The oddly monickered Blue Hummingbird On The Left are part of a new black metal movement, or scene, based in California, called the Black Twilight Circle, who seem to be loosely modeled after the infamous Les Legions Noires aka The Black Legions, which included Mutiilation, Belketre, Aakon Keetreh, Torgeist, Vlad Tepes and plenty more. The scene itself consisted of a handful of members, all of whom performed under different names, and in different combinations as different groups. Similarly, The Black Twilight Circle includes the groups Volahn, Ashdautas, Axeman, Arizmenda, Kallathon, Kuxan Suum, Dolorvotre and others, as well as these guys, Blue Hummingbird On The Left. Might seem like an odd name at first, until you discover it's actually a translation of the name Huitzilopochtli, an Aztec war god, okay, well it's still an odd name, and even more odd (and cool) is that these guys also incorporate FLUTE into their black buzz.
Originally released as a super limited (and now out of print) cassette and finally available again, on vinyl (also limited of course), Bloodflower is a collection of three blasts of raw, primitive, lo-fi blackness, the guitars a black blur, the drums a chaotic stumbling blast, the vocals a crazed maniacal bellow, occasionally slipping into a freaked out almost falsetto wail, the flute seems to just shriek in the background on the opening track, but on the second track, it flutters and flits offering up a sort of Native American sounding melody, which is quickly swallowed up by an avalanche of lumbering pounding black buzz. The title track is the riffiest of the bunch, starting out all downtuned and chuggy, before exploding into another stretch of pounding black fury. Fucking awesome. And anyone who likes their black metal raw and lo-fi, should definitely dig way deeper into the Black Twilight Circle.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Each one hand numbered.
The umlauted Oyster boys' fourth album, from '76, remastered n' reissued with bonus tracks etc. By this point, the Cult was getting pretty big. "Agents Of Fortune" features what must be their biggest hit, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". Worth it for that, and
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
When we did our $5 sale list a few weeks back, we were pleased to include the first three early '70s albums from the often underrated & misunderstood Blue Oyster Cult. Those discs proved quite popular, probably the best sellers of that list! Now here's another one by them, also on sale for just $5. Fire Of Unknown Origin dates from 1981, and thus belongs to BOC at their prime, after they had attained stadium-sized classic rock status. And it features one of the band's biggest hits ever, "Burnin' For You" (a great song, for sure, with lyrics by rock critic Richard Meltzer). But there's also a lot of equally awesome 'deep cuts' here too, like the creepy/campy "Joan Crawford", based on Mommie Dearest, which features a full-on musique concrete freakout in the middle.
Listening to this album, no matter how far out and sci-fi some of the songs get, it's clear that Blue Oyster Cult were a POP band, big time. Their roots in '60s psychedelia are still manifest, but this is also a total state-of-the-art '80s pop rock album, with loads of shiny new keyboards on the title track (based on a poem by Patti Smith), and elsewhere. Their imagery and umlauts (and guitar riffs!) of course also found favor with the hard rock / heavy metal hordes, but despite their reputation, it's hard to really call BOC a metal band. Sure, there's a track here entitled "Heavy Metal: The Black And Silver", but that's 'cause apparently a lot of these songs were written for the animated film Heavy Metal - though only "Veterans Of The Psychic Wars" (with lyrics by author Michael Moorcock, and Andee's favorite B.O.C. track EVER) actually appeared on the soundtrack. Giving this a bit more metal cred, though, the producer was Martin Birch, who did Sabbath's Mob Rules and Iron Maiden's Killers the very same year. And we gotta mention how much stuff like "Vengeance (The Pact)" sounds like the template for current Swedish metallers Ghost!
Ultimately, this is a great, sci-fi-fried, slightly progged out, and even a bit experimental, pop rock record with a bit of metal to it; heavy on the synths, the hooks, and the weird lyrics.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Finally, the very first cd release from Northwestern blacknoize terrorists Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, not a proper full length exactly, more a collection of odds and ends, a selection of out of print tracks, culled from various 7"s and 12"s and tapes, as well as a couple previously unreleased jams.
Those new to Blue Sabbath Black Cheer should definitely beware, the sound this dastardly duo conjure up is more noise than music, more drone than metal, yet it manages to be all of those things at once. They described their sound as "black acid bog death, blackened noise volume assault", and it most definitely is that, it's the sound of SUNNO))) and Wolf Eyes and Organum, mixed with black metal and dark ambience, power electronics and minimal dronemusic, and somehow molded into harsh and harrowing blackened buzzscapes, veering from full on caustic assault, to hushed mysterious creep, often in the same song.
One of the tracks here is from the Borre Fen lp, and of the various micro-releases represented here, that was the only one that we ever managed to get in the shop, which means for many folks, ourselves included, this is practically a new record.
From the opener "Untitled" (most of the tracks are titled "Untitled"!), a swirling buzzing cacophony of crumbling industrial whir, peppered with buried percussion, howled voices lost in the mix, keening sheets of feedback, and a fierce white noise blow out, to the follow up "Untitled", a much more minimal, bit of cinematic drift, still pretty ominous and spooky, but here it's about the drone, and the strange processed gurgling sounds underneath, the heartbeat like pulse, the fragmented melodies and the overall hellish vibe, to another "Untitled", another wash of minimal scrape and creak and groan and grind, shot through with minor key moodiness, and wreathed in warm layers of deeeeeeep whirring rumble.
The record's centerpiece is the 17+ minute track from Borre Fen, which oozes to the surface, a long death march trawl some bleak black underworld of sound, a roiling pit of blackness and despair, thick layers of black drone, processed tapes, field recordings, disembodied voices processed into still more drones, distant streaks of feedback, gurgled grunted 'vocals', rumbling, grinding stretches of abstract sound, fragments of melody drifting in a churning black sonic sea, creepy and dark and desolate and downtuned and very very evil. Besides the above mentioned bands, we also hear bits of Lustmord, Stalaggh, Wolf Eyes, Za Frumi (mostly for the Orc like vocals), Abruptum, Anenzephalia, MZ412...
The record finally finishes off with another "Untitled" track, which eschews all that low end for a 5 minute stretch of horror movie high end, stretched to its breaking point, some definite difficult listening, like some sort of boiling teapot / dog whistle dronejam, all over a grinding bit of crunchy rumble, finishing off the record, if not with a bang, then an ear piercing shriek.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Housed in super cool black on black cardboard sleeves, and for those that care, mastered by Herr Hans Grusel, of das infamous Krankenkabinet!
When two of your band members are credited with playing "cement mixer", listeners can safely assume that you are loud and noisy as hell. Combined with the accepted knowledge that Blue Sabbath Black Cheer is one of the most dense and monolithically HEAVY noise crews currently in existence, it won't take long before you're either running in terror or hitting the "add to cart" button. Of course, at $29 a pop, these aren't cheap, but here's a quick rundown as to why D.D.T.T.N.B. may well worth your time and money, provided this is your cup of noise: 200 copies, awesome cardboard sleeves featuring an ominous silver silkscreened skull on each side with four insectoid/Motorhead looking shapes alongside the credits on an extended flap, and, the crowning glory - a gorgeous slab of one sided pitch black vinyl with another hand screened skull displayed prominently on side 2, a work of art unto itself.
Now lets talk about the menacing tones sunk within these grooves. At first, you will probably be thinking, "It's a cement mixer. I get it." And indeed, the horrifically grating buzzing sounds are just that. But what might sound ridiculous on paper soon takes on a life of its own, and before long the mixers blend with other overblown electronics to create a pulsing, vaguely rhythmic wall of sound. Oddly enough, it becomes comforting and trancelike, and if you allow yourself to be fully hypnotized, the results are almost soothing. If you are wondering what's up with the title, it stands for "Destructively Dedicated to the New Blockaders", as BSBC allegedly worked some of the aforementioned group's material into this piece. We say "allegedly" because more than anything we were overwhelmed by the dense sheets of sound and not really too into the idea of keeping an ear out for anything resembling melody. Not that we're complaining, as this strangely beautiful record expertly harnesses harsh, filthy sounds and works them into a endlessly writhing piece of cinematic white noise. These are already sold out at the label, so you'll probably want to act fast before being forced to hit up eBay with tears streaming down your face. Don't say we didn't warn you.
We're running out of ways to describe these guys. Out thesaurus has been bled dry. Bleak, hateful, grim, blackened, harsh, hellish... By now you should have at least an idea of where this diabolical duo are coming from. Epic slow motion expanses of blacknoize, and rumbling blown out low end, howled blackened dronemusic, ritualistic abstract guitar torture, these four tracks here, three are live, and previously released (but on tapes and cd-r's so limited, that unless you were THERE, you probably never saw one), one is previously UNreleased, well worth it for the black hearted and evil ear-ed.
The live tracks are brutal, might be the heaviest we've heard these guys, processed black soundscapes woven from grinding industrial crunch and howled hellish vox, heaving slabs of caustic low end dissipate in clouds of whirring downtuned thrum, way more effects than usual, tripped out and almost psychedelic sounding, streaked with super distorted white noise hiss. The B side begins with some gurgling black ambience, all rumble and creep, peppered with corrosive shards of amp buzz, eventually growing more and more heavy culminating in a strange assemblage of cool moaning melting riffage. That riffage then gets locked into a strangely hypnotic loop before devolving into yet more freaked out abstract heaviness.
Intense, punishing, pummeling, black as fuck and heavy as all get out, which to those of you into that sort of thing, means this is definitely recommended.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Comes in an incredible sleeve, spot varnished animal head on a rich black background, with an 11" x 11" printed insert.
Super limited new slab of sickness from these purveyors of gloriously abject noise drone filth. So limited in fact that it's already out of print, and we have the last 20 or so.
Brutal ambient filth from the Pacific Northwest, as only BSBC can do it. Moving further and further away from any semblance of doomdronedirge and more into a totally abstract free noise direction, albeit their sound still infused with an element of doom.
These two tracks are sprawling soundscapes of hissy buzz, industrial clatter, rumbling drones, post industrial ambience, an almost static wall of murky sound, but distinctly depressive and doomy for sure. A continuous grinding low end assault, that makes Khanate and Bunkur seem downright musical, which they actually are compared to BSBC, who seem to be more interested in evoking terrifying feelings with sound, of creating a bleak and soul shattering soundworld from walls of black buzz and rumbling doom drenched drones. Mission accomplished.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. THESE ARE THE LAST COPIES EVER. Creepy black and white sleeves, pressed on thick white vinyl.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Right now, everything released by these Northwestern dealers of doomdeathdirgedrone, is out of print, EXCEPT for these two cassettes, Prossneck, Germany 1629, and the split with fellow noisemakers Drowner. But these won't last long. These two tapes are both tour only, limited to 100 copies, we got 20 of each, and judging from past Blue Sabbath Black Cheer releases, those won't last long at all, needless to say, one per customer, and even more needless to say, if you want one of these, don't dawdle! Blink and you'll miss 'em.
This one features two looooong blasts of caustic blur and buzz, murky slowed down vocals, thick waves of hiss, everything churning and roiling, heavy and noisy and brutal, heavy on the drone, built a bit like a low end Whitehouse, some strange demon with a tracheotomy proselytizing over a hellish din, soon joined in by what sounds like terrified screams, and the sound of flames on flesh. Really really creepy. The flipside is a bit more abstract, a drifting sea of crumbling distortion and blurred hiss, some grinding rumbles and buried almost-melodies, sort noise tangled up with deep black industrial dronemusic. As always, heavy and frightening and black as pitch.
Once again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We have 20, that is it!!
Latest in the Doom Mantra series of super limited lps comes from black noise duo Blue Sabbath Black Cheer (after previous installments by Colossloth, Worship and Wicked King Wicker, as well as future releases planned for Dead Raven Choir and The Throes Of Darkness) and is split between previously released ultra limited and now way out of print rarities and new unreleased material, as well as featuring a handful of guests including Mason Jones and Rubber O Cement!.
Unlike the last few BSBC releases, this time the guys dial back the noise assault, focusing instead on texture and mood, still plenty noisy, but this time the noise is doled out much more judiciously.
The opening track sounds like it was composed using busted electronics and field recordings of actual battles, sirens wail and explosions erupt under cloud of static and glitch, wrapped in thick billows of black thrum.
The rest of the side plays out in swells of washed out minimal drift, shot through with streaks of caustic noise, intercepted voices, groaning detuned guitars, melting synths, building gradually to a full on industrial chaos-scape
The flipside begins with a looooong blast of caustic blur and buzz, murky slowed down vocals, thick waves of hiss, everything churning and roiling, crusty and noisy and brutal, heavy on the drone, built a bit like a low end Whitehouse, some strange demon with a tracheotomy proselytizing over a hellish din, soon joined in by what sounds like terrified screams, and the sound of flames on flesh. Really really creepy. As the side progresses it grows a bit more abstract, a drifting sea of crumbling distortion and blurred hiss, some grinding rumbles and buried almost-melodies, soft noise tangled up with deep black industrial dronemusic., before stumbling back into a blown out hiss drenched dronescape, harsh and heavy and intense and BRUTAL.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Packaged in super nice silkscreened covers, with a printed insert inside...
As more and more folks (foolishly & unfortunately in our view) choose to forgo physical media for immaterial downloads, it seems like it's as important as ever to make records special, as much collectible objects and storage devices for sound, as much cool tangible artifact from a band we care about as simply a conveyance for that band's music. And we're constantly amazed at the sort of incredible and unique packaging we see pass through aQ. Perhaps none more so that Equation Records who are constantly pushing the design envelope, with no regard for profit, hell, no regard for even breaking even, for them it's all about the art, the object, every release something special, that will be treasured, both for the sounds within, and all the amazing craziness that surrounds those sounds.
Which brings us to this. Amazing and crazy just scratches the surface. Three years in the works, an extended production rife with problems and complications, some deftly (and cleverly) incorporated right into the artwork. The record is in fact being sold significantly -below- its actual cost, which was appropriately exorbitant, based on the ridiculous and fantastical packaging. But before we get to that, let's talk music. This extreme packaging couldn't have been paired with a more appropriately extreme band, the Seattle doomdronedirge duo Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, whose infamous live Halloween night set is the focus of this release, presented here on a one sided silkscreened lp, a sidelong expanse of harrowing blackened minimalism, crashing gongs and billowing clouds of cymbal shimmer, buzzing metallic thrum, that reminds us of an Organum record gone haywire. The metal buzz gradually processed into deep rib cage rattling drones and ominous low end tones, eventually melodies creep in, and the sound is transformed into an abject tarpit doom, peppered with blown out blasts of percussive crunch, and bursts of Merzbowian white noise, but always settling back into a deep, ominous thrum. Lion roar rumbles give way to keening moaning black buzz, downtuned and crumbling, all weirdly mournful and melodic, the whole thing laced with tortured vox, seriously harrowing and amazing. And as if that weren't enough, there's also a single sided 7", with an etched B side, the music a crumbling wall of super distorted power electronics style crunch, grinding slabs of corrosive textures and heaving buzz blurred into a weirdly meditative, but still seriously corrosive drone. And as if that STILL weren't enough, there's also a cd (not a cd-r), collecting a handful of rarities from various tape releases and splits, as well as some unreleased jams, the sounds varying from percussive post industrial pipe fight bombast, to droned out feedback drenched ambience, and from militaristic minimalism, to grinding blacknoise blowouts. Phew.
NOW we can talk about the packaging, which we should preface with the word MAGNETS!!! ("Fucking magnets, how do they work?!"), more on that in a second, but if you want a visual accounting of the packaging, check this out: http://youtu.be/ZthdRUqd68w
So yeah, there is a one sided lp, with a silkscreened B side. There was an issue with the silkscreening, so there's an insert affixed to the sleeve, explaining the situation. There's also a red vinyl 7", one sided, etched on the B side, and the aforementioned cd of rarities. The 7" comes in a proper picture sleeve with two 7"x7" pro-printed card inserts, the cd comes in it's own proper sleeve as well. Also includes is a silkscreen turntable slipmat, as well as a 12" by 24 poster. Add in 4 stickers, a 2-sided 12" pro-printed card insert, and two separate silk screened covers, each one affixed with magnets, the two sleeves magnetically adhered! There's also a 2" pin, a numbered certificate, all of this is housed in a thick PVC sleeve, sealed with a circular sticker, and on the front, is a sticker, with a description of the record in Latin, and a translation in English. Wow. Needless to say, this is a beauty, an extravagantly conceived and executed labor of love, that is even more impressive when you hold it in your grubby little paws.
LIMITED TO 235 COPIES!!! Guessing this won't be around for long!
Another missive from some grim otherworld, the latest in a hellish black flow from the brackish depths, a never ending glacial eruption of blackened sonic filth and blown out white noise brutality from this despicable duo, this latest, a three song 12", is currently, due to the insanely limited nature of their releases, the only thing these guys have available, but not for long we predict, as this too was limited to a mere 525 copies, we got about a tenth of those, but as with past releases, we can't promise they'll be around for long.
More of the BSBC caustic black ambience, a cacophony of junkyard clatter, the clang of pipes, all sorts of crunch and grind, under a thick wash of high end buzz, and shifting clouds of blurred hiss, monstrous vocals buried in the murk, some riffage too (we think), but those riffs mostly exist as simply another layer of blacknoise, a never ending wash of grinding static heaviness. The second track ups the heaviness, the vocals more bellowing, more surges of black tar low end, still cloaked in sheets of white noise, but churning violently beneath the surface, a rumbling, rib cage rattling drone, that seems to be splintering and crumbling to pieces before our ears.
The flip side is much more tranquil (it's all relative though), a minimal driftscape of distant whir, twisted fragmented melodies buried way down in the mix, the grinding of alien machinery, peppered with squalls of speaker shredding buzz, the track quickly escalates, the noise getting noisier, the buzz getting buzzier, the vocals more howled and anguished, the whole thing pushing toward a Merzbowian white noise blowout. Imagine sitting in a concrete bunker with a thousand transistor radios tuned between stations, with the volume all the way up, an ear shredding symphony of static, while in another concrete bunker Wolf Eyes and Khanate play at full volume, barely audible through the suffocating cloud of hiss all around you.
Brutal, punishing, abject, harrowing, hateful, heavy, and pretty fucking awesome. As if we even needed to tell you.
LIMITED TO 525 COPIES. Amazing woodcut paste on front cover, with a printed insert and postcard inside.
Don't let the title fool you, Bonkers In Yonkers might have you imagining some sort of party band playing a happy hour with Jell-O shooters, but nope, you all should know by now what to expect from both of these noise making beasties. We've give much love to both bands on the list over the years, so this is a pretty dream match-up for us. And instead of a split, this is the BWSKBWC Big Band, with everybody going at once, teaming up for two lovely ditties entitled "Born To Hate" and "Scum Licker", kicking up a roiling, shrieking, brutal avalanche of distorto-brutality. Vocal shrieks, gristly electronics, huge, churning, crumblingly distorted riffage, loads of feedback, and ear shredding skree, total electro-noise mega-doom-destruction. Punishing and kinda fucking awesome.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Bright green tapes with silkscreened J-cards.
Originally released as a super limited cassette (only 50 copies), this 10" (also way too limited at 300 copies) teams up our favorite demonic duo, with the awesomely monickered Dried Up Corpse for some deep dire noise drenched heaviness.
The BSBC side is about the prettiest thing they've ever done, which means it's still vile and sick and murky and ominous and fucked up, it's just that it's not so harsh, more muted and blurred and black ambient, than some of their other outings. A sprawling deeeeeeeeep doomscape, creeping black rumbles, demonic gurgles, distant foghorn like melodies, bits of muted percussion, plenty of buzzing grit and distorted feedback, but all smeared and woozy and subterranean sounding, a darkly demonic drift, that infuses what might otherwise be warm shimmering blackened ambience, with some seriously abject miserablism and gloom.
Dried Up Corpse counter BSBC's sensitive side with a caustic chunk of chaotic crunch. Beginning with some deep whirring rumbles, the track soon splinters into full on blunted white noise, skittery and fractured and totally blown out, all the while underpinned by that initial rumbling whir, eventually the noise peels back leaving a long stretch of deep softened buzz to play us out.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!! Gorgeous super thick hand screened sleeves, with nice two sided printed inserts.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Right now, everything released by these Northwestern dealers of doomdeathdirgedrone, is out of print, EXCEPT for these two cassettes, Prossneck, Germany 1629, and the split with fellow noisemakers Drowner. But these won't last long. These two tapes are both tour only, limited to 100 copies, we got 20 of each, and judging from past Blue Sabbath Black Cheer releases, those won't last long at all, needless to say, one per customer, and even more needless to say, if you want one of these, don't dawdle! Blink and you'll miss 'em.
The BSBC side is another sea of harsh his and caustic buzz, thick waves of distortion and blurred vocal damage, squealing feedback, a million amps with AM radios blasting white noise through busted speakers, strangely beautiful, but that severed limb, horrible car wreck, utter disaster sort of beautiful. A near static expanse of washed out heavy black noise, once again managing to be surprisingly listenable, at least for those who are into that sort of thing!
Drowner offers his own chunk of thick corrosive heaviness, the sound much fuller and seemingly guitar based than BSBC, churning downtuned crumbling black buzz, shot through with shards of feedback, a monstrous low end sludge, peppered with strange buried melodies, bits of electronic shimmer, and various other sonic bits, but at its very black heart, this is a wall of blown out blackened heaviness, oozing glacially, and destroying everything in its path. The two groups make a pretty good match. And while we know we're gonna hear more from BSBC before too long, we definitely want to check out some more Drowner...
Once again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We have 20, that is it!!
It's definitely weird to call something like this 'pretty', but what can you do? Of all the Blue Sabbath Black Cheer records we've heard, this one is definitely the prettiest. Of course it's all relative, one man's pretty, is another's harsh head caving blacknoise, and perhaps another's ear shredding doombuzz brutality, and weirdly enough, it's sort of all of those things, but in the realms of doombuzz blacknoise, this sidelong sprawl is indeed, a strange shade of tranquil, at least at first.
It's BSBC so the ingredients should no doubt be familiar by now, the sound equal parts blackened crumbling, distorted buzz, and glacial hellish downtuned crawl, but here the crunchy, crumbling surface layer hides a slow shifting sonic interior, a whirling buried shimmer, soft sheets of crackle and whir, everything constantly bombarded by huge heaving industrial booms, like mortar shells, along with strange creaks and distant crashes, like some strange Wolf Eyes / Skinny Puppy hybrid, being broadcast through rusted out Soviet era loudspeakers, as the city literally crumbles all around you. Ambient but abrasive, tranquil but harrowing, a field recording of collapsing tectonic plates, rendered in 'music'. Near the end, the sound takes on a power electronics vibe, due in no small part to the creepy, bellowed guttural processed vocals, but still the sounds behind the demented caterwauling, continue to ooze and crumble and throb and crunch and creep.
BSBC are teamed up with an outfit called Griefer, who use their side of the lp to offer up a strangely cinematic stretch of buzz and glitch, lots of super distorted synth fuzz, peppered with strange machinelike creaks and groans, wrapped around super processed alien vox, all draped over a continuously throbbing synth pulse. Hypnotic and almost soundtracky, Griefer slip from heaving speaker destroying crumble, to whirring spaced out synthscape to blurred electronic crunch, often all three colliding in a thick noise-drenched psychbuzz synthdrone blowout, not so much harsh and brutal as intense and evocative.
Pressed on sick swirled green and brown sewage colored vinyl, housed in hand screened sleeves, with two printed, two sided cardstock inserts. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!
We'll keep this short, since we wanted to get 20 or 30 of these, ended up getting 10, and by the time this hits the list, we'll probably have less than that. We have way more copies of the forthcoming BSBC already reserved, but for this one, only the first lucky handful of you will likely score one of these.
Blue Sabbath Black Cheer teams up with a band called Penetration Camp for two sides of crushing abstract low end heaviness (as if you were expecting something else?). The BSBC side is 33rpm, for maximum sloooooooowness, a whirring crackling hissing rumbling drift, like the wash of helicopter rotors, the crackle of burning torches, this almost sounds like some strange field recording, and is definitely the prettiest thing we've heard from these guys. At least at first. Deep swells, warm and weirdly melodic, building to a coda of abrasive crashing chaos, thick and prickly and crunchy, before settling back down into a second movement, which sounds like the first, only the sounds have been doused in extra treble and skree, everything sharper and more jagged, laced with inhuman screams and the hellish sounds of dying electronics.
The flipside is at 45, and no matter what the title or the bastardized insert artwork might lead you to believe, sadly this is NOT a cover of Black Sabbath's "Mob Rules", or if it is, kudos to Penetration Camp for rendering it 100 percent unrecognizable. The perfect match for BSBC, a bleak bit of creeped out black ambient crawl, fucked up stretched out heavily effected vocals wrapped around bit bursts of industrial crunch, thick swaths of sinister buzz, the grinding scrape and crumbling crunch eventually overtaking the deep rumbling drones.
SUPER LIMITED, already out of print, we have less than 10 copies, cool silkscreened paste on covers, two printed inserts, sorry we couldn't get more.
A seriously grim blackened doomdronedirge songsuite from these two outfits, both of which are perfectly capable of kicking up a serious din on their own, so you might be expecting a skull splitting ear piercing onslaught, but the first track at least is downright beautiful, in a bleak and sinister sort of way, lots of space, and texture, some caustic feedback and rumbling low end, some weird demonic voices, and some glitched out electronics, but all laid over a bed of hiss and hum, and eventually morphing into a strange series of moaning chordal swells, all woven together by a barely audible sinewave tone. And the same sort of ethereal abstract ambience extends into the second track, which unfurls like some sort of super minimal abstract rhythmscape, the rhythm in this case a barely there assemblage of murky pulses and concentrated bursts of soft focus static, but it's only the first half of the track, by part two, the sound have splintered into filthy shards of blunted noise, the low end oozing and bleeding into long black streaks, the vocals a FX drenched bellow, all the elements again held together by a strange tangled bit of high end that sounds a bit like air escaping from a balloon.
Track three (they're all untitled) is the first really noisy bit, but even here, it's tempered by some serious dynamics, and some cool abstract production, with the initial onslaught soon dialed back into a strangely rhythmic textural backdrop, before exploding once again, into a churning, rhythmic blackened dirge, the vocals this time around a monstrous growl WAY down in the mix, the shards of feedback strangely melodic, the whole track with a darkly hypnotic looped vibe, super mesmerizing, and the sort of noise that ends up being more tranced out than brutal. After a short stretch of glitched out skeletal doom, which sounds like some sort of experimental death metal run through a bunch of busted FX pedals and spinning at 16rpm, the record finishes off with a nearly 14 minute epic, that spends most of its time all delicate and barely there, lots of processed electronics and strange glitches, but all smeared into the background, some creepy bellowed slowed down vox the only thing that really makes this more noise than some haunting dark dronemusic, it's not until after a long stretch of near silence, that the song finally erupts into some full on crushing and crumbling NOISE, an avalanche of roiling low end crumble, that blossoms into a speaker shredding squall of blown out amp damage and abject sonic decay. Nice!
- MPEG stream: I
- MPEG stream: II
Fourth in this new series of super limited aural oddities, all of them amazing and sonically all over the map, from black metal (Throne Of Kataris, elsewhere on this list) to doom drone (past Record of the Week Hjarnidaudi) to gorgeously gloomy chamber music (Amber Asylum) to this, the first release, as far as we can tell, from epic Finnish post rock prog metal mavens Blueprint Human Being. That's right you heard us, FINNISH. As in from Finland! So all you Finnish music freaks best not dawdle, as you will definitely want to get your hands on this. Especially if you're partial to the sort of Krauty drone rock of Circle and the like, although that element is only one tiny aspect of BHB's sound. There's lots of post rocky drift, a sort of proggier Tarentel maybe, but then the horns kick in and we're in serious King Crimson territory. But there's also lots of fuzzy metal guitar wrapped around jagged loping Slintish rhythms, with strange sung / spoke vocals, all blending in some weird way that reminds us as much of Ved Buens Ende as Crimson. Some parts have the horns moving to the foreground, the music taking on a very jaunty garden party sort of feel, which makes us think of some damaged, sort-of-metal Penguin Cafe Orchestra or some bizarre Japanese what-the-fuck jazzdrone outfit or the stranger Circle side projects like Ratto Ja Lehtisalo. A bit schizophrenic for sure, but in a good way, a super dynamic sort of seasick meander through blasting metallic post rock, far out quirky prog, lilting almost RennFaire acoustic breaks, and blissed out repetitive krautrock. Be sure and stick around for the end of the final 11+ minute track, after a stretch of silence, comes a dizzying blast of freaked out psychedelic noise, all grinding loops, snippets of earlier songs, and all sorts of head spinning post production fuckery. Groovy laid back post-kraut-rock slathered in thick swirls of distortion and fuzzy effects, obscured by tape dropouts and strange damaged feedback, the whole thing warped and warbly as if broadcast through a thick cough syrup haze. So cool.
Limited to 750 copies, packaged in a mini lp style sleeve wrapped in a hand stamped brown paper outer sleeve.
When we listed a previous edition of this some years ago, it was back when our reviews were, um, a lot shorter. So all's we said then was that it was a proto-metal essential, from Japan's answer to Black Sabbath. And maybe that's enough, but since we dig this album so much, and it has at long last been reissued again, let's go for something a bit more expansive...
First off, Blues Creation's Demon & Eleven Children, their second and most classic album, dates from 1971. That's right, 1971!!! Of course it does. They'd started off in '69 with a record of all blues covers, but by '71 they'd heavied-up, and were ready with an album of originals, obviously influenced by the likes of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple's In Rock. And dig that cover art. If you're one of our many proto-metal lovin' customers, you NEED this.
Among early '70s Japanese heavy psych hard rock bands, THESE guys (next to, arguably, Flower Travellin' Band) were indeed the heaviest we've heard. And definitely the most Sabbathy (though FTB did cover Sabbath... and Flied Egg came close too, even putting albums out on Vertigo). But really, just listen to the opening track here, "Atomic Bombs Away". No question. Sounds like a song Sabbath wrote for their first album, but let Blues Creation have instead. Heck if you didn't know better, it really sounds like Iommi's playing the guitar riffs and solos, and Geezer's on the swinging, lumbering bass! Obviously, it's heavy, gotta be when it's called "Atomic Bombs Away" (we wonder if it was was weird for a Japanese band to title a song that, only about 25 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The song ain't actually about atomic bombs, actually, like most of the tracks on Demon & Eleven Children, it's about lovin' and leavin' (or being left). Which can be heavy stuff too. Sample lyrics from "Atomic Bombs Away": "First time I lay you in the rusty shack / Black night keep fallin' in your gypsy eyes / Keep on movin' till the end of time / Lord have mercy for my sin / Set me free from my destiny".
The next track is called "Mississippi Mountain Blues", complete with harmonica... but it's urgent and rollicking, and in any case about as conventionally blues rock as they ever get here. We call this proto-METAL for a reason. Just check out the rockin' riff-fest of an instrumental, entitled "Brane Baster" (aka "Brain Buster"), to see what we mean. It's not all about Sabbath emulation, either. They're proto-Priest in parts, too, or at least, they've got tight twin guitar action on here that'll impress the Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy fans. Definitely pretty badass for when and where they were from. Tracks like "Sorrow" do the slow and sad thing pretty well too. It's not all heavy - there's the gentle "One Summer Day", as lovely as its title suggests. But if you want heavy, '71 style, this album won't disappoint you at all, indeed, you'll be be freaking out. It concludes with the epic, and ripping, 9+ minute title track, and if you're not bowing down to Blues Creation by then, your name had better be, like, Ritchie Blackmore.
Julian Cope ranked this as #17 in his Japrocksampler top 50, not bad. From a proto-metal point of view, though, it's top ten material, and we're not just talking Japan. Up there with Bang and Dust and Buffalo and Leaf Hound and all the rest.
Reissued in one of those wallet-digi packages, numbered.
Japan's Blues Creation started off as standard late 60's traditional blues-rock band but quickly got all heavy and freaky and proto-metallic and sort of became their country's riffy acid-blues answer to Black Sabbath (well, along with a few others like Flied Egg and of course AQ faves the Flower Travellin' Band who covered Sabbath on their first album). We really wish we could still get a hold of the Japanese import cd version of Blues Creation's classic 1971 album Demon & Eleven Children. But at least, at last, we have a few recently obtained copies of this, a reissue of a live album that originally came out 'round the same time. It's got the title track from Demon & Eleven Children, along with a couple of Blue Creation originals not found on Demon, one called "Nightmare" being as good and metal as anything on that album. Plus there's a few covers -- "Understand" with guest vocalist Carmen Maki, who was kind of a Japanese Janis Joplin/Robert Plant hybrid, and extended-length versions of ol' nuggets like "Rolling Stone" and "Tobacco Road" (a mean version of that song for sure!). This is definitely not for those who hate the blues -- a lot of this is real bluesy -- but it's also pretty much always heavy and/or frantic. And the guitar work is KILLER, Iommi-worthy leads ripping out of yr speakers all the time. A live recording is just perfect for these guys. They have a super electric sound and that early '70s jamming aesthetic like the Sabs themselves.
Cosmosophy is the final installment in the 777 trilogy from French industrial black metal weirdos Blut Aus Nord, which began with Sect(s), a record that was sonically well in line with past BaN records, dense and heavy, ultra complex and darkly twisted. The second installment was where things got really weird, The Desanctification found their sound veering dramatically more toward the electronic, and the poppy, with one track sounding almost like nineties industrial electro pop, and a bunch of the tracks driven by programed beats. It definitely seemed like the least black metal, and the most challenging, at least for the grim true metallic hordes.
This final volume apparently is meant to bridge the gap between the two, fusing the gnarled blackness of the first record, with the experimental electronics of second, but in fact forges ahead into completely new territory, eschewing blast beats entirely, as well as traditional BM buzz, and instead weaves a lush, emotional landscape of dark metallic moodiness, sweeping and epic, minor key and majestic. The opener is a dark slab of gloom pop, the guitars heavy, the sound vaguely metallic, but sounding more like Alcest or Katatonia, crooned dramatic vocals over gothic heaviness, while the second unfurls a programmed rhythm, under a haze of crackly static, the vocals a weird spoken word, the background a blur of gauzy shimmer and angelic voices, super stripped down and minimal, when all of a sudden, the song erupts into a super dramatic, soaring, almost operatic sounding epic, chugging riffs underpinning crooned vocals all over wild drumming, the vibe equal parts brooding heavy rock and stripped down power metal. The song's joined by mysterious stretches of droned out static, and weird urgently whispered voices.
The Katatonia / Alcest vibe is huge on the third track, brooding, minor key, starting off hushed and shimmery, but building to something more bombastic, although the second half is the first hint of black metal, harsh vokills, droned out insectoid guitar buzz, it never fully blossoms into blackness, in fact, the guitar splinter, and the sound is transformed into a cool mathy stop/start groove, the chugging growing more and more dense, before the sound is wreathed in soaring melodic leads, the sound managing to be both melodic and melancholy, but also darkly malevolent.
The sound continues to evolve, moving even further into a more melodic direction, downtuned guitars wreathed in hazy washed out synth swirls, all draped over a skeletal mechanical beat, clean crooned vocals belted out, total blackened gloom pop, that briefly splinters into something blacker and dirgier, but still rife with melody and dark emotional energy, before finishing off with the sprawling 11 minute closer, all industrial programmed rhythms, epic muted riffery, and deep chant-like vox, it's almost like an outro (which it sort of is really), looped and cyclical, subtle variations in the sound, but overall, repetitive and tranced out, before fading out, and leaving just a creepy expanse of deep synth drone, that sounds remarkably like some lost Carpenter soundtrack, a weird, but cool way to finish off the trilogy.
And while more metal folks were most likely hoping for something much blacker, we have to say the sonic arc of all three records played out pretty much perfectly.
Latest from these misanthropic French black metallers, loooong time aQ faves, this is the first in a planned trilogy, and finds the band sounding more intense, corrosive and chaotic than ever, with some of the most twisted, gnarled riffs we've heard from these guys, all woven into epic sprawls of discordant, dissonant, hyper technical, drone drenched industrial flecked blackness.
Of course, their sound exists in a sonic space similar to their black metal countrymen Deathspell Omega, particularly in their obtuse riffing and dense masses of sound, not to mention their post rock tendencies, but BaN continue to stretch the boundaries of their already ever shifting sound, and straight away, they erupt into a head spinning, ultra complex wall of bludgeoning black metal, the riffs seeming to detune as they're played, the melodies unraveling, the whole sound teetering on the edge of collapse, tense and so so dark, some avant black hole buzz for sure, the first few minutes exhausting in its relentlessness, until finally the song breaks down into a weirdly melodic and slightly mellower post rock tangle, all wavery buzz and woozy harmonies, some strangely psychedelic leads, the sound oozing and melting, only to splinter and collapse right back into another dizzying blast of tangled riffs and impossibly chaotic drumming, the guitars almost sounding like their being played with a slide, slippery and warbly. The vocals kept to a minimum, letting the warped music carry much of the weight, but this is Blut Aus Nord, so the band slip seamlessly into a bit of industrial drift, all hushed low end shimmer, haunting sine wave like melodies, and programmed rhythms, and hell, that's just the first song.
The rest of the record follows a similarly dark and twisted path, although the band do infuses their bouts of grinding black density and spaced out post rock infused drift with heavy stretches of minimalistic dirgery, as well as some surprisingly melodic, classic metal sounding parts, but of course, the next burst of gnarled black chaos is never far off, the record constantly shifting from epic and majestic, to haunting and atmospheric, to furious and frantic, to smoldering and melodic, to crushing and absolutely terrifying. Definitely as good as any of their past records, and a killer start to the new trilogy, the record closing with a surprisingly not black metal closer, a serious stretch of slow building post rock, sounding like a slightly more metallic Mogwai or Explosions In The Sky, tense and dramatic, moody and darkly mysterious.
Anyone paying attention will know that in the past few years, the unlikely nation of France has been churning out some of the most progressive, intelligent, and best black metal around. There's Deathspell Omega, Peste Noire, Spektr, and of course, the mighty Blut Aus Nord, a shadowy group who seamlessly blends synthy ambience with a relentless, yet interestingly controlled black metal assault. Seasick guitar riffs, plodding, often midtempo drums, and vocalist Vindsval's vile black metal rasp (and occasional operatic chant, no shit) meet up in an unholy union of strangely structured songs that are at once hallucinatory, majestic, and beautiful.
Blut Aus Nord possess a unique, cyclical style of songwriting, and even though we have no idea what they are saying, it is evident through titles that each song fits within a well defined philosophical theme. With names like "This Formless Sphere (Beyond the Reason)", "...the Meditant (Dialogue With the Stars)", and "Elevation", it's clear that the band's interest goes beyond any sort of juvenile take on Satanism, instead seeking to make sense of an endlessly unfathomable universe. Their albums seem to exist as esoteric and surreal dream worlds, and the band's intense, psychedelic approach isn't as much furious as it is contemplative. Within this potent mixture, they are also surprisingly "rocking".
Memoria Vetusta II - Dialogue With The Stars (part I, Fathers of the Icy Age, was released waaaaay back in 1996) starts with "Acceptance (Aske)", a GORGEOUS synthscape that sets the moody atmosphere for the next hour. It was interesting to watch customers enter the store during such a beautiful and melancholy piece, only to be hit with the loping, super blackened approach that kicks off the next track, "Disciple's Libration (Lost in the Nine Worlds)", which over the course of 9 minutes, manages to perfectly encapsulate everything that is so great about this band.
The impeccable production on this album certainly adds to its greatness. Clear and spacious, the music within sounds as if it has existed forever, created by a group of immortal mystics, not, you know, a couple of guys from France. In the end, we are presented with what will undoubtedly be one of the best metal records of 2009.
If you thought the last few Blut Aus Nord records were weird, and freaked out, and fucked up, then this new disc is gonna have you either cowering in the corner with all the lights off and clutching some sort of talisman to ward off whatever the fuck kind of evil this record is emanating, or you'll be scratching your head wondering "What the fuck?" Or if you're anything like us, you'll be doing both, and loving it.
Any vestige of buzzing black metal has been shed and in its place a completely abstract, confusional world of muddy blackness. This music is so weird it's almost impossible to describe it in words. It's most definitely not black metal. It is certainly black, or at least some very very dark shade of gray, but it would be hard to definitively describe this as metal. Imagine all the super Slinty post rock parts from the most recent Deathspell Omega record, take all of those parts, play them all at once, some forward, some in reverse, run them all through banks of effects, and you'll have something like Mort. There are no blast beats, not mosquito-like riffing, in fact Mort hovers a lot closer to doom than to black metal.
But even doom wouldn't really begin to describe the loping lurching weirdness. Every track is a strange assemblage of damaged drum machines, dizzying circusy keyboards a dense oppressive swirl of guitars that sound like they are constantly being tuned and detuned. Super woozy and sea sick sounding. Completely and almost overwhelmingly chaotic. Like the songs are constantly threatening to fall apart at any moment. Which lends the proceedings a certain amount of tension and dramatic gravitas. Leads drift in and out, and sort of warble and wail, before breaking a part and sinking into the murk. The vocals are like another layer of low end rumble, a thick reverberating whir. Everything constantly shifting and blurring, pitches shifting up and down, swarms of creepy little FX appear and then fade away, long stretches of black ambience, punctuated by bursts of near industrial pummel. So weird. But it's mainly the riffs that make this record as fucked up as it is. They're not black metal riffs really, barely even metal riffs, some sort of gothy no-wave sounding deconstructed guitar torture. Sort of like if they had Greg Ginn come in and play a bunch of angular fucked up Black Flag riffs and then slowed them WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down and doused them in effects and randomly adjusted the tape speed, so the band and the various instruments seem to slowly shift in and out of phase, occasionally falling together in one huge blast of black fury, only to slowly drift to pieces again.
So weird and dark, and strangely mournful and melancholy. Some bastardized mix of Abruptum, M83 and Nortt. A baffling and brilliant, blissed out no-wave black doom ambient post rock masterpiece.
- MPEG stream: 1
- MPEG stream: 2
- MPEG stream: 3
What is it about French black metal? Deathspell Omega, Mutiilation, Spektr, Alcest, Peste Noire, Amesoeurs, Nuit Noire, Antaeus, Malcuidant, S.V.E.S.T., Eikenskaden, Vlad Tepes� Sure there are other places that have spawned lots of great bands, but holy shit.
And of course, you can't leave Blut Aus Nord off that list. Beginning life as a furious blackened beast, Blut Aus Nord gradually began to incorporate long stretches of dark ambience, and haunting Wolf Eyes-ian industrial soundscapers into their sound, eventually even recording a whole disc of ambient drone music which was tacked on as a bonus disc alongside their album The Work Which Transforms God.
Their most recent record, Mort, found the band shifting again, shrugging off the buzzing blackness of their past incarnation, and weaving any buzz they had left into long slow loping post rock epics. Sort of gothy, definitely still metal, but a sort of plodding woozy dronemetal. Their strange riffing still intact, having once turned blazing blasts into something dizzying and bizarre, on Mort were turning doomy blackness creepy, demented midtempo dirges. It was unexpected, but it definitely grew on us, the key being that the songs were rife with all manner of fucked up chords, and convoluted arrangements, lost of layers, all woven and twisted and tangled and seriously fucked up.
So here we are a year later, and Odinist finds the band continuing down the same path. No blasts to be found here. The tempo stays pretty slow, sometimes jacked up to a furious midtempo, but just as often slowing down to a funereal plod, and much of the record is spent sort of swaying seasickenly, a lurching gallop, that perfectly compliments the murky melodies and the washed out riffs, the vocals barely audible, the drums pretty far down in the mix as well, only surfacing occasionally with a flurry of double kicks. The key as always is the riffs, and the riffs here are atonal and off kilter, minor key and angular, giving the songs a definite twisted no-wave vibe. But much of what made Mort so damaged sounding has been smoothed out a bit here, the weirdness more subtle, the sound of the record more static, many of the songs in the same key, so they sound like various movements in the same piece, definitely the sort of record meant to be listened to as a whole, but here and there some killer riff will surface, or some unlikely hook and will suck you back in. And keep you there, holding you under, as the black waves of woozy buzz wash over you.
Dark and droney, dizzying and dense, more grey metal than black metal, and if you couldn't tell by now, really fucking awesome.
We're not exactly sure what these French black metal experimentalists have planned for the final part of their 777 trilogy, but if this second installment is any indication, it's bound to be pretty genius / confusing / what the fuck. At the least, it will be seriously alienating for the hordes of metalheads who already find these guys a little bit frustrating. For the rest of us, we'd be hard pressed to pick a black metal group who more perfectly pushed our buttons, while in the process forging a seriously idiosyncratic, yet impossibly still pretty blackened path.
The first in the trilogy, 777 Sect(s), didn't sound all that far removed from a proper BaN record, a dizzying assemblage of gnarled Deathspell like riffage, their own penchant for industrial churn and droned out atmospheres, all woven into some serious sprawling expanses of black beauty, woozy and druggy, warped and fantastically tripped out, haunting and heavy, and once again establishing them as BM royalty, if they weren't already. And while even the grimmest of metalheads could love that record, they might have a slightly tougher time with part two, The Desanctification, which really, is not all THAT far removed from the sound of the first, but it definitely cranks up the weirdness a notch, mostly in the form of programmed beats, which drive much of the record. Opening track "Epitome VII" (all the tracks are entitled Epitome, and numbered), could be, and maybe sort of is, classic Blut Aus Nord, a warbly minor key riff, the sound sort of woozy again, melty and lysergic, the vocals though a strange garbled backwards speaking in tongues, and the drums, a Godflesh like mechanical beat, that's more skittery than crushing, the vibe is more sort of washed out and psychedelic than black and buzzy, but we dig it, super atmospheric and cinematic, and while the track does get more atonal and more black, with some actual human drumming blast beating entering the fray, the sound remains more firmly entrenched in a sort of twisted industrial dirgery than anything else. The next "Epitome" finds the band ditching those programmed beats and returning to something murkier and gnarlier, still hewing closer to a sort of melodic doom than buzzing blackness. After a super cool bit of psychedelic memser and another dirgey doomy expanse of dark riffery and moody murky swirl, those programmed beats return, and again the sound is transformed again into something closer to Nadja than black metal, a sort of metalgaze depressive doom, there's a distinctly shoegaze vibe going on, all hazy and gauzy and darkly dreamy.
"Epitome XII" might be the weirdest of the bunch, also the coolest, not sounding black metal at all really, instead some sort of industrial nineties pop, with cool melancholic melodies, all wreathed in a glistening swirl of synth glimmer, laced with ethereal vox buried in the mix, soaring psychedelic guitars, sort of had us wishing the whole record was so weirdly swirly and spacey.
And then finally, the record closes with another sprawling stretch of downtuned atmospheric doominess, minimal and moody, with clean vox, and plenty of melodies, but all blurred and smeared into a heaving expanse of blackened dreamlike heaviness, with a surprising final 40 seconds, those programed beats returning, skittering beneath a sky full of insectoid buzz and tense high melody. A cool warped finish, and just perhaps, a hint at what's to come in part three...
Super gorgeous artwork, which looks to us like it was done by the same person that did the art for the recent Ascension cd, that one all red and metallic gold, with lots of geometric designs and bold shapes, this one blue and gold, also geometric and bold, and with snakes and stars and a very mysterious occultic vibe. Cool!
The Work Which Transforms God, Blut Aus Nord's most recent release (originally released in 2001, but reissued in 2005), quickly became an all time AQ fave, with its strange mix of damaged off kilter black metal, caustic industrialism and droney dark ambience. Since then the first three BaN discs have gotten reissued and we're just now finally getting around to reviewing them.
The Mystical Beast Of Rebellion was Blut Aus Nord's third release from way back in 2001, immediately preceding The Work Which Transforms God and displayed more of a classic black metal vibe, very droney and mesmeric, a seasick buzz drenched blast, with warped epic melodies, all very minor key and melancholy, lending the proceedings a very moody doomlike vibe. Very reminiscent of classic Immortal or Satyricon. There is definitely some sonic foreshadowing of weirdness to come, slow slithery stretches of murk and mumble, abstract ambient breakdowns, long stretches of buzz slowed way down into truly harrowing lurching lopes, riffs that bend and seem to warble as if some invisible hand was altering the pitch control, dark and dreary miserablism twisted into very Nortt like mid tempo droney doom.
But The Mystical Beast Of Rebellion is more about the blast and buzz, the forst and fuzz, and if you're anything like us, that should suit you just fine!
We've been wanting to list this for a long time now but have been waiting for it to get reissued as a double disc with the new ep tacked on. Well, now the wait is finally over. This grim French outfit somehow manage to play some seriously convincing classic black metal, but in the process, do something indescribable to it, adding all sorts of off kilter guitar parts, industrial pummel, totally alien melodies, huge stretches of suffocating ambience, and totally convoluted midtempo dirges, turning it into some of the most demented, deliriously damaged black metal we've ever heard. Even when they sound like they're just blazing through a passage of straight up black metal, all these little bits and pieces just sound not quite right, which is what makes Blut Aus Nord so fucking amazing. When they slow down, which they do quite a bit, the guitars seem to splinter into jagged shards, malfunctioning and becoming what sound distinctly like SST / Black Flag riffs and licks, you know, all stumbling and angular weirdness. And when they kick out the jams and explode into a buzzing blasting fury, there are strange guitar sounds swooping and soaring everywhere, sonic shards careening past, drones and multiple layers of buzz and hiss envelop every blast like a graveyard fog. The record opens with a two minute track confusingly titled "End", two minutes of swirling ambience, chilly winds and distant chimes, all buried beneath a murky barely there drone, and then the record ends with the also strangely titled "Procession Of The Dead Clowns", a ten minute melancholy doom dirge, simple drums and a simple keening mournful guitar melody, relentless and plodding and totally dismally intense. Between the two are ten tracks of the above mentioned grim and evil, relentlessly repetitive confusional black metal, draped with all manner of bizarre moaning, fucked up guitar damage, weirdly sliding riffage, and all drowning in drones and dirge, howling blackened ambience and seriously bizarre blasting black metal brutality.
Also included is Blut Aus Nord's more recent ep release, Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity, five tracks, 28 minutes of haunting, moaning midtempo dirges, bizarre industrial, drum machined drones, massive slow motion doom, and creepy experimental ambience. Essential.
For whatever reason, we were unable to get the first two volumes in the Liber series from longtime aQ faves, French weirdo black metallers Blut Aus Nord. One was a super limited cd, one was an even more limited 12", but we did finally manage to get our hands on part three, and thankfully, you don't need to have heard the first two to dig this one. And while it's been a while since we've heard from these guys, very little has changed in their warped and woozy blackened soundworld. The core of their sound remains the group's weirdly detuned, and slippery riffage, a gnarled, atonal sonic frenzy, wound around furious drumming, and laced with guttural demonic rasps, the songs proper, dizzying barrages of frantic buzz and blurry fields of tangled black psychedelia, all woven into sprawling black-prog grimnity, and as always, surrounded by plenty of black ambience, and sinister dronemusic murk. Each track, which ostensibly are simply parts of the Liber III songsuite, are separated by drifting sinister blackness, which finally overtakes the proceedings for the final part/movement, which foregoes the metal completely, but instead, unfurls a field of deep, rumbling ritualistic thrum, a blurred backdrop for ominous incantations, and all sorts of garbled backwards voices. But until then, Liber III is a relentless onslaught of impossibly dense black metal chaos, the tracks lurching from midtempo lope, to frantic blast, to dizzyingly obtuse, fragmented WTF downtuned churn.
Packaged in a super swank gold foil printed digipak.
It's only been a year, but it feels like forever since we've heard from beloved French black metal weirdos Blut Aus Nord, so we were super psyched to discover this 4 way split with 3 unreleased BaN tracks, and even though the tracks aren't brand new (they're from a super limited 2004 10"), they definitely hit the spot. In a big way.
But besides the BaN tracks, this comp also features a new Blut Aus Nord side project called Karras that totally destroys as well. And as if that all weren't enough the other two bands are just as amazing and fucked up if not more so.
Let's start with the Blut Aus Nord tracks, what else do you need to know, three tracks, you've never heard em, they are gorgeously twisted and blackened, the guitars slithery and spidery, everything wrapped in a warm cocoon of prickly buzz, long stretches of bleak black ambience, haunted rumblings, mysterious warbles, epic blasts of buzzing blackness, swaths of seasick synths, creepy minor key melodies, very dark and depressive, mournful and almost cinematic, definitely ranks up there with some of our favorite Blut Aus Nord stuff ever.
The Karras track, an massive 11 minute blast of confusional chaos, takes the already damaged and demented sound of Blut Aus Nord eve further, everything more twisted and convoluted, the drums a blasting splatter, guitars swirling everywhere, thick sheets of buzz, creepy processed vocals gurgling and growling, twisted squiggly melodies all over the place, the guitars buzzy, but also murky and muddy and thick like tar, this roiling black madhouse, peppered with long stretches of totally tranquil near static ambient shimmer. But that's not all, huge chunks of industrial pummel, more vocals croaking and mewling, the drums a never ending torrent of spastic beats, blasting and pounding, finally breaking into a funeral doom dirge right near the end before spinning off into a cloud of black hiss. Holy shit. We NEED to hear more Karras. A totally mindblowing and physically exhausting schizophrenic doomed and damaged black metal assault.
Like we said before, that would most definitely be enough, but there are two other bands to dig into. First, blackened Spaniards Bloodoline, whose blasting blackness is peppered with awesome moaning string bends and slippery riffage, that makes their tracks sound all funhouse mirrored and weirdly warped, especially the first track "Voyage Till Death". The beginning of their second song even sounds a bit like Chavez, with dual tangled highend guitar melodies, eventually exploding into a relentless keening crush. The third just seals the deal with another black hole slab of black mayhem, but with a strangely melancholy and poppy undercurrent.
Finally, there's another French outfit, who appropriately shared that abovementioned 2004 10" with Blut Aus Nord. Their sound is more in line with BaN's modern metallic melancholic murk. Slightly industrial tinged, mournful with lots of blurred buzz. Plenty of black metal riffing, but the sound is washed out and near ambient, huge expanses of doomic misery, bookended by gnarled black riffs, much of the two tracks spent drifting through a black haze, or plodding machinelike through some abject blackened sonic wasteland. Creepy growled and chanted vocals, thick swaths of chordal fuzz�
Way recommended obviously, as we think would be anything else that can be tracked down by all four of these bands (and fear not, you know we're already working on it�)
At first we were thought maybe this was gonna be a collaboration and not a split, either way it would be a pretty perfect match up really, of two weirdo industrial tinged French black metal outfits, and a split it is, offering up three songs from each band.
The tracks from long time aQ faves Blut Aus Nord incorporate everything we love about these guys: woozy, psychedelic riffage, haunting spectral vocals, and chaotic, intricate drumming. The opener is surprisingly slow and melodic, bordering on epic doom, especially when the soaring, melancholic leads swoop in, and that depressive doominess bleeds right into the second track, with a gloomy, slowly descending main riff, and monk-like chant vox, draped over stuttery double kick drumming, and another bed of undulating riffage, smeared into something bordering more on hazy black psych, and again, the song blossoms into an aching, mournful doom, plodding and depressive, culminating in the final BaN track, which cranks up the temp a bit, and gets super proggy, without shedding the doomy sonic pallor, instead, it's a twisted prog-doom dirge, rife with haunting melodies, lush textures, and twisted, constantly shifting arrangements, the final moments driven by some super creepy demonic vox, over moaning guitars, and sputtering rhythms.
Which leads us directly into the P.H.O.B.O.S. tracks, which begins with something that sounds more like some blackened Wax Trax 12", all fractured rhythms, over a swirling backdrop of curdled black blur and tangled, mutated melodies, it's really only the gurglingly demonic vokills that make this black metal at all, otherwise, it's some mutant strain of blackened electronica or black industrial, but it is cool, and creepy. The second track introduces some proper riffage, but it's all looped and layered, sounding more like the Young Gods than proper black metal, but again, it works, tripped out and hypnotic, the smeared riffage wound around an almost-breakbeat, gloomy and atmospheric, spaced out and heavy, those vox again the blackest element, which is true of the closer too, and there, even the vocals are more washed out, reverie and echo drenched, but eventually, that track builds to an almost Godflesh sounding crescendo, pounding and metallic, but that metallic pound sounding way more like some lost nineties industrial jam than modern French black metal. So yeah, while we dig this a LOT, metalheads might be a bit disappointed by the lack of actual METAL. That said, fans of either/both of these bands should know by now to expect the unexpected...
This is not new, but we only just discovered these guys and holy shit! Blutch are a Belgian trio who specialize in extreme heaviness, crushing downtuned sludge, but not ultradoom like Moss or Bunkur, instead, these guys go the Melvins route, spitting out, weirdly loping, almost groovy slabs of lurching, lumbering heaviness. Think the Melvins, Harvey Milk, even a little Torche. The Melvins comparison is especially apt, as the vocals tend toward that Buzz Osbourne sort of hushed croon, laid over stuttering start/stop chug, the songs loping and meandering, like some huge black wounded beast.
Some of the tracks slow down to a near funereal crawl, the guitars sprawling into clouds of SUNNO)))-like thrum, the drums less propulsive and more abstract, chords ringing out, riffs unfurling in thick black swells, peppered with little squalls of tangled guitar gnarl, or brief bursts of chug and thud, sometimes building to something almost epic and soaring, other times slowing down to a near glacial drone. The band lock into killer slow motion grooves, and the music begins to sound looped, totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, trancelike, the sound slowly, almost imperceptibly shifting, sucking you in, before an avalanche of crumbling distortion and collapsing riffage buries you alive. Here and there the tempo is jacked up and Blutch begin to sound like some classic death metal band playing at 16 rpm, but even then the songs usually morph into some tripped out abstract exercise in mathy metallic tension and release, or explode in a frenzy of almost grind level screamo fury, but always slipping back into some sort of blackened crawl.
The final track, at nearly 10 minutes, is the prettiest, yet least metal of the bunch, a swirling sprawl of blackened guitar buzz, of shimmering thrum and whir, strange reverbed percussion, moaning minimal melodies, all blurred into an epic slow motion crawl, the production muted and muddy and murky, adding even more to the lugubrious subterranean sound.
If this record wasn't 4 years old, we'd probably be screaming 'metal record of the year', but even still, since like us, probably most of you missed out on this entirely, no reason not to dig it like it was brand new, and like it really could/should be metal record of the year, cuz for those of you who aren't sticklers about such things, release dates and year end lists, well, no matter when a record came out, it's new when you hear it for the first time, even years after the fact, and based on how much we've been digging this heaviness, it's giving most of 2010's heavy releases a serious run for their money...
The latest from psychedelic folk troubadour Matthew Sweet, aka Boduf Songs, is a gorgeously intimate, stripped down and haunting songsuite, a collection of hushed, blackened torchsong and achingly melancholic minimalism, on the surface, a sound much more polished and mainstream than previous releases, but this more assured songsmithery, built from an impossibly lush sonic palette of muted organ thrum, electronic pulsations, layered chordal swells, and most importantly, Sweet's delicate, about to crack, whispery vocals, drifting atop a constantly shifting sprawl of starlit moodiness and crystalline shimmer.
And while much of Stench of Exist is still spent in the shadows, a drowsy, druggy, dreamy psych folk that unfolds languorously, laced with mysterious electronic filigree, and wreathed in occasional symphonic billows, some of the record truly surprises, shifting dramatically toward a sound that touches on other groups as disparate as Iron & Wine, the Editors or the National, just check out "Thwart By Thwart" which transforms the minimal into maximal, tribal drumming, wreathed in warm, lush guitar strum, reverbed piano, even handclaps, and warm, softly crooned vocals, a lush, brooding murk, that does in fact sound a bit like a darker, more propulsive Iron & Wine, but unlike I&W, the sound if flecked with mysterious samples, and field recordings, all building to a pretty epic, and almost Godspeed like coda, gloomy and gothic, and darkly dramatic.
Other mysterious moments in a record rife with them, is the strange glitched out electronica of "Head Of Hollow-Fill And Mountain Top Removal", a warped sprawl of industrial murk, peppered with swells of staticky electronic noise, buried melodies and dubbed out FX, a softly roiling noisescape wound around a robotic processed voice, sounding almost like a blackened industrial Radiohead. Or the ambient drone of "Grows In The Small World Of Nerve", a lowercase drift of distant, barely there dreaminess, beneath a skyful of rain, and snippets of conversation, all smeared into an indistinct blur of soft psych shimmer. Or even the swampy cosmic dirge of "Modern Orbita", that again, positions Boduf Songs for some long overdue commercial appreciation, but as if fully conscious of that potential, the otherwise beautifully brooding ballad, a darkly motorik downer psych gem, dusky and deserty, sounding a bit like Earth and Scenic and Sixteen Horsepower, is pocked with strange spaced out swirls, and more druggy dubbiness, which only serves to shine a woozy black light on the twisted loveliness of the rest of the track.
It's that balance that makes Stench Of Exist so stunning, the sound constantly shifting between hushed, harrowing, super personal, bedroom-folk psychedelia, and experimental electronic soundscapery, muted downer pop and drifting dronemusic, the record's finest moments occur when those various sounds bleed and blur into each other. Simple folk tunes are transformed by skeletal programmed rhythms, or swirls of spacey effects, and alternately, pure mad-scientist sonic experimentation is grounded by dour, delicate melodies, and hushed, introspective poppiness. Many of the tracks here begin life as dark, folk flecked, psych pop, but eventually are reimagined as something much more ominous and even malevolent, a whispery, cinematic soundworld of heaving strings and prismatic melody, stately and morose. While fields of effected guitars, unfurling into spiraling sprawls of alien ambience and rainswept atmospheres, all as a crystalline frame for Sweet's heartfelt croon and delicate star dusted balladry.
Fans of King Dude, Iron & Wine, Woven Hand, Townes Van Zandt (if he were raised on industrial music and psychedelia), Sixteen Horsepower, and even Magnetic Fields (check out "The Rotted Names"), will find much to love here for sure. As will anyone into dark, lysergic, gloom-folk melancholia, twisted drum-machine-driven threnodies, and gorgeously grim psychedelia.
Way back in 2009, we reviewed a record by a band called Body Hammer, a brilliantly dizzying hybrid of damaged hyper grind, blackened dronescapery and frenzied math metal, all housed in a dvd case, wrapped in a sumo cloth. Now here we are five years later, and the man behind Body Hammer, just walks into aQ, having moved to the Bay Area to attend Mills, and in hand, a new Body Hammer record! And while we'd like to say it's way weirder, or way more fucked up, we just can't cuz the first one was pretty demented and damaged, but what we can say, is the new one is just as tweaked and twisted, which all we could have hoped for, hell, even the first track is pretty difficult to describe, a sort of psychedelic industrial blowout, all metallic percussion, and wild electronic squiggles that could be guitar shred, but is likely something else entirely, a dizzying rhythmic workout that leads directly into a 33 second blast of furious metallic grind, only to then explode into a nearly as brief burst of power electronics, which again in turn, transforms into a blurry bit of collaged field recordings and short wave broadcasts, and then�
Well, before we go track by track, it should be noted there are lots of brief tracks here, some ambient, some blacknoise, some grinding metal, some all three combined, the metal parts are totally frenzied drummachinegun style blowouts, while the more abstract tracks are all over the map, eventually as the track lengthen, the sound becomes more harrowing, the terrifying sample laced atmosphere of "A Presence", the churning black buzz ambience of "A Disappearance", laced with buried vokills and tangled guitar shred, or the slo-mo doomdrone of "The Church", but peppered throughout are dense bouts of Godflesh-like industrial metal churn, all robotic deathmarch and machine like lumber, barely there soundscapery, cinematic and haunting, tripped out psych-noise, blasts of guitar clang, and billows of hazy FX, symphonies of feedback, and finally, a hazy long form sprawl of field recording flecked, murky industrial drift, a strangely disturbing coda, for a fantastically fucked up record.
We're not entirely sure where we first heard about Body Hammer, we're not really sure if it's a band or a guy, what we do know, is that this is some seriously fierce and fucked up hypergrind / math metal / black drone weirdness. 18 songs, all but 6 less than a minute long, some of those as short as a matter of seconds, every one an awesome chunk of sonic mayhem. The 1:41 opener is all creep and creak, moan and drift, downtuned guitars and tinkling melodies, some sort of Wolf Eyes / Goblin hybrid, which leads right into 31 seconds of ultra technical, super distorted, gnarled and chaotic noise drenched metallic grind, that should hit the spot for Discordance Axis fans and anyone who digs all that drummachinegun grind. The 14 second follow up is a brief white hot squall of harmonized guitars and malfunctioning drum machines, which leads directly into another industrial drone drift.
The first 2/3 of the records pass in a blur, lurching from haunting droney ambience to chugging churning grinding metal madness and back again, stopping for brief forays into blacknoize, dreamy lo-fi ambient drift, as well as some under 20 second hypergrind workouts, all tweaked FX and lightspeed blast beats, high end feedback laced dronescapes, and rumbling guitardronebuzzandblur.
With 5 songs to go, Body Hammer lets the songs sprawl, and pushes the sound in even more fractured and fucked up directions, a super distorted in-the-red, lurching black doom trudge through a haze of glitched out distortion and howled vokills, thick crumbling post industrial dirgescapes, all reverbed clank and clatter, thud and pound and crunch, hypnotic static guitar drifts built from layered drones and laced with clean guitar twang, warped bass, and buried vox, until the final 7+ minute track, a harrowing blackened doomic dirge, groaning guitars, and distant vocals, which leaves 5 minutes of silence, before a minute or so of white noise hiss and intercepted voices from the ether.
Fucked up and fucking awesome. Packaged in a dvd case, with a printed insert, and while they last we have the super limited deluxe version that comes with a bunch of extra goodies and is wrapped in a sumo cloth and sealed with a sticker.
Finally!!! New music from The Body, who at one time, might just have ranked as one of, if not THE, favorite heavy band around these parts. Their self titled debut is incredible (and sadly out of print), a dizzying mix of post rock, ultra doom, and sludge metal, with a penchant for mathy rhythms, lots of space, and some seriously anguished vocals.
They released a super limited cd-r a bit later (which we have more of for a very short time, see elsewhere on this list!) which was more of the same, and included a totally over the top Judas Priest cover, the original totally transformed, which then leads us to this, a brand new tour ep, ALL covers, and not the sort of covers you might expect from a band like the Body, which is precisely why we love these guys so much.
Crass, Danzig, Black Flag and, wait for it, Sinead O'Connor. Yep. Hard to believe but it works, and they don't just turn it into a pointless sludgefest, they have obvious affection for the original. But before we get to "Black Boys On Mopeds", let's run through the other covers first.
Crass's "Do They Owe Us A Living" is all buzzing low end, and tribal drumming. The vocals a processed feral bark, the whole thing lurching and lumbering and seriously harrowingly intense. Makes the original sound like a lullaby. The Danzig track is a loping low slung groove, with a fierce downtuned riff, and hysterical shrieking vocals, the band totally own it, and again, add untold heaviness and harshness to the original. Black Flag's "Police Story" is pulled apart and gutted, before exploding into a punk rock frenzy, who knew a sludge band could rock so hard? It's a muddy, murky free for all, not that far removed from the original other than the downtuned guitars and the insane vox.
And finally, "Black Boys On Mopeds", a gorgeous sprawling dirge, and wisely the band opted to get some help with the vocals, a gorgeous female voice, underpinned by howled shrieked back up vocals way off in the distance, the bulk of the song a single buzzing throbbing note stretched out into a thick undulating drone, the rhythm a metronome like clack buried in the mix, the end gets all trippy and dubbed out, but damn if this isn't creepier and prettier than the original.
The Body is back, and we couldn't be happier. Now someone just needs to sign these guys and give them tons of money so they can finally put out a new full length!!!!!
We've long been fans of burly bearded post doom crushers The Body, their sound like the classic two man pummel of godheadSilo expanded into something even more majestic and sprawling, black hole heavy, infusing their ultra doom glacial sludge with plenty of post and rock mathisms, the cinematic tension of groups like Godspeed, and heck, they even cover songs by folks like Crass, Danzig, Black Flag and Sinead O'Connor! For a two piece, these guys pretty much transcend and obliterate any sort of limitations that lineup would pose to most mere musical mortals, but that said, plenty of two pieces have seen fit to expand, say to a trio or a quartet, maybe just to record, get a few guests, or even permanently, ditching the duo which sometimes gets focused on more than the music. But few bands (dare we say, practically none) expand further than that, say from 2 members to THIRTY TWO! But that's exactly what The Body has done for All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood, their second proper full length in ages, one that marks ten years as a band, and more importantly, marks a serious sonic shift. No longer are they scrappy DIY punk rock noisemakers, setting their sites above and beyond, these guys have gone for it, meticulously crafting an album of extreme heaviness, of sonic mystery, haunting, and epic, metal for sure, even going so far as to include an actual 13 member choir, and not just for little random bits here and there, nearly seven minutes of the ten minute opening track, is just choir, lilting and angelic, lovely and otherworldly, only making the sudden shift from ethereal vocal harmony to crushing downtuned ultra doom all the more jarring. But the coolest part, is that the parts aren't clearly delineated. The choir continues on into the heaviness, so the howling churning crush, is peppered with gorgeous hymn like vocals, creating some sort of strangely liturgical sounding swirly sludge. And it's not just the vocals, there's saxophone, samples, piano, plenty of noise. And that pretty much sets the template for the whole record.
Besides the Assembly Of Light Choir, who are featured on almost every song here, the record also features Robert Lowe of Lichens offering up some additional vocals, not to mention the other 15 or 16 guests who contribute, beyond the core Body duo of drums, guitar, samples and vocals, a pretty crazy array of soundmakers, more vocals, saxophone, sousaphone, guitar, piano, keyboards, Moog, baritone saxophone and more drums. LOTS more drums. In fact, on the final track, "Lathspell I Name You" drummer Lee Buford is joined by EIGHT extra drummers!!! More on that in a moment.
The second track "A Curse" begins with a loping post rock beat, swirling synths, a melancholy melody, soaring chiming guitars, very moody and slow burning, before the band explodes into full doom, the sound shifts too, the crystalline clearness, becomes big and booming, the sound blown out, but more sort of warm and muted than in the red, the drums massive and pounding, while the guitars swirl in little chordal clouds, and the anguished vocals howl and wail, which gives way to "Empty Hearth", which sounds like some abstract experimental Swans style track, looped sample of what sounds like speaking in tongues, lurching mechanical crunch, glitched out electronics, shrieking vox, the whole song occasionally stuttering to a halt, as if the song was being remixed or was gloriously malfunctioning, there's also some awesome guttural throat singing, laced underneath the start stop, sample skitter, and super distorted bass buzz.
"Even The Saints Knew Their Hour Of Failure And Loss" starts with tarpit riffery and blurred hiss, strangely atmospheric, the drums skeletal but subtly mathy, the choir adding their gorgeous harmonies, an epic spiritual doom, tolling bells, everything dropping out, leaving just the booming drums, the shrieked vox, those bells, until a thick layer of low end washes over everything, and the track unwinds as some classic funereal doom.
"Song Of Sarin The Brave" begins all blown out and tangled up, sheets of feedback, huge heaving bursts of titanic metallic crunch, mysterious voices, finally the band launches into the song proper, and things get really weird, the drums stripped way down, the whole track slathered in strange murky blur and melting effects, while underneath, a strange sampled voice drifts, through clouds of other voices and mysterious sounds, totally creepy, and beautiful, and so mesmerizing, it goes on forever, and could have gone on way longer, but instead finishes off in a minute long blaze of shrieking black doom sludge crush.
"Ruiner" is another smoldering slow starter, haunting, downtuned minor key riffs ring out, doomic drums pound out a barely there rhythm, again, all underpinned by a strange staticky cloud of hiss and gauzy atmospheric hum, the track starting out super spare, but gradually growing more and more dense, more and more doomy, gathering momentum, not rhythmically so much as sonically, the progression laced subtly with strings and horns, little streaks of psychedelic guitars, until finally exploding into a lumbering dirge, the instruments blackened and crumbling, less riffy than a throbbing organic black buzz, pounding and pummeling before blinking out abruptly.
Which leads us to the final track, the 14 minute, multiple drummer-ed side long "Lathspell I Name You", a heaving, expansive ultra doom epic, a churning looped riff and some busy drumming start the track off, not doomy at all really, more noise rock or post rock, with some gorgeous folky melodies woven in, the choir offering up their lovely harmonies, but in this context, they sound less angelic and slightly demonic, locked into their own looped pattern mirroring, the motorik metal loop underneath, which gives way to a weirdly records, noise drum blowout, voices and instruments hissing and buzzing while a cacophony of drums pound and crash, mesmerizing and hypnotic, before the glacial chug resurfaces, along with the choir, and the band lock into a seriously slow motion, abrasive cathartic doom sludge crawl, the sound growing more and more blown out until every drum hit pegs the needles and distorts everything, making the sound that much more caustic and emotional and intense.
The roots of The Body's sound may be in doom or sludge, or even simply metal, but All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood has taken that sound so far beyond, transforming sludge and doom into something way more transcendent, way more difficult to immediately categorize, it's melodic, and poppy, and mathy, and drone-y, and electronic, and experimental, epic and majestic and mysterious, while somehow still remaining brutal, and pummeling and heavy as fuck. Fans of the usual suspects will probably dig this big time, Moss, Bunkur, Khanate, Monarch, Nihill, Otesanek (in fact the liner notes read: "All Praise To Otesanek And Man Is The Bastard"), Eyehategod, Habsyll, Fleshpress, but be prepared to look beyond the realms of traditional doom, or of conventional heaviness, because The Body are anything but traditional or conventional, and All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood just might be the coolest, weirdest, most original doom record EVER.
Incredible packaging too, heavy vinyl (3 sided, the 4th side is blank), thick, gatefold sleeve, with some chillingly striking artwork, a printed 12" x 12" insert silver reflective ink printed on black cardstock, liner notes and lineup on one side, lyrics on the other...
We've been huge fans of Rhode Island two piece sludge doom duo The Body for years now, and have raved about every recording we could get our hands on, at one point even lamenting the fact that we were dying for a proper full length, and then BAM. Their self titled full length debut hit, and it DESTROYED. Then a few years later, and the band unleashed their epic, and seemingly universally acclaimed All The Waters Of The Earth Turned To Blood. A chunk of sludgy doom unlike anything we'd heard before, sure there was massive downtuned riffs, and bellowed and shrieked vox, pummeling drums, but there also happened to be a full choir, not to mention multiple drummers, strange electronics, programmed rhythms, strange samples, all wound into a bizarre and brilliant collection of avant heaviness, and finally it seemed the world caught on, and The Body began to get the love they so obviously deserved.
The bummer is, that while All The Waters IS incredible, so are all the weird and super limited cd-r's and singles that came before, so folks who discovered The Body via that record, were missing out on a whole world of heart stopping head caving sound, that is until now. This little collection, compiles pretty much everything the band has ever recorded minus their two full lengths (the older of which is sadly out of print), including split singles, tour cd-r's and even tacks on some unreleased stuff to boot.
Their 2008 tour cd-r might be one of our favorite recordings from these guys, and definitely displayed the band's dizzying mix of post rock, ultra doom, and sludge metal, as well as their penchant for mathy rhythms, lots of space, and seriously anguished vocals.The coolest part was that it was in the context of cover songs, and maybe not the sort of covers you'd expect from a sludge/doom outfit. Crass, Danzig, Black Flag and, wait for it, Sinead O'Connor. Yep. Hard to believe that last one works, but it does, and they don't just turn it into a pointless sludgefest, they have obvious affection for the original. But before we get to "Black Boys On Mopeds", let's run through the other covers first.
Crass's "Do They Owe Us A Living" is all buzzing low end, and tribal drumming. The vocals a processed feral bark, the whole thing lurching and lumbering and seriously harrowingly intense. Makes the original sound like a lullaby. The Danzig track is a loping low slung groove, with a fierce downtuned riff, and hysterical shrieking vocals, the band totally own it, and again, add untold heaviness and harshness to the original. Black Flag's "Police Story" is pulled apart and gutted, before exploding into a punk rock frenzy, who knew a sludge band could rock so hard? It's a muddy, murky free for all, not that far removed from the original other than the downtuned guitars and the insane vox.
And finally, "Black Boys On Mopeds", a gorgeous sprawling dirge, and wisely the band opted to get some help with the vocals, a gorgeous female voice, underpinned by howled shrieked back up vocals way off in the distance, the bulk of the song a single buzzing throbbing note stretched out into a thick undulating drone, the rhythm a metronome like clack buried in the mix, the end gets all trippy and dubbed out, but damn if this isn't creepier and prettier than the original.
Also included in this collection is Even The Saints Knew Their Hour Of Failure And Loss, another killer cd-r of that immediately recognizable Body style abstract sludge doom. Think a more skeletal Khanate, with dubbed out drums, but replace Alan Dubin's vocals with a even more hysterical shriek bordering on Bathtub Shitter territory. Weird but so fucking cool and creepy. Massive sheets of blacktar guitars, sometimes a grinding trudge through a viscous cloud of noxious grime, at others, a slow motion stumble through stark post rock territory, one track features a doom dub breakdown, where the snare sort of careens lazily in a wide open space before eventually being stomped flat by a wall of anvil guitars, another track is peppered with creepy soundbites, adding to the paranoid creepiness. And they tackle another cover, "Here Come The Tears" by Judas Priest, and turn it into a blown out white noise drenched dirge, crumbling and crushing.
These guys love their covers, as is evidenced by their Cop Killer / Dead Cops single also included here, a double dose of dead cops. The Body dump their sludgy doom all over "Cop Killer" by Body Count and "Dead Cops" by M.D.C.! The originals are barely recognizable, the original riffs, transformed into cesspools of filthy sludge. Again, comparisons to Khanate and Moss and are apt, but they definitely twist these jams all up into their very own blackened shapes.
As if that weren't enough, the collection is filled out with their track from a split 7" with Get Killed, and another unreleased track from 2004, as well as their very first demo, originally released as a super limited cassette on Armageddon, which displays the band, even in the early stages, capable of unleashing thick torrents of shrieking, lurching, avant doom, the sound a dizzying mix of slo-mo mathiness, low slung sludge, and blackened post rock, all blurred into epic swaths of black hole heaviness and skull caving crush, without losing their sense of melody or mood. Awesome.
Super striking visuals/packaging as always, spare and austere, with the liner notes printed on a cool white on black mini poster insert.
The Body return with another sprawling epic of avant experimental doom, after having recently relocated from Rhode Island to the Pacific Northwest. While their last release, a sort of stopgap ep called Master, We Perish, found the band mostly ditching all the experimentalism of their debut, All The Waters Of The Earth Turned To Blood, instead offering up something much closer to actually seeing these guys live, as in pure, physical brutality, blown out ultra doom-noise crush. But here, the band continue to push the boundaries of doom, their Assembly Of Light Choir in tow, for a record that is the perfect follow up to All The Waters. Just check out the opener, and you'll be sold. After a brief ambient intro, "To Attempt Openness" unfurls a bit of hazy static, before in come the drums, the churning riffage, and the choir, all blurred into something strangely hymn-like, as if it were the music for some bizarre religious sect, a twisted pagan offshoot of some strange arcane faith, the music blurry and blackened, laced with all manner of noise, industrial buzz and caustic whir, buried melodies, constantly shifting textures, super dynamic, noisy and off kilter, the guitars dropping out at one point, leaving just shrieked vox way back in the mix, and pummeling drum pound over a field of glitch and gristle, before eventually devolving into full on noise.
And of course it doesn't end there, nor does it get any more typically doomy. "Melt Away" drapes samples over lumbering tribal drumming and glimmering shimmer, haunting and ambient, and even when the doom drops, it again is more sort of spectral and chorale-like, the choir way better integrated on this record, less singing intros and outros and now woven into the Body's blackened sonic fabric, the song unwinding as a harrowing dirge. "An Altar Or A Grave" introduces strings, transforming the song into a strange chamber music slow core crawl, that's as lovely and melancholic as it is downtuned and brutal, the sound lurching back and forth between shrieking ultra-doom and that chamber sludge loveliness.
The songs are WAY shorter this time around too, allowing the band to flit from sound to sound, a 3 minute blast of face melting sludge gives way to some female vocal driven blackened ambience, churning feedback drenched industrial doom lumber collides with ultra slow doom-drone-drift dreaminess, all ethereal vox and processed drums, electronics and rumbling whirring synths, fields of hushes static give way to churning psychedelic kraut-doom creep, until finally, "Bearer Of Bad Tidings", one of the two longest songs here at about seven minutes, closes things out with a field of tangled guitar noise, that explodes into a full on blast beat, everything distorted to the point of structural failure, grinding, blown out psych-doom-noise, that splinters into some seriously avant, out there, electro-doom, black noise dirgery, reminding us of Bastard Noise or aQ faves Geronimo. Some seriously next level doooooooooom that we are digging like crazy.
A two barrel blast from these slow motion sludge merchants. A double dose of dead cops. The Body dump their sludgy doom all over "Cop Killer" by Body Count and "Dead Cops" by M.D.C.! The originals are barely recognizable, the original riffs, transformed into cesspools of filthy sludge. If you love Khanate and Moss and other masters of the ultra slow doom, The Body is more of what you need.
Cool packaging, transparent silkscreened sleeve with machine guns obi insert.
The return of the Body! We've been chomping at the bit, waiting for these sludgelords to come up with record number two, might still be a while, but in the meantime we've got this super limited 20 minute cd-r ep to tide us over. Four tracks of abstract sludge doom. Think a more skeletal Khanate, with dubbed out drums, and replace Alan Dubin's vocals, with a hysterical shriek bordering on Bathtub Shitter territory. Weird but so fucking cool and creepy. Massive sheets of blacktar guitars, sometimes a grinding trudge through a viscous cloud of noxious grime, at others, a slow motion stumble through stark post rock territory, one track features a doom dub breakdown, where the snare sort of carreens lazily in a wide open spce before eventually being stomped flat by a wall of anvil guitars, another track is peppered with creepy soundbites, adding to the paranoid creepiness. The final track, a Judas Priest cover (!) is a blown out white noise drenched dirge, crumbling and crushing. Fuck yeah.
Packaged in a cool hand stamped cardboard sleeve. SUPER LIMITED so act fast!
Seeing this doom duo live is as much a physical experience as it is a sonic one. Standing right in front of the band as they play, the sheer force and volume of the sound, literally blows your clothes and hair back, like they have fans instead of speakers inside their cabinets. The weird horn shaped drums like sonic snowblowers. It's seriously visceral, and pure noise bliss for sure, BUT, it's on record where these guys get to flex their avant doom muscles. Cuz live, it all blurs into a nearly Merzbow-ian onslaught, sheets of ear shredding doomnoise that seems like it would be a room clearer, but instead seems to lull the crowd into a headbanging doom-noise trance.
One their last full length, All The Waters Of The Earth Turned To Blood, the band pulled out all the stops, adding a choir, multiple drummers, fucked up experimental production, some tracks ambient, others nearly electronic, their actual doom balanced by all the other sounds, making for what still ranks as one of the coolest weirdest doom records ever. On this new EP, the band balance both sides of their sonic personality, opening with a churning noise drenched dirge, the sound blown out and crumbly and in-the-red, there may be sirens howling in the background, but this is the sound of the band as a two piece kicking out the jams. The vocals a hysterical shriek, the drums crushing, the guitar a wall of churning white noise. It's not until the last minute or so that things start to get weird, electronic drums (or weirdly processed acoustic ones) lock into a loop, leading into the second track, which definitely sounds like it could have been plucked right off All The Waters, a simple minor key strum, a creepy sampled vocal, an angelic choir, weirdly clipped and effected drums, the vibe mysterious and moody, then those shrieked vox come in, then the sound of a cocking shotgun explodes into more blown out doom dirgery, the band finishing things off with a sprawling blast of dirge noise heaviness.
Finally, the EP closes with the nearly ten minute "Worship", which begins all distorto drums, swirling psych guitars, collaged sampled voices, the band locked into a tranced out tribal drum driven psychedelic noise dirge, sounding like Gnod via the Butthole Surfers, it's not until nearly 6 minutes in when the hammer finally falls, the band slipping back into their monstrously lumbering downtuned trudge, more shrieked vox, the drums WAY blown out, the band lurching wildly, before it all drops out again, leaving an extended outro of rumbling guitar buzz, more buried voices, strange abstract percussion, manipulated effects, the sound shifting in pitch, warbly and woozy, laced with field recordings, a haunting ambient drift, that easily could have stretched out endlessly...
More warped avant doom brilliance from these Portland via Providence heavies, and it definitely has us hankering for the upcoming full length.
The Body, despite having become one of the more prolific heavy bands around, have not had a proper solo full-length released since 2013's Christs, Redeemers, tending to collaborate with artists instead. But here they are on thier own again, and on No One Deserves Happiness, the Body have asserted that they sought to make the "ugliest pop record of all time". In some ways, they may have succeeded. Anyone that's heard the Body before will know that anything they touch is a far cry from Katy Perry, but nonetheless, No One Deserves Happiness is a dose of heaviness that's definitely chock full of pretty melody lines dripping with murky atmospherics. While some among the aQuarius staff are not exactly fans of vocalist Chip King's piercing shriek, the good news is that those, um, somewhat difficult to take vocals are minimal here, the album having a few strictly instrumental tracks, and others graced with the angelic croon of Chrissy Wolpert (quite a contrast with Chip). All in all, this is the best solo effort we've heard from The Body yet.
FYI while they last we have the special pink vinyl version, if you get the vinyl! And also fyi and btw, The Body also (of course) have a new collaborative cd out, with Full Of Hell, on Neurot, that we just got in, too.
