It's about time Arcata, California produced a spacey psych band, don't ya think? It is, after all, the home of drop-out hippies and farmers of Mary J. Wanna. Happily, we report that Humboldt County's sons are just as tripped out on distortion and fuzz as the new wave of other space-rock outfits - Lumerians, White Hills, Sweden's just plain 'ol Hills, and a whole host of other bands whose names may or may not contain the word "owl." But judging by the album art, White Manna don't want to travel space so much as explore the dense redwood forests of their homeland. What has this quartet found in the thick of those gentle giants? 1. Massive volume, on levels akin to that of a Who concert. 2. Crazy wah-wah sounds and spiraling guitar solos, like you just took a hit off a four-footer for the first time since 10th grade. 3. Vocals shouted from the depths of a tunnel.
Best of all, White Manna distinguish themselves with their ability to hang a song on the nail of a bluesy hook. Further, they forego slow build-ups - the addition of saxophone on the opening of "Don't Gun Us Down" is about as much of a prelude as you're going to get here - and tend to cut to the chase pretty quickly on each of this strong EP's five tracks. It's almost as if they want you to actually dance to their particular brand of neo-psychedelia, unlike Holy Mountain label-mates Wooden Shjips, whom we enjoy equally but differently. Track 2, "Keep Your Lantern Burning," blares with a Stooges three-chord dissonance. The last two tracks, "Don't Gun Us Down," and "Sweet Jesus," seriously boogie. The latter boldly ends with a variation of the "Mr. Mojo Rising" mantra until it breaks free into the most sprawling freak out of the whole set. We thank White Manna for ushering us behind the redwood curtain and can't wait to see what they do next.
White Medal! What an awesome name for a metal band. Not to be confused with white metal, or unblack metal, this is not any sort of Christian metal, this is some twisted damaged doom-ed blackened heaviness the likes of which we've never really heard before.
This stripped down UK horde, open up proceedings with gentle clean guitar, minor key melodies, a bit of dreamy drift, until the track explodes into a hyper distorted blown out chugfest, super stripped down and raw, but SO distorted, it was a bit difficult to tell if the band was plodding along doomily or blasting furiously, just a massive blown out rrrooooaaaaar. The drums pound away beneath an epic metallic riff that churns and throbs, slathered in blistering distortion, the sound almost more like Godflesh or Pitchshifter than black metal, too hot and loud to be lo-fi but the same sort of texture and timbre. Keyboards (it sounds like keyboards) enter the fray and the track builds to some sort of total majestic metal blow out. Like Godspeed versus Bone Awl or something.
The flipside starts with some static high end guitar buzz, and just like the A side, the song erupts into a furious chaotic pound, the sound on this side much more distinctly fast and blackened, but with the same super saturated ultra distorted guitar, buried drums and shrieked vocals, there are a few tranquil moments, the guitar still distorted and buzzy, just sort of hovering dreamily before the band launches back in.
The label compares this to stuff like Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Ancestors and stuff like that, and while we do hear a bit of that, the sound is also massive and majestic, making us think of bands like Godspeed, Menace Ruine and a bit of that postrockmetaldrone we dig so much. WAY recommended.
LIMITED of course, packaged in cool hand screened sleeves.
Progression is the latest chunk of abject nihilistic ultra doom sludge from these Aussie heavies, the first full length since their sprawling double cd on 20 Buck Spin, and it continues on right where that one left off. Lurching lumbering downtuned slo-mo riffage, dueling vocals: grunted monstrous growls versus maniacal shrieks, fat fuzzed out bass buzz and massive pounding drum pummel, but unlike many of their doom/sludge contemporaries, Whitehorse actually have some groove, and some serious forward momentum, with maybe more in common with Eyehategod and Khanate than say Monarch or Bunkur, this isn't all near-ambient black doom drift, no these guys grind and pound, this is most definitely metal, just really really slow, it's propulsive, but a sort of tarpit propulsion, the sound super dynamic, lacing their metallic crunch with plenty of stop/starts, long stretches of squealing feedback, strange industrial clatter, the songs shifting from slow slung bass driven crawls, to loping glacial doom, to almost swinging metallic crush.
Opener "Mechanical Disintegration" channels the spirit of Winter and diSEMBOWELMENT into some sort of slow motion death metal, peppered with some surprisingly melodic filigree, these strange but super hooky guitar melodies draped over the main churning riffage, makes it sound like some classic metal playing at 2 rpm.
The title track slows it done even further, adding lots of scrape and clatter to the death march trudgery, a pounding minimalism that shifts gears part way through when the band launch into a serious groove (at least for them), verging on almost headbangable, really lurching and lumbering, some Sabbathy swing slowed down into something more serpentine and slithery. The rest of the record veers from funereal crawl, to grinding metallic pound and back again, the songs laced with strange mechanical hiss, white noise hum and weird glitches, all wrapped around that super low throb and thrum, culminating in the epic 9+ minute closer, which pounds away relentlessly before finishing off in a squall of feedback skree, twisted black noise and super distorted buzz.
Finally, the first widely available full length (and then some!) cd release, after a handful of live eps, from�Australia's masters of monstrous sludge, a double disc set collecting tons of previously released material from some of those long out of print cd-r's, a couple tracks from the long gone Conspiracy lp, and most importantly, a brand new studio recording in the form of the 22 minute track "The Unwelcome Return"! We'll get to that in a second, but first, a primer for those new to the downtuned brutality of Australia's Whitehorse, and folks who may have missed out .
Falling somewhere between the ultra doom of Khanate, the metallic post rock pummel of Isis, and the shrieking feedback / bowel-loosening dirge of Earth / SUNNO))), Whitehorse kick up a serious racket. Rumbling ambient drones slip into screaming feedback which in turn become huge unstoppable walls of noise, occasionally interrupted by beautiful mellowed out melodic interludes. Crashing drums all over the place, high end guitar melodies shriek like sirens, and of course the howled hyper intense vocals add another layer of sonic skree to the mix,�plodding drum beats are set at least a mile apart, moans and drifting guitars and cymbal sizzle drift like tendrils of black smoke between each Teutonic crush. These guys are a massive slow moving lumbering sludge metal behemoth, trudging through graveyards, and ruined villages, the depths of hell and everywhere in between
Each track a�massive slow build, like an apocalyptic metal tinged Godspeed, swirling cymbals, keening guitars, thick drifts of distorted fuzz, underneath gargled demonic vocals struggle to be heard above the swirling din, super abstract and nearly ambient, it takes forever before the songs kick in properly and then you're done for. Slow motion math metal sludge jams of unprecedented proportions. Stumbling and crushing, swathed in space rock FX, sounding very Corrupted like, an unstoppable dirge, with some wild off kilter drumming and strange arrangements, so strange in fact, that occasionally, the band bursts into spastic chaotic almost 'free' sonic freakouts, like Neurosis doing free jazz. Nicely compliments their unstoppable glacier like brutality. But the�pace is not always so funereal the vibe is as much Eyehategod as it is Khanate, still harsh and abrasive and brutally heavy, but there's almost a groove going on here and there. Which definitely lends the proceedings a sort of stonery doom vibe. It's easy to hear bits of Corrupted, Khanate, Eyehategod, Bunkur, Moss and the like, but Whitehorse definitely add their own twisted slow motion spin.
A�good chunk of this stuff is previously released. Avid AQ doomhounds may very well have 75% of this stuff, but odds are, due to the limited nature of the eps, and especially the Conspiracy lp (of which we only ever had 20 copies), a lot of you missed out on at least some of it. And besides all that, there's the brand new 20+ minute�"The Unwelcome Return" to contend with... and whaddayaknow, another crushing, head caving slab of slow motion sonic dirgery, like Electric Wizard on some serious downers, spun at 16 rpm, a lumbering gargantuan crush, with a long stretch of swirling bass heavy ambience in the middle. A loping bassline amidst lowend rumbles and strange shuffling drumming, all wrapped in constantly shifting swells of white noise and buzzy hiss, before the whole track explodes again, trudging hellward and crushing every goddamn thing in its path. Including us. And we LOVE IT.�
Worshippers of all things doom and drone and sludge would do well to prostrate themselves before these mighty and unmerciful doomlords, and to welcome the oncoming sonic annihilation...
Packaged in a killer black on black, gloss on matte, mini gatefold lp style cd sleeve, with a full color insert!
Killer split 7" from Aussie heavies Whitehorse, and Floridian thrashers Hot Graves. Whitehorse offer up another skull caving slab of extreme heaviness, churning, lumbering, groovy and sludgey, with some cool harmonized melodies offsetting the otherwise downtuned crush. The vocals are a demonic gurgle buried in the mix, occasionally exploding into banshee like howls, the sound creeping one second, swinging and Sabbathy the next, a killer jam, and surprisingly melodic/catchy.
Hot Graves are new to us, and a quick glance online seemed to have them pegged as sounding like Swedish styled death metal, but to these ears, at least on this split, they sound way more old school thrashy metal, reminding us quite a bit of aQ faves Speedwolf. Loping, galloping metallic punk (or punky metal?), all classic metal chug, shredding leads, raspy throat shredding bellows, raw and fucking fierce, with wicked classic harmony guitar leads, and a cool second half, that slips into a mosh worthy breakdown with still MORE classic metal riffing. Definitely want to hear more...
Probably limited, super swank silkscreened covers, and a printed heavy cardstock insert.
It's been a while since we've heard from Aussie heavies Whitehorse, but they've returned on this split with East Bay grinders Negative Standards, Whitehorse's contribution to the split a sidelong sprawl of downtuned miserablism, a song that takes WH's usual knuckle dragging tarpit doom sludge, and adds some insectoid black buzz, the swirling fast picked guitar weaving a strange backdrop to the band's monstrous lumber, bellowed vokills and caveman drum crush, the song droning and tranced out, devolving into a killer stretch of power electronics midway through, a field of garbled static and solid state feedback, before lurching back into action, slipping right back into an epic sonic trudge, that like past jams, sounds a bit like a more abject, slo-mo Godspeed, before returning to that opening black metal riff to finish things off.
We had never heard, or even heard of Negative Standards before, even though they hail from across the Bay, but they definitely make a good match for Whitehorse, their sound not doomy as much as crusty and grindy, opening with an extended intro of blackened ambience, and swirling FX, before launching into some fierce D-beat pound, lurching from crusty churn, to furious fastcore grind and back again, the vocals a seriously sick demonic rasp, the sound relentless, until the doomy midsong breakdown, the song slipping easily into slo-mo, downtuned creep, all knuckle dragging pound that evolves into some near Neurosis level epicry, before exploding into one final salvo of blasting, grinding fury. Things finish off with a short sharp burst of crusty grind, beginning with a brief blast of static/feedback power electronics, before exploding into some frenzied metallic crush, the relentless blasting crust, peppered with a few seconds of seriously spaced out doom midway through.
Killer artwork from Sutekh Hexen's Kevin Gan Yuen! But no download, sadly.
We first discovered French electro-grind-metal-psych-whatthefuck duo Whourkr a year or two back when we got their debut record, Naat, which totally blew us away, it sounded like a malfunctioning metal record and a freaked out techno record, all scrambled up together, tangled up and spit out, a skittering, skipping, looped, grinding chunk of electronic metal weirdness. The vocals would howl, but then get processed and looped and would become something else altogether, the drums and guitars were so gnarled and stretched and twisted up, that the band could explode into flurries of rapidfire mathematical grind, way faster and more complex and convoluted than any human could possible play. It was a total headfuck. Like the fastest freakiest grind, made even faster and freakier, but with a little techno thrown in for good measure. Remember the Drum>MachineGun compilation, of insane drum machine driven grind? Whourkr makes that stuff sound so so tame in comparison.
We tried and tried to track down copies for the store, but never had any luck, and then we heard that Crucial Blast would be releasing the NEW Whourkr, so we waited and waited, and now it's finally here, and it's totally different than the first one (or at least how we remember the first one), way poppier and more melodic, like the band are now actually composing songs instead of throwing all the sounds in a blender to see what comes out (not that we don't dig that too!), it's way poppier, catchier, but still totally and utterly freaked out and glitchy and fucked up beyond belief.
Chugging guitars and shrieked vox are chopped and spliced into a hyperspeed deathmetal Melt Banana, all the sounds constantly shifting, the tempo changing, the rhythms colliding and hiccuping, occasionally coalescing into full on grooves, other times splintering into bursts of electronic freakouts, and there are serious hooks happening too, it doesn't seem possible that music like this could be listenable, let alone catchy, but it is. Big time. We'll be the first to admit, that the other Whourkr record was difficult listening, brutal and to many ears annoying, and yeah, the same might be said for Concrete as well, but the band are so much better now, in terms of composition and songwriting, that once you're immersed in their fucked up and freaked out soundworld, it becomes surprisingly easy to acclimate to the rapidly and constantly shifting sounds and rhythms, in order to enjoy the songs themselves. Plus the vocals seem to play a much larger role, not just howls and shrieks, there are plenty of clean vox, soaring almost operatic, low AND high, wrapped around frenzied riffing, wound up into spiralling psychedelic freakouts, or like the instruments, chopped into crazed stutterscapes.
Take the track "Santo", with its deep crooned vox and acoustic guitars, sounding almost like Circle, the electronic effects very subtle at first, before the track lurches into full on doom, the voices and guitars just slightly glitched, eventually giving way to gorgeous delicate piano, only to be obliterated by the next track "Skovsnails", a little burst of drums, and a crazy clipped main riff, it almost sounds like some insane DJ remixing Orthrelm, the song stutters and lurches and hiccups, totally frenetic and relentless. The record dips its toes into all sorts of weird sounds, loping moody electronic downtempo, albeit a little fractured, head spinning hyper grind, shot through with unlikely pop hooks, glitched out death metal, soaring slow building post rocky drama, and more Melt Banana-esque grind pop, but nothing here sounds thrown together, or hodge podge, this is a baffling collection of sounds, but one that is meticulously composed, performed and recorded, and for those in the market for something truly demented, insane, extreme and heavy, not to mention out-there, and pretty much entirely unlike anything you've ever heard before, be next to impossibly to top Whourkr. Definite contender for metal record of the year, even though calling it a metal record is selling it WAY short. Regardless, absolutely recommended.
And, for a limited time (next couple of weeks, until February 2nd 2010), we'll be selling this for a special $2 discount off the regular price, which would normally be $13.98.
The idea of decay in sound has always been super appealing to us. Malfunctioning machinery, misused and abused effects, damaged tape, drop outs, hiss, hum, all the various imperfections that most music strives to eliminate, we tend to embrace, and that weird fucked/damaged element informs so much of what we are attracted to sonically. Which is why we were especially thrilled by our discovery of the French electro-grind / glitch-metal duo Whourkr, whose album Concrete we made a Record Of The Week a few years ago. Whourkr seems to embrace that who damaged fractured thing we love so much, but instead of their sound being about decay and destruction, it's some strange form of creation, and hybridization, melding blurred lightspeed metallic crunch with stuttery chaotic electronics, but again in keeping with that same vibe, their mission is not to make that interaction seamless, instead it's a glorious head spinning sonic trainwreck. There's definitely a method to the madness, and their mastery of both metal and electronics is something to behold, but as one of us casually mentioned when listening to the other Whourkr record recently, "why does all of our favorite music sound like the cd player is malfunctioning?". Which is as good a place to start as any with this, the duo's 2007 debut, Naat.
In our review of Concrete, we offered a brief thumbnail description of Naat, which we might as well repeat here:
"Like a malfunctioning metal record and a freaked out techno record, all scrambled up together, tangled up and spit out, a skittering, skipping, looped, grinding chunk of electronic metal weirdness. The vocals howl, but then get processed and looped and become something else altogether, the drums and guitars so gnarled and stretched and twisted up, the band exploding into flurries of rapidfire mathematical grind, way faster and more complex and convoluted than any human could possible play. A total headfuck. Like the fastest freakiest grind, made even faster and freakier, but with a little techno thrown in for good measure. Remember the Drum>MachineGun compilation, of insane drum machine driven grind? Whourkr makes that stuff sound so so tame in comparison."
And listening to this again now, we're reminded how fucking nuts this stuff is. It's definitely death metal, but some sort of alien death metal, where the churning riffs splinter into little shards of digital flutter, while the belching cookie monster vocals get stretched into weird gurgling drones, it's heavy and hypnotic, like some sort of mad scientist took his Cannibal Corpse records and Necrophagist records and removed the sound bit by bit, byte by byte, and then meticulously assembled this demented slab of digital death. Less insanely glitchy than Concrete, this is way more death metal, but still so completely and fantastically fucked up, that its transformed into a sort of death metal for outsider weirdo music electro metal nerds. If there are such things, well, besides us!
Those who worship at the altar of all that is slow and low and heavy and sludgey and doomy and droney, you must now bow before a new lord, the duo from New York known simply as Wicked King Wicker. After three records, each heavier than the last, comes Borne Black, a sprawling black sun explosion of creepy crawly riffage, lumbering lugubrious tempos, tarpit sludge, and spaced out abstract buzz and shimmer, if you fancy Moss, Bunkur, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, SUNNO))), Wolf Eyes, Khanate, Skullflower, Human Quena Orchestra, Monarch, Corrupted, Otesanek, Habsyll, and all the various other denizens of the inky black dronedirgedoom underworld, and have yet to hear WKW, you are in for a treat. That is, if a treat for you is two guys all dressed in black, mere shadows, pummeling you to within an inch of your life with bloodied guitars, tossing your limp form into a freshly dug grave, before toppling a Guitar Center's worth of amplifiers into the hole, then burying you alive, before pushing the amps, the bloody guitars and your mangled corpse across an endless expanse of blackened filth and debris with a massive demonic KILLdozer. That's kind of what it feels like listening to Borne Black, five lengthy tracks of ultra slow riffing, and black ambient soundscaping. And while these guys can lean their guitars against the amps with the best of 'em, conjuring up thick black clouds of noxious low end slither, they are also masters of the RIFF, and most of these songs do in in fact contain riffs, not always right up in front, but the songs are driven by the riff, giving them more weight, more heaviness, and making them sound way more METAL than most of their contemporaries.
Just have a listen to album opener "There Is Only Pain", a crushing descending, depressive doom riff, that just churns relentlessly, pounding away, a gloriously miserablist sonic trudge, all amidst a constantly swirling field of white noise, static buzz, and caustic feedback. Over the course of 10 + minutes, the riff, and the demonic vokills that accompany it, sing slowly into the abyss, as the swirling clouds of noise around it grow more and more thick, the main riff eventually crumbles into a tangle of what sounds like drum machine and electronics, before finally disappearing completely in a doomic haze of black psychedelic power electronics. Woah. We could stop right there, and you'd definitely be getting your $12 worth. But there's nearly 40 minutes of 'wickedness' to go...
Woozy washed out shimmer gives way to ultra distorted crunch, which in turn gives way to some post industrial noise drenched pummel. Murky groaning ambience spreads out like some black fog, underneath which delicate melodies struggle for air, the textures shift and the layers roil, before an insanely distorted riff emerges, the distortion so thick and crumbling and blown out, it's difficult to discern the actual notes, that riff plays out, transforming as it goes from sharp caustic crunch, to muddy murky mumble, always wrapped in bellowed vox and a steady barrage of FX-saturated noize, until finally, the 13 minute noise doom dirge of album closer "They Are Suffering Alone And Terrified", a feedback slathered stumble through a field of erratic metallic buzz, chugging grinding guitarnoise and weirdly dubbed out drums, a twisting tangled bout of abstract heaviness, so corrosive and chaotic, any semblance of metal can only be glimpsed through a constantly heaving haze of blackened fury.
Fucking awesome, and definitely some seriously difficult listening, but for the legions of the slow and low, who can't ever seem to get enough glacial, near static, demonically riff-ed, doom-ed blacknoize, then Borne Black is yet another gloriously grim missive from the darkside, another black sonic stone to hurl at the heavens, as let these sounds drag you further into the fiery deep.
WAY recommended!!
Evolving is the latest from NY doom/sludge/dirge/drone duo Wicked King Wicker, and does in fact find the band evolving, their already blackened, tarpit, ambient dirgery moving further away from any proper metallic riffery, and instead, exploding in a supernova of power electronics and blacknoize brutality. The opening track here, a 10 minute sprawl titled "The Devil Must Learn The Limitations Of The Host", drapes a pulsating buzz over a field of grinding blackened electronics, of rumbling, crumbling drones, the vibe weirdly motorik, buried beneath all the noisiness, there seems to be strange shapes drifting, hauntingly melodic, giving the noisiness a mysteriously tranquil core. Soon the sound is engulfed in swirls of white noise, swaths of hiss and static, there seem to be vocals as well, buried in the mix, a monstrous bellow, blurred into still more smeared soft focus blackbuzz, the sound locked into an almost kraut-drone noisiness, before splintering into something much more caustic and chaotic, but still anchored by that buzzing riff-like pulsation.
That track definitely lays the foundation, as "A Prayer For Death" explodes right out of the gate, a heady, howling blast of Merzbowian murk, all churning, roiling crunch, and like that first track, obscuring something much more melodic underneath, this time, a dirgey slowcore pulse, and a field of constantly shifting textures, shards of feedback rain from the sky like hailstones, squalls of grinding skree, and crumbling distortion, all woven into something weirdly hypnotic, yet still undeniably brutal and caustic.
Things don't really let up. "Zen And The Art Of Nihilism" unfurls a field of grinding low end, wreathed in sheets of ear shredding upper register blasts, again, somehow transformed into something weirdly rhythmic, and strangely listenable, this track in particular, almost like multiple black metal riffs, melted down, and poured directly into your earholes, a tar black sonic pitch, pure blacknoize bliss. And finally, "The High Exalted Nothing" finishes things off with a riffy, dirgey churn, a darkly propulsive black dirge, almost industrial sounding, like Wolf Eyes meets SUNNO))) meets Bunkur, with some seriously terrifying vokills, no high end on this one, a black murk blowout that might be our favorite track here!
We had never heard of this NY band before but HOLY SHIT. A serious new contender for sure in the ever expanding world of crushing slow motion ultra doom-dirge-dronemusick. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, SUNNO))), Skullflower, Khanate, Wolf Eyes, Bunkur, etc. Any of those names get your blood boiling, then WKW just might be your favorite new band.
Flydust is WKW's latest offering, two tracks, both taking up a whole side, each a harrowing black expanse of crumbling, buzzing, churning heaviness. A sprawling, bottomless sea of throbbing, pulsing downtuned lowend buzz, roiling distorted drones, all murky and muddy and smeared into constantly shifting layers and textures, abrasive and chaotic, but washed out into a single heaving organic black expanse. Over the top, a weirdly motorik drumbeat, locked into a neverending rhythm, looped and hypnotic, and over that, super creepy vocals, equal parts death metal gurgle, and tortured anguished howl. The sound is mostly monochromatic, but the sounds shift and the textures transform, moments of melody surface here and there amidst the long stretches of near static blur and buzz, the vocals almost like another instrument, another black layer, all tangled up into an abject, blackened and brutal otherworldly kraut-doom. Harrowing, mesmerizing, buzzing, grinding and blown out, fucked up and abrasive, but simultaneously hypnotic and in its own brutal and punishing way, strangely beautiful.
VINYL ONLY. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one has a hand drawn inner sleeve, customized (i.e. scribbled on) by the band, every one unique.
More planet crushing doom drone blackness from these two axe wielding alchemists, one of which just so happens to run the bad ass Noiseville label, whose bad assness most definitely extends to his work in WKW, a juggernaut of low end brute force, ultra doom, plodding, trudging, lumbering heaviness, slowed down to an absolute crawl, 4 bpm never sounded so harsh and harrowing, which is saying a lot....
WKW take the slow and low template laid out by Khanate, and fill up all the extra space with crumbling distortion, howling feedback, garbled grunted vokills, fractured riffs, churning anti-rhythms, filthy and blackened and grim, a sprawling black cloud of sound, that seems to teeter on the edge, right between doom metal and pure drone, the two elements fused into some impossibly brutal and punishing sonic beast.
The awesomely titled "Call My Name Sweet Demon, So I Know I Am Not Alone" find WKW dipping into Wolf Eyes' bag of tricks, infusing their apocalyptic metallic creep with all sorts of industrial flavor, looped mechanical rhythms, stuttering processed electronics, sheets of feedback, thick shards of caustic buzz, layered and tangled, swooping from rhythmic throb to on-the-verge-of-collapse noise meltdown to muted damaged chug. The final epic track (all three tracks are just shy of 20 minutes long) is another strange assemblage of sounds, some abstract riffage, some swooping swirling high end streaks, plenty of hiss and skree and crunch, the whole thing twisted and tweaked, sometimes stumbling to a near halt, other times sprawling into a caustic crumbling jagged drone, and other times soaring into a near Merzbowian psychnoise blow out.
One of two new releases from this East Coast ultra doomdrone duo, the latest in Noiseville's Outer Bounds Of Sound lp series, which in the past has featured Burnt Hills, Kleistwahr. Skullflower... And Wicked King Wicker fits just find in that esteemed noise making company.
Much like their sonic compatriots Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, WKW seem to be a doom band in noise's clothing, or maybe it's the other way around. Ostensibly a doom outfit, WKW are just as likely to unfurl a burly glacial downtuned riff as they are to releases a swirling cloud of washed out psychedelic drift, which is what they do here, the root of their sound is still a downtuned buzz, a sort of murky riffage, but it's transformed into a looped dronescape, whatever riffage there was has been blurred and smeared into a softly pulsing, roiling blackened sprawl, peppered with gorgeous bits of electronic glitch, or synthy shimmer, it's hard to discern what it might be, but it adds a cool melodic component to the band's heaving abstract heaviness, the result something much more atmospheric and dreamy, that's pummeling and punishing, while still managing to sound heavy and intense and pretty epic.
The B-side sounds like it might have started life as a throbbing lumbering dooom jam, but was somehow subverted into an almost Fennesz sounding stretch of intense muted heaviness, glazed with flecks of crackle and crunch, wreathed in a psychedelic blur, the main component remains some sort of transformed guitar, all pulsing throbbing rumble and whir, finally finishing off in a blaze of abstract, super distorted Sunroof! like psychguitar ur-drone.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, housed in cool metallic foil stamped jackets...
Latest grim black slab of droned out corrosive ultradoomscapery from this East Coast one man band, a nearly 40 minute, two sided, two tracked onslaught of crumbling distortion, pulsing roiling downtuned churn, slo-mo drone-psych riffage, blackened ambient crawl and howling glacial creep, falling somewhere between the all out blacknoise brutality of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and the blissed out ur-drone skree of Sunroof!.
The A side is a filthy, crusty monster, but the chug and crush and rumble is infused with thick layered swaths of high end fragmented melodies, siren like pulses, a swirling tangle over a roiling black undercurrent, the strangely melodic bent gives the otherwise harsh noise a strangely orchestral feel, epic and majestic and soaring and sweeping, but still brutal and suffocatingly punishing.
The flipside is much more minimal. Muted and muddy and murky, the guitars blurred into long grimy streaks of industrial whir, blown out and super distorted, but so washed out to be almost transformed completely into a subtly propulsive dronescape, buried in the mix are some actual riffs, even a bit of rhythmic heft, and vocals too, a monstrous barely audible demonic gargle, but all wrapped in a lo-fi haze of crackling, slowly decaying sonic filth. Totally epic and hellish doomdronedirge bliss.
Housed in a super sweet three color silkscreen cover, and LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, 75 which are red, those are the ones we have, and we don't have all that many...
We had never heard of this NY band before but HOLY SHIT. A serious new contender for sure in the ever expanding world of crushing slow motion ultra doom-dirge-dronemusick. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, SUNNO))), Skullflower, Khanate, Wolf Eyes, Bunkur, etc. Any of those names get your blood boiling, then WKW just might be your favorite new band.
This WKW's self titled debut, and is in some ways even heavier and more blown out than Flydust (reviewed elsewhere on this list). The root sound is similar, a heaving morass of crumbling superdistorted guitars, but where as Flydust is murky and muddy and washed out, the sound here is prickly and cacophonous, abrasive and sort of sharp. The sound is also more propulsive, more distinct riffs, dripping with in-the-red distortion and twisted FX. The opening track is one single ascending riff, looped over and over and over and over, pounding its way through a dense cloud of impossibly thick buzz, the drums a buried plod, the vocals, barely audible through the churning mass of unfurling riffs and a constantly expanding wall of sound. The strange thing is, there is a definite groove lurking underneath, loping and lurching, but groovy nonetheless. Think Godflesh or Pitchshifter mixed with Ramleh and Wolf Eyes, but super charged and revved up, and dipped in a psychedelic concoction of tripped out prismatic psychrock filigree and blown out amp destroying drone drenched doom.
But the second track is a whole different beast altogether, a stretched out slowed down distorted riff, unfurled in slow motion, very reminiscent of Earth 2, but peppered with simple spare drumming, only barely, until about halfway through when the sound is swallowed up but a wall of distorted sound much more like the opening track, and suddenly the sound is transformed into a blown out acid-doused blast of crumbling blacknoise.
The last two tracks offer up more of the same, varying degrees of forward momentum, of spaced out ur-drone, of in-the-red effects, pounding abstract percussion, all draped over near static whitenoise buzz, weird krauty grooves, woozy metallic crawls, pulsing metallic ambience, and heavy heavy hypnotic dirgedoomdronemusick.
The lp is limited to 490 copies, pressed on purple vinyl, the cd is limited to 1000 copies.
As promised last list, here's the second of the two volumes of collected wah-wah overload and heavy fuzz freakout from this legendary underground UK hard psych power trio, circa 1969-1972, who were doomy and proto-metallic, but also fairly melodic and bluesy and sixties-sounding (they do a version of Jimi's "Voodoo Chile" here, which fits right in).
There's seven more archival Wicked Lady selections here to delight deaf bikers everywhere, ranging from excellently titled opener "I'm A Freak" to the album-ending 22 minute epic "Ship Of Ghosts", each full of heavy fuzzed out chugging guitar to the max.
Imagine a rather darker, more evil sounding Blue Cheer and you'd be close. The nearly 10 minute "Passion" sounds a heck of a lot like something by early Pentagram (or Bedemon), you could almost imagine it's Bobby Liebling singing it. Also there are some lines in the lyrics that go: "Tell me you love me / And I won't throw your grandma on the fire", how nice!
The cd booklet includes lyrics, and liner notes (the same notes as found in vol. 1, The Axeman Cometh, though). And for your information, Guerssen has released this on vinyl as well, though we're still waiting for our copies to arrive.
A holy proto-metal relic here, folks. This is the first of two volumes (vol. 2, modestly titled Psychotic Overkill, we'll review next time) collecting the recorded output circa 1969-1972 of this heavy riffing underground UK unit, well known in the annals of hard psych fuzzarama. A classic power trio, featuring Martin Weaver (later of the Dark) on guitar, along with Bob Jefferies on bass and "Mad" Dick Smith on drums, Wicked Lady had a rep for being LOUD and causing violence. No surprise that Wicked Lady's axeman stateth in the liner notes that their fans were either partially deaf people or bikers! Or both!
Their sound was based on the basic British blues rock of the day, a la Cream, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, and so forth, with melodic vocals and a generally sad vibe, their songs sometimes relatively tame hippie popsike seeming - at first - before Weaver would unleash the hellish wah wah fuzz freakouts that whipped those poor deafened bikers into such a state.
Groovy, lumbering, loping, amped up and drugged out, Wicked Lady is the real deal, dated to us now, perhaps, but quite charming. You can't argue, ferinstance, with how after a gentle, folky beginning, the track "War Cloud" morphs from melodic to martial, a jackbooted march with wild soloing o'er top, kinda as if Trad Gras Och Stenar went (proto-)metal� such fuzz guitar jamming excess is to be found throughout, like Wicked Lady were the Earthless of their day.
The eight tracks found here (DIY recorded in the band's dingy rehearsal space, 'cuz they were about playing live, not making records, but wanted to remember how the songs went!) are all gonna be of interest to those into the likes of Randy Holden's Population II, High Tide, Stray, '70s Pentagram, Iron Claw, T2, Negative Space, and other obscure late sixties / early seventies purveyors of heavy psychedelic riff rock. This is the first time Wicked Lady's music has been legitimately released on cd (and Guerssen has pressed vinyl too, which hopefully we'll have soon), with the participation of Martin Weaver himself, who contributes liner notes, telling the whole Wicked Lady story - and he's got some stories. Though he does dispel the rumor that he broke a window and stole his first guitar - instead, apparently, he built it himself. Full lyrics are also included in the booklet.
As an earlier, bootleg edition of this on the cult Kissing Spell label put it in a back cover blurb: "60 Minutes Of Wah Wah Hell"!
We always considered German black metallers Wigrid to be the true heirs to the throne of blackened buzz vacated by Burzum as he descended into neo-Naziism and fruity Peter And The Wolf keyboard music. The first Wigrid record was a frosty blast of Burzumic fury, a plodding midtempo swirl of fuzzed out riffs and primitive minor key droning depressing darkness. One of the all time BM essentials for sure. A lot has changed since then, and we're not sure what could have caused such a dramatic shift (is the band photo a clue? Sole member Ulfhednir, now sports short hair, a neck beard, t-shirt, tattoos, jeans and a chain wallet), although no matter how bummed out some of the more true grim BM warriors have been with Die Asche Eines Levens, we are loving this, as we imagine you will too. Sure it's still grim and buzzy, heavy and drone-y, but the sound is so much more post rock than blck metal it's a bit shocking. Think Mogwai, Slint, Godspeed, Kinski, My Bloody Valentine, Bardo Pond, Aereogramme, that epic repetitive slow building majestic sort of post rock, then add a bit of black buzz, some howling anguished vocals and you'll get a rough idea of what this new Wigrid sounds like. Gorgeously melancholy riffing, haunting arpeggiated guitar melodies, over that instantly recognizable Wigrid struggling, midtempo drum machine drumming, all wrapped up in a propulsive, emotionally charged cinematic epic slow burning post rock crescendo, stretched out over each of the five lengthy ten minute tracks. So gorgeous. We've been digging all those sludge metal / post rock hybrids lately (Conifer, Tides, Mouth Of The Architect, Pelican, Isis, Baroness, etc.) so maybe this is the next logical step, that most recent Deathspell Omega was pretty post rock too. Call it black post metal, or post black metal, or blackened post rock. Whatever you call it, it's fucking awesome! And even though this new Wigrid is maybe more Mogwai than Burzum, it finishes off with a not so subtle Burzum homage, a thirteen minute ambient synthesizer swirl (a la Filosofem?), delicate and crystalline, simple notes chiming and tinkling, a sweetly mournful haunting lullaby.
While they last we have the super limited digipak version, once we run out of those you'll get the regular jewel case version (which might be a buck or two cheaper!).
Wigrid is a one-(Ger)man band that plays raw black metal definitely influenced by the notorious Burzum. Indeed, as you become enveloped in the depressive, distorted, plodding fuzz-forest of Wigrid's imagination, you'll be convinced that such unending grimness hasn't been inflicted upon the world since before the incarceration of Varg Vikernes, aka Burzum. Wigrid's massive, murky wall of fuzz, with desperate, screamed vocals lost behind it, marches slowly ever onward, with primitive, minor-key melodies subliminally effecting your soul. The sparse, pulsing drum machine hits are similarily buried in the repetitive guitar riff-stortion. Nothing fancy, or that original (the cover drawing even looks suspiciously like it was borrowed from Burzum's "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss"), but wholly satisfying if this is a mood that interests you. Submitting to Wigrid's monotonous yet majestic misery and cold, cold anguish is a release. It's trancey and hypnotic and ambiently ear-grinding. For fans of "Hvis..." / "Filosofem" era Burzum (duh), Weakling, and other troglodytic, minimal dirge metal.
Another�disc that had us sold before we even got to the music. The band name alone, Wijlen Wij? We're a sucker for whatthefuck band names... And the fact that this Belgian horde are made up of a veritable who's who of doooom loooominaries, folks from bands like AQ faves Fall Of The Grey Winged One, Pantheist, Until Death Overtakes Me, In Somnis and a bunch more. Throw in a totally black cover except for the name of the band, and that it was released on Aesthetic Death, home to mighty UK doomlords Esoteric...
So yeah, we were expecting some serious doom, the lots-of-o's kind of doom, as in dooooooooooooooooom, but maybe with twice that many o's, or heck three times as many o's, but what we got, while still doomy as fuck and seriously crushingly heavy was a whole lot weirder.�
The record opens with some delicate Renn Faire sort of flutter, organ and chanted vocals, very medieval sounding, a bit Viking even, then a super King Arthur sort of melody joins the fray, and we were beginning to think maybe we had the wrong idea about these guys, until the guitars kick in, easily some of the thickest most distorted, downtuned filthy ugly guitar sounds EVER. And the coolest part is that the medieval intro, wasn't just an intro, the song continues on with that sort of seasick Viking waltz, but now dripping with oozing blackdoom riffage, a bizarre epic medieval funeral doooooooooooom. The next track ditches the Renn flair, and instead offers up a gorgeous crushing slow crawl, but with moaning melancholy cello drifting amidst the pounding sludge like black smoke. This is serious doom, it's got the classic sorrowful vibe of bands like My Dying Bride, but it's delivered though the cracked filth crusted sludge of bands like Esoteric or Bunkur. And then out of the blue (or black perhaps is more appropriate) comes some haunting little Trollmann like synth melody, or even what sounds like some Morricone Western style harmonica, that drifts along hauntingly before slipping back under, and the band returns to some impossibly slow trudge, through a barren black landscape. One of those rare records than manages to be so impossibly and crushingly heavy at the same time that it's utterly haunting and beautiful.�
Absolutely our new favorite doom record. Hands down. Worthy of more o's that we have any right to be dealing out. Essential for fans of Bunkur, Planet Aids, Winter, diSEMBOWELMENT, Esoteric, Catacombs, Wereju, and all other wielders of black hole heaviness...
You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz.
We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too.
But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch).
So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear.
So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean.
Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones:
THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs.
WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM".
Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!
You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz.
We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too.
But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch).
So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear.
So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean.
Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones:
THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs.
WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM".
Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!
You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz.
We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too.
But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch).
So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear.
So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean.
Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones:
THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs.
WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM".
Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!
The metal label Stormspell's motto is "Old farts stuck In the '80s and proud of it". They're the folks who have been bringing us a lot of cool cd reissues of obscure, cult metal bands from the '80s (such as Max Planck, Xinr and Detest), some of 'em as part of Stormspell's ongoing "Red White and Heavy Arcane Collector Series For The Initiated" featuring long-lost demos from bands that are SO cult and obscure they never even got signed to make a proper album.
Well, the old farts at Stormspell have now found some young bands also stuck in the '80s, and have begun a new series of releases, putting these bands' demos out on cd but this time not waiting 30 years to do it. Fantastically dubbed the "Jewels Of Gwahlur" series (the Jewels Of Gwahlur being the macguffin of a Conan story of the same name), five volumes have now been released, and we're reviewing 'em all this list. It's a bit like something else Stormspell did some years ago, the "Thrash Clash" series of splits by underground thrash acts. But these bands are even more "old school" in sound.
Each entry in the series comes in nice trifold digi-wallet packaging, the covers pretty much identical except for the band logos, with a standardized "bejeweled ancient leather tome" look, a la the 3rd Edition D&D rulebooks if you're familiar with those; doubtless some of these bands are! However, despite the uniform design, each entry in the series gets its own unique artwork on the inside, as well as credits, liner notes, etc. Most of these discs are ep-length, around 4-6 tracks, but it should be noted that they're quite cheaply priced. So even though we're reviewing each one individually you might as well buy 'em all and let your cd player sort 'em out! As for us, we're looking forward to hearing more from all these bands (pretty sure we will!), and are curious as to what further Jewels Of Gwahlur will be uncovered by Stormspell in the future.
WILDHUNT are an Austrian hesher duo playing "Teutonic power/speed metal", basically heads-down, old school thrash, with elements of even older, more traditional heavy metal styles. The five tracks on this demo disc are full of ripping but melodic guitar leads, some bass leads too, rough but not too gruff vocals, and TONS of raw energy. Headbanging is job one! Pretty solid and enjoyable, will put a smile on your face and a crimp in your neck, if nothing more. Crack open a beer while listening to this and you might finish off the six-pack before you're done spinning this five-song disc (be careful!). Good times.
Goddamn we love this band. And goddamn they're hard to pigeonhole or review. They're the sort of band that leaves critics throwing their hands up and saying weird things like "Animal Collective playing metal", or finds us comparing 'em (on past albums) to everyone from MBV to Redd Kross to the Swans to Gaye Bykers On Acid to the freaking God Bullies...
They sound like a lot of things, but ultimately their own special Wildildlife thing - and we don't have enough hypens handy to describe all the genres they glom together into that. Yeah they're heavy and noisy and fucked up, palling around with Harvey Milk and other sludgey/doom metal types, but also have an almost glammy, "buried pop" side to 'em that's become less and less buried from record to record. This new one is perhaps their poppiest, catchiest yet, without sacrificing any of the delicious distortion, noisiness or heaviness, though.
Details, its front cover bearing appropriately demented, deliberate eyesore cover art scrawlings (the back of the sleeve is even better - a drawing of a cat in corpsepaint), is awash with spacey swirling FX, stonery druggy vocals, and sinuous grungy riffage, making for some seriously psychedelic fuzzed out noise pop that's maybe still somehow sorta metal - definitely mental though. Take some Butthole Surfers, some Dead Meadow, some '90s alt-metal (Nudeswirl, anyone?), some slowcore and shoegaze and old school Sub Pop, and you're getting close to the idea of what's going on here.
We suppose we could just mention a few highlights among this album's seven tracks, but it's tough to choose. The short-and-sweet blast of the excellent opener "Dub 1"? The majestic keyboards of "Water Underneath"? The sleazy riffage cranked out on badass rocker "Conditioner"? The tripped out, lumbering awesomeness of, uh, everything??? Yeah we love it all. You should just get this and listen to it yourself, and let it sink into you and you into it, that's our recommendation. Oh, but speaking of sinking into it, let's also mention how the second side closes out with not one but two 8+ minute hypnorock epics. There's the big roiling drums, droning keys and almost bagpipe-like guitar soloing of "Love Hums", and then the even heavier/dirgier "Edge Of The Apocalypse (Forever)", the latter with a pretty little come-down electronica bit at the end, as the song gently fades out... Nice.
We may be a bit biased of course, 'cause Wildildlife singer/guitarist Matt Rogers is an aQ alumnus, but honestly, we had no expectations, in fact we were surprised this even came out, 'cause we thought the band had basically broken up long ago, the guys living in different cities, Matt more into techno DJing than playing rock music, but here it is, and if it's their swansong it's a damn good one, but hopefully the release of this record might spur 'em to get their shit together and get back on stage and play live again 'cause they KILL and it would be great to see Matt writhing around with his guitar again (and the other guys going off too) and hear these tunes super LOUD in person.
Vinyl-only (grrrr) but it includes a download!
Warped druggy psychedelic metallic noise rock trio Wildildlife, who just so happen to features a former aQuarian amongst their ranks, always had a bit of pop in their sound, even at their most tripped out and damaged, when they were channeling Butthole Surfers and Gaye Bykers On Acid and God Bullies and Lubricated goat, their wild rhythmic blowouts were always laced with primo hooks and loads of melody, and it was that subtle poppy undercurrent, that kept them from being just another noisy rock band. But the thing was, before now, it seemed that it was mostly about the heaviness, and they were indeed heavy, sidling up alongside outfits like Harvey Milk, spitting out churning elephantine riffage and skull caving flurries of drum damage, if we had our way, we wouldn't have changed anything about Wildildlife. That is until we heard this.
It's like they're a whole different band. Not sure if it's a natural progression or if it's the influence of their new producer, Jennifer Herema of Royal Trux, but the new sound is downright GLAMMY, swaggery, and power poppy, the vocals, which used to be distorted and sped up and processed into strange chipmunk squeals, is now actual and proper singing, and as if to drive that whole glam thing home, there's sax now, and we generally HATE sax, but this is like Stooges / Hanoi Rocks sax, which means it rules, and it somehow just makes things sound even cooler.
The opening track might just be our new favorite jam, right out of the gate, it's total soaring fuzzy pop, chiming guitar melodies, warm synth swells, and then when the main riff kicks in, we're in classic Kiss territory, suddenly the picture on the back of the lp, that has the band all in white, the lens all vaselined, looking like seventies rockers Angel, makes WAY more sense. And actually, after more listens, it sounds less like Kiss, and more like Redd Kross cover Kiss, which is even better, slithery and swaggery an snotty and hooky but still heavy, but so glammy, right down to the little sexy exhalation of breath in the super short break. And somehow it seems appropriately self defeating that their catchiest and most accessible song is titled "Fuck That".
The follow up "I Want You Out" even furthers the whole Redd Kross / Kiss thing, but we're talking old Redd Kross, circa Teen Babes From Monsanto, when they were still heavy and a little dark, and way drugged out and psychedelic, "I Want You Out" is all big tribal drumming, downtuned riffs, even some handclaps, and more of those new vocals, and lots of bleating/skronking sax, that once the song gets going sounds like a glam metal version of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk". Not sure what the hell happened, but we most definitely want some of what they're having.
And the rest of the record unfurls in a similar fashion, classic rock riffs, are all wound up in a glittery haze, hooks are doused in fuzz and buzz and sent spinning into the space rock ether, but the band continue to mix it up, to confuse and confound. "Sometimes" is a folk ballad, dubbed out and drenched in low end synth buzz, acoustic guitars wrapped in reverb, the result a sort of apocalyptic doom folk, glitter style, only to lurch right into "Give In To Live", another Kiss/Thin Lizzy style glamrock groover, but here underpinned by some serious double kick drumming. "Stormbringer" (possibly a Deep Purple cover?) is an epic slow build of distorted vocals, gurgling synths, big drums, but instead of launching into full on glammed out noise rock mode, they lay back, and groove out, a sort of old school Hawkwind style space rock brooder that KILLS, and should have gone on for another 6 minutes. "Shiv" is a low slung, super distorted fuzz heavy churning creep, laced with glammy filigree, and finally, "Permanent Vacation" is the ultimate send off, you can almost imagine these guys on a huge stage, lit from behind with blinding showers of pyro, the drummer standing on his seat, winding up the crowd to clap along, the vocals gnarled and twisted, the guitars chiming and soaring, but instead of launching into the song proper, these guys stretch it out, adding weird rhythmic shifts, bits of mathy weirdness, all the while building and building, totally epic and majestic, before all the sounds are stripped away, leaving a weird warped melody, and some twisted drum machine skitter.
Remember about 1000 words ago we said something about never wanting these guys to change? What the hell were we thinking, sure we might miss the sheer heaviness and drugged out crush of the old Wildildlife, but it seems like a more than fair trade for the new, glammed out, super catchy, weirdo noisepop Wildildlife. Fuck yeah.
While they last, we have the super limited version on AMAZING colored vinyl, they are mostly clear, with weird spurts of color in the middle, mine looks like a bloody egg or something, and all the lps include a download coupon for a digital copy of the record as well!
We dug the first ep from SF transplants Wildlife, who just so happened to feature our very own Matt in mailorder on guitar and vocals. A blown out tripped out heavy as fuck space rock psychedelic freakout of the highest order. Since then, not only have the band changed their name, to the much weirder and somehow more appropriate Wildildlife but also honed their sound into something somehow more blown out, more tripped out, heavier, weirder, but more importantly, WAY catchier. Hooks and melodies that most bands would kill for, but Wildildlife play it like it's no big thing, burying that stuff under avalanches of processed guitars, throbbing howling bass pedals, metallic Iron Maiden like riffing, insane chaotic drumming, and a fierce white hot wall of sound.
We were pretty much sold from the first track. Beginning with some simple Adam Ant drumming, tribal and pounding, before the glistening reverbed Big Country guitars come in, all swathed in delay and drifting over the tangled rhythmic chaos below. The guitars build into a serious chordal frenzy, and then a strange haunting, and very eighties sounding hook, and that's when the vocals come in. Distorted but melodic, a dangerously catchy hook, that somehow reminds us of Gaye Bykers On Acid. Druggy and tripped out, with a cool guitar/vocal "la� lalalalalaaaaaaa" refrain that sticks in your head FOREVER. Wildildlife are usually described as Butthole Surfers meets Black Sabbath, which while flattering, and maybe to a certain extent accurate, hardly do justice to Wildildlife's cracked pop flecked noise rock heaviness.
Yeah, they're heavy, but there's no massive doom riffing or downtuned metallic pummel, and they are definitely trippy, but not in the same way as the Buttholes.
Take the second track, beginning with a wicked tangle of distorted guitar, when the drums kick in, and the band locks into an angular almost new wave melody, and those vocals return, sort of raspy and crooned, echoed by either a high wavery guitar or a falsetto vocal, and they repeat, mantra like, mesmerizing and hypnotic, relentless and seriously tripped out. The drums a constant rhythmic lock beneath the strange poppiness of the vocals and the guitar, before the whole thing splinters into a Hawkwind free rock noise jam, all super effected vocals, total drum mayhem, and thick washes of crumbling guitars and throbbing buzzing bass, eventually petering out into a gorgeous metallic slowcore dirge, everything still wrapped in thick layers of reverb and delay, a gorgeous mournful doomic sonic deathmarch. While some may hear the Buttholes, we're hearing stuff like the God Bullies, the Cows, Lubricated Goat for sure and still plenty of Gaye Bykers, although all even more souped up and super charged.
The two halves of the record are separated by the longest track, the 18+ minute "Magic Jordan", which begins as a washed out post rock dirge, all shimmery strummed guitars, echoey Jim Morrison vocals, and a simple stripped down rhythm, Eventually, the band erupts into a massive roiling bout of slow heaviness, that sounds like a way more psychedelic Harvey Milk, with killer angular riffs surfacing amidst the endless black sonic swirl, eventually giving way to 10 minutes of tripped out free folkiness, all warped backwards guitars, abstract percussion, fluttering melodies, haunting disembodied vocals, all sorts of random creaks and chimes and whir and hiss. Which is quickly followed by what is easily the catchiest track on the record. The relatively brief seven minute long "Feed", with its abstract delayed guitar harmonic feedback intro, giving way to probably the most Buttholes sounding bit on the record, a tense and intense bit of furious drumming, and throbbing bass beneath little flurries of metallic guitar leads, doused in FX and sent swirling over the abyss, while the vocals croon from WAY down in the mix, finishing off with a cool thick chunk of melancholy riffage, massive low end throbs playing out a gorgeous melody beneath the squiggly guitar chaos above.
The disc finishes off with a massive sonic one two punch, two fourteen minute tracks, the first, a super abstract slow motion noise doom lurch, with anguished vocals, sung from the bottom of a well, the guitars and drums offering up jagged little stabs, before locking into a relentless Swans like crush, nearly suffocating the vocals, until the band again lock into an impossible blissed out drone, where the guitar and bass mesh into a nearly M83 sounding wash of fuzzed out psychdrone, before reverting to full on glacial plod until the end.
While the final track, begins with a thick bit of bassy buzz, weaving a hard to define slow motion melody, the buzzing rich and thick and rife with overtones, metallic, electric and lush all at once, eventually joined by a downtuned guitar mirroring that same slow motion melody, eventually joined by dramatic almost gothic vocals, the drums dropping in like brass knuckled fists to the sternum, the band again almost slipping into some intense Swans like doom, before the riffing slips away leaving nearly six minutes of soaring guitar noise, and cymbal sizzle, eventually building to a super dramatic major key coda, all soaring chords and falsetto crooning, like some sort of alien metallic "Star Spangled Banner" (again reminding us a bit of Harvey Milk), before drifting off into a meandering morning after guitar bass post rock fade out.
Way recommended. Noisy and heavy and poppy and psychedelic and fucked up and catchy in a way few bands can pull of. And the one time we caught them live, we were hanging in a hammock, above the stage, IN A BUS, getting rammed repeatedly by the headstock of the guitar as the two axemen dueled wildly in the outrageous confines of the space below. Barring that sort of intimate and surprisingly painful interaction with Wildildlife, this record will definitely serve as an ideal introduction to their damaged and druggy fucked up metallic noise rock space pop, at least until you too can be battered and bruised by these guys in the flesh!
Recorded by Aaron from Mammatus, released on the always awesome Crucial Blast, and in some seriously amazing packaging, a super fancy mini gatefold sleeve, thick and full color, with an intense bejeweled turquoise skull on the cover, a fucked up masked dirt faced hatchet flag duel photo inside, as well as a full color booklet with liner notes and a bunch more freaky blurry creepy masked wild(ild)life photos...
As a teaser for their upcoming Jennifer Herrema (Royal Trux, RTX) produced full length, psychedelic metallic noise poppers Wildildlife team up with their sludge pop doom noise pals in Flood for a killer two song onslaught.
Wildildlife just keep getting better, their sound getting poppier and poppier, but somehow managing to not get less heavy or any less weird or psychedelic. Their track here explodes right out of the gate with some mathy drum pound and some tangled guitar harmonies, sounding almost like some sort of Iron Maiden / Butthole Surfers hybrid, the sound woozy and distorted and druggy, the vocals processed and all tripped out, hooks galore, but all buried under Wildildlife's blown out glammy noise pop chaos. Swaths of crumbling sound and swirls of spacey effects get wrapped around looped samples, and wild streaks of pop flecked psychedelia, churning, and rhythmic and heavy, and noisy and crazy catchy to boot.
Flood counter with some low slung slithery post rock lope, which gains momentum and finally explodes into a seriously stonery doomy sludge, the brooding minimalism giving way to some epic, majestic hypno doom crush, but with plenty of groove, the sound at one point locking into a long stretch of repetitive and hypnotic chug and churn, sounding like a downtuned doom metal Circle, pounding away beneath bellowed vox and majestic melodies. So good.
Limited to 500 copies, we managed to get a bunch of the colored vinyl. Each one is hand numbered, and comes with a download coupon.
As hopefully you fondly recall, just a few weeks back, we made a double cd entitled Might Of The Planet Eater, by this eccentric Finnish outsider blackened industrial / electronica act, our freakin' Record Of The Week. 'Twas a sprawling and utterly bizarre set, part Pan Sonic, part power electronics, part (ir-)rhythmic occult ritual, apparently what happens when a Finnish black metal weirdo does DIY industrial experimentation. Weird and primitive and (to us) utterly awesome.
While we absolutely LOVE Will Over Matter, we'll readily admit they're, uh, possibly a difficult listen (but then, compared to some other things we sell, maybe not really). And fortunately a lot of you folks seemed to dig it! So, of course, we thought you'd want us to list this one too, an earlier album from Will Over Matter, also on Bestial Burst.
This disc is actually the first WOM we ever heard, preceding Might Of The Planet Eater by a couple years. What happened, is not long ago one of us came across a Will Over Matter track on the internet somewhere, got kind of obsessed, and was happy (and amused) to find that we actually already had one of their albums in stock!! That was this one, 9 To The Moon, which we'd apparently ordered from Bestial Burst a couple years ago (2009) when it came out, but never reviewed. The next time we did a Bestial Burst order, we also got the newer double cd, and, our obsession growing, decided to make it Record Of The Week. So all of you who liked that one, you want this too!
Again, outsider electronic electro-dirge, chock a block with squeaky squelchy static-y sounds, stuttering irregular rhythms, noisy glitchy distortion damage. Bloop zwoop zip zap. Buzzing electricity. Sinister analog synth. Computers gone haywire. The occasional disembodied, drugged out voice buried in the mix (heard on the plodding "No Waste Of Sorrow" and elsewhere). Yes, the blown out, black and white, lunar landscape (?) cover art is so appropriate for these alien, bleak, brutal sci-fi sounds, that are both confusional and compelling.
To recap, WOM is a one-man band, a project of Harald Mentor from equally insane AQ faves Ride For Revenge, allegedly a "black metal" act. WOM is not black metal (though Beherit did dabble in this direction once upon a time) but anyone who really appreciates Ride For Revenge, as well as anything totally fucked up, ought to enjoy it. And the esoteric themes of these songs (they ARE songs) are as out there as any black metal weirdness ever. The song titles aren't even provided, but the internet knows what they are.
While it's not a double disc like the other one we listed, there's 9 tracks, all of 'em long... with grand finale "The Burning Logic" building and building for over 8 minutes of crinkum crankum, industrial electro-dirge hypnosis. The whole thing is possibly dangerous headphone listening all right!
We got this in on the day we sent out our last list, the latest from weirdo Finnish avant electronic surreal industrial outfit Will Over Matter, the solo project of the maniac behind damaged sort-of-black-metal avant rhythmic alchemists Ride For Revenge, and we were totally tempted to just list it then, with a review that simply said "This is so much better than anything on this week's list" and leave it at that. We wussed out at the last minute, thinking it a bit too flip, and like all records we love, we really wanted the chance to gush and get a bit more in depth, but it seriously only took a day or two of listening, before we were very nearly incapable of listening to anything else.
The music of Will Over Matter, whose Might Of The Planet Eater double cd we made our Record Of The Week a few months back, is simultaneously infuriating and addictive, baffling and beautiful, a dizzying collage of primitive electronics, of abstract spaced out synths, of bizarre spoken word vocals and sprawling pulsing glitchy malfunctioning buzzscapes, like an Emeralds record if it was crafted by some strange tribe of interstellar cave dwellers, or Daniel Higgs creating primitive spiritual rituals post frontal lobotomy. There's definitely an Amps For Christ vibe too, the same sort of controlled chaos, disparate sounds and tones woven into songs both textural and strangely melodic. The opening track here is the perfect example, a 12+ minute of warped lo-fi kosmische exploration, sounding a bit like it was culled from samples of the Starship Enterprise, recorded on a handheld microcassette recorder, and then played back on a busted up old Casio sampler, a sort of spaced out industrial power electronics, but with the power rendered not so much in volume and intensity, but in depth and mystery, a hazy sort of pulsating rhythmic ambience, one that takes on more and more hiss and buzz as it goes, and it's not until about 9 minutes in, when all of the noise abates, leaving a jagged throbbing synth pulse, beneath which a strange voice intones some mysterious manifesto, the sounds gradually blurring until finally blinking out.
Even though the above paragraph would seem to point to the opposite, this stuff is actually insanely difficult to describe, because it is so unlike anything else we've heard, a compelling bit of modern electronic industrial minimalism, with touches of cold wave, of classic old school industrial, hints of course of the rhythmic weirdness of Ride For Revenge, but here stripped way down, and presented as something much more austere and cold, the voice a Teutonic bellow, that only occasionally erupts unto a more black metal growl, while the music does all the heavy lifting, creating undulating stretches of analog synth, blown out bursts of gristly glitchy crunch, rhythms cobbled together from bits of hiss and thrum, skies full of skittery bleep, of old modem high end flutter, of white noise and pink noise and brown noise all sculpted into sort-of-shapes and almost-melodies, creating again, something that to many ears might be perceived as damaged and difficult and borderline unlistenable, but to us, and presumably many of you, that's part of what makes this so amazing, the fact that it IS completely and utterly whatthefuck bizarre, while somehow managing to be totally mesmerizing, and impossibly listenable, a warped chunk of avant outsider electronic industrial weirdness that has quickly become some of our favorite music ever, and even now, we're still fighting the urge to erase this whole review and just write "this is so much better than anything/everything else EVER"...
The awesomely titled Might Of The Planet Eater is the latest from mysterious Finnish one man band Will Over Matter, which just so happens to be the work of a fella by the name of Harald Mentor, who you might know better as the maniac behind avant outsider not-quite-black-metal weirdos Ride For Revenge. So if the low end rhythmic weirdness that is Ride For Revenge is one step removed from black metal, imagine Will Over Matter as about 5 or 6 steps past that. Not black metal at all, but more like some sort of outsider electronica.
Our obsession with Ride For Revenge stems from the fact that over the course of their career, their sound has changed to the point where they are now totally subverting and transforming the idea of black metal into something much more primal and rhythmic, forgoing the buzz and blast and replacing those obvious BM tropes with looped mesmer and tribal pound, stripping the sound down to its essence, and then slowing it down as well, sounding more to us like Aluk Todolo than Beherit. Although the mention of Beherit, another Finnish black metal institution seems particularly apt here, in that Beherit are infamous for their non-black metal output, their experimental electronics, which is precisely what Will Over Matter is. If Ride For Revenge is Mentor's twisted take on black metal, well then Will Over Matter is his skewed attempt at power electronics, or industrial music, channeling the spirit of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Whitehouse, and all the rest, but filtered through some sort of cracked and damaged blackened Finnish lens.
Will Over Matter combines the stripped down rhythmic minimalism of Ride For Revenge with experimental industrialism, melding lumbering beats to fields of spaced out static, wrapping sheets of Merzbowian noise around shuffling low end thrum and machinelike beats, adding distorted alien vox to squalls of glitched out electronics, or winding multiple streams of electronic information into strangely twisted sonic barrages.
The opening track here is a bizarre soundscape of chittery electronics, of twisted feedback and growled super distorted vocals, pelted by grinding crunch and skittering squelches, a strange array of bleeps and bloops, and buried within, a sort of almost rhythmic bit of ever shifting static, which leads directly into the next track, a droned out stretch of pulsing electronic shimmer, which manages to sound spaced out and sinister at the same time, the tone and timbre switching constantly creating, again, it's own sort of psychedelic rhythm. It's not until "Read The Signs", track number three, that the various elements coalesce into what is really the core of WoM's sound, another fluctuating field of static, of strange space-y electronics, bits of glitch and hiss, but wound around a lumbering, skeletal beat, some sort of alien krautrock, before switching gears, and becoming a weirdly propulsive throbbing electronica, but with elements of kraut/post/space rock, at it's most propulsive sounding a bit like Bastard Noise offshoot and former Record Of The Week-ers Geronimo, and at its least, like nothing you've ever heard before. The track offers up strange electronic squiggles, sinister high end buzz, all in the surface of trailing behind that motorik beat, which itself is in constant flux, cymbals popping out of the mix, processed and all dubby, while the various electronics get more and more tangled and frantic.
Then there's the sprawling 24 minute "Stone Cold Heart", a super spare and abstract stretch of blackened rhythms, and distant buzz and shimmer, that buzz, growing ever more insistent, the vocals here not so distorted, more ominous and intense, intoning some sort of ritual, over what almost sounds like a black metal Pole, minus the barrage of wildly buzzing synths, and primitive analog electronic tones.
One of our favorite tracks is the gorgeously droned out and hypnotic "Forever Nameless" that seems to inadvertently channel John Carpenter and Goblin, into something much more dark and sinister, a totally mesmerizing rhythm, wound up in a thick, corrosive buzzing low end melody, while way off in the distance, a Burzum like synth melody plays out, again reminding us of a less noisy Aluk Todolo, totally hypnotic, the vocals here are almost sung, wrapped in a weird warped distortion, the end result like some sort of doomy drone pop slowcore or something.
Throughout the remainder of these two discs, WoM stretch out strangely stiff rhythms, or pull apart robotic electro beats into weirdly metallic anti-grooves, which unwind lazily beneath hazy streaks of static, creating a series of tarpit crawls, often swallowed whole by heaving walls of electronic sound, that seem to emulate the sheer crumbling power of SUNNO))-like doomdronedirge, but are more often left to pulse, and pound, and throb, a strange alien death march, as the label describes these rituals, each ritual an "epic journey through inner knowledge, lunar madness and cosmic superpowers of satanic possession", the twisted bastard child of some dark forest, outer space ritualized mating of industrial music, black metal, power electronics and krautrock, brilliantly baffling and maddeningly mesmerizing, by now, it should be easy for you to tell if this is your cup of seriously spiked tea or not, and for most of you, we imagine it must be. Fans of Ride For Revenge, Aluk Todolo, Geronimo, Mammal, Bastard Noise, This Heat, spaced out ritualistic blackened electronics and fucked up Finnish weirdness, this one's for you...
Not Hill, Hell. The truest cult American black metal band we can think of. Windham Hell is the duo of Leland Windham and Eric Friesen, two guys, who when not scaling the glaciers near their small Washington town (where "Twin Peaks" was filmed, hence the song title "Glacier Walk In Me"!), hole up in a home studio and make unique, neo-classical black metal masterpieces. Dark, atmospheric, abyssic. Twisted obscure lyrics, cold soundscapes, and TONS of amazing lead guitar shredding from both band members. That's what really sets Windham Hell apart from their competition, why Allan's been a fan of 'em since the "Hell Is Here" demo way back in '89! An eccentric, homemade mixture of Bathory and Bach! Their third album in a decade. Recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
NOW LISTING THE VINYL VERSION...
Um, yeah!! Windhand. At this point, three albums in, doom lovers, do you need us to tell you they're freaking great? Bow down already. There are lots of lots of doom bands, and dooooom bands, and even dooooooooooooooooooom bands out there dooming it down these days, but Virginia's Windhand are easily at or near the top of that heaping heap. Do not sleep on this latest release of theirs. Heck, they know how to write a 14 minute long doom song that's so groovy and catchy and heavy and utterly hypnotically captivating, that you're startled when it ends. That's something a lot of other doom bands, no matter how long they make their songs, can't do.
Windhand wield plenty of heavier-than-thou (and heavier-than-Sabbath, Vitus, even Electric Wizard) massive fuzzy riffage, plus they have a bunch of other elements that make them unique, including the way they occasionally weave in acoustic Americana parts, and some ambient passages too, amidst the blown out heaviness of the whole thing. Also crucial is their singer, Dorthia Cottrell, who as a female vocalist in this genre is interesting 'cause some of the time you can't tell it's a woman singing, and sometimes you can, but either case she brings a lot of melody and emotion and presence to the vocal parts, adding a lot to the overall, multidimensional Windhand sound. On previous Windhand slab Soma, the band really started making use of the potential of Cottrell's vocals, and Grief's Infernal Flower builds on that.
"Hesperus", the album's quasi-title track (it's in the the lyrics), brings back the surprising Acid Bath comparison we noted in our review of Windhand's debut, in the vocals at least, delivering a catchy refrain, until the lengthy song's final 2 or 3 minutes, which ramp up the already stoned out sludge to incredibly hypnotic, even heavier and harder proportions, before the sudden ending gives way to the next (also 14 minute!) cut's ambient opening, but we're hitting repeat on "Hesperus" already. Damn it's the epic doom jam of the fall, utter doom trance nirvana. Oh, speaking of Nirvana�at times on this album we're reminded of Seattle grunge slowed waaay down, and interestingly enough, Jack Endino produced this.
There's one entire old tymey folky sounding acoustic song here, "Sparrow", following on from some efforts in this direction on Soma as well as Cottrell's solo album earlier this year. It's a nice change of pace, well not pace really� nor even mood� just change in volume and heaviness from most of the other tracks here, which ultimately are all about thee HEAVY sheer slomo groove, married to a melodic sensibility as well. Kinda like Electric Wizard run through some sort of 'especially-melodic, almost-sorta-dreamy' filter. So maybe Electric Wizard with some Mazzy Star to it?? Whatever, it's a beautiful thing. So once again all the doom fanatics here are in love. Windhand rules.
It seems like only yesterday that Virginia's Windhand first emerged on the scene seemingly from out of nowhere, announcing their arrival with an enormous earth-splitting debut that left doomheads the world over cavorting in slow motion ecstasy. But in the year and a half that's followed their acclaim has only grown (thanks in no small part to an immense split with Cough) and now their second full length has arrived with some serious expectations in tow. But never fear! Because it's another overwhelming stoned monument of blown-out moss-specked DOOM. The first thing you'll notice about Windhand is just how damn HEAVY they are, and in the graveyard realm of doom metal that's no small feat. But just the very tone and weight of Windhand's music seriously puts most other supposedly "heavy" bands to shame. The guitars are lumbering funereal paced black magic incantations - all overdriven and decayed, but unfathomably huge, with the occasional dreamy affects drenched lead swimming out from under the murkiness. The sound is so bottom heavy that it's hard to tell where the guitars end and the bass begins. Instead they simply congeal into one slithering black leviathan mass, while the drums plod underneath like slaveship percussion. The vocals seem to be crying out from the other side of a black hole, ghostly and buried in the mix, sounding perfectly forlorn and out of reach. They immediately bring to mind Electric Wizard's landmark Dopethrone, and really we'd be remiss in not mentioning that Electric Wizard is a pretty obvious touchstone for this band in general. But there does seem to be a more serious undercurrent running through Windhand's music. While Electric Wizard's music is often imbued with a kind of acid biker B-movie kitsch, Windhand instead trade that in for a sense of urban decay and personal dread that brings to mind Pallbearer or Strength To Dream-era Warning. There is very little reprieve from the claustrophobic heaviness. The only real exceptions are the sparse Americana twang of "Evergreen"'s acoustic folk noir (a song that really allows Dorthia Cottrell's haunting vocals to shine) and the lonely acoustic minimalism interspersed into the enormous slow-burn "Boleskine", which closes out the album with 30+ minutes of intense heaviness before fading out into the bleak sounds of howling prairie winds.
As a sidenote, we should also mention that the dudes (& dudette) from the band swung by aQuarius when they were in town last week - and we just happened to be playing the new record in the shop at the time, of course! Needless to say they were super nice and friendly, even going so far as to put us on the guest list for their show that night! And we're very pleased to report that when we arrived at the tiny Hemlock Tavern for the performance, we were subjected to literally one of the loudest, heaviest (and sweatiest!) live shows we've ever seen, and it really gave us a new appreciation for the band. Not that we needed another reason to recommend this record! It goes without saying, but if all things slow and heavy are what get your motor rumbling, then there's no way you can pass on this stumbling crumbling testament to relentless heaviness!
It takes a lot for a doom metal record to knock us on our asses. Sure it's a sound we love, so even the most pedestrian doom pushes our buttons, and we tend to find it sonically pleasing, but as a genre, doom more than most metal subgenres has a tendency to become boring and ponderous. It's sort of unavoidable, it's slow and dreary and depressive, and so it takes some sort of spark to turn that sort of dreary sonic depression into something you want to listen to. So what is it exactly about this record, the debut from these Richmond doomlords (which weirdly features members of Alabama Thunderpussy) that has us losing our shit? In fact we'd been chomping at the bit to get this reviewed on the list, but our distributors continued to be out of it.
So here it is, finally, presented for your approval, and we can safely say that since we first discovered this record, we've listened to little else. It's slow, heavy, Sabbathy, hell it even starts out with the whole rain and thunder and whipping wind thing (which in fact pops up throughout the record!), but it's also seriously droney and tripped out, in fact listening to it now, it definitely reminds us of Electric Wizard a LOT, the same mix of classic churning doom, and witchy psychedelia, the vocals are doused in effects and soar majestically beneath heaving walls of blackened doomic crumble, the songs are peppered with squalls of wild wah guitar, the drumming is monstrous, the riffs KILL, and the songs are catchy as fuck. The band lock into these super tranced out almost mantra like workouts, that remind us of EW's "Supercoven", the sort of drug drenched heaviness that inspires a woozy lethargic swaying hypnotic headbanging, a sort of trancey worshipful reverence that only the truly exalted doom outfits command.
We're also reminded weirdly of Acid Bath, the band have a serious knack for apocalyptic psychedelic pop, but here rendered in shades of dirge and doom, just check out "Heap Wolves" which sounds like a doom band covering something off Paegan Terrorism Tactics. Heavy and psychedelic, doomy and droney, Windhand have most definitely made THEE psych doom record of the year, and a serious contender come year end top ten lists, metal OR otherwise!
FYI there's also a cd version, but our supplier wuz out, hopefully we'll have 'em soon...
What would a band composed of members of such notable post-rock / metalcore bands as Isis, Red Sparowes, Anodyne and 27 sound like? Well Windmills By The Ocean answers that question authoritatively, as this shortlived Boston band's sole album, recorded in 2003 but never before released, features musicians who went on to play in all those bands! And it's just about what you'd expect, heavy moody monumental mostly instrumental music, but it some ways it's actually quite surprising, much mathier and more aggressive than any of the bands that would come after.�
Most of the tracks begin soft and shimmery, a sort of Godspeed slow build before the band begins to churn out some seriously vitriolic post rock, heck, a lot of this is straight up metal, chugging downtuned heaviness, but it's the delivery and the arrangements that make it so special, the band will be plowing through dense riffs and blown out space rock when they suddenly lock into a groove and don't quit. Endlessly over and over and over, so deliriously intense, we wish those parts would never end. Little chunks of Gore (the Dutch hypnometallers) pepper the whole record, and give Windmills an amazing and hugely hypnotic vibe. And heavy, man, this is heavy as fuck, the guitars are huge, the drums and guitars locked in mortal battle, often circling each other for what seems like forever. And those are the best parts, the metallic stalemate that results in endless mesmerizing riffage.
At first we though Windmills sounded a bit like a metal Shellac, and it sort of does, mostly because of the�super clinical and LOUD drums, constantly pounding out deceptively complex rhythms, but the sound is so repetitive and circular, it's hard not to hear a bit of Circle in there. Maybe if you crossbred Circle with Neurosis, you'd come up with something like Windmills.�
This�has been pushing all of our hypnometal and epic post rock and dizzying math rock buttons like crazy... The first song alone routinely sends us into paroxysms of unfettered head banging... which of course means WAY recommended!
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Debut 22-minute, five-song ep of dark and moody and mostly mellow post-black metal from Norway, featuring the proficient guitar soloing of Carl August Tiedeman (who's played on records by both Arcturus and Ulver). Atmospheric, almost romantic stuff (there's lots of piano synth), with clean, crooning vocals (similar to Sculptured). Black metal trainspotters should note also that Jan
Battlecruiser is a new label from AQ pal Campbell Kneale who runs the impeccable NZ label Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Battlecruiser is basically an outlet for a bunch of New Zealand noise guys to fufill their secret desire to be metal gods! Who can argue with that? Cool band names, distorted guitars, demonic vocals and all that good stuff! Metalheads might have to stretch their definition of 'metal' to really get into this stuff, but the rest of us, metal and unmetal alike will find lots of beautiful crushing far out noisy weirdness on these evil 'lil 3" cd-r's!
The majestically monickered Wings Of Vengeance offers up gentle chiming harmonics that are slowly overtaken by creaking, moaning waves of slow motion riffs that eventually erupt into hyperspeed death metal, with thick slabs of bass guitar, grunted vocals and spastic drum machines. Less metal per se, more sort of stuttery, throbbing grind sludge. Like the Flipper catalog played by Corrupted. Or something. 9 tracks in 9 minutes! And we also ought to note: this band is named after a Hammers of Misfortune song, oddly enough!
Doom legend Scott "Wino" Weinrich, front man for Saint Vitus and The Obsessed, and member of Shrinebuilder, offers up a new solo album, the vinyl of which we have via Volcom. But don't expect heavy stoner doom here. It's passionate, and earnest, yeah, but not heavy - this is an all-acoustic album, just voice and guitar pretty much. So, it's kinda the coffee house version of Wino, we'd have to say. He's gone all singer songwriter on us. And that's not bad, after all he's got a cool voice and is a talented guitar player, as capable with the delicate country folk flecked acoustic stuff as he is with the shredding psychedelic electric leads that sometimes intrude over the acoustic strum. It might not be fair to say that this is his Book Of Shadows (this IS better than that Zakk Wylde acoustic album) but it's definitely a far cry from Born Too Late or The Church Within, as well, doomhounds should note. Maybe Jar Of Flies would be a better comparison? Oh, and if you ever wanted to hear unplugged versions of Motorhead's "Iron Horse" and "Born To Lose", the album ends with such a medley. There's also a Savoy Brown cover too. ----* ----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed : ----* If you want to order one of these, just search for the item, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart! ACID MOTHER'S TEMPLE / STEARICA "Sterica Invade Acid Mothers Temple" (Homeopathic) cd 17.98 ACRYLICS "Lives And Treasure" (Hot Sand / Friendly Fire) cd 13.98 ANAL CUNT "Fuckin A" (Patac) cd 11.98 ANBB (ALVA NOTO & BLIXA BARGELD) "Mimikry" (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98 ANIKA "s/t" (Stones Throw / Invada) cd 21.00 BANJO OR FREAKOUT "s/t" (RBR) cd/lp 15.98/16.98 BEACH FOSSILS "What A Pleasure" (Captured Tracks) cd/lp 10.98/13.98 BEE MASK "Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico" (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) lp 21.00 BICK, ANDREAS "Fire And Frost Pattern" (Gruenrekorder) cd 16.98 BIRDS OF AVALON "s/t" (Bladen Country) cd 14.98 BLOOD OF HEROES, THE "s/t" (Ohm Resistance) cd 17.98 BLUE SABBATH BLACK CHEER "Skeletal Coupla Remains" (Gnarled Forest) lp 16.98 BLUE SABBATH BLACK CHEER / WICKED KING WICKER "split" (Gnarled Forest) lp 14.98 BRIGHT EYES "People's Key (First Edition)" (Saddle Creek) cd 14.98 BURZUM "Fallen" (Byelobog) cd 14.98 CASSLE "s/t" (Shadow Kingdom) cd 13.98 COHEN, TIM "Bad Blood" (Captured Tracks) 2x7" 10.98 COVER STORY VOL. 2 "Cover Story Volume Two: Odd, Obscure, and Outrageous Album Art" (Waxpoetics) book 24.95 DANAVA / EARTHLESS / LECHEROUS GAZE "s/t" (Kemado) lp 19.98 DARK DAY "Strange Clockwork" (self-released) cd 12.98 DECEMBERISTS, THE "The King Is Dead" (Capitol) cd 17.98 ELECTRIC VOYAGE "Flight of No Return" (Kemado) 7" 5.98 ESG "Dance To The Best Of ESG" (Soul Jazz) 3lp 59.00 EXPO 70 "Center of the Earth" (Sonic Meditations) 2lp 33.00 FABRIC "A Sort Of Radiance" (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) lp 21.00 FATHER BEFOULED "Morbid Destitution of Covenant" (Relapse) cd 14.98 FEAR "The Record" (Slash / Rhino) lp 14.98 FINCHES "On Golden Hill" (Ulrike) cd 10.98 FLOATING BRIDGE "s/t" (Aurora) cd 17.98 FRIMPONG, K. & HIS CUBANO FIESTAS "s/t" (Continental Records) lp 17.98 GANG OF FOUR "Entertainment" (Rhino / Warner Bros.) lp 24.00 GRAYCEON "All We Destroy" (Profound Lore) cd 13.98 GREEN DOOR KIDS, THE "Muzikal Yooth" (Optimo Music) lp 16.98 GROSSKOPF, HAROLD + VARIOUS ARTISTS "Synthesist / Re-Synthesist" (Rvng Intl) lp+cd 22.00 HAINO, KEIJI, JIM O'ROURKE, & OREN AMBARCHI "In A Flash Everything Comes Together As One There Is No Need For A Subject" (A Black Truffle / Medama) 2lp 29.00 HAMMER, JOSEPH "I Love You, Please Love Me" (Pan) lp 36.00 HELEN LUNDY TRIO, THE "s/t" (HLT Records) cd 11.98 HUMAN INSTINCT "Kiwi Psych Heads : Singles 1966-1971" (Groovie) lp 32.00 HYPE WILLIAMS "One Nation" (Hippos In Tanks) 12" 25.00 INDEX "Black Album / Red Album / Yesterday & Today" (Lion Productions) 2cd 27.00 JOHANNSSON, JOHANN "Virdulegu Forsetar" (Touch) 2lp 22.00 JOKERS "s/t" (Fading Sunshine) cd 14.98 JUV "s/t" (Miasmah) cd/2lp 16.98/23.00 KALEIDOSCOPE "s/t" (Shadoks) cd 17.98 KVELERTAK "s/t" (Indie Recordings) cd 14.98 LARD FREE "Gilbert Artman's Lard Free" (Wah-Wah) lp 30.00 LI, LYKKE "Wounded Rhymes" (Atlantic) cd 13.98 LIFELOVER "Sjukdom" (Prophecy Productions) cd 16.98 MAJUTSU NO NIWA "Ecstatic Crystalization" (Musik Atlach) cd 16.98 MANDELBROT & SKYY "OD-Axis" (Digitalis) lp 14.98 MARATHON MAN / THE PARALLAX VIEW (MICAHEL SMALL) "OST" (Film Score Monthly) cd 17.98 METABOLISMUS "Mauser Ok" (Amish Records) 7" 10.98 NATURAL SNOW BUILDINGS "Waves Of The Random Sea" (Blackest Rainbow) cd 19.98 NATURAL YOGURT BAND, THE "Tuck In With..." (Now Again) cd 18.98 NEUMEIER, MANI & KAWABATA MAKOTO "Samurai Blues" (Bureau B) cd 17.98 NIGGAS WITH GUITARS "Ethnic Frenzy" (Digitalis) lp 16.98 OSWALD, JOHN + 1,001 VINTAGE POP STARS "Perplexure" (Fony) lp 14.98 OUTER LIMITS RECORDINGS "$20 Bill" (True Panther) 7" 6.98 PSYCHIC REALITY "Vibrant New Age" (Not Not Fun) lp 14.98 PUCE MOMENT "Avoiding Certain Topics / Essence Of Mann e.p. / Puce Moment" (self-released) 3 x cassette 9.98 PULSE EMITTER "Spiritual Vistas" (Cylindrical Habitat Modules / Expansive) lp 14.98 PURO INSTINCT "Headbangers In Ecstasy" (Mexican Summer) cd/lp 13.98/16.98 PURO INSTINCT "Stilyagi / Put Medved To Bedved" (Mexican Summer) 7" 5.98 QUICKSAND DREAM "Aelin - A Story About Destiny" (Planet Metal) cd 10.98 RIVAL SCHOOLS "Pedals" (Photo Finish) cd 12.98 RONETTES, THE "Be My Baby : The Very Best Of The Ronettes" (Legacy) cd 10.98 ROSE, EDEN "On The Way To Eden" (Lion) cd 16.98 RURAL ALBERTA ADVANTAGE, THE "Departing" (Saddle Creek) cd 14.98 SAXANA - THE GIRL ON A BROOMSTICK (MICHAJLOV, ANGELO) "OST" (B-Music / Finders Keepers) cd 16.98 SCALE THE SUMMIT "The Collective" (Prosthetic) cd 14.98 SHIFLET, MIKE & DANIEL MENCHE "Stalemate" (Sonoris) cd 13.98 SHIVER, THE "Walpurgis" (Garden of Delights) lp 34.00 SIMONE, NINA "At Newport" (Doxy) lp+cd 26.00 SIMONE, NINA "The Legendary First Recording In New York City, 1957" (Doxy) lp+cd 26.00 SLITS, THE "In The Beginning" (Vinyl Lovers) lp 27.00 SLOATH "s/t" (Riot Season) lp 17.98 SPACEMEN 3 "Take Me To The Other Side" (Fire) 12" 13.98 STEEL MILL "Jewels Of The Forest" (Rise Above Relics) cd 16.98 TEAMS VS. STAR SLINGER "s/t" (Mexican Summer) 12" 19.98 THX 1138 (LALO SCHIFRIN) "OST" (Film Score Monthly) cd 17.98 TORO Y MOI "Underneath The Pine" (Carpark) cd 14.98 V/A "Brazil Bossa Beat! Bosa Nova & The Story Of Elenco Records, Brazil" (Soul Jazz Records) cd/2lp 23.00/24.00 V/A "Cartagena! Curro Fuentes & The Big Band Combia And Descarga Sound Of Columbia 1962-72" (Soundway) cd 16.98 V/A "Casual Victim Pile II" (12XU) lp 14.98 V/A "Funky Chicken" (Trojan) cd 15.98 V/A "Groove Club Vol. 3: Cambodian Rock Intensified!" (Lion / Get On Down) 2lp 22.00 V/A "Guitar Mood 2" (INST) lp 10.98 V/A "Nippon Girls: Japanese Pop, Beat, & Bossa Nova 1966-1970" (Big Beat International) cd 19.98 V/A "Rhythm" (Gruenrekorder) cd 16.98 V/A "Riddimentary : Diplo Selects Greensleeves" (Greensleeves) cd 12.98 VACANT LOTS "Confusion b/w Cadillac" (Mexican Summer) 7" 5.98 VAMPILLIA "Alchemic Heart" (Important) cd 14.98 VENA "Nomadic" (Paradigms) cd ep 11.98 VESTER, HEIKE / OCEAN SOUNDS "Marine Mammals And Fish Of Lofoten And Vesteralen" (Gruenrekorder) cd 16.98 WILLIAMS, LUCINDA "Blessed" (Lost Highway) cd 15.98 _______________________________________________________________________ Please place your order via our website. [1] We will contact you to verify your order and let you know when it will be shipped. Please note that occasionally it may take a day or two for us to reply. We are not a faceless bunch of computers replying to your order -- we are human beings! [2] If we are out of some of your items and we think we will get them within the same week, we can wait to ship. Or... If it's going to be more than a few days to complete your order, we will ship what we have and then will contact you as the remainders arrive. [ note ] Due to the everchanging nature of the independent record business, we are not responsible for listed price changes (due to supplier price changes) and often cannot update our site fast enough to reflect these changes, but we will always try to let you know of any differences.
It's about time that stoner rock guitar god Scott Weinrich, better known by his nickname Wino, former vocalist for Saint Vitus, just up and called his band "Wino". After all, The Obsessed, Shine, Spirit Caravan, Hidden Hand, they were all Wino projects with drawing card, Wino. So, at last, here's the man's "solo" album. Unlike at this year's Southern Lord SXSW showcase, where he did indeed play an entirely solo (and acoustic!) set, Wino is in fact a band on Punctuated Equilibrium, a power trio that also features the talents of Jean Paul Gaster (of Clutch) on drums and Jon Blank on bass.
And guess what? Wino sounds pretty much like Wino's other bands! Which is exactly what we hoped for. A mix of '70s style heavy rock, aggro punkishness, and technically badass instrumental interplay, with of course political-mystical-conspiracy lyrics delivered in Wino's trademark gravelly croon. Wino's other trademark, his distinctive fat guitar tone, is also present and accounted for.
Loping, bellbottomed opener "Release Me" sounds a bit like Captain Beyond, born too late. Then things get a bit frashter for the next tune, the title track. And the album rolls on, an eclectic, electric trip through, well, what Wino is all about. Making music that's part Mountain, part Mahavishnu... doomy, psychedelic, often esoteric and instrumental (among the latter, there's a song called "The Women In The Orange Pants" that almost could be Stinking Lizaveta...and considering the title, it's probably just as well there's no lyrics).
Speaking of track titles, who else but Wino would call a song "Gods, Frauds, Neo-Cons and Demagogues"?
Available once again, this legendary doom/death classic, done up deluxe by Southern Lord. Available on vinyl for the first time in about 20 years, and again on cd...
We're always excited to sing the praises of this record, it's been one of our favorites for years, always on the iPod, and never far from the stereos of those of us into the DOOOOM. The last reissue came out way back in 1999, but wasn't always that easy to get, and so were were psyched about this new one, and Southern Lord's version makes perfect sense, especially with the ongoing interest in all things doomy and sludgy AND the fact that probably EVERY SINGLE band on SL owes a HUGE debt to these doom / sludge forefathers. We bet there's even some folks out there who don't realize there was any doom pre- Corrupted / Boris / Earth / SUNNO))). Well let's go all the way back to the very early nineties, head out to Long Island and re-discover the pummelling majesty of the mighty Winter. There's not a doom band worth its stripes who wouldn't cite Winter as an influence, and one listen proves why. Crusty, downtuned sludge metal, but unlike the current crop of ultra doomsters, Winter's roots were in much more traditional thrash and doom metal as well as crusty punk. Often described as a slowed down Celtic Frost, due in no small part to the vocal delivery, Winter managed to mix elements of Black Sabbath (obviously, what doom band doesn't), Hellhammer, diSEMBOWELMENT and UK political crust band Doom into a slithery, creeping, suffocatingly dense blast of chugging guitar, pounding drums and creepy growled vocals. On closer listening their are also strange bits of organ and found sounds and bizarre vocal snippets scattered throughout and buried here and there. There are even guitar solos!! But no normal solos, no these are all spikey and twisted and serpentine, chaotic squalls of prickly squealing freakout that fit perfectly into Winter's desolate doomscapes. The other thing worth mentioning is the lyrics, which at the time got them a lot of attention / flak, quite cryptic for sure, but they seem to focus on saving the environment, anti-pollution, anti-technology, ecological awareness (Exit-13 anyone?) displaying their crusty roots there for sure! Fans of the new crop of doom and ultra doom would do well to take a peek at a band who truly was ahead of their time, a band who helped lay the groundwork for the sonic pummelling provided to you on a daily basis by bands like Skepticism, Esoteric, Rigor Sardonicous, Moss, Bunkur, and even Electric Wizard and Sleep, who might not even exist were it not for Winter.
The vinyl is housed in a super heavy, deluxe, Stoughton style gatefold jacket, and both versions, vinyl and cd, include a big booklet full of lyrics, artwork and old flyers (the lp's booklet in the form of an oversized newsprint insert!)..
The only bummer about the Southern Lord reissue, is that for some reason, this version leaves off the bonus tracks that were included with the previous cd reissue, the equally kick ass Eternal Frost ep, but maybe/hopefully Southern Lord plan on reissuing that one later, on its own. Here's hoping!
We've always wanted to list this, it's been one of our favorite records for years, always on the iPod, and never far from the stereos of those of us into the DOOOOM. This reissue first came out way back in 1999, but it hasn't been easy to get lately, so when we found a distro that had a bunch we jumped on 'em. And it's especially timely now considering the renewed interest in all things doomy and sludgy. We bet there's even some folks out there who don't realize there was any doom pre- Corrupted / Boris / Earth / SUNNO))). Well let's go all the way back to the very early nineties, head out to Long Island and re-discover the pummelling majesty of the mighty Winter. There's not a doom band worth its stripes who wouldn't cite Winter as an influence, and one listen proves why. Crusty, downtuned sludge metal, but unlike the current crop of ultra doomsters, Winter's roots were in much more traditional thrash and doom metal as well as crusty punk. Often described as a slowed down Celtic Frost, due in no small part to the vocal delivery, Winter managed to mix elements of Black Sabbath (obviously, what doom band doesn't), Hellhammer, diSEMBOWELMENT and UK political crust band Doom into a slithery, creeping, suffocatingly dense blast of chugging guitar, pounding drums and creepy growled vocals. On closser listening their are also strange bits of organ and found sounds and bizarre vocal snippets scattered throughout and buried here and there. There are even guitar solos!! But no normal solos, no these are all spikey and twisted and serpentine, chaotic squalls of prickly squealing freakout that fit perfectly into Winter's desolate doomscapes. And speaking of guitar, this reissue also contains Winter's Eternal Frost ep, which features the bizarre (and prescient, considering the current state of ambient drone doom metal) bonus track "Manifestations 1", an extended psychedelic soundscape constructed wholly from guitar and manipulated effects. So cool. The other thing worth mentioning is the lyrics, which at the time got them a lot of attention / flak, quite cryptic for sure, but they seem to focus on saving the environment, anti-pollution, anti-technology, ecological awareness (Exit-13 anyone?) displaying their crusty roots there for sure! Fans of the new crop of doom and ultra doom would do well to take a peek at a band who truly was ahead of their time, a band who helped lay the groundwork for the sonic pummelling provided to you on a daily basis by bands like Skepticism, Esoteric, Rigor Sardonicous, Moss, Bunkur, and even Electric Wizard and Sleep, who might not even exist were it not for Winter.
This definitely has to be the first record ever inspired by a t-shirt. We shit you not. And just to get in the spirit, I'm actually wearing said shirt as I type. But it must be noted it is a really cool shirt! A friend of aQ who used to make t-shirts, whipped up this badass Winter Is Coming shirt a while back, a stark design of leafless branches against a grey sky. Only a handful made it off the press and onto people's back, one of which ended up on a fella by the name of Tom who then started Winter Is Coming, the group, not to be confused with the shirt. And you know what? It's just as cool as the shirt if not cooler. The cd sleeve is an homage to the shirt's design, winter branches against a grey sky, the words Winter Is Coming in olde English letters, but from that point on the shirt comes off and we're into some sort of mysteriously wintery drone sludge ambient shit that is fierce and frightening, and is exactly the sort of thing we can never seem to get enough of. It's like the musical version of a cold grim winter, the sound of icy winds and dying leaves, five massive tracks of slow moving whir and rumble. Sometimes delicate and crystalline, sometimes thick and viscous and almost black in its heaviness. The instrumentation is as unlikely as the band's inspiration, homemade washtub doodle bass with nylon weed whacker strings, dulcimer, dinner bell, creaking chair, jew's harp as well as guitar, synth and vocals. Winter Is Coming is not just a shirt, it's a metaphor for death, as the man behind WiC works in the emergency room and this recording is the musical expression of his experiences with death. The coming winter, the inevitable end. Life like seasons. Heavy stuff. As is the music. A huge glacial crawl, rife with strange sonic irregularities, like a mudslide picking up corpses and random detritus as it lays waste to everything in its path. The bringer of death, but strangely serene and beautiful. Definitely for fans of the sludge and the drone, Boris, Corrupted, Moss, Marzuraan, SUNNO))) as well as the heavier side of the drone, Nadja, Abruptum and the like. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Winter Is Coming indeed...
For more on the inspiration behind the coming winter check this out: http://conceptualart.dreamhosters.com/npr/archives/102
When we first got this disc in, we had no idea what it was. We never would have guessed it was the Winterblut as the new Winterblut was supposed to have original cover art by Wrest from Leviathan. But this disc was in a plain all-black slipcover. So we slid out the jewel case, and what do you know? The jewel case was opaque and black as well, with absolutely no text on it anywhere. At this point we still had no idea what the heck it was, until we pulled out the booklet, and lo and behold, there it was, Wrest's artwork, some seriously demented painted shapes grappling, a nude woman, a demon, way too many clawed hands...
It's been four long year since we last heard from Winterblut, and at the time, the album Grund Gelenkkunst had just been released and found Winterblut totally transformed from a grim buzzing Nordic style black metal beast, into a twisted, convoluted SST meets Voivod sort of black prog combo, having more in common with Ved Buens Ende than Darkthrone, with a punk rock production, gnarled Greg Ginn riffage, super strange arrangements and some very un-black metal elements. Which of course meant we dug it like crazy. And played it to death, always expecting to hear more from Winterblut sooner or later.
So it ended up being later, but finally here it is, Das Aas aller Dinge, and while a lot has changed in the last 4 years, much of the prog has been purged, and not all the riffing is angular and obtuse, Winterblut hasn't merely reverted to classic Norwegian style black buzz, although much of Das Aas aller Dinge is more blasting and buzzing than anything on Grund Gelenkkunst, instead it's apparent from the very first riff, that L. Hiver, the man who is Winterblut, still has a distinctly skewed take on black metal, with the tempo firmly set at mid, and plenty of Voivodisms still in place, right down to the vocals, in fact one can almost imagine this is what Dimension Hatross would have sounded like had it been a black metal record, lurching and mathy, woozy and sort of seasick, everything shrouded in reverb and black black distortion a killer groove, complex drumming, the guitars skeletal and spidery as much as buzzy and black. Even the second track sounds like a blackened Voivod, and part way through when it kicks it up into full on blast, the melody and riffing is still haunting and minor key, with a subtle sci-fi edge. The next few tracks are definitely heavier on the buzzing and the blackness, and more old school classic Norwegian style, but still the riffs are completely atypical, gnarled and just a little bit off. In a good way.
It's on "Das Aas (Erloschen)" where the band get all weird again, a super slithery, slippery stop start groove with a main riff that warbles drunkenly up and down the fretboard, with big wide open spaces between chords, the drums a simple framework for the guitars to tangle themselves up in. A track or two later, there's the 15 minute epic "Das Aas (Sehnsuchtig)" a loping waltzy Burzumic dirge, that partway through transforms into a furious blast, and then unwinds into a killer serpentine progscape with impossibly off-kilter drumming, and strange tempos, everything still bathed in black, the vocals a raspy growl, but all strung along a lurching mathrock rhythm, the riffs following suit, a whirling relentless black space prog jam. The record finishes off with "Das Aas (Egnid Rella)" another track that meshes classic black with the twisted riffage and octopoidal rhythms that made us dig Winterblut so much in the first place.
Obviously amazing, and essential, but even considering everything we just wrote, if you're anything like us, it could have been summed up perfectly in 4 simple words: "black metal Dimension Hatross."
As mentioned above, packaged in a black opaque jewel case, in an all black slipcover, the booklet inside and the disc face features killer artwork from Wrest, the booklet also includes some seriously creepy band photos, as well liner notes and lyrics.
Black metal bands are notorious for their scarily complex and utterly unreadable logos. With this release, Germany's Winterblut take that unreadability to new heights -- by deliberately *blurring* their logo (and all other writing) on the front and back of this cd. If you squint at it from a distance, maybe you can make it out -- but then you have the ornate logo itself to contend with. And don't try to look on the cd spine for help (our technique, 'cause usually the band's name is printed in a normal font there) because the spine is totally blank. Cunning bastards. Anyway, the blurred logo is not the strangest thing about this album... We already liked Winterblut's previous stuff, total Darkthrone styled Nordic black metal, grim and true. We ended up liking this new album a lot too, but not for the reasons we expected. This more-or-less one-man band (a person named L. Hiver responsible for wretchedly bizarre vocals, guitar, and bass, assisted by various drummers) sounds less like Darkthrone than it does Voivod! More accurately, "Grund" sounds like an SST band circa '87, full of Greg Ginn guitar skronk, all gnarly and proggy and punkly produced. In the realm of black metal, we can only cite Enslaved and Ved Buens Ende as precedents. With Gore-like midtempo plod, math-rock twists, and some quietly atmospheric grooves, you'll forget this is supposed to be a black metal record -- then, whoomp! Hiver unleashes the evil. His vocals are as ever wonderfully wretched as before, but the music is a total surprise.
MPEG Download: "track 1" [/audio/winterblut1.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "track 1" [/audio/winterblut1.m3u]
