before the whole thing splinters into a Hawkwind free rock noise jam, all super effected vocals, total drum mayhem, and thick washes of crumbling guitars and throbbing buzzing bass, eventually petering out into a gorgeous metallic slowcore dirge, everything still wrapped in thick layers of reverb and delay, a gorgeous mournful doomic sonic deathmarch. While some may hear the Buttholes, we're hearing stuff like the God Bullies, the Cows, Lubricated Goat for sure and still plenty of Gaye Bykers, although all even more souped up and super charged.
The two halves of the record are separated by the longest track, the 18+ minute "Magic Jordan", which begins as a washed out post rock dirge, all shimmery strummed guitars, echoey Jim Morrison vocals, and a simple stripped down rhythm, Eventually, the band erupts into a massive roiling bout of slow heaviness, that sounds like a way more psychedelic Harvey Milk, with killer angular riffs surfacing amidst the endless black sonic swirl, eventually giving way to 10 minutes of tripped out free folkiness, all warped backwards guitars, abstract percussion, fluttering melodies, haunting disembodied vocals, all sorts of random creaks and chimes and whir and hiss. Which is quickly followed by what is easily the catchiest track on the record. The relatively brief seven minute long "Feed", with its abstract delayed guitar harmonic feedback intro, giving way to probably the most Buttholes sounding bit on the record, a tense and intense bit of furious drumming, and throbbing bass beneath little flurries of metallic guitar leads, doused in FX and sent swirling over the abyss, while the vocals croon from WAY down in the mix, finishing off with a cool thick chunk of melancholy riffage, massive low end throbs playing out a gorgeous melody beneath the squiggly guitar chaos above.
The disc finishes off with a massive sonic one two punch, two fourteen minute tracks, the first, a super abstract slow motion noise doom lurch, with anguished vocals, sung from the bottom of a well, the guitars and drums offering up jagged little stabs, before locking into a relentless Swans like crush, nearly suffocating the vocals, until the band again lock into an impossible blissed out drone, where the guitar and bass mesh into a nearly M83 sounding wash of fuzzed out psychdrone, before reverting to full on glacial plod until the end.
While the final track, begins with a thick bit of bassy buzz, weaving a hard to define slow motion melody, the buzzing rich and thick and rife with overtones, metallic, electric and lush all at once, eventually joined by a downtuned guitar mirroring that same slow motion melody, eventually joined by dramatic almost gothic vocals, the drums dropping in like brass knuckled fists to the sternum, the band again almost slipping into some intense Swans like doom, before the riffing slips away leaving nearly six minutes of soaring guitar noise, and cymbal sizzle, eventually building to a super dramatic major key coda, all soaring chords and falsetto crooning, like some sort of alien metallic "Star Spangled Banner" (again reminding us a bit of Harvey Milk), before drifting off into a meandering morning after guitar bass post rock fade out.
Way recommended. Noisy and heavy and poppy and psychedelic and fucked up and catchy in a way few bands can pull of. And the one time we caught them live, we were hanging in a hammock, above the stage, IN A BUS, getting rammed repeatedly by the headstock of the guitar as the two axemen dueled wildly in the outrageous confines of the space below. Barring that sort of intimate and surprisingly painful interaction with Wildildlife, this record will definitely serve as an ideal introduction to their damaged and druggy fucked up metallic noise rock space pop, at least until you too can be battered and bruised by these guys in the flesh!
Recorded by Aaron from Mammatus, released on the always awesome Crucial Blast, and in some seriously amazing packaging, a super fancy mini gatefold sleeve, thick and full color, with an intense bejeweled turquoise skull on the cover, a fucked up masked dirt faced hatchet flag duel photo inside, as well as a full color booklet with liner notes and a bunch more freaky blurry creepy masked wild(ild)life photos...
As a teaser for their upcoming Jennifer Herrema (Royal Trux, RTX) produced full length, psychedelic metallic noise poppers Wildildlife team up with their sludge pop doom noise pals in Flood for a killer two song onslaught.
Wildildlife just keep getting better, their sound getting poppier and poppier, but somehow managing to not get less heavy or any less weird or psychedelic. Their track here explodes right out of the gate with some mathy drum pound and some tangled guitar harmonies, sounding almost like some sort of Iron Maiden / Butthole Surfers hybrid, the sound woozy and distorted and druggy, the vocals processed and all tripped out, hooks galore, but all buried under Wildildlife's blown out glammy noise pop chaos. Swaths of crumbling sound and swirls of spacey effects get wrapped around looped samples, and wild streaks of pop flecked psychedelia, churning, and rhythmic and heavy, and noisy and crazy catchy to boot.
Flood counter with some low slung slithery post rock lope, which gains momentum and finally explodes into a seriously stonery doomy sludge, the brooding minimalism giving way to some epic, majestic hypno doom crush, but with plenty of groove, the sound at one point locking into a long stretch of repetitive and hypnotic chug and churn, sounding like a downtuned doom metal Circle, pounding away beneath bellowed vox and majestic melodies. So good.
Limited to 500 copies, we managed to get a bunch of the colored vinyl. Each one is hand numbered, and comes with a download coupon.
From right here in San Francisco, via Boston, comes this debut recording from Wildlife. And in the interest of being totally up front, we should tell you that we do actually have a vested interest in Wildlife, not only can SF always use another killer band to call its own, but we also got another amazing AQ employee out of the deal, Matt in mailorder, but all of that aside, this shit is seriously cool.
Opening with a hushed soundscape of record crackle (we're sold already!), a swirl of hiss and static and pops, underpinning thick bass thrums that shimmer like black clouds, while above this low end miasma hover simple muted guitars and huge drums way up in the mix (where they belong). Suddenly the sound is some sort of abstract slowcore indie doom, with beautiful drifting melodies, lugubrious tempos, all beneath a simple caveman plod and clouds of little effected guitar squiggles. The song eventually erupts into a massive downtuned crunch, thick waves of detuned riffage pile up beneath howled Stooges-y vocals wrapped in thick swaths of reverb, swaggering over the slippery tarpit dirge underneath. The song ends in a flurry of gorgeous harmonics, with shimmery distant angelic vocals, and strange dynamic shifts all tangled up with shards of angular jagged high end scrape and skree. Phew, and that's just the first song.
After a brief interlude, a strange cloud of ambient clatter, made up of blurred bits of fuzz and hiss, clockwork like rhythms as well as distant booming percussion, the band launch back into the rock, with a muted angular groove, not unlike Sonic Youth or Blonde Redhead with dense reverby guitars and simple tribal rhythms that build into a lurching sea sick stumble, with distorted shrieked vocals, swirls of feedback and moaning guitar wail before winding back down into a swirling dense coda of wild drumming and tangled squalls of blown out psych guitar.
The final track is a spare slab of creepy disembodied folk, thick stabs of tangled steel string dissonance wrapped in a bleak doomy ambience. A slow creeping monotone strum, with simple percussion and snarly vocals. The whole thing very sun baked with lots of reverb, a wild and clattery, Jandekian dirge folk work out that manages to be strangely epic and majestic.
We only have about twenty of these so we may run out quick. A repress is in the works, but it might be a while, so if you don't want to wait (and you definitely don't) then don't dawdle...
The whole UK grime scene / movement seems to have fizzled in terms of blowing up in the US. Which is too bad 'cause what we've heard so far has been awesome. We all totally dug the Dizzee Rascal record, and the Wiley single from a few months back hit the spot as well. With stuttering, un-funky two step garage (pronounced gare-ij), fuzzed out monster synths, and a convulted cockney flow. So Wiley's full length is finally here (beating Dizzee's sophmore effort by a matter of weeks) and it totally delivers. Funky and funny with massive beats, ridiculous flows and totally alien, squiggly synth melodies. Relentlessly funky and fucking awesome. The real question is with stuff this weird and amazing coming out of the UK, why the fuck does anyone give a shit about the massively boring Streets?? We'll never understand.
You know once Dizzee Rascal exploded over here, it was only a matter of time before everyone went looking for more of the same. And they found it in Wiley. Another export from the UK's grime scene, the same scene that spawned Dizzee and a handful of other folks who decided to add a bunch of fuzzy synths, buzzing basslines, and tongue twisting toasting to their two-step garage (pronounced gare-ij), a simple and repetitive offshoot of drum and bass. So if you loved the Dizzee Rascal record, you'll probably dig this, especially as the single is a dig at the whole garage scene. And those of you who are new to this stuff and haven't heard that Dizzee Rascal record, imagine a jungle record, stripped to its very framework, all extraneous beats removed, leaving just the kick and snare (two step, geddit?), and a big ol' farting burping bassline, and some Jamaican style toasting/rapping and you've got an idea of Wiley / Dizzee and the grime/garage sound. Also contains a video viewable on your computer!
The Monk label strikes again with another killer release, this one from legendary Memphis bluesman Robert Wilkins, whose contributions some of you may remember from the Mississippi compilations I Woke Up One Morning In May (the song "I'll Go With Her", unfortunately not included here) and Last Kind Words (the amazing "That's No Way To Get Along", which, true to the title of this record, is featured here). Wilkins ran in the same circle as Furry Lewis (whose "I Will Turn Your Money Green" Monk put out not too long ago), Son House, and Memphis Minnie. Like Lewis, Wilkins enjoyed a resurgence in the '60s when he was rediscovered by the folk scene, making appearances at Newport and other festivals. During the time after his initial run, he found time to become an ordained minister, playing music all the while, even going so far as to change the more evil lyrics of songs to suit higher powers. Of course, the stuff featured here is classic Memphis blues, with many of the songs including such time worn topics as rambling about ("Rolling Stone" pts. 1 and 2), solitary wondering, and serving time in the pen. The songs on Side A were recorded during 1928 and 1929, featuring Wilkins solo with guitar. His voice is a slow drawl, weary sounding but also wise to the realities of the world, sometimes distorting the speakers with its power. Side B contains songs from a session in 1930 as well as some later tunes from 1935 featuring accompaniment from Little Son Joe on guitar and Kid Spoons on, you guessed it, the spoons. Wilkins would outlive many of his contemporaries before passing away in 1987 at the ripe old age of 91. That's No Way To Get Along serves as a great compilation from one of Memphis' greats and will undoubtedly appeal to all you blues obsessives. ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
As hopefully you fondly recall, just a few weeks back, we made a double cd entitled Might Of The Planet Eater, by this eccentric Finnish outsider blackened industrial / electronica act, our freakin' Record Of The Week. 'Twas a sprawling and utterly bizarre set, part Pan Sonic, part power electronics, part (ir-)rhythmic occult ritual, apparently what happens when a Finnish black metal weirdo does DIY industrial experimentation. Weird and primitive and (to us) utterly awesome.
While we absolutely LOVE Will Over Matter, we'll readily admit they're, uh, possibly a difficult listen (but then, compared to some other things we sell, maybe not really). And fortunately a lot of you folks seemed to dig it! So, of course, we thought you'd want us to list this one too, an earlier album from Will Over Matter, also on Bestial Burst.
This disc is actually the first WOM we ever heard, preceding Might Of The Planet Eater by a couple years. What happened, is not long ago one of us came across a Will Over Matter track on the internet somewhere, got kind of obsessed, and was happy (and amused) to find that we actually already had one of their albums in stock!! That was this one, 9 To The Moon, which we'd apparently ordered from Bestial Burst a couple years ago (2009) when it came out, but never reviewed. The next time we did a Bestial Burst order, we also got the newer double cd, and, our obsession growing, decided to make it Record Of The Week. So all of you who liked that one, you want this too!
Again, outsider electronic electro-dirge, chock a block with squeaky squelchy static-y sounds, stuttering irregular rhythms, noisy glitchy distortion damage. Bloop zwoop zip zap. Buzzing electricity. Sinister analog synth. Computers gone haywire. The occasional disembodied, drugged out voice buried in the mix (heard on the plodding "No Waste Of Sorrow" and elsewhere). Yes, the blown out, black and white, lunar landscape (?) cover art is so appropriate for these alien, bleak, brutal sci-fi sounds, that are both confusional and compelling.
To recap, WOM is a one-man band, a project of Harald Mentor from equally insane AQ faves Ride For Revenge, allegedly a "black metal" act. WOM is not black metal (though Beherit did dabble in this direction once upon a time) but anyone who really appreciates Ride For Revenge, as well as anything totally fucked up, ought to enjoy it. And the esoteric themes of these songs (they ARE songs) are as out there as any black metal weirdness ever. The song titles aren't even provided, but the internet knows what they are.
While it's not a double disc like the other one we listed, there's 9 tracks, all of 'em long... with grand finale "The Burning Logic" building and building for over 8 minutes of crinkum crankum, industrial electro-dirge hypnosis. The whole thing is possibly dangerous headphone listening all right!
We got this in on the day we sent out our last list, the latest from weirdo Finnish avant electronic surreal industrial outfit Will Over Matter, the solo project of the maniac behind damaged sort-of-black-metal avant rhythmic alchemists Ride For Revenge, and we were totally tempted to just list it then, with a review that simply said "This is so much better than anything on this week's list" and leave it at that. We wussed out at the last minute, thinking it a bit too flip, and like all records we love, we really wanted the chance to gush and get a bit more in depth, but it seriously only took a day or two of listening, before we were very nearly incapable of listening to anything else.
The music of Will Over Matter, whose Might Of The Planet Eater double cd we made our Record Of The Week a few months back, is simultaneously infuriating and addictive, baffling and beautiful, a dizzying collage of primitive electronics, of abstract spaced out synths, of bizarre spoken word vocals and sprawling pulsing glitchy malfunctioning buzzscapes, like an Emeralds record if it was crafted by some strange tribe of interstellar cave dwellers, or Daniel Higgs creating primitive spiritual rituals post frontal lobotomy. There's definitely an Amps For Christ vibe too, the same sort of controlled chaos, disparate sounds and tones woven into songs both textural and strangely melodic. The opening track here is the perfect example, a 12+ minute of warped lo-fi kosmische exploration, sounding a bit like it was culled from samples of the Starship Enterprise, recorded on a handheld microcassette recorder, and then played back on a busted up old Casio sampler, a sort of spaced out industrial power electronics, but with the power rendered not so much in volume and intensity, but in depth and mystery, a hazy sort of pulsating rhythmic ambience, one that takes on more and more hiss and buzz as it goes, and it's not until about 9 minutes in, when all of the noise abates, leaving a jagged throbbing synth pulse, beneath which a strange voice intones some mysterious manifesto, the sounds gradually blurring until finally blinking out.
Even though the above paragraph would seem to point to the opposite, this stuff is actually insanely difficult to describe, because it is so unlike anything else we've heard, a compelling bit of modern electronic industrial minimalism, with touches of cold wave, of classic old school industrial, hints of course of the rhythmic weirdness of Ride For Revenge, but here stripped way down, and presented as something much more austere and cold, the voice a Teutonic bellow, that only occasionally erupts unto a more black metal growl, while the music does all the heavy lifting, creating undulating stretches of analog synth, blown out bursts of gristly glitchy crunch, rhythms cobbled together from bits of hiss and thrum, skies full of skittery bleep, of old modem high end flutter, of white noise and pink noise and brown noise all sculpted into sort-of-shapes and almost-melodies, creating again, something that to many ears might be perceived as damaged and difficult and borderline unlistenable, but to us, and presumably many of you, that's part of what makes this so amazing, the fact that it IS completely and utterly whatthefuck bizarre, while somehow managing to be totally mesmerizing, and impossibly listenable, a warped chunk of avant outsider electronic industrial weirdness that has quickly become some of our favorite music ever, and even now, we're still fighting the urge to erase this whole review and just write "this is so much better than anything/everything else EVER"...
The awesomely titled Might Of The Planet Eater is the latest from mysterious Finnish one man band Will Over Matter, which just so happens to be the work of a fella by the name of Harald Mentor, who you might know better as the maniac behind avant outsider not-quite-black-metal weirdos Ride For Revenge. So if the low end rhythmic weirdness that is Ride For Revenge is one step removed from black metal, imagine Will Over Matter as about 5 or 6 steps past that. Not black metal at all, but more like some sort of outsider electronica.
Our obsession with Ride For Revenge stems from the fact that over the course of their career, their sound has changed to the point where they are now totally subverting and transforming the idea of black metal into something much more primal and rhythmic, forgoing the buzz and blast and replacing those obvious BM tropes with looped mesmer and tribal pound, stripping the sound down to its essence, and then slowing it down as well, sounding more to us like Aluk Todolo than Beherit. Although the mention of Beherit, another Finnish black metal institution seems particularly apt here, in that Beherit are infamous for their non-black metal output, their experimental electronics, which is precisely what Will Over Matter is. If Ride For Revenge is Mentor's twisted take on black metal, well then Will Over Matter is his skewed attempt at power electronics, or industrial music, channeling the spirit of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Whitehouse, and all the rest, but filtered through some sort of cracked and damaged blackened Finnish lens.
Will Over Matter combines the stripped down rhythmic minimalism of Ride For Revenge with experimental industrialism, melding lumbering beats to fields of spaced out static, wrapping sheets of Merzbowian noise around shuffling low end thrum and machinelike beats, adding distorted alien vox to squalls of glitched out electronics, or winding multiple streams of electronic information into strangely twisted sonic barrages.
The opening track here is a bizarre soundscape of chittery electronics, of twisted feedback and growled super distorted vocals, pelted by grinding crunch and skittering squelches, a strange array of bleeps and bloops, and buried within, a sort of almost rhythmic bit of ever shifting static, which leads directly into the next track, a droned out stretch of pulsing electronic shimmer, which manages to sound spaced out and sinister at the same time, the tone and timbre switching constantly creating, again, it's own sort of psychedelic rhythm. It's not until "Read The Signs", track number three, that the various elements coalesce into what is really the core of WoM's sound, another fluctuating field of static, of strange space-y electronics, bits of glitch and hiss, but wound around a lumbering, skeletal beat, some sort of alien krautrock, before switching gears, and becoming a weirdly propulsive throbbing electronica, but with elements of kraut/post/space rock, at it's most propulsive sounding a bit like Bastard Noise offshoot and former Record Of The Week-ers Geronimo, and at its least, like nothing you've ever heard before. The track offers up strange electronic squiggles, sinister high end buzz, all in the surface of trailing behind that motorik beat, which itself is in constant flux, cymbals popping out of the mix, processed and all dubby, while the various electronics get more and more tangled and frantic.
Then there's the sprawling 24 minute "Stone Cold Heart", a super spare and abstract stretch of blackened rhythms, and distant buzz and shimmer, that buzz, growing ever more insistent, the vocals here not so distorted, more ominous and intense, intoning some sort of ritual, over what almost sounds like a black metal Pole, minus the barrage of wildly buzzing synths, and primitive analog electronic tones.
One of our favorite tracks is the gorgeously droned out and hypnotic "Forever Nameless" that seems to inadvertently channel John Carpenter and Goblin, into something much more dark and sinister, a totally mesmerizing rhythm, wound up in a thick, corrosive buzzing low end melody, while way off in the distance, a Burzum like synth melody plays out, again reminding us of a less noisy Aluk Todolo, totally hypnotic, the vocals here are almost sung, wrapped in a weird warped distortion, the end result like some sort of doomy drone pop slowcore or something.
Throughout the remainder of these two discs, WoM stretch out strangely stiff rhythms, or pull apart robotic electro beats into weirdly metallic anti-grooves, which unwind lazily beneath hazy streaks of static, creating a series of tarpit crawls, often swallowed whole by heaving walls of electronic sound, that seem to emulate the sheer crumbling power of SUNNO))-like doomdronedirge, but are more often left to pulse, and pound, and throb, a strange alien death march, as the label describes these rituals, each ritual an "epic journey through inner knowledge, lunar madness and cosmic superpowers of satanic possession", the twisted bastard child of some dark forest, outer space ritualized mating of industrial music, black metal, power electronics and krautrock, brilliantly baffling and maddeningly mesmerizing, by now, it should be easy for you to tell if this is your cup of seriously spiked tea or not, and for most of you, we imagine it must be. Fans of Ride For Revenge, Aluk Todolo, Geronimo, Mammal, Bastard Noise, This Heat, spaced out ritualistic blackened electronics and fucked up Finnish weirdness, this one's for you...
Back in 2011, we made Might Of The Planet Eater, the debut from weirdo minimal blackened power electronic one man band Will Over Matter our Record Of The Week. We initially discovered WOM via the fact that the 'one man' behind that one man band, was none other than Harald Mentor, mastermind of aQ beloved Finnish rhythmic black metal minimalists Ride For Revenge, who for some crazy reason, we just realized, have never nabbed Record Of The Week honors, cuz in retrospect, any/all of their previous records were more than deserving.
As we mentioned in our reviews of the other Will Over Matter records, if you thought Ride For Revenge were weird, then prepare theyself to be blown away, baffled, confused, frustrated, thrilled, unnerved, disturbed, most likely all of the above. Will Over Matter takes the dense rhythmic churn, already sort of spaced out and abstract, and replaces the bass and drums and traditional instruments, with what sounds like a battery of cobbled together electronics, home made machines and invented instruments, it's tough not to envision Mentor as some sort of mad scientist, in his murky musical laboratory, surrounded by walls of primitive electronics, old computers, blinking lights, blown speakers, a room full of towering obelisks of obsolete technology, harnessed into something otherworldly, and improbably next level. The sounds these machines emit glitchy and gristly, jagged and hiss-drenched, in some ways the template for WOM is the same as it was for Ride For Revenge, the 'band' locked into simple, lurching, lumbering motorik grooves, the 'beat' wrapped in dense sonic swirls, thick fields of static, everything glitched out and in-the-red. A head spinning sprawl of blackened kraut-noise synth-drone power-electronic minimalism, that RULES. Which brings us to the latest missive from Mentor, which is another psychedelic minimal electro-noise WTF doozy, the vocals kept to a minimum this time, the three lengthy tracks, spaced out and droney, slow shifting layers, constantly morphing textures, pulsing and pulsating, the sounds raw and gristly, the tracks maniacally repetitive and cyclical, in a way that to our ears is total tranced out bliss, but to less adventurous ears, might be just the opposite. The lack of 'song' and 'structure', not that there was that much of either on past WoM release, but even less so here, is precisely what makes Phenomenal Highways a whole different beast, at times, it's like past WoM records stripped down to their very skeletal essence, the opening track some sort of primitive kosmische ritual, a single synth locked and looped into a seemingly endless cycle of simple pulses, weirdly warbly and super distorted, a heartbeat like pulse wreathed in filthy, crusty synth squelch, that squirms and oozes, occasionally shaped into actual melodies, but more often than not droning and buzzing hypnotically, the final few minutes, finds the sounds transformed into weird lazer blast like blurts before suddenly blinking out.
The second track is even MORE minimal, a super spare soundscape that sounds like some mysteriously manipulated alien field recording, something you might here on Editions Mego, a field of crumpled low end crackle, muted and murky, peppered with little bits of percussion, the sound a weird bit of grinding muddy noise, it's not until 7 minutes in that the sound splinters, the background smoothing out into a whirring distorted drone, while Mentor delivers some demonic sermon over the top, his voice processed and doused in distortion, before the track explodes into a field of grinding electronics, tangled melodies, swirling tones, a robotic psych-noise freakout that manages to be more listenable than it has any right to be, a head spinning psychedelic churn that blossom into a final super blown out speaker shredding blowout, before oozing into the final track, a weird shuffling sprawl of rib cage rattling low end, dense subsonic tones delivered through what sounds like slow motion helicopter rotor wash, weirdly rhythmic and mesmeric, this minimal ooze and creep soon joined by strange curlicues of melody, the deep tone gathering all sorts of acoustic crunch as it goes, and once again, about seven minutes in, a super distorted blast of fractured blown out melody surfaces, giving the whole thing a seriously psychedelic vibe, those tones totally overtaking the rest of the sound, before fading out, and returning us to the slow-swell pulsations of the first half, only to fade out into a crackly sprawl of sculpted feedback, wreathed in hiss and hum, the sound smoldering and sinister, draped over a buried barely there rhythm, some echo drenched vocals in there too, everything sort of washed out and blurry, drifting beneath sheets of feedback and fields of staticky hum, all culminating in a final freaked out psych-noise squall, that does little to disguise the haunting melodic beauty that lurks within.
As always, amazing, bizarre and bafflingly brilliant, a dizzyingly abstract, twisted industrial psychedelic drone-noise masterpiece. That is of course also extremely limited...
In case you're unfamiliar with the In The Fishtank Series, here's a brief synopsis, Dutch label Konkurrent invites a pair of touring groups into the studio to spend a couple of days recording whatever they like. Past artists who have accepted the
It's been a while since we've heard from Australian label Hidden Shoal, and just as long since we've heard from SF sound sculptor and dreamdronedrift composer Wes Willenbring, but now that we're all reunited, we can go ahead and gush over yet another fantastic Hidden Shoal release, and another gorgeous disc of ethereal ambience from Mr. Willenbring.
Willenbring is an accomplished pianist and guitarist, and those instruments form the basis of these songs, in some places that's obvious, but in others, the piano and the guitar, or any semblance of either, are blurred, or smeared, or pixelated into hazy clouds of sound, of softly shifting streaks of crystalline shimmer, the guitar often transformed into a buried pulse, the piano into soft focus flurries of barely there melody, at its most diffused and abstract, this is total bleary eyed starlight pop ambience, the sort of hushed orchestral drift that would appeal to fans of other sonic abstractionists like Stars Of The Lid or Tim Hecker or Fennesz. But Willenbring doesn't rely entirely on effects or processing, much of the music here is darkly delicate chamber music, shimmering strings, over pointillist piano, buzzing steel strings unfurling melancholic melodies in slow motion, one note at a time, a sound that's lush and haunting, cinematic and subtly epic.
Totally sublime moody minimalism, a late night moonlit, slip-into-the-ether sort of dreamdrift dronemusic, equal parts gauzy abstraction and languid whispery post rock drift, that is as divine as it is dreamy.
Another dreamy slab of sonic loveliness from Australian label Hidden Shoal (along with the Sankt Otten reviewed elsewhere on this list). We're so psyched to finally have copies of this to list, but it wasn't as simple as just ordering 'em, it took a lot of doing to get these into AQ (or to get them to physically exist at all), what are we talking about? Just read on...
So this has actually happened to us a few times, which either speaks to our naivete, or as we prefer to think a dogged belief in the record album as object, to be held, listened to and loved, and an inability to understand any thoughts to the contrary. Australia's Hidden Shoal Records got in touch with us and was hoping we would check out some of their bands, we did, and got all excited about carrying them at AQ. Until, after we emailed and tried to order some, we were regretfully informed that Hidden Shoal was in fact a digital only label, no lps, no cds, no cassettes, just MP3's. Too bad we thought, as far as we were concerned, though of course we know there are those perfectly happy to download some MP3's. But over the course of many months, and lots of emails back and forth, the label admitted to being interested in actually pressing up cds. We of course encouraged them, because we wanted all our customers to be able to buy and hear this music, but also, because, there's something about the object, the cd or the lp or the 7", the liner notes, looking through the booklet while listening to the music, the feel, even the smell. And sure, it IS all about the music, but that other stuff is part of it too, no matter how much iTunes wants us to think otherwise. Obviously most of you don't need to be told that, otherwise you'd probably not be reading this.
Well, the upshot is, two of our favorite recordings on Hidden Shoal, are now finally available on cd, well, cd-r actually. But they are professionally pressed, with full color artwork, printed artwork on the disc, and heck, we'll take cd-r's over MP3s any day. And lots of you seem to prefer cd-r's anyway...
It's strange that we went through all that, and convinced a label in a far away land, to press cds, so we could finally get copies of a cd by a performer who lives RIGHT DOWN THE STREET from aQuarius, but that's precisely what happened. This disc, and the other Hidden Shoal release by German outfit Sankt Otten, reviewed elsewhere on the list, were hand delivered, by our neighbor, Mr. Willenbring himself. But so what if it wasn't the most direct route, all that work was well worth it.
Willenbring employs a piano and a guitar, but for the most part you'd never know it, as most of the tracks here are huge slow moving sheets of pure sound, blurred and abstract. Even the ones that do start with bits of piano, or offer up bits of strum and twang, gradually become more and more washed out, gorgeous wet windshield smears, sparkling with muted colors, glistening and glimmering, it's the music of light reflecting off wet pavement, the sound of trees heavy with snow and ice, of home movies of long car trips, of out of focus landscapes from the past. Melodies that creep and drift, gradually growing heavier and heavier, the clouds gathering, until it's a slow drive through thick fog, shapes and sounds barely visible. But it's those glimpses of piano, or fragments of guitar that ground the music on Somewhere Someone Else, keep it from being "dronemusic", imbue it with warmth, emotion, hidden melody, dark secrets, the songs may end up adrift on a glimmering black sea, but they began on the shore, within site of home and family, gradually moving farther and farther away, the familiar fading away, slipping slowly into the unknown.
Absolutely gorgeous. Dreamy dark meandering melancholia for fans of Stars Of The Lid, Eluvium, Dead Texan, Tim Hecker, Godspeed and other purveyors of darkly dramatic, abstract moody minimalism...
Hailing from Detroit, 66 year old Andre Williams plays blues based, ruckusy heartfelt drinking music for fans of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mick Collins and the like. This release has noodly guitar leads and old school soul organ. The Lovely Ronnie Spector apears as lead vocalist on one song.
Soul shaking romps from the guy behind "Shake a Tailfeather", but this is a NEW album from 1998, a collaboration with 2 guys from the Gories (including the crossdresser in Demo Dollrods). Very highly anticipated in the indie rock world.
Bad-ass. That's the word Andre Williams' raunchy r&b rock n' roll soul conjures up. Yep, for an old guy, he's bad-ass. Hence all the would-be bad-ass young 'uns eager to help him out on this record, including Jon Spencer & his Blues Explosion, The Cheater Slicks, and The Dirtbombs, The Countdowns, and The Compulsive Gamblers. Plus, Steve Mackay of Stooges' "Funhouse" sax-mania fame makes an appearance. Also of note: nice No Limit/Cash Money rap album parody cover (y'know, that "Pen & Pixel" Photoshop style that every hip hop album cops).
Andre Williams has been making records for over 50 years now -- Wow! Often credited as being the godfather of Rap as his vocal delivery and raw stylings foreshadowed the MC and the birth of hip-hop and beat 'em to the punch by decades. He also of course has always been a serious presence in blues, soul and rock 'n' roll as well. This new release finds his voice still sounding as good as ever and it's an album of seriously solid rhythm and blues. His life's struggles years of hard times are felt in every one of his songs yet through it all you get the feeling that Williams is that rare kind of survivor that will keep playing music till the day he dies. A documentary is set to come out soon on his life & music so hopefully a whole new crowd will discover the man and his music and realize just how much he contributed to music as we know it.
If you've got a soft spot for exceptionally well-crafted charming gentle pop with sensitive lad vocals, here's your (and our) latest crush! Right from the opening track of his debut album Carefree, Devon Williams will surely make you swoon with his sweet boyish demeanor and the comforting sway of the guitars. Most of the songs are quite engagingly reminiscent of the warm jingle jangle of '80s indie pop and the wide eyed innocence of '60s Brill Building pop. Mind you he'll surprise you with little more edge on numbers like "Stephanie City" which some around here thought brought to mind a bit of Pixies. Songs such as those make his recent tour pair-up with Dan Bejar's band Destroyer less of a head scratcher and more of a complementary coupling. Lay on some glorious string embellishments (courtesy of Steve Gregoropoulos of Lavender Diamond) which seemingly alternately inspired by the swirling orchestrations of Flaming Lips and Burt Bacharach, and you've got a breezy summertime keeper!
The composer of the alterna-country hit "Passionate Kisses" is back after long hiatus with new album featuring her trademark rough warble of a voice, which some fans find addictive. Hear why Emmylou Harris considers Lucinda Williams one of country's finest songwriters.
