This latest reissue from the B-Music collective (Andy Votel, Cherrystones etc.) comes from blue-eyed funk-rock outfit Wool. Fronted by Ed Wool and his sister Claudia, Wool's sole 1969 album produced by Margo Guryan (who had just released her own folk-funk record on Bell) is full of the stuff beatheads crave: awesome drum breaks and groovy interludes, which is basically what we have come to expect from this label. Comprised mostly of covers including songs by The Troggs, Neil Diamond, and Big Brother and The Holding Company, Wool reminds us of other 60's female fronted rock acts such as Genya Ravin and Ten Wheel Drive, Cold Blood and Coven. But while those acts often had a couple of good songs and a lot of filler, the songs on Wool are consistently good throughout this record (well, they are mostly covers) culminating in the 10 minute James Brown-inspired "Funky Walk".
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
There's some sort of competition going on in the cassette tape underground. There's nothing new about elaborate packaging, the weirder and wilder and more extravagant the better, but things are getting, well... dangerous.
Recently we reviewed a tape by UK doomlords Moss, each one packaged in a huge metal sculpture, most adorned with nails and chains and gears and all manner of sharp metal bits (don't ask, those are LONG GONE). Somehow though, the packaging fit the music perfectly.
Now we have the latest from the strangely monickered Work/Death, the brilliantly titled Teenage Heavy Metal Revisionism, and the packaging, well, it manages to outdo the Moss in one important way, it's MUCH SHARPER. We mean it, the first time we picked one of these up, we sort of started and dropped it, unprepared were we for the strange sensation of nails on the soft skin of our hands. It's a regular old tape, in a plain old tape case, but each side has a little mini-bed of nails, really sharp nails, tied up tight with twine. Very imposing and threatening looking. And again, somehow, the sharp and twine-y outer shell suits the music within.
A dark, rumbling, scraping and creaking cavernous journey through some post industrial low end wasteland. Sort of ambient, but also brutal, and aggressive, harsh and harrowing. Metallic percussion peppers a snarling swirling black soundscape, streaked with shards of feedback and crumbling black melodies. Thick blown out fuzz churns and roils, as if Wolf Eyes and Black Boned Angel were boiled down and placed in a huge black iron pot to simmer. Or like some sort of caveman Einsturzende... a million black suns slowly dying and spreading out, coating everything in thick, viscous blackness...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We got about 15, and be warned, it's VERY SHARP, so if you do damage to yourself, we are not responsible, and if you order this with other stuff, it will have to be properly padded and secured to keep it from damaging any of the other items in your order, and in some cases that might bump up you shipping a tiny bit, but it's so worth it!
A stark half-toned reproduction of two idealized proletariat workers graces the cover of Work / Death's debut full length album. This along with the stencil text of the album's title gives the impression of this being somewhere not too far from the anarcho-punk of Crass or the sadistic noise of Con-Dom or Grey Wolves. In fact, Work / Death's fizzing synth-drones are far from these grim signifiers. At one time, this Rhode Island one-man band might have abused his audience with sheer hellish miasma. But even though he still uses the self deprecating slogan "garbage in, garbage out" to describe his working process, Tender Comrades is nothing at all of a noise record, creating mesmerizing assemblages of layered static, soft blurry orchestrations of electronics, and sustained drones which come together much closer to the likes of Tim Hecker or Lawrence English than anything previously mentioned.
The album opens with a wispy swirl of aerosolized hiss situated above a Charlemagne Palestine style church organ drone, slipping into an Oneohtrix Point Never melody on the synth presets for horns by the end of this uncannily gorgeous piece. The second track may be more in keeping with Work / Death's earlier compacted noise, with motorized clickings and dampened alarm bells perched upon a carcinogenic hum of MB style sonic rumbling and electro-acoustic brutalism. But the gauzy approach returns on the third through a quiet set of guitar strummings behind another engulfing mass of thickened grey/white noises, with all of the sharp edges burnished off, like a shoegazed approach to noise construction, matching the mood of the plaintive guitar strums. By the album's finale, Work / Death offers something of a post-noise homage to Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon or Jonathan Coleclough's Period, with small clusters of piano hanging on a smoldering backdrop of rasping Brendan Murray-like minimalism. Very nicely done and a quite a nice surprise.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Using a MiniDisc player feeding back upon itself as the sole source, Dion Workman (formerly of the Sonic Youthish avant-rock ensemble Thela with Dean Roberts and Rosy Parlene) and Australian sound artist Rohan Thomas have constructed an incredibly austere piece of digital minimalism that sounds very much like the Bernhard Gunter album "Details Agrandis." An album that tries very hard
All right! More seemingly time-lost but actually quite contemporary psych-rock from the musical wizards that populate Sweden, a mystical land seemingly teeming with talented retro-rockers such as Elope and Dungen. Not only are The Works on the same label as (the now exceedingly and deservedly popular) Dungen, but members of Dungen and The Works have played in each other's bands, one of the Works playing live on tour with Dungen, while Dungen folks guest on this debut cd from The Works. But they don't sound exactly alike, of course -- this is less rustic, less folky than Dungen, more proggy, more bombastic. And The Works sing in English. But there ARE flutes. Along with spacey, symphonic washes of keyboards, organ, and Mellotron. Of course Mellotron. These guys are called The Works after all, and they're not gonna leave out anything that'll give 'em that authentic '60s/'70s psych-prog vibe! They certainly share some influences with Dungen but have other obvious ones of their own as well... listening to this, we mentally checked off the following as probable influences and/or possible comparisons: Pink Floyd, Sgt. Pepper's, Yes, Pugh Rogefeldt, The Who, Olivia Tremor Control, and Radiohead circa OK Computer. The latter especially really seems to surface as the album progresses, actually. We won't say this destroyed us quite like Dungen did, but for a modern day, backwards-glancing psych-prog-pop piece it's quite nice indeed!
"Krautfolk" is what Workshop's music has been called. You're intrigued, aren't ya? Me too. While I haven't heard Workshop's supposed four other albums, this one piqued my attention immediately. It's simply the combination of elements that keeps this
In Europe this record was released on Mouse on Mars' label Sonig, and here it sees light via David Grubbs' Blue Chopsticks imprint. Yay.
Honey Owens is one busy woman. Besides her vocal based drone outfit Valet (whose gorgeous new 7" we reviewed last list), she is also a sometime member of Jackie O Motherfucker, Nudge, Dark Yoga and others, as well as running the kick ass Yarn Lazer cd-r label. Somehow she also manages to record in the duo World, with Adam Forkner, who plays in Yume Bitsu, White Rainbow and with Owens in Dark Yoga. This is the last World release ever apparently, which is sort of too bad since this is the first one we've managed to get a hold of.
Can You Feel It Coming In The Air Tonight? is a collection of sorts, gather up two tracks�originally meant to come out as part of a box set of Portland bands that was eventually scrapped, a 30 minute collaborations with another Portland band called Tres Gone, as well as a handful of unreleased track and remixes. But it hardly matters that this is a collection, as all the tracks here are ghostly and haunting, and all flow together perfectly as if they were written and recorded to be this single suite of music.�
Every track is mysterious and murky, lots of dark shimmer, and fuzzy druggy twang, when there are vocals, they�are smokey and ghostly, or cooed and creepily sexy, the percussion is minimal and as muted and mumbly as the rest of the sounds. Our favorite songs are the ones where the band sound sort of country, incorporating bits of abstract twang into their glacial drift. Like�a way more stoned, spaced out and cough syrupy Red Red Meat all�languid and languorous, stoned and sleepy sounding, or imagine�taking a Souled American record, and spinning it manually on the turntable with your finger as slooooooow as possible,�a gorgeous, dreamlike warble.
Elsewhere the rhythms become more active, and the songs begin to resemble a more soft focus No Neck or Sunburned Hand, all spare and sparse, reverb drenched and, drunken melodies stumble through wide open fields of choral voices, distant drones, everything swirling dizzily, while�in the background crumbling melodies drift in crunchy distorted soundscapes of buzzing and crackling drones, all smeared into traffic-light-through-rainy-windshield blurs. So gorgeous.�
The record finishes off with that 30 minute collaboration with Tres Gone, and combined, the two bands are way more propulsive, adding some more distinct angular distorted guitar and wild skittery free jazz drumming, all tangled and abstract, over a roiling bed of distant industrial whir, and rumbling low end shimmer, the result being some sort super druggy, stumbling outsider free folk acid jazz jam. Cool.
Packaged in an oversized photocopied and hand painted sleeve, with a full color photo. LIMITED TO 120 COPIES!!!
How had we never heard this band before. A Japanoise grind/noise/powerviolence trio, featuring a vocalist and two drummers and that's it. No guitar, no bass, but you might never know it. When we first heard it, we thought it was some super obscure metal band, but knowing it's just drums and vocals makes it even more ridiculous and cool, some track are wild chaotic, near metallic freakouts, others are blurred Merzbow style blowouts, but the vibe/sound is way different, that it's all drums and vocals, there's even shards of squealing feedback, that again give the impression there are guitars, and sometimes the drums are so blown out and distorted, they sounds like blurred buzzing riffage, the vocals too, go from wild Boredoms like yowls, to death metal grunts, to hysterical shrieks, to straight up, face melting white noise. The sound sometimes settling into some weird rhythms, just the drums pounding away, before the sound explodes again into full on noise mode, brutal blurred fury, that manages to remain musical, while destroying your speakers and eardrums. We just might have ourselves a new favorite Japanese band. thanks Ormolycka. And yeah, once again, these tapes are pretty dang LIMITED!!!!!
The digital re-issue of the 1996 super-limited vinyl edition along with new material and bonus tracks. For the most part, murky drones give way to Fahey-esque country picking - fans of Jim O'Rourke or Souled American take note.
Featuring DJ Rhettmatic, mixing Jurassic 5, Mos Def, T-Love, Alkaholiks, Xzibit, Rasco, more.
Another Yoshida prog project!
Haruomi Hosono (Yellow Magic Orchestra) produced this "virtual country" album, that name-checks John Fahey, Leo Kottke, Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, Mississippi John Hurt, Hank Williams and others. Ambient banjo? Another really nice addition to the always-surprising Asphodel roster.
World Standard is a long running "ambient acoustic" project dedicated to the "American primitive spirit" produced by YMO founder Haruomi Hosono and run by Soichiro Suzuki. Windy didn't like this one as much as the last one, which was more sort of dreamy electronica. Volume three utilises guitar, piano, organ, glockenspiel, pedal steel, fiddle, banjo, euphonium, trumpet, saw, ukelele and more. They cover Albert Ayler's 'Ghosts' as well as a handful of 'traditionals'. Not sure how the last 'electronica' record necessarily paid tribute to the primitive American spirit, but this one sure does. The tunes are languid and dreamy, instruments sound warm and gauzy, with summery, back porch melodies and warm swells. Tentatively plucked guitar and loping horns, funereal but sort of hopeful at the same time. World Standard have definitely captured that 'old timey' sound. Think Souled American, Scott Tuma, Calexico, Orso, but with a brass band, some chirping birds, a few electronic tweaks here and there, a flat top barge floating lazily downstream, all day to leisurely strum and pluck and bow, not a cloud in the sky and not a care in the world.
This is the latest release from local black metal tape label Brotherhood Of Light, who have been moving well away from black metal on recent releases, never more so than here, the first we've heard from Worldscape:18, one of a handful of new BoL tapes (the rest are listed in the In Stock Not Yet Reviewed section if you want to take a flyer on any of those) that find the BoL crew exploring all manner of experimental soundscapery, power electronics, harsh (and not so harsh) noise and even techno, ALL of which find their way onto Hunter, a dizzying, constantly shifting sprawl of crumbling drones, blurred damaged loops, corrosive textures, and even some beats!
Hunter starts out in a grey sonic fog, sound a bit like Nurse With Wound doing power electronics
all blown out, decayed sonic detritus, the sort of cool warped sound that makes it hard to figure out if it's meant to be like that, or if it's the batteries dying in your Walkman, either way, it sounds amazing, a churning fractured dronescape, buried melodies and swirling looped samples underneath, sounding a lot like a noisier, more caustic Caretaker, all washed out and woozy.
The sound shifts into dense cascades of melting symphonic swirls, and wild squalls of demonic whispers and fractured psychedelia, again all jumbled and tangled into a swirling chaotic mesmer, harsh in places for sure, but smeared into something less brittle and brutal, and transformed into the sort of soft noise that's totally hypnotic and mesmerizingly tranced out.
We were settling in for a long sprawl of droned out zoner drift, when BAM, the sound splinters, and then explodes into a sort of killer distorto house music, blown out and super aggressive, like a jacked up Silent Servant, laced with all sorts of strange sci-fi bloops and bleeps, spacey melodies, wreathed in sheets of thick blacknoise thrum, pounding malevolently, total blackened dancefloor destruction for sure. That beat soon disappears in a cloud of staticky white noise, before devolving into a cool, slithery downtempo groove, all slowed down vocals, roiling looped rhythms, again all wreathed in gristly buzz, and drifting atop a bed of rumbling thrum. Haunting minor key melodies surface, again transforming the sound into something hauntingly beautiful, the beats still throbbing down in the murk, sounding a bit like a demonic lo-fi Boards Of Canada, sort of. All before another barrage of noise swallows the proceedings whole, and spews out an entirely different set of gnarled beats, monstrous vokill bellows, and swirling kosmische synth melodies, buried beneath layer upon layer of black noise buzz. And so it goes. A twisted sort of electronic noise record, fused to old school hardcore techno, woven into a beat driven chunk of psychedelic post industrial power electronics, and filtered through a damaged floorcore harsh noise combo, and the result might just be one of our favorite BoL releases yet!
Come the Thaw is the brand new 2nd album from San Francisco's female fronted gothic downer doom trio Worm Ouroboros, which now features Aesop Dekker (Agalloch, Ludicra, Hickey) on drums, as well as bassist/guitarist/cover artist Lorraine Rath (The Gault, Amber Asylum) and guitarist/vocalist Jessica Way (World Eater). We really liked WO's self-titled 2010 debut, also on cult metal label Profound Lore, and are finding that this new one is just as dreamy and depressive, pretty and portentous as before, another slow-moving slab of their "4AD doom" stylings, with ethereal female vocals once again gently hovering over sparse, serene, sorta post-rock soundscapes. The metal factor is actually LESS evident than on their debut; while a few parts do get momentarily heavy with the guitars, it's mostly rather restrained in that regard, or at least seems to be, Worm Ouroboros channelling the likes of Dead Can Dance even more than before. Which is, really, quite nice. And somber, and hushed, and blissful...
On Profound Lore, which has developed quite the reputation as an interesting metal label across several genres ('tis always worth listening to what they deem worthy of release, we'd say) comes the debut from Worm Ouroboros, a Bay Area based trio that notably includes singer/bassist Lorraine Rath formerly of blackened gothic doomsters The Gault (also ex-Amber Asylum). The trio is completed by guitarist/vocalist Jessica Way and drummer Justin Green, who both play in a crusty death-doom metal act called World Eater.
Although Worm Ouroboros has its doomy aspects, it's pretty far from crusty, or even often metal, really! The music on this disc is really mostly quite gentle, with hushed lovely vocals and somnolent instrumental atmospheres. It's all vaguely medieval (in a folky, not metal way) and meditative, dark and dreamy, though these songs do have post-rock style loud-soft dynamics, allowing for some heavy distorted doom riffage to kick in occasionally, and always majestically. Much of the time, though, Worm Ouroboros is all about the interweaving of delicate drifting guitar, clean female vocals (the two ladies in the band sometimes sing harmonies), poetic lyrics, and restrained drumming.
When we first put this on, it started off in that near ambient ethereal mode, and we were thinking, hmm, hope this doesn't turn out to be boring, or too "Lilith Fair", but pretty soon we were thoroughly entranced, it's total ear candy that compels repeat spins. It flows beautifully, whether mellow or more "metal", and even when the waters are churned by heavier guitar/drums passages the mood still remains calm, soothing somehow. Never headbanging, maybe head-cradling though, face in hands, weeping, perhaps from sadness, perhaps from joy...
Slow and sinuous, this sometimes reminds us of forgotten Finnish art-metal act Decoryah from the '90s (which is strange, since they were so unique we're rarely reminded of 'em, in fact, haven't even thought of them for ages, heck now we're gonna go put a Decoryah cd on!). To mention some perhaps better known bands that this also evokes, in ways, at times: Katatonia, Isis, Amber Asylum, Sigur Ros, Hammers Of Misfortune, and of course The Gault... So, can we call it gothic downer doom rock folk prog? Yes indeed. There's even a bit of flute (helping to make the heaviness of the epic 11 minute "Riverbed" be even more progged out), and magically tinkling glockenspiel! Most definitely, another unusual winner (as far as we're concerned) from Profound Lore.
Here's something we've been meaning to list for a long time... since, oh, about 1995! 'Cause while we've reviewed a LOT of things on our site, somehow we haven't reviewed everything. So more than once in a while, we like to write up an old fave that we haven't actually ever listed before - often something that kinda predated our doing of "the List". Like this, which came out in '95. Turns out the distributor we got it from originally still had some copies in stock, and we figured that lots of you might not have come across this before. Plus, c'mon, how could we pass up finally having a band called WORMDOOM in our catalog?
However, it's not the usual doom metal fare like you might be expecting. Instead Wormdoom are, uh, fake Christian '70s heavy psych! Well, fake's not quite the right word (though these guys and gal probably aren't actually all that Christian). But they're not really trying to fool anyone about actually being from the '70s, either, we mean. That's just their inspiration, the Wormdoom concept, totally going for an apocalyptic Jesus freak "holy fuzz" vibe. The artwork is right on, the cover reminding us of some private press krautrock rarities (not necessarily Christian but apocalyptic anyway, like Necronomicon and Gravestone's Doomsday). Not only does it have the look, they've got the sound down too, as well they should since Wormdoom was comprised of folks with great record collections, members of a bunch of other great, totally freaky bands that were all part of the the whole genius drugged out Twisted Village scene of the early '90s. On guitars, Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar from Crystallized Movements, Magic Hour, Vermonster, B.O.R.B. aka Bongloads Of Righteous Boo! On bass, Tom Leonard of Luxurious Bags (and also Vermonster, B.O.R.B.). On drums, Joe Malinowski (Vermonster). And of course, Wayne, Kate & Tom are all currently still slinging axes and kicking out the jams in Major Stars.
So, no surprise Wormdoom are willing and able to deal out the full on distortodelic acid guitar splurt like it was gifted to them from on high! Their garagey protometalgrindboogie is actually waaaay more extreme than anything really from the '70s, nothing back then sounded quite this crazed (did it?). With trashcan drumming, tons o' distortion n' noise, and glossolalia-like vocal babble on a couple tracks ("The Gift Of The Tongues" parts 1 and 2, natch - everythin' else is all instrumental), they woulda however fit in sonically pretty darn well on one of them classic PSF Tokyo Flashback comps, were they Japanese. Heck, some of this would fit in on a Butthole Surfers album. Of all the Twisted Village bands, Wormdoom is by far the heaviest.
And, underneath it all, they manage some damn catchy hooks, the wham-bam 2:21 title track ferinstance definitely boogie-ing its way into your brain until the Rapture, at least. They also sprawl out with some extended jams too, as you might expect from this bunch, proving that you don't need drugs, just Jesus to get you high. We'll put "Jesus" in quotes, though.
This, by the way, was Wormdoom's only album, besides this they managed a live 7" and a comp track and that's about it, which is as it should be, since if they really WERE an early '70s Jesus rock band, they wouldn't have left behind much more than that for collectors to discover years later, would they? Praise the Lord, they let it all hang out here.
15 years after this came out (and, like, 40 years after it -looks- like it came out), it still seems like we're approaching the Last Days don't it? So, if you missed this before, repent ye sinners, Wormdoom saves! Amen.
Interplanetary cosmic space-slamz? Hyperwarp tech-death cyborgization? Computronic brutality from the event horizon? Surely aQuarius of all places would champion these genres, if they were real. Luckily, Spain's Wormed invented all of them! Their third album, and somehow the first we've reviewed, Krighsu, explores a distant future where the last human lineage seeks to save the universe from destructive nanomachines. The music to accompany the story is easily the most over-the-top, hyperspeed, mind-meltingly technical brutal death slamz you will hear between now and the distant cyberfuture. Somehow, Wormed are indeed humans, and how humans created these sounds is beyond us. So deep into the abysss of mechanized brutal death metal that it will surely appeal to people who don't normally dabble with the gore-obssessed simpletons that they would otherwise avoid. Top notch stuff!
We don't see a whole lot of music from Singapore come through here, the most recent was the dark psychedelic folk of the Observatory, and then all the way on the other end of the spectrum are these guys, Wormrot, also from Singapore, but whose sound is a furious blasting downtuned metallic grindcore that SLAYS. Think Insect Warfare, Nasum, that sort of hyperspeed fury. Released last year, on a tiny indie label in Singapore, it didn't take long before heavy music freaks caught on, many declaring Wormrot's Abuse THEE grind record of last year. Which caught the ear of one of the original grind labels Earache, who swooped in and reissued Abuse with a whole bonus disc of demos (34 tracks!).
So here it is, and holy shit does this smoke. We try really hard to convert people to the way of the grind. No reason folks who love black metal and death metal and all sorts of heaviness shouldn't also be into grind, it's fast and furious and technical and super intense, brutal as fuck, more political, more sonically raw, and feral, we've raved about Discordance Axis, Brutal Truth, AKBK, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Gridlink, Nasum, Pig Destroyer, Unholy Grave and loads more, and Wormrot fit pretty perfectly amidst such esteemed grind royalty. Their sound fast and frantic, the drums insanely intense and technical, the guitars gnarled and frantic, the dueling vox, guttural grunt and inhuman shriek, wrapped around frenetic super convoluted complex blasts of metallic fury, that blaze at lightning speed one second, churn and chug the next, flipping from tempo to tempo, lots of super dynamic start stops, killer riffs, little chunks of classic metal laced into insectoid buzzing and blasting pummel, 23 songs in less than 22 minutes, but about a million parts and a billion riffs, putting most bands 10 minute epics to shame in less than a minute. And if that wasn't bad ass enough, these guys even do a Yeah Yeah Yeah's cover, and DESTROY IT. Easily one of our favorite grind records of the last few years, and we urge anyone who has been grindshy, to check this shit out, hard to imagine you won't be converted.
And while they last, the cd version (not the lp, sorry) of Abuse includes a second disc, Extra Abuse, 34 demo tracks, alternate versions of some of the songs proper, but a mess of otherwise unreleased stuff too.
Record number two from these Singaporean grinders, and it's just as fierce and furious as their first. In fact, in some ways it might be even MORE so. Twenty five songs crammed into eighteen minutes, most of the songs between 30 and 45 seconds (a couple 5 seconds or less!), which is plenty of time for these guys to blast out some tangled super frenzied riffing, and some INSANE lightning fast drumming, the vocals a maniacal shriek, and unlike lots of grind, much of the riffing here sounds VERY metal, not so much punk, but actual metal riffery, just sped WAY up, these micro metal epics that SLAY. No wacky covers like the on their first record where they did a Yeah Yeah Yeahs tune, instead, just a relentless blast of grinding metallic fury, with many of the tracks slowing down for some serious chuggery, before exploding in another head shearing blast of blurred brutality. AND unlike a lot of grind, these songs are surprisingly catchy, with some seriously killer riffs, which makes this way more listenable than lots of similar stuff, but somehow, no less heavy and brutal and badass.
We realize that lots of folks might have only recently discovered aQuarius, and may have missed out on lots of past favorites we consider essential listening. Many of those same people may not relaize that our very own Andee runs the tUMULt label, on which some of our all time favorite records have been released. Since the world has finally caught on, caught up and plain old caught a serious case of Finnish fever (Circle, Avarus, Anaksimandros, Islaja, Kemiallisett Ystevat, etc.) we figured it was high time to re-list this slab of beautiful brutality, from mighty and mysterious outfit, Worms:
Will Finland never cease to surprise us? How can one tiny country continue to produce so much progressive, transgressive, creative and fucking perfect experimental rock? Circle, Keuhkot, Avarus, Anaksimandros, Mieskuoro Huutajaat, Pharoah Overlord, Ektroverde, Skepticism, Kemialisett Ystavat, and now Worms!
The Worms may be new to us (and actually to most people in Finland, surprisingly) but they have been a fixture of the Finnish underground for over a decade. And even after a decade, their entire recorded output consisted of three 7" singles and a few compilation tracks. So Andee's tUMULt label managed to track down the band, and discovered that they actually recorded a full length a few years back, but the label that was supposed to release it dropped the ball.
So here it is finally and man is it something. Five tracks of beautiful brutality. A dark and wintry, more motorik My Bloody Valentine, mixed with a little Circle and a little Filth-era Swans. Or some Frankensteinian dirge rock band, equal parts Godflesh, My Bloody Valentine, the Shadow Ring, and the Swans.
The disc starts off with a massive 30 minute medley, a droning hypnotic dirge, like Terry Riley composing for Godflesh or the Melvins and not a little reminiscent of Dutch riff gods Gore. Endless and hypnotic, crushing and brutal. The next three tracks display Worms more melodic side, letting a little pop shine through, with lilting vocals and darkly melancholic melodies and frontman Veli Pesonen's deep Michael Gira like drawl intoning simple mantra-like lyrics, over jangly strummed riffs, more melodic maybe, but still drone-y and hypnotic and dreamy. Think late era Swans, or maybe the Terminals, or the Clean, that sort of dreary, jangly New Zealand rock. The twenty minute 'Border' closes proceedings with a glorious din of shimmering but harrowing guitars, buried melodies and relentlessly propulsive rhythms. This was a long time coming, but once you hear it you'll agree it was well worth the wait. Definitely for fans of all the above mentioned bands as well as connoisseurs of drone/dirge/doom. Crushingly beautiful. And of course essential.
When we first heard about Worms Of Sabnock, a grim TRUE black metal band from the UK, they were being touted as sounding exactly like Nattens Madrigal-era Ulver, which it ended up was not actually all that accurate, but what they did end up sounding like was even more exciting. There are definitely some of those elements present, super brittle buzzing insect-like riffing, thrashing broken bone blast beats, but the vocals are much more over the top, a growly shriek much closer to Cradle Of Filth's Dani Filth. In fact the band has quite a bit of overblown instrumental bombast also quite reminiscent of the Filthies. Big washes of keyboards, weird haunting clean vocal croon, and angelic female choral parts. But the best part would have to be the flute. That's right, the FLUTE. We almost fell out of our chairs when this flute came swooping in, fluttering and flitting over a grinding blasting black buzz, so totally unlikely, but so fucking perfect.
Farther into the record it gets even stranger, with several lilting tranquil folk interludes, rife with dreamy flute and softly strummed acoustic guitar, some blown out droney murky sort-of-post-rock with sweetly crooned clean vocals, almost chant like, mixed in with streaks of utter grim blackness. Definitely a confusional mix, but it somehow works. A tripped out, grim and frosty, psychedelic black metal journey through a world of Worms and Dark Harmonies. With flutes!!
Super over the top packaging, with the band sporting seriously gruesome corpsepaint, splattered with blood and festering wounds, one band member is even sporting horns that appear to have pushed messily through the front of his head, streams of blood pouring into his eyes. Cool.
It doesn't really get any more METAL than this. Wormsblood. Killer name. Wicked illegible logo, the band name written out in the black roots of some hellish plant. Over a black and white photocopied canyonscape. Epic and windswept, snow covered and GRIM. The man behind Wormsblood is Wyrdskull, and to the black cause he contributes "common ritual tools, heavy-handed electro-overblood, vibrations of the unsilent dark tomes and the crossing of song and siege." Guests include Crimson Maaritkitaka who delivers "cryptwyrm bloodlet and akashic magnet", Vragknacht The Two-Handed, who offers up "battle-ready bloodsong", then the song titles: "Thundercall", "The First Dim Shinings (Of Those About To Awaken", "Ritual Of Bone And Horn", "Tolling Beyond Our Lunar Trance", plus they do a Manilla Road cover, "Street Jammer" and they even offer up a hearty "Hails to the fucking Mad Street Hammers".
But for all the pure troo metal action, the sound is anything but, which is most likely due to the fact that Wormsblood is very likely made up of folks from the free noise / freak folk scene, who in Wormsblood finally get the opportunity to indulge in their darker musical side, to touch that blackened part of their music soul, to unleash all those pent up demonic forces, and the result is a dizzying confusional blast of chaotic, lo-fi, muddled and muddy, freaked out and blown out, damaged what-the-fuck blackened METAL.
The closest comparison we could come up with is probably a black metal Faxed Head, which is pretty much all we'd need to hear. The vibe is definitely similar, the riffs a garbled buzzing mess, thick swaths of weird keyboard, the drums splattery and stumbling and blasting, the tape hiss, and random instrument buzz as much a part of the sound as the bands damaged black roar, then there are the vocals, hysterical shrieks, rumbling grunting moans, haunted howling, the tracks often crumbling into utter disarray, or coalescing into epic doomy pound, everything drenched in malfunctioning electronics and fried FX.
An absolutely dementedly genius fucked up black metal noiserock melt down. Packaged in a super strange fold over plastic sleeve, with multiple printed inserts, and most likely crazy limited...
A couple years ago we reviewed an obscure, DIY cd-r release, In The Stars, by this band Wormsblood. As you might guess from their name, they're an underground black metal free noise new weird America psych folk cd-r band... oh wait you might not guess that. But you'd get the idea this is something dark and strange and evil, right? Not some normal indie rock band that's for sure. And you know this, if you remember our review of that previous release. So, band leader Wyrdskull (an alter ego of Clay Ruby from freak folksters Davenport and psych doomsters Jex Thoth, we have reason to believe) and cohorts are back with a new release, an actual cd this time, though the music is still way DIY and lo-fi (like we like it!), consisting of three "demo" sessions recorded between 2004 and 2008. Though without that info you wouldn't know this wasn't conceived as all one album. Ten tracks total, about 38 minutes of very, very fucked up "metal". Like, if Ariel Pink did even -more- drugs and then tried to produce a black metal album. Or, imagine a black metal Faxed Head (as we said about 'em before). It's that weird, that WRONG. And thus damn right in our ears. 'Cause if we know anything, we know our fucked up black metal. Dead Reptile Shrine, Varghkogargasmal, Vorak, Dead Raven Choir's Cask Strength stuff, old Necrofrost, Wold, etc., this fits right in, not that it really fits in anywhere.
The disc starts off with the amazing/retarded "Fragments Of The Witch" which will either convince you this is the best thing you've heard since you played the Weakling album backwards through a malfunctioning Kaoss pad while screaming at the top of your lungs, or convince you to turn it off. Obviously, we're part of the former camp. A murky, palpitating admixture of primitive, clanking rhythms, truly over-the-top gargled and anguished kokills, dim distorted guitar riffs and woozy synths dealing out Skeptical doom plod. All of it mired in an echoey, almost dubby "production". The next track, "Hollow Cost Nothing", ups the ante with even more majestic, messed up melodies. It dawns on us that whomever is on guitar can really play. Somehow this makes Wormsblood sound even more insane. It also suggests that maybe one way to look at this isn't as an attempt at making tr00 cvlt black metal primitivism, but rather as simply a very, very, VERY damaged version of traditional '80s heavy metal (and we recall they did do a Manilla Road cover on the In The Stars cd-r)...
Then, there's a track that also appeared on that cd-r,"The First Dim Shinings (Of Those About To Awaken)", which takes a turn into ritualistic ancient folk musick, with a military snare and Muppet-on-meth vocals. It's like Ghost meets Abruptum. Or ESP-Disk's Cromagnon gone metal. That's followed by "Sig Bind", which begins with abstract, Jewelled Antler-y atmospheres before erupting with high-end guitar neck strangle, kind of like a Kemialliset Ystavat meets Krallice mashup. By the end of this track, it's a madhouse of maniacal voices, harshing the mellow with which it began. And on it goes, this disc of demos delving backwards in time, the recordings getting boombox-ier and buzzier, the songs even less songlike and more soundscapey if possible. "Goodnight" opens a can of that Striborg-style aersol spray, a grim sonic mist of vibrating electric strings and hissing exhalations. "Obsessed By The Bloodstone" (is that shout-out to cult pulp fantasist Karl Edward Wagner?) is an ambient piece for keyboard - and barking dog! And then sometimes, they get it together for an extended spasm of, uh, song, full of high pitched singing/shrieking and chaotic drums/guitars.
Now, you might be thinking, there's other black metal releases on this week's AQ list. Yet this is the only one we chose as a Record Of The Week. Does that mean it's BETTER than those other black metal albums? Better than Ayat, or Moloch, or Nav, or the new Satyricon, for example? Well, no, not exactly. But we're not judging this purely as a black metal release. We figured this was something that AQ customers into any sort of bizarre, fucked up music (many of whom love black metal, to be sure) would find intriguing. 'Cause as metal as this is (and it IS, really metal, if you listen close) it's equally something else entirely. There's whole passages of "music" here that sound more like that fake field recordings disc Jurassic Soundscapes, but with lonely werewolves wandering around in the prehistoric swamps. And drugged up pterodactyls swooping about overhead. Wormsblood's sound is as much recognizable metallic instrumentation (guitars, drums, vocals) as it is wyrd sound FX and destroyed noise, rustlings and clankings and howlings.
As befits this music, this comes packaged in black and white and grey, bearing disturbing, fantastical, hellish yet cartoonish line drawings that look a bit like Mike Diana's notorious art... get the LP if you want to study the drawings in detail.
It had been ages since we last heard from these North Western crusty doomcore punx, when suddenly out of the blue, a brand new record surfaced a few months back, and completely kicked our asses. A monstrous slab of downtuned tribal sludge falling somewhere between Eyehategod and Neurosis, but with keyboards, and lots of tribal drumming.
So here we have a brief double 7" follow up to Starvation, and it's just as great, mixing heaping doses of churning low end guitar, dense tangled drumming, throbbing bass, harsh crusty vocals and of course, tons of keyboards. The result is some impossible mix of Crash Worship, Neurosis, Eyehategod and black metal. Might sound like it wouldn't work but it does. The A side here begins with a blackened drum circle, toms everywhere, swirling rhythms underpinning crumbling slabs of distortion and wild squealing feedback, all wrapped in layers of epic keyboards, a gorgeous super cinematic crusty metallic version of Godspeed maybe. The other three sides continue in a similar fashion, albeit a bit more 'rocking', with strangely mathy rhythms, simple pounding drums, some of the filthiest and sludgiest distorted guitars, and lots of creepy creepy melodies.
Packaged in a gorgeous diecut fold out thick maroon sleeve, printed in black and metallic gold ink. So nice.
Pounding, ugly, crusty doomcore from this Seattle metal band, mastered by Steve Austin of Today Is The Day (not that it matters terribly much who masters something, but Mr. Austin's name will give you an idea where these folks are coming from). Other hints:
We only really started getting into Wormwood in the last few years, a shame really as they've been at it since 1997, and have now, after 11 years, decided to hang it up. Commemorated by this 7", which is all the more sad, cuz it's fucking awesome.
The A side begins all tribal drumming, and crunchy detuned guitars, creepy buzzing synths and howled almost yelped vocals, crushing and dirgey and hypnotic and like a lot of Wormwood stuff heavily indebted to Neurosis and the other band of that time and scene. But the B side is THE jam. A furiously fierce slab of lurching stop start slow motion power violence. The drums and guitar locked into a stuttery abstract non-groove, the vocals howling along, getting into some serious Harvey Milk territory almost, feedback ringing out in the pauses a la Eyehategod, one of those parts that must make lesser bands weep openly, but it is Wormwood, so of course, they manage to confound, by switching gears partway through, and unfurling something more melodic, with some surprising female vocals, which give the track a strange sort of Viking black metal vibe. And then it's done. We'll miss 'em, but these two tracks are definitely a perfect so long and fuck off. And if you somehow missed their Starvation record, pick it up, you do not know what you've been missing.
Incredible packaging! Metallic silver ink on thick black cardstock, lyrics printed on the inside in some cool mysterious font, a full color photo affixed to the front with those antique photo corners, each one hand numbered, inside a thick cardstock insert, also printed in silver, with another full color photo affixed to it, the whole thing is super striking.
LIMITED TO ONLY 300 COPIES.
We reviewed the first Wormwood record ages and ages ago. At the time we described them as sounding like " Eyehategod with keyboards, a black metal Neurosis, a nastier, less spaced-out Tarantula Hawk..." Reading that just now only reminded us just how much we dug these guys. So where the heck have they been? Well, if this new record is any indication, they've been holed up in some black cave somewhere (one equipped with a jam pad and a recording studio) getting weirder, more fucked up and even better that they were before.
Eyehategod and Neurosis are definitely huge influences, but the band has gotten even slower and dirgier, and it definitely suits them. Take EHG and Neurosis, but toss some Corrupted, some Asunder, even some Isis into the mix, and you'll be getting close. But then there's keyboards, ALL OVER THE PLACE. And they're not subtle or minimal, they're just not used for ambience, they are psychedelic and proggy and give the proceedings a definite psychprog black metal vibe. Weird. But so cool. Take some super heavy, murky crusty epic metal, howled vocals, wild drumming, bombastic and ultra pummeling, then add in the keyboards, break it down every once in a while into some super tripped out psychedelic passages, where the keyboards hit prog overload and the drums get all tribal. Sort of Neurosis meets Cradle Of Filth? Whatever it is it's cool.
But the second lp is where stuff gets really good. Side three is almost entirely taken up by "No True Altruism", an epic dirge of haunted house cinematic doom, or something, it sounds like Corrupted channelled through Goblin, slow and lumbering with bursts of sludgy pummel, blasts of double kick drumming, grinding overblown bass, absolute horror movie prog sludge nirvana.
Side 4 is all a single track, a mind blowing coda to a record that was already pretty brain melting, "Gluttony" is a massive chaotic dubbed out whirl of what-the-fuck sonics and processed sludge weirdness. It sounds like a remix, sort of, with huge walls of backwards guitars, garbled backwards vocals, weird processed rhythms, bits of Terminal Cheesecake, Butthole Surfers all whipped into a maelstrom of Corrupted meets Teenage Filmstars sonic fuckery, but still murky and muddy and impossibly doomy. Wow.
There will be a cd release of this eventually, but it definitely sounds like it was made to be a double lp, with disc one being the more black psych sludge rock, the second disc the sludgey tripped out doom. Either way, awesome!
Packaged in a killer, super thick gatefold sleeve, with creepy cool artwork and lyrics and liner notes inside. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each copy hand numbered!
Worship (not to be confused with the infamous doom outfit) are a new mysterious group who've just released their debut cd-r. Definitely for fans of Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice and the Jewelled Antler folks. At times, their shape-shifting, ultra minimal swamp twang is so barely there, it's phantom-like. You feel a presence, more than hear one. Note: this first pressing is limited to 100 hand numbered cd-rs.
Debut full length from these East Bay doomlords, who once featured our very own Andee behind the kit! It's three tracks 43 minutes, of slow building, brooding, emotional, classic epic doom, the emotion mostly due to the vocals, way up in the mix, a cool sort of John Garcia (Kyuss) / Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) hybrid, moaning and mewling during the slow post rocky parts and howling and wailing during the churning chug of the more doomy parts.
Surprisingly catchy and hooky, Worship Of Silence minus the vocals might slip into something more sludgey and ultra dooooooom, but the vocals transform this into something much more accessible, this sounds like a slight, but it's totally not, it really wouldn't be that weird to hear this stuff on some super progressive alternative / metal radio station. It's the Soundgarden vibe, it's hard to avoid, but fuck it, why bother, we all love Soundgarden, so imagine Cornell and company trading in their Zep worshipping grunge, for sprawling epic downtuned doomscapes, with cool swirling riffage, wild tribal drumming, long expanses of shimmery drift, a definite prog element too, as during lots of the slow brooding tribal parts, the band definitely dip into Tool territory, which makes for an awesomely hooky, catchy, but still crushing and epic post-doom. And it's not just the vocals, the riffs and the arrangements are awesome, well crafted, channeling the sound of old school classic doom, but twisting it into something much more modern and polished, eminently headbangable, but definitely a little progged out and catchy as fuck. We're definitely digging this big time.
So somber and emotive, Worthington craft slow country-tinged songs for you to unwind to. Imagine 10,000 Maniacs fronted by a male singer and joined by Guided By Voices later in the album, and you might have an inkling of Worthington's warm, moody sound. He Was Not A Micromanager is an impressive sophomore release, definitely infused with a well-worn ease and confidence. Beautifully packaged in an intricately folded screenprinted cardboard sleeve (which sadly didn't scan very well so our website pic won't do it justice).
Ah ha ha ha ha! Triumphant battle-metal will never die!! Hahahaha! Gird your loins and steel your sinews and be ready to wet your sword or axe in bloody red gore, for it is Wotan who approacheth at whatever maximum volume decibel level you can conjure from your stereo, and Wotan are majestic and mighty and take no prisoners. Unlike most European "power metal", and certainly unlike most Italian power metal, Wotan's heavy metal is raw and heavy and underground, and boasts a biting guitar tone that will kill poseurs (and wimpy power metal popsters) dead. Plus, the vocals that aren't bad for an Italian (if you listen to much Italian power metal you know what we mean). They are super dramatic, though, so you have to be partial to such theatrics. Wotan's unashamed worship of Manowar pays off because this isn't jokey, they're really feeling it... and maybe can make you feel it too (it worked on us, as the beginning of this review proves). Though doubtless laughable to many, the few and proud will loft Wotan to the pantheon already occupied by such acts as Doomsword, Solstice, Brocas Helm, Sacred Steel, Thunderstorm, and Slough Feg...
The power of gloom and doom!! And the glory! It's all on full display here, yes indeed, as rolling waves of doomed out, fuzzed filled riffage emanate from this, the latest slab of slow and low heavosity from the UK's epic doom mongers The Wounded Kings. Ahhh, the sound of overdriven vintage tube amps! With occasional atmospheric embellishment from sad acoustic guitar and church organ keyboards when they want to indulge their more proggy and introspective inclinations (as on the moody interlude "Space Conqueror" for instance).
To top it off, The Wounded Kings' generals are gathered in their masses like witches at black masses by the commandingly creepy, husky and haunting vocals of Sharie Neyland, who initially stepped up to the mic on The Wounded Kings' previous album, In The Chapel Of The Black Hand. Now fully integrated into the band and their writing process, she's an even more crucial presence this time. Imagine a Jex Thoth who's lived the life of Ozz, doing drugs and drink, biting bats and doves, having visions. Or, Mark "The Shark" Shelton of Manilla Road, with a sex-change. Or, hopefully you've heard that Darkscorch Canticles compilation of '70s proto-metal we made Record Of The Week recently - specifically, you know the track "Warlord" by the band Wrath, with the girl singing who sounds like brainwashed cultist? 'Cause we think Neyland sounds kinda like her, but all growed up, even more certain in her beliefs, her voice aged deeper and dronier. It's a weird, wicked, wailing warble, enhanced by effects, that incredibly suits the hypnotically stretched-out Sabbath/Vitus sludge of The Wounded Kings.
'Tis true, female-fronted occult rock and doom acts are quite thick on the ground these days, it's kind of the in thing, many of them quite good (Blood Ceremony, Purson, the aforementioned Jex Thoth, etc.). If we now count The Wounded Kings as part of that scene, they still stand apart, sounding "old" but not "retro", if that makes sense, and also being so much HEAVIER than most. Their closest competition would probably be the mighty Windhand, but Windhand generally doesn't have "clean" vocals, so that's a big difference. Besides, we figure that The Wounded Kings, who originally had a male vocalist, hired on Neyland not 'cause they just wanted a "female singer" but because they wanted HER unique vocals, sounding like a witness to the abyss, so synergistic with their preexisting epick aesthetic.
Once again, a success, from one of the best in the realm of the oh so gloriously doomy and gloomy.
Wow, what a surprising piece of downer metal artistry from a band we'd never heard of before! Though, we were curious about 'em 'cause this, their debut, is one of the first two releases from the new Eichenwald Industries imprint, which is closely related to the limited edition Paradigms label, who have put out a lot of cool stuff you probably have. On this, the Dartmoor, UK duo known as The Wounded Kings play classic, epic, dark doom metal (a la Sabbath) with an especially druggy, spaced out, very psychedelic vibe. The very first, and title track, sets the tone, being a three-part suite beginning with some proggy organ drone... soon joined by funeral paced, fuzzed-out guitar... and cleanly sung, eerie echo-effected vocals with a melancholic, Ozzyish croak to 'em. The album continues with much more in the way of morose heaviness, epic-ness, and ambience, full of the sort of sludgy riffs we like, having quite a haunted, occult vibe.
This should appeal to fans of both Electric Wizard and Witchcraft. Clearly their record collections include a lot of '70s psych and possibly also Italian prog too... there's hints of Goblin going on here with the organ and all. We might also cite Trouble, very early Cathedral, Fall Of The Idols, Wizar'd, Solstice, Reverend Bizarre, and early Candlemass (Epicus Doomicus era)... the obscure Detroit '80s act Coven too if you've ever heard them... all could be referenced to describe The Wounded Kings' somber sound. Definitely some recommended, traditional (but not too traditional) DOOM here, folks!
Bow down doom hounds, the third full-length opus of spaced out sludge trudge from these British heavies is here! In most respects, exactly as expected, slow and low and psychedelic. But, they've changed up one (big) thing. Get this: in our review of their previous disc, The Shadow Over Atlantis, we suggested that the many fans of their labelmates Jex Thoth might dig the The Wounded Kings too, due to similar sonics and aligned atmospherics. Well, now that's even more the case, as on this album suddenly the Kings have a female singer, a la Jex Thoth! Not sure why they made this move (the popularity of Jex Thoth, The Devil's Blood, Blood Ceremony, et. al. in the "New Wave Of Female Fronted Occult Metal" trend couldn't possibly be the reason, could it?) but it was a good one, really. Not that we didn't like their original singer (former bassist George Birch, now out of the band) but we're really digging new singer Sharie Neyland's haunting, yet commanding, presence on this platter. Also, it makes perfect sense, considering that The Wounded Kings already had the spooky-proggy organ sound of Italian horror movie scores as a big influence upon their sound. Female vox fit in quite well with that vibe, and, as those other aforementioned bands also have demonstrated, sound good in conjunction with dirgey, lumbering, Sabbath-derived riffage.
And they're not just "female vox" anyway, there's an eccentric personality here. With her wavery, witchy, fairly low for a female voice, Neyland sounds something like a weird hybrid of Jex Thoth and Manilla Road's Mark "The Shark" Shelton... really! Now that's cult. Take that voice and let it range o'er epic effected hypnotic heaviness along the lines of early Cathedral or Electric Wizard (with a dash of Blizaro), and you've got In The Chapel Of The Black Hand.
So. Not just another Wounded Kings album (though that would have been fine too) but one that stands apart, if not above. Phantasmagorically recommended.
We described this British doom duo's debut in 2008 as being Sabbathy doom metal with a particularly druggy, spaced-out vibe... well they've returned and are even more druggy and spaced-out than before! This isn't doom that crushes you (though they can get quite heavy) but rather doom that envelops you, doom you sink into... like the warm embrace of sleep - or like Atlantis sinking into the ocean, the mythic cataclysm about which it appears this is a concept album (that's doom!). Thus, 'tis dark, majestic, mournful. With that mood in mind, the cover art and font used really capture the look of '60s paperback pulp sci-fi / fantasy novels, and we do know The Wounded Kings take much inspiration from both literature and the occult. They also cite several of our '70s proto-metal and prog rock faves: Night Sun, Museo Rosenbach, Hairy Chapter, Gracious, May Blitz, Alphataurus, Earth and Fire, and Van Der Graaf Generator, among others. Though what we hear could possibly best be described by suggesting one imagine UFOmammut, Witch, or Electric Wizard, ultra qualuuded and heavy lidded, at their most '70s proggish and beauteous. Also, this being on I Hate Records, it occurs to us that Jex Thoth fans (and would-be fans, those turned off by the singing in that band) ought to dig the music here.
The first track is called "The Swirling Mist" and is aptly named, describing the Wounded Kings' sound altogether. Their doomy gloomy guitar riffs are sluggishy smeared across this whole disc, almost becoming one continuous psychedelic downer drone stretching from song to song; songs which trudge forth in gorgeous glorious misery, driven by plodding drums, embellished with eerie Goblinesque chiming of keys, ofttimes gothically graced with vocal lamentations delivered a spooky shivery deep voice, reverb effected, all contributing to this album's very much haunted and melancholic feel. As does the trance inducing slo-mo psych guitar soloing and comforting organ buzz throughout. Also, some of our favorite moments are the most mellowed out ones: the gentle piano/drone interlude "Into The Ocean's Abyss" is both sad and beautiful, one of two brief instrumentals here (the other, "Deathless Echo"), among the much more epic, heavier tracks. We'd certainly recommend this Wounded Kings album to not only our true doom and doom-drone regulars but also folks into current indie psych and even cold wave acts, you might find something to grab you... and envelop you... and dreamily doom you, here!
Of all the new bands coming out of Austin, TX, we think Woven Bones just might be our favorite. Their dark & punky garage rock just comes flowing out with such pure conviction. We're stoked to see that Hardly Art took notice of the great music the band has been making and added them to their roster. This new 7" finds the band at their most catchy, without losing any of their dark chops. So driving and full of gusto, and there is something so timeless and true about these songs. It's cool how Woven Bones can make as much sense next to todays lo-fi garage rock peddlers like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Fresh & Onlys, yet they have much more of a primitive post-punk driving vibe a la the Wipers. If you loved the last full length as much as we did, then for sure you need to grab this, and if you haven't had your moment with Woven Bones yet this is a great way to jump into the fold.
Woven Bones are an awesome band from Austin, TX (see the Casual Victim Pile comp) who bring a more punky and dark vibe to the recent wave of great garage rock we've all been getting swept up by as of late. They are for sure one of those bands who could have been from almost any time, '86 or '96 or now, as there isn't that certain specific sonic flavor of the minute, the reverb and the feedback and the noise and the irony that seems to be part and parcel of much of the current garage rock pack. This is more meat and potatoes, dark and gritty classic garage rock, with plenty of fuzz and a distinctly gloomy overcast feel. They kind of remind us of what it would sound like if Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees covered classic punk bands like The Wipers, Fear, Angry Samoans, The Dicks or The Urinals. It's a thick and chunky sound delivered with total conviction and an almost understated aggression. We're also reminded of total garage rock legends like The Mummies and The Gruesomes. Woven Bones is one of those bands that will totally appeal to old school garage punkers who could care less about the recent wave of lo-fi weirdo rock hipsters, as well as winning over younger folks who do love all that new stuff but know the real deal when they hear it. This is fucking great!
Seems like only moments ago, my favorite record of last year came out. Maybe that's just because I still listen to it almost every day!! It's that good. If you read the AQ list you know I'm talking about the totally amazing Woven Hand record, a solo project of David Eugene Edwards from Sixteen Horsepower. Let's quickly recap for those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Sixteen Horsepower make weird backwoods gypsy folk, augmenting normal instrumentation with fiddles, accordions and mandolins. Dark and swampy tales, campfire stumps and lugubrious dirge folk crawls. Sound good? Well that's 'cause it is!! A huge AQ favorite. We weren't sure what to expect from Edwards solo record. We certainly weren't expecting it to surpass 16HP in every way, but it did!! Darker and creepier, tales of apocalyptic doom and Biblical salvation rendered in dreary, droney folk, lit by the fire of a bayou campfire. SO SO SO GOOD!!! One of the few records that really moved me. Seriously, like to tears. It's so gorgeous and passionate and sinister and perfect. Yes, PERFECT. So here we are a year later and a new record from the Woven Hand. Blush Music is music composed for a modern dance performance by the Belgian dance troupe Ultima Vez. It's about half re-worked songs from the first record and half new material. At first I was a little disappointed that it was different versions of old songs, until I heard the new versions. GOD!! This record perfectly complements the songs on the first record. One of the highlights from the first record was the cover of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine", a perfectly gut wrenching, tear jerking slow motion valentine to lost love. On Blush Music, "Ain't No Sunshine" reappears as the 12+ minute "Animalitos", with the original stretched out into an entirely new shape, complete with dark, mornful ambient passages, wheezing organs, bombastic percussion, rumbling drones, bird calls, and forest sounds, with the vocals and melody occasionally surfacing only to be immediately overwhelmed by the turbulent soundscape. A couple songs from the first record get this treatment and the results are sublime. The new tracks, while not as immediately catchy as a lot of the tracks on the first record, still capture the same dread and dark hope. A good way to imagine this record in relation to the first, is imagine the first record as the -soundtrack- to an epic biblical southern love story equal parts Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Southern Comfort and All The Pretty Horses. Now imagine that Blush Music is the -score-, all the incidental music, the theme reworked and stretched out to hover emotionally beneath dialogue, or to guide the viewers emotions. I think this record works better if you already own the first one (thankfully the first one was just released domestically), but that isn't to say Blush Music is not a perfect slice of dark and droney, fire and brimstone, forlorn and forgotten, gorgeously damaged, gypsy psych-folk. 'Cause it is!
So far, we've reviewed two Woven Hand records, and each time, we invariably slipped completely out of objectivity and giddily gushed about the sheer brilliance of this band, and we hate to break it to you, but this time is going to be no different. In fact, it's bound to be way worse (or better) because if you can believe it, this record is even better, and darker, and more suffocatingly apocalyptic, more biblically brutal, more overtly religious, more instrumentally obstuse, more sonically unpredictable, more soul-shearingly heart-breaking and quite possibly the best record of the year.
Woven Hand is David Eugene Edwards, who fronts the equally brilliant Sixteen Horsepower, a dark and doomy swamp folk outfit that peddles gorgeously dreary ballads of death and destruction. Woven Hand takes the sound of Sixteen Horsepower even further down that dark and seldom travelled path. Tales of an angry God, fire and brimstone, confusion and misery, the coming Rapture, lost souls, death and misery and the long hard road to salvation, all set inside mini epics of biblical proportions, acoustic guitars, mournful piano, throbbing upright bass, shuffling drums, weeping strings, creepy fuzzy ambience, and Edwards' gorgeous throaty moan of a wail. But it's not just pretty and sad and creepy, it's absolutely menacing, and intense and as heavy as a band like this can be. Imagine the Swans playing country ballads or a born again Nick Cave with a bayou pick up band forced to play the devil for their souls.
Not sure what else to say about this record. It's just so goddamn good. And so utterly soulful and important. It's everything music should be. You don't need toagree with his spiritual bent, or even understand what he's on about. This is passionate and pure and heartfelt and disturbingly personal and is thus more important than 90 percent of the music that gets made these days. Listening to the Woven Hand, you can't help but imagine them playing atop a crumbling mount, as the cities below them lay in ruin, flames and famine, death and pestilence ravaging the land, while the band, suffused with a heavenly glow, plays one last dirge, a skeletal ode to death, a bittersweet funereal lament, as the human race sinks into oblivion and the world prepares to begin anew.
As any avid reader of the AQ list can no doubt attest to, we have long been huge fans of Mr. David Eugene Edwards, formerly of Southern Gothic swamp folk outfit 16 Horsepower, currently performing as Woven Hand, a band that takes the swampy folk of 16HP somewhere even darker, a world of imminent damnation, and dreams of glorious salvation. The music of Woven Hand is a dark and brooding, fire and brimstone, apocalyptic doom folk, with Edwards testifying like his life depended on it. And maybe it does. Edwards makes no bones about being a Christian, and the music of Woven hand plays like the Old Testament come to life. Damnation and suffering, a cold cruel world, the only hope of life everlasting is to somehow weather the harsh and hellish, to bow down and be lifted up. And the thing is you don't necessarily have to be religious to be terrified of death and suffering, or eternal torture, and even the staunchest atheist might think twice if offered a chance at eternal life, and eternal happiness. Typically, the word of God, the usual messages from on high, repent or die, do unto others, are hugely heavy handed, granted, they are meant to be as they do concern your eternal life, but when delivered in the context of the Woven Hand, some of us find our agnostic selves chilled to the bone, the fear of God, -some- God anyway, gets us quaking in our boots. But it's more about the delivery than the message for us, and from a purely musical approach Woven Hand's music is gloriously grim, an expansive and minor key world of darkness and drama, lost souls and true love, simple strummed guitars, dramatic understated strings, fiddles and wheezing accordions, haunting arrangements, bizarre percussion, strange FX and incredibly intense ambience, and of course Edwards' gorgeously affecting croon: dramatic, intense, emotional, but so obviously troubled, conflicted, hopeful too, yet streaked with a dark despair.
So although Woven Hand's chillingly morose gothic twang is perfect on its own, when tangled up with Edwards' moody tales of punishment and salvation, of love and death, it takes on even more emotional weight. And compared to the first Woven Hand record, Edwards seems to slowly be moving away from the sound of 16 Horespower, the first Woven Hand could have been another 16HP record, but such is the way with records like that, a 'solo' record from the band member who wrote most of the music for the band he just left. But each record has been getting darker, more personal, disturbingly so, but at the same time, more epic, more cinematic, and more and more beautiful.
So far, we've made EVERY record we've reviewed, but one, from post 16 Horsepower apocalyptic swamp-blues folk-gospel proselytizers Woven Hand a Record Of The Week. And really, we're not sure why we didn't make that other one (Blush Music) a ROTW as well, and for that matter, this new one too, a stunning collection of songs that displays David Eugene Edwards and co.'s continuing shift toward a sound more heavy and bombastic, while still managing to retain the gut wrenching moodiness and soul stirring sonic fire and brimstone of those other records. That shift is even more evident this time around, as Edwards' back up band on Refractory Obdurate is made up of members of hardcore heavies Planes Mistaken For Stars!
Just check out the opener "Corsicana Clip", which perfectly lays out the new WH musical math, beginning like a classic David Eugene Edwards jam, all brooding, and twang flecked, shuffling and loping, hypnotic and darkly majestic, brooding and harrowingly haunting, and we'd be perfectly happy if that's how the track played out, but then about halfway through, the song explodes into something seriously heavy, thick chugging guitars swoop to the fore, the drums get more bombastic, the echo drenched vocals wilder, a furious psychedelic blowout that's not at all what we've come to expect from WH.
A bunch of the tracks here are more restrained, playing out like just another great Woven Hand record, but others are fierce slabs of twisted post punk, some are smoldering slow build epics, and still others are super distorted hard rocking stomps, but they all sound perfectly and classically Woven Hand. The production is massive as well, giving the sound some serious heft, the new players injecting serious venom into the songs and sound, and consequently, Edwards also sounds more intense, his vocals snarling and feral, his guitar playing wild and frenzied, the dynamics dense and dramatic, the sound careening wildly from hushed haunting mesmer to furious almost noise rock crunch. Awesome.
The current incarnation of sixties-spawned free jazz & acid folk label ESP has been doing more than just reissuing their old n' obscure classics. They've also been signing up some new bands from the NYC jazz underground (which we have yet to really check out), and, perhaps better yet, have also dug up some hitherto *unreleased* vintage recordings from artists in the ESP orbit. Such as the music on this disc, which barely contains the energetic maelstrom stirred up by tenor saxophonist "the Reverend" Frank Wright and his band, live at Germany's Moers Jazz Festival in 1974. There's two long (almost half-hour tracks) here, full of frenzied blowing from Wright, who after all was inspired by Albert Ayler to take up the sax in the first place, and was discovered by ESP boss Bernard Stollman while sitting in with John Coltrane's band in '64! The other cats on here are certainly up to the challenge of expressing themselves alongside Wright -- you've got Alan Silva on bass, Bobby Few on piano, and Rashied Ali's brother Muhammad on drums! Together they made some truly vital, exciting music that night, and you can hear the crowd at Moers really getting into it!
