For a lot of young Swedes, it's apparently still 1973... what with bellbottomed bands like Witchcraft, Horisont, Noctum, Dead Man, and Graveyard, eh? Here's the latest from the latter, their second full-length, and yeah as the title suggests - and as everyone who heard their self-titled, stonery debut would expect - it's heavy '70 style blues rock, all right, rollin' and tumblin' with amped up urgency and authentic analog-recorded old school mojo.
As always, Graveyard remind us a bit of aforementioned fellow countrymen Witchcraft, with whom they share roots in the late '90s band Norrsken (when oh when will there be a reissue of that awesome band's obscure output we wonder?!). For that matter, both bands also share members with another outfit, Spiders, that we've reviewed some singles by recently. But Graveyard do their psychedelic blues thing their own way, with less of Witchcraft's admitted Pentagram influence for one thing. Instead, we're (again) hearing echoes of good ol' Monster Magnet. Maybe even Thee Hypnotics. And of course the '70s bands, that inspired those bands...
Graveyard's vocalist has a nice raspy edge to his voice when he wants, like when wailing away on opener "Ain't Fit To Live Here", one example of the many galloping rockers to be found on this disc... which also has its moody slow moments, take the lovely, lumbering 2nd track "No Good, Mr. Holden" with its backwards effects, for instance. Or the wide-open spaces, spaghetti western whistling atmospherics of "Longing", which sounds like a nod to Ennio Morricone, or maybe to Bjorn Olsson. Fans of another very '70s sounding Swedish band (and AQ-fave), Elope, should feel right at home with this more mellow side of Hisingen Blues.
Furthermore, while the amount of cowbell and whoo-whoo backing vocals found here could come across as cliched in lesser hands, Graveyard sound like they really mean it, these tracks possessing real emotional resonance alongside their retro radness.
From experience, we know they're a great live band, but this is the sort of record that would make you very much suspect that, anyway. Will we get to hear 'em kick out these jams in person sometime soon? Sure hope so!
Andrew: "Ugh. Is this Soundgarden?"
Andee: "I hope this isn't the new Graveyard."
The curse of "success rock" strikes again.
Disappointing (to us) but maybe not as bad as we are making it out to be. We should listen to it again. But proabably won't.
When we tell you there's a band from Sweden, a bunch of longhairs who look liked they just stepped out of 1973, playing heavy, psychedelic, blues-based rock n' roll with sinister, occult themes, who do you think we're talking about? And then what if we tell you, nooooo they're not Witchcraft. And not Burning Saviours or Dead Man either. Meet another excellent Swedish stoner-doom outfit, Graveyard, who sound something like Witchcraft meets Monster Magnet. The vocals are very Wyndorf (with some hints of ol' Glenn Danzig too).
Unlike Witchcraft, and the first two Burning Saviours albums, Graveyard probably wouldn't entirely fool anyone told this was allegedly a long-lost '70s proto-metal gem. Not that it sounds modern, but it does sound like they've heard their share of '90s stoner rock (the singer also sometimes reminds us of John Garcia from Kyuss). And then there's the aforementioned Monster Magnetism. Nothing we don't like, though! Perhaps you remember another band of Swedes, heavy psych throwbacks Roachpowder? Graveyard are in that tradition, and if there's one thing that Swedish bands can do, is uphold tradition! Whether it be with the warm, analog-recorded guitar tones, dark riffs that run from Sabbath to Samhain, and the general bewitched and bellbottomed vibe, Graveyard have got the goods.
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.
Finally!!! The first two Green Machine records, originally released on Man's Ruin, re-released with three bonus tracks each! And not a moment too soon considering how much we've all been freaking out for their most recent full length The Archives Of Rotten Blues. Unlike the monstrous sludge of that one, these two records are slightly more stoner rock, and a bit more melodic, but somehow harder: thrashy, noisy and chaotic, with lots of leads, almost like classic hard rock / proto metal but WAY heavier and more aggressive, very reminiscent of midwest aggro sludge like Helmet, Unsane and all that growly Amrep stuff. But all run through that Japanese bizzaro filter we love!
Plus song titles like Cunt Maniac, Burdens Of Karma, Barbarian Of Dope, Hempty God Returns To The Sky, Machinists Smoke and Holy Grinder tell you anything else you need to know.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
2nd Man's Ruin effort from these Japanese sludge rockers--actually not so sludgy as before, this has more of a "stoner groove" thing happening, although the vocals are still in the harsh Eyehategod-style screaming realm. Song titles that may clinch the deal: "Barbarian of Dope", "Slug", "Hempty God, Returns To Sky"...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally, the return of Japanese sludgemetalmeisters Green Machine! Not sure about you, but we LOVED those Green Machine records on Man's Ruin way back when (also back in print, though not listed yet, see the 'instock not reviewed' section!) and after that they seemed to just drop off the map. Which was really too bad as they were a massive monstrous sludge / groove metal behemoth few could touch. Well, we're happy to say that Green Machine are indeed back, and more sludgy, groovy and monstrously heavy than ever. Can't hurt that Atsuo from BORIS produced the record! But it's not just the production. This band is tight and heavy and huge. And so are the songs. Bulldozing riffs, pounding drums and throat shredding vocals. Like classic stoner rock, supercharged and run through a special Japanese 'sludge' pedal. Think High On Fire, Motorhead, Venom, Eyehategod, Cavity and of course Boris' Heavy Rocks. And don't let the counter on your cd player display confuse you. Track seven is split into about sixty individual five second tracks to throw you off before the final track, number 69, "Hammer And Burner", a lighting fast, hammering barn burner, like Motorhead on 45. Fans of all the above bands and Boris and Boris-related obessives will want this for sure!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally!!! The first two Green Machine records, originally released on Man's Ruin, re-released with three bonus tracks each! And not a moment too soon considering how much we've all been freaking out for their most recent full length The Archives Of Rotten Blues. Unlike the monstrous sludge of that one, these two records are slightly more stoner rock, and a bit more melodic, but somehow harder: thrashy, noisy and chaotic, with lots of leads, almost like classic hard rock / proto metal but WAY heavier and more aggressive, very reminiscent of midwest aggro sludge like Helmet, Unsane and all that growly Amrep stuff. But all run through that Japanese bizzaro filter we love!
Plus song titles like Cunt Maniac, Burdens Of Karma, Barbarian Of Dope, Hempty God Returns To The Sky, Machinists Smoke and Holy Grinder tell you anything else you need to know.
All the metalheads around here love stoner rock, and stoner metal, from Kyuss to Sons Of Otis, Mystick Krewe Of Clearlight to Mammoth Volume, Roachpowder to Raging Slab, Church Of Misery to Elder, and of course Black Sabbath, who aren't technically stoner rock, but who sort of created the template, and then there's Monster Magnet, Natas, Electric Wizard, we could go on, but you get the drift. And we'd always been super partial to Swedish stoners Dozer, who seemingly hung it up in 2008 after five killer full lengths. So we were pretty psyched when we got this record in, from a band called Greenleaf, which features a bunch of guys from Dozer, and we were surprised to discover that Greenleaf have been active since 2000, concurrently with Dozer for almost a decade! And yet, this is the first we've heard from 'em. This is their third full length, and is produced by the guy from VAKA, whose piano driven post rock / stoner doom record Kappa Delta Phi record was a big favorite around here, but that definitely gives Nest Of Vipers some serious heft, which helps balance out the EXTREME poppiness. The band also includes members of Lowrider, Truckfighters, and features a handful of guest appearances from members of Opeth and Spiritual Beggars among others.
Allan jokes that when we mention Queens Of The Stone Age in a review, it tends to scare people off, and we sell way fewer copies than we would otherwise, but it's just unavoidable sometimes, and hell, QOTSA in the early days was only one step removed from the mighty Kyuss anyway, and the opening track here "Jack Staff" is kind of a dead ringer for QOTSA, especially the crazy catchy, super poppy chorus, with its soaring Josh Homme like vox, heck it even goes beyond QOTSA into full on commercial heavy rock, but fuck it, it sounds killer, the guitar tone is thick and deserty, the main riff is crunchy and fuzzy, the overall vibe is swaggery and snarly, the song seesawing between extreme stoner crush and total heavy pop.
Nothing else on the record is so overtly poppy, but lots of parts come seriously close, all the songs here definitely displaying a serious pop edge to them, no matter how heavy or stonery the jam is. But let's not overplay the poppiness, cuz some of the jams here are seriously fierce, fuzzy, and blown out and HEAVY. Another Swedish band whose influence can be felt throughout are the Hellacopters, which again, as far as we're concerned is not a bad thing at all. And Kiss, lots of these tracks are obviously beholden to those masters of hooky heaviness. There's some organ that pops up too on a few tracks, which definitely gives the proceedings a bit of a psychedelic vibe, but overall this is just a seriously kick ass, seriously catchy collection of fuzzed out hook heavy stoner rock radness. And if your collection features lots of records on Meteor City, Small Stone, Tee Pee, Leaf Hound, Rise Above, Elektrohasch and the rest, then Nest Of Vipers will definitely feel right at home...
It's weird to think about the world before the Internet. Little pockets of bands in out of the way places, producing wild and wonderful music, that outside of a few tape traders and cool record stores just didn't get heard. In some ways the advent of immediate world wide communication has been a wellspring of amazing music, since now, some kid who records in his bedroom in Finland, can now be heard by anyone in the world. Anywhere. Any time. The downside is of course the proliferation of bands whose material maybe didn't need worldwide exposure, music that was just fine where it was, in the bedroom or the basement. Thankfully this particular release is a definite example of the former. Australia has produced some killer rock over the years, from AC/DC to Radio Birdman to Lubricated Goat (one of Allan and Andee's favorites) to the Dirty Three to more obscure noiserock bands like Budd or the Dumb And The Ugly or Primitive Calculators. A few lists back we reviewed an awesome disc by the band Whitehorse, whose epic sludge-y, drone-y dirge definitely hit the Sunn 0))) / Earth / Corrupted / Khanate spot. The guys in Whitehorse suggested we check out another Aussie outift (also from Melbourne) a two guys and a gal trio called the Grey Daturas, who only a few weeks later just showed up in our store with a box full of cds, about to embark on their first US tour (some of the dates with Sunn 0))), see elsewhere on this list for tour dates). And while the Daturas are indeed heavy and droney, their sound is less slow motion sludge and more blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. The Daturas' sound is all over the map, from churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah. When they kick out the jams, it's fierce and mesmerizing, pounding and relentless, with simple propulsive percussion and spaced out swirl. Often stretching out into head nodding Krautrock jams, spacious and hypnotic. When the storms calm and the band drifts off and just sort of meanders, we're reminded of Codeine and other like minded practitioners of drowsy, druggy slow core. Still noisy, but mellow and intense, brooding and subtly aggressive.
The Grey Daturas are all instrumental which as you probably know we tend to dig, since there's nothing like a bad singer to ruin a perfectly good band, but there's always the risk of bands with no vocalists to be really really boring. But because a lot of the Daturas' tunes are improvised, and the band is willing to take all kinds of musical chances (they often switch instruments, sometimes perform as a duo with no drummer, etc...) it never gets boring, instead it becomes the perfect mix of droning free rock, kick ass instrumental post rock, buzzing druggy psych and even occasional blasts of full on metal. Mix in some cool song titles: "The Hanging Man Is No Peacock", "Force Is A Weapon Of The Weak", as well as some oddly political song titles (but more sort of Sixties politics): "For Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale", "Night Of The Barricade: Paris 1968", a gorgeous washed out black, brown and grey cardboard sleeve, and a totally kick ass live show (they performed admirably with a handful of fill-in drummers here, even teaming up with art noise outfit the Yellow Swans for one show), and you've got one of our favorite new bands / releases. AND they're recording a new record right here in SF when they get back from tour...yay!
Huzzah! Our favorite instrumental down-under doom-bringers return (to disruption) with this new
full-length, the prolific Melbourne trio's debut for Neurosis' Neurot label. It's a good fit, of course, this should go over well with the whole post-rock/metal crowd, this album often grindingly hypnotic, the Grey Daturas' lumbering sheets of distorto-drone skullflowering forth over a roiling bed of precision percussive clangor right from the get-go! Their threatening waves of pure heaviness, sharpened into a drill-drone of an attack, also occasionally take detours into areas of abstract ambience, the guitars of Bonnie Mercer and Rob MacManus carving psychedelic feedback sculptures, then tightening again back into full metallic impact, driven by the skittering drums of Robert Manson.
As heavy as they are (which is HEAVY) you can't really call the Grey Dats a metal band. They're in that quasi-metal realm with the likes of SUNNO))), Boris, Harvey Milk, and Nadja, perhaps, with a certain amount of experimental lo-fi fuckery going on that reminds us of many of their freenoise comrades over in nearby New Zealand... The title track itself is a clattering, pottering about, like something the Dead C would come up with, while the track called "Undisturbed" is anything but, sounding like a violin or creaking door hinge dying a slow and dismal death. And the high-end scraping skree of "Balance Of Convenience" should peel some paint. And then, as already mentioned, there's all the juggernaut, trance-inducing, spaced-out, instrumental doom rock post rock surging through tracks like "Beyond And Into The Ulimate" and "Neuralgia".
The Grey Daturas definitely like all the varieties of drone! And fans of, what should we call it, avant-doom, or drone-doom, or whatever, should like all varieties of the Grey Daturas, starting with this disc if you haven't already made their acquaintance, covering all the bases as it does!
Any band described as 'the Melvins playing King Crimson', well, how could you not want to hear that, assuming that were it true, you might have a new favorite band!! But, those sorts of descriptions are usually hyperbole, and while we love us some hyperbole, claims like that definitely bear some deeper digging.
That said, this stuff is pretty close to that Melvins meets KC claim, a sort of avant sludge, or prog-doom, or avant-prog-sludge. In addition to the Melvins and King Crimson, we're also thinking Harvey Milk, Dot [.], Moss, Swans, Black Shape Of Nexus, Blutch, Slomatics, and tUMULt's Like A Kind Of Matador, in fact, pretty sure that Gruel features the guitarist from LAKOM, and thus it has a similarly epic sludge prog feel. Four loooong songs, all clocking in at about 15 minutes, sprawling and epic and intricate, loads of parts, riffs, bombastic drumming, the sound slipping from classic sounding rock, to glacial sludge, to slo-mo ambient drift, to math metal churn, midtempo caveman pounds to frantic thrashing crush to super spare abstract ultra-mega-doom, to almost pretty shoegazey buzz to hushed barely there shimmer, the various parts laced with wild leads, mysterious percussion, children's voices, harsh hellish vox, bellowed yowls, weird field recordings, thick rib cage rattling low end, and a massive milk curdling guitar sound. So while it might not exactly be Melvins meets King Crimson, it's close enough, and most definitely plenty proggy and doomy and sludgey, and will no doubt hit the spot for fans of all the above mentioned bands, and all things slow and low, heavy and heady.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, packaged in a PVC sleeve, and wrapped in a full color sleeve that folds out into a big two sided full color poster!
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All right, another "hawk" band. Lately there's been Freedom Hawk, and Doomhawk. Being somewhat "stoner rock", this is one that should also appeal to the same folks who liked Freedom Hawk. And going way back, maybe even Hawkwind. Though the classic '70s rock band that these guys most remind us of is Thin Lizzy. A LOT. They're overtly, utterly under the spell of Thin Lizzy (a band that's more influential now than ever it seems). The melodic but husky vocals are like a gruffer Phil Lynott, the twin guitars twine together harmoniously in classic Lizzy fashion. And heck, in case we didn't get it, they even do a song entitled "For Those Who Love The Lizz" that not only sounds like Lizzy, but has lyrics that cleverly consist of references to that band's songs, like "the hero and the madman", "renegade boys back in town", "that blue orphanage in the shade", etc., as a tribute to their Irish inspiration! Although, overall, Gypsyhawk are more than a tribute, bringing in elements of garage, doom, punk, prog, and good ol' metal along with the specific Lizzy/Lynott influence.
Turns out, Gypsyhawk vocalist/bassist Eric Harris used to be in blackened thrashers Skeletonwitch, another killer band we like quite a bit. What we heard was that he got kicked out of Skeletonwitch, or otherwise quit the band, while they were on tour. This happened in Los Angeles, and instead of catching a Greyhound bus back home to Ohio where Skeletonwitch are from, though, Harris decided to stay in LA and start his own band there! Which, we gotta say, is a pretty darn rock n' roll thing to do. Thus, Gypsyhawk was born. And they're quite a bit different from Skeletonwitch (whose dual guitars dated from a different era) but equally awesome. For those into more melodic stuff, anachronistically proto-metal, especially so. These guys have the riffs, the leads, the melodic hooks, and the heaviness, to be right up there in the "hawk" band pantheon. Rockin' and majestic stuff that should go down well with fans of Lizzy-lovin' bands like Bible Of The Devil, Hot Fog, Falcon, and Valkyrie.
A fine debut, and it's adorned with fantastic purpley-blue and gold artwork (that looks a bit Erol Otus-y), nicely packaged in a digi (the cd) or gatefold sleeve (the lp). And the vinyl version is limited, there's 200 on purple wax, 200 on half-and-half purple/multicolored splatter, and 100 clear with color splatter, we've got an assortment of the first two.
Hopefully we made it clear, we're stoked on this!
Rambunctious 2nd full-length here from these Pasadena, CA heshers, now on Metal Blade, whose rippin' retro rockin' sure as heck still worships Thin Lizzy and also, to a lesser extent, Motorhead. The twin guitar harmonies, the rollicking riffage, the gravely whiskey soaked vocals - yeah it's all about those two '70s proto-metal, partly punky gods, especially Lizzy. Though their influences don't stop there, of course� they do a decent NWOBHM gallop, and channel KISS catchiness and psychedelic Priest too; but not much after, say, 1980 makes it into the mix! And Gypsyhawk do it all damn well, kicking ass here with triumphant fervor, building on the promise of their debut which we also dug a lot. They've got the sound, and the songs, sheer good times for anyone who likes some '70s inspired, high energy hooky heaviness - though, we wonder if the closing cover of Rick Derringer's "Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo" isn't taking things a bit far�? Naw, they're just having fun, as will you. (Did the original version of that song have somebody yell "Smoke weed!" right before the lead break? Well if not, Gypsyhawk has rectified that oversight.)
Put this on, and sure you're probably gonna wanna follow it with some Lizzy, but not before you give the Gypsyhawk another few (or many!) spins. And it just begs for the volume to be cranked to ten or eleven. What else can we say? Really recommended for those who wanna rock! Especially fans of Thin Lizzy, Bible Of The Devil, Slough Feg, and heck that other AQ fave 'Hawk band, Freedom Hawk.
We originally thought these Southern sludgelords were just adding a letter to their name to make it cooler, you know, like Mutiilation with two 'i's, or Wooden Shjips with a 'j', or Celestiial also with two 'i's, but it seems that perhaps they are named after a certain High Frequency Active Aural Research Program, a program seemingly designed to explore radio communication via the ionosphere, but it reads more like some sort of weaponized sound to us. And hell, if weaponized sound is what you're after, look no further than these New Orleans heavies, who we had previously heard sharing a split with fellow Southern crushers Thou, and you know any band with the sonic balls to throw down with a group like Thou, well, needless to say, prepare to have your ass handed to you.
Which is precisely what'll happen, about 10 seconds into this, Haarp's debut, a crusty, filthy, pummeling slab of epic downtuned NOLA style crush. It's pretty impossible to not think of Eyehategod when it comes to this sort of stuff, and seeing as these boys were drinking the same water, it makes sense that The Filth definitely has the feel of EHG worship, but like Thou, they definitely have their own take on this sludge/doom/dirge thing, most notably the vocals, a fierce, monstrous bellow, WAY up in the mix, that sounds more death metal than sludge metal, sort of Chris Barnes crossed with Phil Anselmo (this was released on Anselmo's Housecore label after all), a voice that perfectly suits Haarp's slow-mo swagger and caveman pummel.
Slow, groovy, heavy as fuck, but with some surprising bits mixed in here and there, surprising super melodic stretches, psychedelic guitar leads, some classic metal harmonies, but for the most part this is an epic skull caving rib cage rattling avalanche of black hole slo-mo sound, absolutely required listening for doomlords into the usual slow and low suspects: Eyehategod, Cough, Thou, The Body, Buzzov-en, etc...
NEW ON tUMULt!!!!
It's starting to get seriously tUMULtuous around here. One killer disc just out and still fresh, The Memories Attack, (one of ,if not THE pop record of last year, this year and any year, in Andee's humble opinion), THREE new releases about to drop (Diamatregon, Amocoma and the Ovens) and this, the first full length record from French ultra-mega-abstract-doom trio Habsyll, which just so happens to feature one member of the mighty Fantastikol Hole, as well as the former drummer of faerical punk blasters Nuit Noire!
But nothing, and we mean nothing will prepare you for Habsyll's particularly virulent strain of ultradoom. Heavy and slow, yeah obviously, but it's HOW heavy (very) and HOW slow (ummm, so slow the songs seem to have almost zero forward momentum) that makes Habsyll something much more than a metal band or a doom band, it's almost like twentieth century classical played with downtuned guitars and massive drums. So much space, the notes and drum beats miles apart, the drums not so much beats and rhythms (although those do pop up occasionally) as brief explosions or percussive squalls, more for dynamics and texture, or if they are actually engaged in some sort of actual beat, it's mind bendingly abstract and extended and slow to the point of hovering around 2 or 3 bpm. Think Khanate, Monarch, Moss, Bunkur, Fleshpress? You're already thinking too fast, too structured, too riffy. This is some excessive extremist radical dooooooooom, the sort of chug and plod and buzz and bombinate that makes the rest of those bands sound like speed metal.
But in this slow sprawl, and these long stretches of decay, these sudden flurries of drum splatter and downtuned chug, there is a buried beauty, occasionally, these disparate parts mesh into a brief flicker of melody, or a single epic majestic hook filled swell, before slipping back into blackness. And once or twice the band ramps it up, and locks into some serious pounding crushing black hole sludge, but even then, it's a crawl, a glacial black ooze tempo, and before too long, the band abandon any sense of rhythm or tempo, opting instead to drift through some wide open stretch of outerspace ultra doom emptiness.
The guitars go from grinding and sharp, to muddy and massive, the chugs flung into the ether and carried along on streaks of whirring hiss and blackened buzz, spitting out huge jagged shards of feedback, and long smears of blurred anti-riffage, the bass is a massive cloud of low end, throbbing and pulsing, exploding like a brick wall to the side of the head before slipping back into a shadowy rumble, the vocals a caustic demonic shriek, raspy and hellish, slipping into an almost hysterical falsetto, and just as often offering up some alien ululations, and the drums, oh the drums, any drummer can tell you how hard it is to play slow, but they're talking slowcore slow, or even regular doom slow, this is something else entirely, this is doom drumming gone free jazz, pound and skitter in equal measure, meting out beats one at a time, like some sleek black submarine releasing depth charges.
Two lengthy epics, 17 minutes and nearly 29 minutes, neither very traditionally doomlike, but both most definitely doom, maybe more 'doom', than most actual doom we've heard. Like staring into the abyss, or looking up at a black moonless night sky, these sounds are the sounds of emptiness, of bottomless depths, of never ending expanses of space and time, the end of the world, the birth of new universes, the sound of black holes, of exploding stars, the soundtrack to the end of the world, to the end of everything. Slow and heavy and low and spaced out and damaged and fucked up and strangely beautiful and mysterious and abstract and far out and completely kick ass while remaining very very very difficult listening indeed!
This is a split label release, tUMULt of course, along with 5 other kick ass labels: At War With False Noise, Obscure Sombre, PsycheDOOMelic, Skyr and Odio Sonoro.
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For fans of freaky psych and wild heavy noisiness, an album title like Ultra High Dimensionality should definitely conjure up images of long haired Japanese bands from the seventies, of huge amps, bell bottoms, trippy light shows and extreme volume. It's the sort of title you might expect to find on a Mainliner or White Heaven record, which we're guessing was probably the idea, since this band is not in fact Japanese, but British, and are fronted by Mike Vest, he of psychedelic doomlords Bong! But this IS meant to be an homage of sorts to that classic Japanese sound, especially Les Rallizes Denudes, coupled with the downtuned crush of the Bong mothership of course, and if that sounds good to you (and why the hell wouldn't it?!), you're likely ready for some serious Ultra High Dimensionality.
Forty minutes of epic heavy psych, still a bit doomy, and spacey, after all, as the saying (sort of) goes, you can take the man out of Bong, but odds are he'll likely drag some of that doominess with him, but it makes for a killer mix, just check out the opener, which sounds, as you might have surmised, like Les Rallizes Denudes by way of Bong, a loping, slow burner, all blown out psychedelic balladry wreathed in dense swirls of distorto guitar, and anchored by some hard hitting drumming, the sort of brooding slow build heaviness we could get lost in forever, total seventies style psychedelic smolder, in fact, most of Ultra High Dimensionality sounds like some alternate dimension version of Les Rallizes Denudes, which is most definitely not a bad thing, the tempos generally slow, lumbering, but seriously tripped out, equal parts doomy and psychedelic, if you ever wished those Les Rallizes records weren't so lo-fi (although, why would you?), this will definitely hit the spot. And while this is most definitely far enough removed from the doooooom of Bong, to maybe disappoint some doomlords, folks into The Heads, White Hills, Carlton Melton, and all that psychedelic space rock stuff, as well as all the aforementioned Japanese psych combos, this comes HIGHLY recommended.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl, housed in a swank sleeve, screen printed on grey recycled cardstock in metallic ink. Includes a download code too.
Along with the sudden miraculous appearance of their nigh-impossible to find 1998 album "Amplifier Worship" in our racks (see elsewhere on this list) we've also managed to acquire a few copies of some other hard-to-find Boris titles, including this
RealAudio clip: "The Decision of a Dream Which Will Never Be Completely Red" [/audio/hainoborisdecision.rm]
We have yet to be disappointed by the restrained, doomic ambience that Half Makeshift (aka Nathan Michael) provides. More atmospheric than absolutely heavy (most of the time), Half Makeshift makes chilling chill out albums for the SUNNO))) scene. This new one is called Omen and it is indeed quite... ominous. It lets you get about 8 minutes into the first track before the crashing waves of distortion kick in. Even then, despite the volume, it still seems somehow hushed. And before the track is over, it retreats again into a melodic, melancholic realm of looping loveliness for guitar; spare and spacious and unhurried. Elsewhere on this album that pattern repeats itself, this moody work having a stretched-out set of dynamics like a somnolent post-rock band... it's quietly droning much of the time, adorned with plaintive piano and guitar, building a seductive sense of despair, that occasionally reaches level of cathartic release when Half Makeshift so subtly cranks it up and gets heavy. Loops and backwards effects and digital glitch figure into the mix throughout, but no vocals. Omen has a baleful prettiness to it that could appeal to fans of recent Earth, KTL, Fear Falls Burning, Nadja, Fun Years, and Oren Ambarchi amongst others.
And this time Half Makeshift makes its home on the Profound Lore label, who, not unlike the likes of Southern Lord, 20 Buck Spin, and often tUMULt, teeters on various edges of the metal/doom/drone/blackened/experimental zone, with releases from the likes of Alcest, Atavist, Nadja, Wold, and (reviewed last list) Krallice.
This is some serious grim and brutal business, this here new Halo record. So slow, and chaotic, and sludgy and crushing. With feedback spraying wildly from beneath the hyper-dense black hole riffs, tortured vocals, clawing their way up in the mix, fingers bleeding and bruised, a bass sound that is like puncturing your skull and filling it with concrete, and drums that sound like John Bonham trying to beat his way out of a tar pit. Think Godflesh, Swans, Skepticism, but then slow it down, drug it, down tune it, and get the fuck out of the way. This is doom metal played by crusty punks, industrial music played by Eyehategod, the Butthole Surfers covering Earth. The almost industrial precision of their first record has eroded just enough to let the band sort of sprawl, and throb, the sound is psychedelic, but not in the traditional sense, this is dark and druggy and hypnotic, and lulls you to sleep as much as it makes you want to overturn cop cars and set them on fire.
Halo are easily one of the heaviest, creepiest, most intense bands we have heard in a long time. This Australian two piece (bass and drums, voice and electronics) spit out such a massive sound it's hard to get your head around. Lurching, pummelling, sludgy, slow-motion doom versus squealing, speaker shredding, super distorted power electronics. Think Godflesh and Neurosis and Earth and Whitehouse and Cop Shoot Cop, and Gore and Noisegate and the Melvins, with the treble turned to zero, the bass turned to ten, and about 1000 extra amps, turned on, buzzing and squealing and rumbling, as Halo channel all of this unbridled energy into huge molten riffs that stretch out into near ambient dirges. Static, hum and hiss swarm wildly in and out of the mix, and occasionally everything drops out until all that's left is blurry static ambience and stray rattles and rumbles, until the two-headed beast struggles free and lurches madly forward again. Fucking amazing.
Once again, we were sold before we heard even a single note. A super suicidal, ultra depressive, doomy black metal bedroom band called� Happy Days. Yep, that's right. Happy Days. Funny because the music is anything but, but also because, for a band this grim, and this miserable, it seems strange to have a name that to some will no doubt evoke the Fonz and Potsie and Richie Cunningham.
But don't let the name throw you off, Happy Days are not a joke band, they are nothing if not serious. Serious about their utter abject musical misery, from the opening few seconds, a lugubrious loop of mournful reverbed piano, set amidst a deep shimmering sea of drones, and an emotional voice, intoning a tale of personal misery. Super dramatic and powerful, and so so so so miserable.
But that track only serves as an intro. "The Beginning�" starts with a simple guitar melody, which gives way to a spare melancholy strum, peppered with samples from Fight Club oddly enough, and although Brad Pitt is probably the last person you might expect to hear on a suicidal black metal record, removed from the context of the film, those spoken word passages are indeed bleak and perfectly suit the music. That voice intones: "Our Great Depression is our lives�" and then the guitar kicks in, recorded way too hot, the distortion crumbling, a furious fuzz, the drums also distorted, wound into a simple moody crawl, the vocals totally blown out and confusional, going from maniacal shriek, to caustic growl, to strange spoken word, in what seems to be both English and Norwegian, all over a gloriously loping minor key dirge.
The final three tracks, the bulk of the record, are all extended epics, ranging from 10 minutes to nearly 20. And all three offer up more gloriously dismal Burzumic buzz, the drums a doomy plod, the riffs, thick and crunchy, existing more as a nearly static white noise whirled blur, the sound and arrangement and production, woozy and seasick, the vocals over the top, sometimes so loud and hysterical they peg the meters and drown out the rest of the music, even the spoken word parts are super distorted and strangely blown out. The riffs, seems to speed up and slow down as well, almost like the tape speed is being subtly adjusted, which only adds to the haunting otherworldiness.
The sound is ultra raw, and definitely has that bedroom 4-track vibe, giving Happy Days a sound more personal and lo-fi than heavy, but the heaviness is still masterfully conveyed in the sound, the riffing, the super saturated production, the emotion. Miserable abject hateful, but weirdly melancholy and beautiful, a few subtle changes, and this could be a blissed out slow motion sadcore record, but as it is, it's anything but.
The final track is a cover of a song by Czech black metal band Trist, whose sound easily becomes Happy Days', the recording here even more damaged, the guitar so hot and in the red, that it seems to be crumbling to pieces, or the speakers seem to be overloading, making it sound almost electronic, a chopped and clipped distorted chunk of white hot buzz, laid over a framework of equally distorted drums, a lurching slow motion buzz drenched plod, the vocals at their most anguished and miserable. The sound so fractured, that over the course of the song's 10 minutes, it almost stops sounding like black metal, and more like some experimental blackened buzzscape.
Really nice packaging, extra thick cardstock booklet and tray card, spare images, all blacks and greys, it's a real cd too, NOT a cd-r, but still strangely limited to ONLY 300 COPIES!! So odds are once we run out these will be gone for good.
Hmm, they're called Harsh Toke, they're on Tee Pee, huh, jammed out psychedelic stoner rock anyone? Yup you guessed it! Harsh Toke's music isn't itself a 'harsh toke', not if you dig stuff like Earthless. Harsh Toke are from San Diego too, and feature pro skater Figgy Figueroa on wailin' guitar. There's only four songs here, but except for the kickass 4:11 opener they're all pretty long, up to 14 and a half minutes for "Weight Of The Sun", which takes up the rest of side one. If you did that track you'll dig the whole record - it starts off with some hippie/kraut freeform flute flutter and drum circle percussion before taking off at about the 3 minute mark into stratospheric realms of distorted guitar. It's a real spaced out, riffed up jamdown.
The heaviness and Hawkwindiness continue on side two's two lengthy groovers, "Light Up And Live" and "Plug In To The Moon". Yes indeedy, the mostly-instrumental Harsh Toke sure do crank the amps and bash it out, their cosmic jams having a bit of jazziness to 'em, and a LOT of long haired feedback/FX abuse. Surefire stuff we think for fans of Acid Mothers Temple, Comets On Fire, Fuzz, the aforementioned Earthless.
It would be pretty much impossible to fuck this one up. Steve Von Till's (of Neurosis) Harvestman, along with psych heavies U.S. Christmas, and sludgy metallic post rockers Minsk, all covering their favorite Hawkwind jams. Exactly. We didn't even really have to hear this to know we needed it. And we were not disappointed.
U.S. Christmas are definitely right at home tackling these Hawkwind tracks, as there's plenty of Hawkwind in their sound anyway. Musically, their versions are dead ringers, the same sort of urgent guitar crunch, the swirling clouds of effects, the big difference is the vocals, sounding more like a super harmonized Paul Stanley, which is not a bad thing, but it's definitely a bit weird, and does help to make these songs their own. And the songs they picked, tough to beat: "Master Of The Universe", "Psychedelic Warlords", "Orgone Accumulator" and "You Shouldn't Do That" (notable also for the specificity of vocal duties described in the liner notes: "Do That"s, "Shouldn't Do That"s and "You Shouldn't Do"s, all split between various band members). Needless to say, if this was just a U.S. Christmas Hawkwind ep, we'd be in, but there's more more more.
Harvestman too are no stranger to psychedelia, and we can bet Steve Von Till has a pretty serious Hawkwind collection, and he proves it with some cool versions of some of our HW faves, "D Rider" sounds like a Von Till original here, stripped down and acoustic but with plenty of effects, and that unmistakable rasp. "Down Through The Night" also sounds like just acoustic guitar, but wrapped in a thick swirl of hissing space psych effects, and some awesome vox, "The Watcher" is bluesy and slithery, and sounds like Hawkwind via Tom Waits, while "Magnu" is all propulsive crunch and psychedelic swirl.
Finally Minsk drop the hammer, on "7X7", "Assault & Battery / The Golden Void", and "Children Of The Sun", and get all spaced out and druggy and psychedelic, letting their pounding post rock get swallowed up in clouds of buzz and blur and his, they even let loose with some sax! Finishing off with a straight up acoustic "Children Of The Sun", which is all sun dappled and dream, until near the end, when it transforms into a churning chugging psych space stomp.
Anyone who dug those Trensmat Hawkwind covers singles is gonna want to check this out, and if you love Hawkwind as much as we do, and as these guys obviously do, you're probably not gonna be able to resist. So why try? You shouldn't do that.
When faced with a new Harvey Milk record, we're flooded with various feelings and emotions. The first being pure exultant joy, seeing as these guys are quite possibly one of our all time favorite bands EVER. Heavy, melodic, so weird, willfully difficult listening that seems to be impossibly listenable as if to spite itself. Another being a sort of incredulousness, that for all intents and purposes this band ceased to exist, a handful of old records, all that was left of their substantial but unsung legacy, hard to imagine now, but not that long ago, it took a LOT of digging to track down HM records. And finally, we're faced with the sort of feeling we get more and more often, "how the hell are we supposed to review this?", or "what the hell can we say about these guys that we haven't already said?" Well, the practical answer is not much. You can go back and read all of our expansive, wordy, gushing reviews of every Harvey Milk record, and all of that stuff still applies, but the band have obviously grown and changed, their sound while still similar enough, that every new record is worth celebrating and obsessing over, each one is still just different enough to avoid being nothing more than just a Courtesy And Good Will Part 3 or 4...
The untitled opener here is crazy melodic, and instrumental, with a super catchy main riff, minimal drumming, the song sort of swings, eventually the riff is joined by a shimmering layer of buzz, and the song gets just a little bit shoegazey, before returning to the sort of slow doomy, melodic mathy meander. But "I Just Want To Go Home" is more recognizable HM territory, beginning with some super low slung bass creep, before the drums begin to pound, the guitars start to soar and howl, and then those vocals, folks who have yet to hear Creston Spiers vocalize, are in for a treat, or at least a surprise, a gruff howl, weirdly melodic, but so tortured and gloriously emotional, one of the few voices that is totally and utterly unique, here draped over that skeletal rhythm and that rumbling bass, a ghostly sort of abstract doom ballad that creeps and crawls and manages to be both heavy and haunting.
"I'm Sick Of All This Too" is classic HM, super mathy, but impossibly abstract, little squalls of gnarled riffage and drum pound, unfurling bursts of short sharp mathy heaviness, only to ring out, and leave huge spaces, repeated, but seemingly never in the same way twice, finally shifting gears during the last few seconds and turning gorgeously melodic and intense. Only 2 minutes, but the sort of song that could take up a whole side and we'd be psyched.
We could definitely go track by track, minute by minute, but in some ways that sort of reductive description takes away from the magic of Harvey Milk, it's not really what they do, more how they do it. The constituent parts are the same as a million other bands, but there's no mistaking these guys for anyone else. Whatever they decide to do with those parts, their songs, it always turns out sounding ONLY like them. From super melodic slowcore doom pop ("I Know This Is No Place For You" might be their prettiest song yet), to churning, chugging lumbering post doom dirgery, to twisted synth driven dronerock, that gives way to hushed, super intimate, piano driven barely there balladry, to epic, 'classic' rock majesty, sounding a bit like a Queen record left out in the sun, all harmonies, and huge choruses, and big guitars, but all sort of blurred and oozy and melted, into something gloriously warped, and like the rest of the tracks here, something that could only be Harvey Milk.
It's weird to think that there was a time when it was practically impossible to get a Harvey Milk record. We spent ages trying to track down any information about these guys, looking for their Courtesy And Good Will lp, trying to decipher the mystery of the My Love Is Higher album cover. A random sequence of events led to Andee reissuing Courtesy on tUMULt, which was later snapped up by Relapse. And after that, things started to snowball, singles collections, reissues, and lo and behold a new album, the band back together again, and touring! Finally taking their rightful place at the head of the heavy rock table where they always belonged. Only now, they're the elder statesmen instead of the young upstarts. But hell, they still sound way heavier and more alive than any of the current crop of heavies. And this brand new disc just seals the deal.
And as if the band weren't heavy enough, they've added Mr. Joe Preston (Thrones/Melvins/Earth/High On Fire/etc.) to the group. And the results are pretty stellar. Not only do the band still crush and destroy (they couldn't really get any heavier, could they?) but they're even more melodic. In some strange twist, they seem to have melded the classic rock tendencies of Pleaser era Milk, with the infuriatingly and brilliantly repetitive dirge of Courtesy, creating something both epic and catchy, hooky and heavy, and insanely obtuse and difficult.
The opening track begins with Creston singing in a delicate falsetto, over simple strummed guitar, and then the bomb drops, and the band explode into some post-Melvins, post-Killdozer dirgey crawl, but even at their most sludgiest, they still manage to sound incredible. It's like some pop band got flayed alive and shoved in a bubbling tar pit. Only to emerge a stumbling lurching dripping beast. Epic grinding riffage and classic rock leads give way to an extended chugscape, over and over and over, the vocals suddenly sounding all Gibby-like, the guitar so distorted it crumbles and falls like sodden chunks through the grill of your speaker, until the very end when the vocals transform into a line from the Beatles' "A Day In The Life", and then they finish off with their own version of -that- famous chord. What the fuck?
The next track begins all Led Zep, huge booming drums, until in swings the riff, and vocalist Creston Spiers wounded howl. Then there's "After All I've Done For You" a super dense tangled riffscape that recalls Don Caballero or Bastro, with it's furious mathiness, but it is Harvey Milk, so it of course mutates into a slow motion doomdirge complete with fucked up backwards production.
Our favorite track might be "Motown", with it's soaring melody, and super hooky main riff. A total pop classic albeit one bathed in guitar crunch, and delivered in a feral croon. Some killer leads seal the deal, and some almost Eagles like guitar harmonies. Then there's "Roses", which begins all gentle piano, and guitar harmonics, and Creston's plaintive warble, before slipping into something a little sludgier and sloooooooooooow. Very Courtesy sounding for sure. Near the end, "Barn Burner explodes into another frenzy of mathy riffage, proving again that HM are not a slow motion one trick pony. But it's not just a riff fest, there are some gorgeous harmonies, and some amazing guitar playing going on.
Finally the band finish off with a bang. The nearly nine minute "Good Bye Blues", an impossible slow trudge, peppered with little jagged chunks of riff, plenty of space, stop start weirdness, an almost classic rock sounding bridge, all tangled soaring leads and manic drumming, only to slip back into epic dirgery, and finishing off with a goofy little burst of 'Milked polka and a big Gong Show goooooong. Irreverent, goofy, funny, but somehow still deadly serious, musically merciless, creating epic skull crushing doomscapes one second, whispered balladry the next, and fucked up mathy what-the-fuck the very next, and thus remaining still, without a doubt, one of the best bands in the world.
This is the fancy Japanese double disc edition, which is the only one we're carrying right now, since we figured that most folks into Harvey Milk are WAY into Harvey Milk, and wouldn't mind paying a little extra for a whole extra disc, not to mention some fancy Japanese gatefold packaging. If you really want the cheaper domestic single disc version, just ask, we can order it for you, but heck? Why would you. Who can argue with MORE Harvey Milk? Not us. SO here we have a whole second disc of MORE. Basically, it's the whole record, in demo form, which means, that it's instrumental, and that the arrangements and recordings are dramatically different. Some songs are truncated, others are way stretched out, some changed dramatically between the demo and the album, some remained almost the same, but in both cases, these versions are fantastic. And you know it's something when a band's demos sound better than most other band's actual albums. But as if that weren't enough, there's also an unreleased Leonard Cohen cover! "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" And HM fans will remember what these guys can do with a Cohen track, as is evidenced by "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" on Courtesy. This one is similar, not quite as anguished, but close, dark and strangely haunting, Creston's vocals more retrained, but still raw and raspy and deep, over a simple strummed guitar, a mournful lament, which in true HM fashion finishes off with some retarded super effected riffing that sort of grinds and noodles until a computer voice intones "This cellphone is a piece of shit."
How can you not love Harvey Milk?! You can't. You just can't. So buy this. It's probably the best record you'll buy this year, and for lots of you, it will immediately become the best record you own. All hail the Milk!
As mentioned above, this comes in a super swank full color Japanese style mini gatefold, with an obi, and multiple printed inserts, track listing, a bunch of Japanese text, and lyrics in English!
Around these parts, a new record from sludgelords Harvey Milk barely requires a review. They are the rulers of the slow and low, every record equally heavy and catchy, crushing and complex, glacial and epic. And this live set is no different. Their very first European performance EVER, recorded last year, jam packed with tons of our favorite HM jams, very little stage banter, or even crowd sounds, the band just plow through song after song, barely pausing to catch their breath, and as you might imagine, it's breathtaking, and the sound is as good as any of their records proper, the drums dense and chaotic, the guitars impossibly massive and downtuned, the bass a wall of rib cage rattling rumble, and the vocals, Creston Spiers and Joe Preston offer up some incredible harmonies, incredible mostly cuz the two of them have voices like molasses being poured out of a cement mixer, growly and raspy moaning bellows, but together, they sound practically angelic (if you're imagining filth encrusted fallen angels drowning in a tarpit, that is). The sound is ace, the band is tight as fuck, what more do you need to know? Well, probably that it's wicked limited, pressed on clear yellow vinyl, comes with a printed insert with photos and liner notes from both the label and the band, and if that all's not enough, they totally nail a crushing grinding blown out cover of Fear's "We Destroy The Family"! WAY RECOMMENDED, grab one while you can...
My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be. What an awesome title. And the record cover, a bull and a rooster and an ornate candle, the words Harvey Milk in tiny blue type over the rooster. On the cd, the text: "Harvey Milk is Cronos, Mantis, Abadon". Song titles like�"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I",�"The Anvil Will Fall" and "Merlin Is Magic". By now most avid AQ customers are very familiar with the mysterious sludge rock power trio Harvey Milk, but when we first laid hands on this disc, back in 1994, we had no idea what to think. As if�the artwork wasn't enough to have us scratching our heads, the music inside was even more willfully difficult. And still is. Obviously borne of some serious Melvins worship, Harvey Milk, took the already difficult sound of the Melvins to new heights, or depths, crafting lengthy sludge jams, packed with as much space as riffs, long expanses of spastic John Bonham like drumming, vocals a whiskey soaked gravelly bellow, guitars thick black sheets. This was without a doubt some of the strangest music we had ever heard. But at the same time, somehow the most beautiful. The sound�of Harvey Milk was some impossible blend of noise rock, math rock, post rock, punk rock, twentieth century composition and METAL. All tangled into one huge gnarled black hole of sound. A sound that crawls more than it rocks, but when it does rock, it blows away pretty much any other band in the land.�
Lots of you no doubt already own Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men, arguably one of the greatest records EVER, heavy, sludgy or otherwise. If you don't you need to stop reading for a second and go buy it right now. We'll wait...........
Okay, Courtesy was HM record number two, and found the band 'tightening' up their sound, taking the chaos of My Love, and crafting it into, well, more chaos. It's hard to say how they changed between these two records. My Love is a tiny bit faster. The best way to describe it is like this:�My Love is to Courtesy, the way Nirvana's Bleach is to Nevermind, more immediate and raw, but with some of the best songs the band ever wrote, and like Bleach, it's a record that tons of fans continue to insist is the best thing they've ever done. And while we are of the mind that Courtesy is in fact the best Harvey Milk record ever (unless you ask Allan, who would probably say The Pleaser, the -other- HM reissue this week, a killer disc of Harvey Milked ZZ Top worship) returning to My Love has us maybe reconsidering. We can't actually decide. There are so many amazing songs on My Love that we had forgotten about, as good as anything on Courtesy. It would probably be more realistic to proclaim�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be /�Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men as the ultimate math-sludge-slow-motion-dirge-doom-whatever one-two punch EVER. Maybe the greatest first and second record combo of all time. Needless to say, if you're at all into the current crop of slow motion doom mongers, and have somehow missed out on these records, you will lose your fucking mind (and odds are loads of you have never heard My Love as it's been out of print for ages). It's no exaggeration when we say every song on My Love is darn near perfect. But a few of our favorites:
"A Small Turn Of Human Kindness" was the absolute first peep we ever heard out of HM, and it's brutal and beautiful, so utterly confusing and unlike anything ever. A�frustratingly obtuse abstract jam, even calling it a jam is stretching the definition of the word jam, there's LOTS of space, the track begins with a minute of weird electronic noodling, a huge wash of cymbals and guitar scrape, a killer BIG drum fill, and then... nothing... a weird barely there buzz, some cymbal dings, a moaning cello.... How amazing is that?!?!? It isn't until halfway through the song before the riff finally kicks in, and even then, it's like pulling teeth to get these guys to let loose and rock. In fact, it's not until the last two minutes that the band really go for it. And it was worth the wait, but before you know it comes�"Women Dig it", slowing everything waaaaaaaaay back down. A super drawn out exercise in tension and release, with long stretches of just drums, big Zeppelin style drums, accompanied by mewled vocal, but which features one of the most awesome riffs EVER, so much so, that when it kicks in, it makes you want to rock the fuck out, which you could do if it wasn't just played once every couple minutes.... oh the glorious frustration!!! It's the sort of riff most bands would not only kill for, but that most bands would repeat over and over and over and base a whole song� around, whereas the Milk kick out that riff maybe twenty times, in the whole song, and all clumped together, with the rest of the song spent plodding and drifting and doing anything but locking into a killer groove. But that's what makes Harvey Milk so great, when that riff DOES drop, it's a ridiculous release, like an orgasm, this unbelievable rock-out relief, but like with most things it's the wait, the build up, that is the best part. Or at least the 'other' best part.
Another classic Milk track is�"The Anvil Will Fall", a moody drifting whispery ballad, peppered by huge bursts of downtuned pummel,�when out of nowhere, in come the strings, some patriotic hymn, an almost recognizable tune that Creston sings along too in his warbly raspy croon, even kicking it up into a wicked falsetto, before petering back out into the original hushed crawl, eventually launching into a super moving moody goddamned ANTHEM. The sort of song that should have sludge fans teary eyed with hat in hand, and hand over heart. And finally...
"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I", besides being the best song title maybe EVER, it's also one of the greatest songs ever, a really really�fucking weird song, howled tortured vocals over a relentless tribal drum fill with occasional bursts of Zeppelin like riffage,�before the guitar transforms into a static rumbling drone, and the drums just sort of do whatever the hell they want, for ever it feels like...�and then the band launches back into it and it's some relentless bastardized groovy Southern sludge jam, but like all HM songs, they stop not long after to just sort of wander, and plod and wait, and pause, before doing it all over again....
We could go one and on, and get all mushy and fanboy about every single song on�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be, but you get the drift. This record is magical. Majestic. Freaked out. Furious. Heavy as anything you've ever heard. Strangely pretty. Mind meltingly difficult. Crushing. Confusing. Baffling. Brutal. And pretty much one of our favorite records ever...
Got a few more copies of this final Harvey Milk album from '97. It's very different from their tUMULt release (the cd reissue of the '95 "Goodwill And Courtesy..." LP) which was super-heavy dronemetal to outdo the Melvins, but "The Pleaser" is still a great
All most folks will need to know about this, is BRAND NEW HARVEY MILK TRACK. And maybe LIMITED TO 550 COPIES and ALREADY ALMOST OUT OF PRINT. If you're a long time aQ New Arrivals list reader, then the deal will no doubt be further sealed by these words: BRAND NEW WILDILDLIFE TRACK. Okay, that's enough all caps for one review. But that's it in a nutshell, killer new super limited split 7" from the gods of epic slow motion majestic sludge, and the up and coming masters of chaotic tripped out psychedelic metallic noise pop. Both bands bringing their A game, with tracks that sound like they could have come off either of their kick ass last albums.
So Harvey Milk, if you need an introduction, have a gander at the multitude of gushing reviews elsewhere on the aQ website, needless to say, there are a handful of bands who practically define aQ, who embody everything we love about music, and Harvey Milk is definitely one of those bands. And even in one side of a 7" it's easy to understand why. Even at 45, it still almost sounds too slow. And while it most certainly is sludgey and doomy and drone-y and dirgey it's also super catchy, with killer vocal harmonies, but those weird harmonies only HM can pull off, rough and raw and howled but still somehow harmonious, the sound and song majestic and epic, slow burning and emotional, like some classic rock staple slowed waaaaaaaaay doooooooown. So good.
Wildildlife counter with probably their poppiest song ever, still with that lysergic Butthole Surfers vibe, but WAY more hooky and bubblegummy, this track too has a classic rock vibe, but also a little Janes Addiction, sludgey guitars (that also sound a bit Aerosmith-y), chaotic drumming, tangled vocal lines, some clean and clear and crooned, others processed and sped up, all a little tripped out, with some killer squiggly guitar leads, lots of effects, delay and reverb all over the place, a dense, heavy, catchy hook filled pop psych jam that totally slays. Produced by Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux btw (she's also producing their forthcoming full length).
LIMITED TO 550 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. Weird cover art: HM dude eating toast on one side, corpse painted cat on the other, some tripped out illustrations and liner notes inside. Will be gone before you know it.
Pentagram man in sleaze metal shocker! Big hair, bullet belt, snakeskin boots. Sometimes (all the time) you just can't beat good ol' skool heavy metal, '80s style! This reissue is just that, authentic underground '80s metal, recorded circa '84 and '86, capturing the party time sleazy rock vibe of the big hair era, but with an extra doom twist, so while arena Ozzy is one influence, Witchfinder General is another. And Pentagram, definitely Pentagram. That's 'cause this Joe Hasselvander fella is best known as the longtime drummer for those American doom metal legends. (His other claim to fame: since the late '80s, he's also been the drummer for NWOBHM stalwarts Raven.) He was a member of Pentagram for years and years (until recently), in particular a crucial member of the band when they were but a duo, he and wizened vocalist Bobby Liebling together creating Pentagram's comeback classics Review Your Choices (1999) and Sub-Basement (2000), Hasselvander playing not only drums but guitar and bass as well on those albums, as well as penning a good portion of the material! (Reissues of which are back in stock this list by the way.)
So, anyone into Pentagram should be curious about the solo material Hasselvander recorded back in the '80s, and your curiosity will be rewarded if you pick up this disc... it rocks! And demonstrates again that he's a talented multi-instrumentalist, metal songwriter, and a pretty decent singer as well.
It's basic, heavy, fun stuff that's stick-in-your-head catchy. Track 4, "Loud Enough", was echoing 'round my brain for days after first spinning this - you know when you start thinking of a song, your humming it without knowing it, but can't figure out what it is? Listening to as much music as we do here at AQ, that happens now and then, and it took a while before I was able to identify the chorus occupying my mind as being from that song, and this disc.
There's 16 tracks total on this disc, consisting of the Lady Killer lp from 1984 and the Roadkill sessions from '86. Plus, there's two bonus tracks. One's a live recording circa 1979 from another Hasselvander band, Overlord. And then another a live track, "The Ghoul", performed by Death Row (aka Pentagram) from 1982, with Bobby L. on vox of course, another reason for Penta-fans to get this.
The Roadkill material comes first on the disc, probably a good thing 'cause it sounds much better - though all of this has raw sound quality, the budget production of Ladykiller material is especially fuzzed and frazzed with distortion, sounding more like a demo than Roadkill does, even though Roadkill was a demo (later issued on vinyl in the late '90s), while Ladykiller was an actual release in '84.
Apparently Lady Killer was originally intended as an exploito-metal project, supposedly to be an all-girl band a la Girlschool. But when the female singer hired for the session failed to show up, Joe had to sing instead, with no prior vocal experience. He also played all instruments except lead guitar. Universally panned upon release, it's got a bit of a cult status now... but the Road Kill material is stronger, Joe's vocals much improved (since he had a chance to practice 'em) consisting of 8 demo tracks, six by Joe and two by former Pentagram guitarist Victor Griffin. Songs from Road Kill like "Back Door Man" and "Under The Gun" seem like they could have been hits... in the '80s anyway. Kinda like early Twisted Sister, early Motley Crue, or early W.A.S.P (with that extra doomy vibe already mentioned). Heavy and hooky, meat and potatoes American metal, nothing too high falutin', but with tons of underground '80s metal atmosphere.
This is packaged with a thick cd booklet full of lyrics, liner notes from Joe, and vintage photos (including an unbelievably wasted lookin' pic of the now-deceased guy who played guitar on Roadkill, Jay Smith). Recommended to all heshers and headbangers!!
Record number two from this hateful harsh suicidal black metal band turned dark gothy gloom wave outfit, and the band continue to shed the black vestiges of their past incarnation, moving ever toward a more purely darkwave pop sound, and like on their debut, Famine (Or Into The Bellies Of Worms), the sound here is all warm muted buzz, propulsive drum pound, low slung slithery basslines, all woven into a droned out darkly psychedelic chunk of sweet sonic miserablism, the vocals this time a bit more strident in places, and powerful, making this sound more like Killing Joke than anything. Although the deep dramatic croon from the first record remains, and seems to be again channeling Andrew Eldridge from Sisters Of Mercy. There are also long droned out tones, that sound like horns, but could be guitars or synths, the effect is the same, adding a sort of mournful funeral quality, which is balanced by the chiming melodies, and the almost Cure-like songcraft, although it's more like Cure filtered through Circle, as the tracks have a looped krautrock like mesmer to them, hypnotic and trancelike.
Some of the tracks are peppered with weird squelchy synths and electronics, adding a weird spaciness to the proceedings, but for the most part, the sound here is a dark, driving minimal gloom pop, with the guitars occasionally slipping into an almost metallic chug, but tending more toward the angular crunch of echo drenched jangle, there are samples too, but really with music like this, it's all abut the bass and drums, that sort of Joy Division foundation that's in full effect here, and is dark and driving and dreamily depressive, mournful and melancholic, Hateful Abandon like the darker grittier version of Nuit Noire gloom pop offshoot Soror Dolorosa, and really anyone who dug that (did anyone not?) will love this too!
Released on the always kick ass UK label Todestrieb.
'Bout time we had a cd reissue of this obscure slab of heavy, hard rockin' high weirdness, the only album released by this late '60s/early '70s band, who if nothing else, should get an award for having one of the best names ever. Haystacks Balboa, just what were they on? Also, one guy in the band is a dead ringer for the MC5's Rob Tyner (big dude with honky Afro).
Originally released back in 1970, produced by Shadow Morton (The Shangri-Las, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly, New York Dolls), this is a crazy little record, part acid rock, part blues, part prog. There's lots of heavy groovin', proto-metal riffing mixing it up with proggy keyboard action a la ELP's self-titled debut from the same year. More cogently, we'd recommend this to fans of Sir Lord Baltimore, The Good Rats, The James Gang, Mountain (whom they were buddies with) and Billy Joel's Attila (don't laugh - we love that record and really wish it would get reissued too!). Or, for a more recent reference, sometimes SF's own Hot Lunch sound a bit like Haystacks Balboa, actually!
The album starts off in full-on fuzz guitar & jammin' organ mode, with "The Spoiler", the rough-edged vocals hollerin' hard. The next track, "The Children Of Heaven" is even heavier at first, with ultra-gruff deep voiced vocals and lumbering riffage, but then veers into twee thespianism and ornate keyboard melodies, the track teetering back and forth between light and heavy extremes, with some maniacal laughter thrown in as well. Next up, "Bruce's Twist" (aka "Gasbag") is rollicking number with sleazy lyrics, blues guitar licks and carnivalesque organ, hardcore honky-tonkin'. Following that, the mostly melodic epic "Auburn Queen" takes center stage for nearly nine minutes, and many moods - one of which sounds a bit like ELP doing the theme music to The Simpsons, and another of which is kind of in the mode of spooky, atmospheric Alice Cooper, like "The Ballad Of Dwight Frye", but with a dash of Tom Waits due to the especially gruff singing.
Haystacks Balboa give us the "Sticky Finger" next, a great garage-prog headbang, and then offer up another ambitious psychedelic epic, the two-part "Ode To The Silken Men", before winding things up with the mellow "Riverland", a sweet song about a place "where life is grand and wars are fought with loud rock bands". Yeah!
ATTENTION DOOM FANATICS, DOOMLORDS and DOOM MAIDENS!!!
HC Minds began life way back in the early nineties, in the placid little town of Eugene Oregon, and while the name might not be immediately familiar to many of you, the bands that were spawned from HC Minds most likey are familiar: the legendary YOB, and the not nearly so legendary, but equally awesome Aldebaran. HC Minds released a handful of records, including a split with Japanese sludgelords Dot [.], most of which faded away with little or no fanfare, but maybe it was just that their doom was a bit ahead of its time. Now that we're in the midst of a doom renaissance, what better time than now for HC Minds to rise from the grave and offer up a new batch of filthy, downtuned doomy sludge!
Their first record in 6 years, The Beginning Of The End is a gloriously heavy sludgefest, doomy yes, but not ultra doomy like Corrupted and Bunkur and Moss, no this is way more rocking, we're talking Eyehategod, Grief, Bongzilla, Weedeater, Acrimony, Church Of Misery, that sort of thing.
The opener here is a short sharp blast of groovy stoner doom, with a killer almost NOLA sounding main riff, recorded HOT and way in-the-red, lo-fi, but fierce and intense, but that brief blast quickly gives way to some massive slow motion Sabbathian doom, lurching, lumbering, tuned way down, the drums spread way out but pounding heavily, total classic old school dooooom. But the record closes with another uptempo jam, a super heavy grinding stoner doom workout, mathy, jagged, with wild drumming and a killer main riff.
The first track on the B side is the record's centerpiece though, HC Minds get all Corrupted, starting off with 5 or 6 minutes of dark languorous piano, atmospheric and haunting, before the hammer falls and the band launch into the meat of the song, WAY heavier, but no less atmospheric and mysterious, this time bordering on ultradoom, with the riff unfurling and ringing out into long stretched spaced out crumbling decaying distortion, before the riff winds up and goes again, the drums a massive pound, but striking every few seconds, the vocals a raspy whisper, the whole thing gorgeously depressive and sloooooooow.
The band close out with an even slooower doom jam, super abstract, and ultra distorted, a lugubrious crawl, but peppered with furious squalls of wild grinding psychedelic freakouts, and some harsh demonic almost black metal vox, so fucking awesome, almost wish this track had been given a whole side of its own.
Heavy, and slow, and doomy, and downtuned, which in case you're still not getting it means total stoner doom dirge NIRVANA.
LIMITED TO 380 COPIES!!!! On black vinyl, although amidst the 30 copies we got, there are 4 or 5 of the super limited white vinyl version, maybe you'll get lucky. Comes in an awesome full color eye popping sleeve, with a printed insert, and an equally eye popping poster of the cover.
Look out! Lurching, lumbering, mesmerically repetitive & rambling, doomed-out blackened metal comin' at ya here, from Stockholm, Sweden, brought to us by a label that sure knows their hard-to-pigeonhole, psychedelic "occult rock" heaviness (The Ajna Offensive, who most recently brought us both the latest Aluk Todolo and Sabbath Assembly efforts). Head Of The Demon's debut is indeed demonic "head" music, the sort of thing meant for late night listening, with the lights low, when you're in a particularly Luciferian and/or Lovecraftian mood, doing some grim partying all by yourself, working your way through a few cans of beer, cranking tunes that aren't meant for the light of day nor the ears of the innocent.
Under such circumstances, it's easy to embrace the plodding desolate atmospherics of the 9+ minute "They Lie In Wait - Riding The Waste", for instance, and groove to the chantings of "By Titan Hand"...
Head Of The Demon's weird vibe is in part due to the guttural, slightly goofy vokills (that grew on us), channelling Tom G. Warrior deathgruntage at times, Pete Steele gothic crypt-speak at others, all echoed and effected. Even more crucial is the chiming and buzzy but still rather clean guitar, that's wielded by an ex-member of doomlords Saturnalia Temple. The guitarist plays some almost Eastern-inflected riffs, kinda coming across like dismal, doomic snake charmer music, super raw and hypnotic - with eerie organ tones and drones also adding to the effect.
A sickened Sabbath is an obvious reference, also we should cite The Wizar'd, Hellhammer, Negative Plane to explain other aspects of Head Of The Demon's sound. And the cyclic chug of "Phantasmagoria" could be a black metal incarnation of Pharoah Overlord, perhaps! Definitely not a normal "metal" album, but one that for sure fits in with the avant/extreme Ajna aesthetic of darkness and doom.
A new Heads record is definitely cause for celebration around these parts. This UK power trio fuses stoner rock, psych rock and krautrock into a drone-y spacey heavy whole that couldn't be more AQ perfect. Technically, however, this is not a -new- release, it's a vinyl reissue of the Heads' 33 cd, which was of course limited to 33 copies, and which means, unless you are in fact one of those 33 people, then this is essentially a new record as far as most of us are concerned. And it's not exactly a proper Heads record either, instead it's twenty tracks of unreleased songs, studio snippets, outtakes and experiments all seamlessly woven together into one entire record (think Faust's Tapes). Quite a bit more abstract than other Heads records, 33 is definitely on the jammy, rhythmic experimentation side of things, definitely falling way more on the krautrock side of the line than the psych rock. Which is indeed a good thing. This is a perfect slab of hypnotic, tripped out, droning, tribal psych rock, and fans of Circle, Salvatore, Faust, Can, Spacemen 3, and all that sort of stuff should not miss it. And as with most things like this, QUITE LIMITED!
Last list we slobbered all over an album called Under Sided by UK psych rock rulers The Heads, and in the course of the review we mentioned we also had an even newer disc by them, the live-in-rehearsal album At Last. We quickly ran out of Under Sided (hopefully we'll be getting more of 'em back in soon) but At Last is still here, and it's a great freaking freakout record too. With a band like The Heads, ALL their albums might as well be live, it's just that with the actual live album you get versions of classics culled from earlier albums, plus new material n' improvisations never heard before (or again). To quickly recap, The Heads are an unsung uber-awesome heavy duty psychedelic garage rock band that takes their inspiration from '70s masters like Hawkwind, The Stooges, and the Pink Fairies. We're also reminded a bit of Lubricated Goat and some other Aussie acts. So if you're into any of that, and/or current acid-rock acts like Monster Magnet, High Rise, Comets On Fire, and suchlike, you ought to like The Heads. Apparently they recorded this while getting ready to open up for Mudhoney, who, good as they are, must have been blown off the stage. As good as Under Sided (a few tunes from which get the live treatment here) and equally as recommended!
AWESOME, REPRESSED!!!! Originally released in 2009, out of print for years. If you missed it, at last here it is again - for a little while anyway. What we said originally...
As much as we dig the new breed of psychedelic space rockers, none of them can touch the Heads, whose sound is some impossible union of Hawkwind, the Stooges and Monster Magnet, able to whip off a 3 minute pounding garage psych jam one minute, and a 30+ minute free form metallic space drone the next, usually choosing to meld the two into super rocking, ur-psych blowouts, sprawling and heavy and blown out and EPIC.
This 2lp live set, recorded while the band were on tour with SF's own Wooden Shjips, finds the Heads in fine form, effortlessly kicking out the jams live, BIG TIME, and in the process offering up a primer for all those young psych rock whipper snappers.
Brooding slow burn space-out to full on supernova lysergic psych meltdown, effects everywhere, swirling clouds of hazy blurred distortion, drums, heavy and pounding and rock solid, but occasionally getting all skittery and abstract, the songs slip from dirgey and doomy to hypnotic and heavy to super rocking and chaotic, the vox (when they do surface) are distorted and howled and buried in the mix, and the riffs, oh the riffs, for all the atmosphere and the vibe and the effects, the riffs slay, the melodies are insanely catchy, the leads stick in your head as if they were the chorus from a pop song, hooks buried everywhere beneath the roiling incendiary space rocking and free form psychedelia.
So goddamn good, the band's already heavy and unhinged sound gets even more far out live, the songs and sounds let loose, the unfurling into super spacious drone drenched spaced out psychedelic heaviness. Fuck yeah.
SUPER LIMITED, once again. Gorgeous Day Of The Dead sixties style psychedelic cover art, thick stock, nice heavy vinyl, killer sound, essential...
This band kicks out raw, spacey, psychedelic acid jams that any psych rock freak who likes it hard and heavy (you! c'mon, stand up!) will spazz over. We've been fans of England's The Heads for years. They put out a few records on the now-defunct Man's Ruin label a while back, and they sure stood out from the general run of the usual stoner rock and punk on that label's roster. But its been much more recently -- in the last year, really, after being exposed to their harder-to-find, post-Man's Ruin output -- that we've realized just how great a band The Heads really are. Really f**kin' great! Carrying the swirling smoke spewing torch of fuzz wah wah fx freak rock handed down from The Stooges and Hawkwind, adding a post-punk edge, The Heads here serve up a sonic maelstrom that makes their Japanese contemporaries like Mainliner and Acid Mothers Temple sound like wimps and poseurs. No US bands come close either, really, but if you dig Comets On Fire and Monster Magnet's garage groove and stoner trance, you'll dig The Head's Under Sided, from three minute riffers like "Dissonaut" to the 29+ minute album closer "Heavy Sea". At long last we've got some import (but inexpensive!) copies of this, their most recent studio album, released last year, recorded in '01. Supply is limited, so act fast or be patient... And we've also got some copies of their brand new live disc, At Last, that we'll review on our next list. The Heads are right on. Super freakin' recommended!
Named after Miami's basketball team, or perhaps not, this heavy band of psychedelic stoners hails from Berlin, Germany, and really rip it up here on this disc, brought to us by This Charming Man Records, who also first turned us on to aQ faves Kadavar. They are very '70s sounding, in the vein of Kadavar, yep, and Witchcraft, Graveyard, and the like. Hard rockin' stuff, with vaguely Ozzy-ish vox (but not as Ozzy-ish as some bands) wailing over twin guitar jamming, lotsa bellbottomed wakka-wakka-wah-wah action, and some Hammond organ too, Heat riffing away like it's still 1973, pretty darn kick ass really. They have a melodic side to 'em too, on moody but still energetic numbers like "The Golden Age", and deploy plenty of non-lame bluesiness as well (the band features ex-members of Samsara Blues Experiment, by the way). This sort of thing is of course the result of years of study of the masters: Sabbath, Zeppelin, Lizzy, early Scorps, Wishbone Ash, etc., but besides the worship and woodshedding, you've gotta have an authentic spark, and Heat sound like they have it for real.
Heat will surely warm the hesher hearts of all who've been digging the recent likes of Spiral Shades, Electric Citizen, Ovvl, Sons Of Huns, Carousel, Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovell... man we're living in a real heavy retro rock renaissance these days!!
In keeping with the duality within this band's name, there's probably two sorts of people reading this review. There are those who are dedicated fans, familiar with the latter-day Black Sabbath saga, awaiting this album with eager anticipation. And then there's those who need to be told that Heaven & Hell IS Black Sabbath, in all but name - hence this album's title, The Devil You Know. For the latter folks, we'll help 'em get with the program by explaining that this so-called Heaven And Hell band is the Black Sabbath lineup - Ronnie James Dio on vocals, Tony Iommi on guitar, Geezer Butler on bass, and Vinnie Appice on drums - that last appeared on a studio album seventeen (!) years ago: 1992's Dehumanizer, which in hindsight was a pretty good record. Dio of course was original Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne's replacement in the band, joining up in 1980 for the Heaven and Hell album (natch), followed by Mob Rules and Live Evil. He then quit for a solo career, and Sabbath's fortunes soon declined... a decade later, Dehumanizer was a short lived reunion, scuttled when Sabbath sans Dio agreed to open for Ozzy's so-called "retirement" show... Ozzy obviously didn't ever retire, and eventually rejoined Sabbath himself, for several successful tours - but no new studio album. And it seemed that there never would be another Sabbath album... until now, though it's not called Sabbath! Getting restless just going around doing "Paranoid" and "Iron Man" with a doddering Ozzy, recently Tony and Geezer were lucky to persuade Dio to let bygones be bygones and get back together with his old Sabbath mates for a tour and live album under this new name (Black Sabbath with Ozzy remaining on some sort of official hiatus we suppose).
We saw 'em play in San Jose and good grief, for a 66 year old frontman, Dio was AMAZING. Full of energy and as impressive/expressive/excessive vocally as ever. It's no wonder that inspired by their touring, these senior citizens (well perhaps Vinnie isn't quite so old) answered the prayers of Dio/Sabbath fans everywhere and recorded a brand new album! (Now the first batch of people referred to at the top of this review can tune back in.)
The truth is, we sorta had low expectations for this. As good as they were live doing old classic tracks, could they really write a worthy new record? The 3 new Dio-fronted studio tunes that were included as a bonus on Sabbath's The Dio Years anthology in 2007 were kind of weak, though they sounded better in concert, we must admit. And many a venerable band has stumbled when a long-awaited reunion album has finally happened (The Stooges being a good, or rather bad, example).
So we were pleasantly surprised to find, when we finally heard it, that The Devil You Know was actually pretty darn good! Great, even. Apparently they took their time and did this right, with serious intent. They didn't try to modernize their sound, nor is it a half-assed cash-in, they simply did what they know best how to do - heck, what they invented. EPIC DOOM METAL. No, it's not the equal of Heaven and Hell or Mob Rules, but who could expect that? It IS at least as good or maybe better than Dehumanizer, and certainly blows any other attempt at epic doom you're gonna hear this year out of the castle moat. How could it not? It's Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler and Ronnie James effin' Dio!! (Too bad for Candlemass that they just put out a new album, too... but they'd probably even agree.)
From the very first song, the lumbering "Atom And Evil", you'll hear this is firmly in their own grand tradition. Dio era Sabbath lives! The wizardly elfin one's vocals are mighty and majestic, Tony's guitar tone sounds straight from the '70s, he and Geezer offering up surging heaviosity o'er which Dio weaves his vocal spell, with portentous lyrics to match the dark doominess of much of the music. Not that it's all a dirge, they rock out plenty too, maybe too much so on "Rock N' Roll Angel", though you gotta love it that there's still a band who'd write a song with a (non-ironic) title like that. Tony gets in some choice solos, and his regal riffage leaves his "riffmaster" reputation unblemished, although what may be more memorable are the melodies of Dio's vocal lines. Possessed by the phantoms of past glories, this is, wonderfully so.
While the debate among Sabbath fans over the relative merits of the band's various vocalists will forever rage (similar to the debate over who's the best James Bond), what's certain is that in the here and now, the ancient yet ageless one known as Dio is clearly the superior, only choice for Sabbath frontman. Can't imagine them making anything as remotely as solid as this if they'd tried it with Ozzy! Celebrity/corporate crapola would ruin it... plus Ozzy's voice these days seems almost entirely computerized. Also, for these guys, it'll never be 1971 again. But 1981, via 1992, is a lot easier to conjure. Dio's still got it, and with him, they truly "click". He'll tell you himself, that despite his many years solo and with other groups, Rainbow, Elf, going back to Ronnie And The Redcaps in 1959, Black Sabbath is THE best band for him.
Who knows if Heaven & Hell aka Black Sabbath will ever make another album (did we mention Dio is pushing 70 years old?), but if they don't, this one is a proud ending to an illustrious career, a classy comeback and/or grand finale, upholding (reinstating?) their legacy indeed.
Attention Finnish music freaks, yet another weird and wonderful discovery from our favorite far away sonic Mecca. Colossal is the debut full length (released in 2008) from this Finnish stoner sludge combo, whose sound is gloriously thick and viscous, blown out and blisteringly heavy, a mix of Kyuss-y desert buzz, churning aggro AmRep-y noise rock, Eyehategod slo-mo Sabbathy dooooom and crumbling Torche style distorto pop, all tangled up into a super (subtly) hooky and heavy psychedelic brew. Plenty of stonery swing for sure, so fans of recent aQ faves like Black Pyramid, Orchid, Obrero, Freedom Hawk and all things Meteor City should definitely check this out, but ONLY if they're ready for something WAY more fucked up, sludgey and super distorted, with lots of the songs smoothly segueing from grinding, howling tarpit heaviness to groovy near poppiness, sometimes laced with wild psychedelic leads, wah wah guitars, other times, just utterly filthy and distorted and blackened, the drums bombastic, the arrangements mathy and super dynamic, with the occasional stretch of woozy stripped down slither, and sprawling expanses of detuned ultradoom crawl, but generally spending most of its time in either super sludgey stoner mode, or wildly pounding noise rock mode, usually some unholy union of the two. The magic to the record really is the recording though, which is impossibly heavy, ridiculously blown out, the sound super saturated and in the red, it sounds like the tape is frying or the speakers are melting, the guitars so distorted they become heaving swells of crumbling buzz, anchored by the drums and transformed into some seriously fierce riffage, the sort of tranced out riffiness that turns this into something just as spaced out and psychedelic as White Hills or Carlton Melton or any of those outfits (just check out the tranced out closer "Death") albeit WAY WAY heavier. Definitely recommended if for folks who dig the EXTREMELY slow and low, Sleep, Bunkur, Conan, Monarch, the Body, Otesanek, Slomatics and the like, but these guys definitely have their own twisted take on that sound, one that has us already tracking down their newer one, which will hopefully show up on a future list...
We're liking this Nordic notion of 'jazz fusion', all right. The heavy duty debut from the Hedvig Mollestad Trio comes to us from Norway's Rune Grammofon label, who specialize in such things - the 'death jazz' of Supersilent, for instance, and also the likes of Scorch Trio, Ultralyd, and Bushman's Revenge - the latter of whom even covered Motorhead on their latest disc. Well, not to be outdone, the Hedvig Mollestad Trio cover the Melvins, here! That ought to give you an idea of where they're coming from, jazz-wise.
These guys - actually, two gals and one guy, on electric guitar, bass and drums, respectively - are a skronky power trio who rip it up instrumentally, their tunes twisty, turny, and full of distortion and feedback. In other words, they rock, rollercoaster style, reminding us of AQ instrumental faves Stinking Lizaveta at times, and eponymous guitarist Hedvig Mollestad has a dash of Nels Cline in her playing.
Though the band members are all jazz-trained musicians, their brand of fusion is heavy on the grungy rock side of the equation, though they tone it down for the moody meanders of "Doom's Lair" and "The Valley" amongst a few mellower moments. Not to be counted among those moments, of course, is that Melvins cover (the chunky, rockin' "Blood Witch" from A Senile Animal), the only song here to feature vocals.
All in all, this is catchy stuff, as far as noisy noodling jazzrock goes! Recorded live in the studio with minimal overdubs, capturing a lot of raw energy and jaunty glee indeed. Available as a digipack cd, or on lp w/ download code.
Originally released on kvlt Northwestern black/metal/doom/drone label Woodsmoke as a super limited (100 copies) cassette, this is the first release from Hell, a one man black drone sludge outfit from Salem, Oregon, now remastered, and reissued as an ultra deluxe lp by Pesanta Urfolk, and (un)holy shit, is this a monster! Massive, crushing, crumbling heaviness, heaving low end miserablism, plodding death march pound that gives way to blown out in-the-red blackened guitardrone buzz, and thence to stonery sludge groove. Hell slips from doomic and lumbering, to super intense and mesmerizing, to groovy and rocking, all in the same song. Think Khanate, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Corrupted, Moss, Bunkur, but also Eyehategod, and the legion of EHG worshipping groovesludge merchants.
Just take album opener "Brutus", which begins as a hateful sonic trudge, the drums a caveman slo-mo pound, the vocals inhuman and alien, the guitars thick and tarpit black, the sound stumbling and hellish, only to have the vocals and drums drop out leaving a dense blast of buzzing, layered guitars, a weird black harmony of heaviness, droned out and mesmerizing, like a SUNNO))) record spinning at 78rpm, wreathed in siren like feedback, and all manner of echo, until the guitars coalese into a proper groove, Sabbathy almost, and then the song explodes into some serious stoner sludge crush, the main riff MASSIVE, with a cool ascending lick at the end that seems almost at odds with Hell's extreme grimnity, the vocals heavily effected and all twisted up, eventually slipping right back into the plod and lumber of the track's opener, until it grinds to a halt, in a weird cloud of ambient room noise, cartoon music, and glitched out channel surfing. Fucking bizarre and AWESOME.
"Infernus" is much more minimal, a barely propulsive beast, the guitars stretched out into thick streaks of black blur and keening high end skree, the vocals a distant anguished wail, the riffs gnarled and atonal, seeming to come apart before your ears, when the band to lock in, it's an impossibly slow sludge, the sound thick, the chugging weirdly percussive, as if the bass was tuned so low the strings were slapping loose against the bass. "Tyranno" is similarly sludgey, but way more noisy and murky, a blurred swirl of black filth, and spaced out glacial riffage, with some cool lurching stop start dynamics, and another near groove, that dissipates before it really gets rolling.
"Deflagatio" ups the tempo a bit, but just a bit, somewhere between abject crawl, and slo-mo groove, the guitars tuned so low, the vocals a demonic glass gargling shriek, but some surprising melody tucked amidst all the buzz and crumble. "Lethe" begins with a cloud of strangled guitar buzz, which gives way to a heaving bit of monstrous plod, the vocals way up in the mix and heavily echoed, giving them a weird dubbed out feel, the sound gradually shifting from lumber to lope to full on blown out drift, hovering in a field of black psych noise, before slipping right back into it, only to almost immediately be sucked into a cloud of swirling effects, while the guitars continue to buzz and drone.
Finally, the record finishes off with the 15+ minute "Maeror", a gorgeous mostly ambient sprawl, a symphony of whirling minor key shimmer, and strange clouds of tape hiss, the notes drawn way out, haunting and ominous, the speed warbling and constantly shifting, giving the whole thing a warped warbly vibe, breifly, some guitars explode from out of the murk, unleashing gouts of super distorted buzz, and shards of jagged feedback wreathed crunch, not to mention strange keening melancholy melodies, and some tripped out FX, before drifting off, and leaving a long warped expanse of minimal creeping haze to finally lay the record to rest. So killer, and obviously essential for fans of all things slow and low, black and buzzy, glacial and grim.
LIMITED TO 322 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. Pressed on nice thick black/blood red vinyl, and housed in heavy, super striking blood red/black woodcut sleeves, includes a massive poster (and we mean HUGE) of the woodcut cover art, and a printed cardstock insert. Also includes a download coupon.
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.
We could easily fill several paragraphs talking about the historical significance of Hellhammer (speaking of metal history, not world history, of course, though for some of us the two are of equal importance). But if you're reading this, and possibly already considering buying a deluxe double cd (or triple vinyl!) set of the band's early demo recordings, you probably already know something about the seminal significance of Swiss primal metal trio Hellhammer, the precursors to Celtic Frost. If you do want to know more, we'd point you to the liner notes to this release, written by HH/CF mainman Thomas Gabriel Fischer (aka Tom G. Warrior, aka Satanic Slaughter), which were adapted from his forthcoming book Only Death Is Real, all about the early '80s origins of those two bands.
As you probably know, Hellhammer started off as an amateur but enthusiastic exercise in teenage worship of NWOBHM black metal originators Venom, but took Venom's defining sound to further extremes, becoming a pioneering band not only in the black metal genre, but also for death metal and sludgy doom metal as well. And all this without much of a recorded legacy, just the 1984 Apocalyptic Raids ep and some compilation tracks and these demos, the band's initial recording sessions at long last presented officially on cd and vinyl, remastered from the original master tapes.
These three demo cassettes -- Satanic Rites, Death Fiend, and Triumph Of Death -- were released in mere handmade handfuls back in 1983. Including raw(er) versions of such later classics as "The Third Of The Storms", "Triumph Of Death", and "Revelations Of Doom", as well as many otherwise unheard Hellhammer hammerings, such morbid morsels as "Dark Warriors", "Crucifixion", "Decapitator", "Ready For Slaughter", and, er, "Bloody Pussies", it's 29 tracks, 102 minutes of truly ancient evil that any self respecting black/death/doom metaller should revel in. With a twanging low-end of rubbery bass, lurching riffs, pogoing rhythms, echoed vocals, these decidedly lo-fi recordings sound almost like a no-wave take on metal. Accidentally avant-garde (unlike Celtic Frost's later efforts to intentionally be so), Hellhammer were so wretched and fucked up that they've defined "necro" for all time. Hear here how they began.
The limited edition double cd version is packaged in a handsome, slipcased hardback digibook, 5.5" x 7.5", with a 36 page booklet bound inside, plus a small poster. Within the booklet, you'll find hella vintage black and white necro photography, xeroxed flier artwork, the original cassette covers, lyrics and liner notes from the band. Along with occult artwork, including a previously unpublished demonic pencil sketch by bassist Martin Eric Ain that, since it's rendered on graph paper, has us speculating that these guys probably were playing D&D in their bunker as well as recording the metal of death.
Meanwhile, the vinyl edition (also quite LIMITED, the eight we have are probably all we'll ever have) is a truly weighty proposition, 180 gram vinyl in a thick gatefold package with the aforementioned booklet, etc. as well.
Once the deluxe cd edition is gone, we'll have the regular, less-deluxe (but also less expensive) version.
Awesome German retro-thrash.
