San Francisco's own Grayceon follow up their self-titled 2007 debut with This Grand Show, a moody and majestic work that seamlessly merges gothy cello (yes, cello) dirges with more metallic riffage, resulting in a highly textured album, further augmented by the cleanly sung female/male vocals that bring to mind a sort of British folk/doom metal hybrid. Think Amber Asylum (of which cellist Jackie Perez Gratz is also a member) meets a less overtly crushing ASVA, with a bit of Pentangle thrown in. The complex, multifaceted songs take you on a dreamlike journey full of serpentine guitar riffs, plodding drumbeats and gloomy atmosphere. All the while, the cello keeps things nice and mournful, and just when you've serenely slipped into Grayceon's beautiful world of despair, the band effortlessly shows their METAL pedigree with hyperspeed blastbeats and an almost black metal heaviness. The result is hypnotic, beautiful, and intense. Recommended.
Sounding just a bit like a weird cross between slo-mo doom bringers Asunder and tunics-and-tights folk metallers Falconer, San Francisco's Grayceon are an uncategorizable combo who rock the majestic medieval metal riffs in a sort of chamber-prog / post-rock context, with a big part of their sound deriving from the droning classical cello stylings of Jackie Perez Gratz (who indeed also saws the cello strings for Asunder, and also plays in Amber Asylum). Pummelling drums and sometimes thrashy guitar round out the trio's lineup, with both clean male and female vocals in the mix, though Grayceon's approach could work just as well instrumentally. The caress of their loud-soft, soft-loud dynamics should find this appealing to both indie/post rockers and, say, fans of Hammers Of Misfortune and the Fucking Champs. Imagine Rachel's on a date with Apocalyptica, perhaps. This self-titled debut consists of four songs in 45 minutes -- the last and longest track clocks in at an epic, elegant 20 minutes, and, like the rest of the album, provides stately and somber moodiness alongside headbangingly metallic moments... it's mournful, technical, and we think pretty cool!
Killer doom from Spain. Candlemass meets Celtic Frost. Ultra true doom, heavy and sorrowful, huge guitars, great riffs and soaring emotional vocals. Good stuff.
Here's a new example of an up and coming (albeit questionable) subgenre in the metal realm: the onesonghourpluslong disc. Sleep, Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra, Sabbat, Boris, Corrupted, now Green Carnation. Their experimental bent goes beyond the song length,
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally!!! The first two Green Machine records, originally released on Man's Ruin, re-released with three bonus tracks each! And not a moment too soon considering how much we've all been freaking out for their most recent full length The Archives Of Rotten Blues. Unlike the monstrous sludge of that one, these two records are slightly more stoner rock, and a bit more melodic, but somehow harder: thrashy, noisy and chaotic, with lots of leads, almost like classic hard rock / proto metal but WAY heavier and more aggressive, very reminiscent of midwest aggro sludge like Helmet, Unsane and all that growly Amrep stuff. But all run through that Japanese bizzaro filter we love!
Plus song titles like Cunt Maniac, Burdens Of Karma, Barbarian Of Dope, Hempty God Returns To The Sky, Machinists Smoke and Holy Grinder tell you anything else you need to know.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
2nd Man's Ruin effort from these Japanese sludge rockers--actually not so sludgy as before, this has more of a "stoner groove" thing happening, although the vocals are still in the harsh Eyehategod-style screaming realm. Song titles that may clinch the deal: "Barbarian of Dope", "Slug", "Hempty God, Returns To Sky"...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally, the return of Japanese sludgemetalmeisters Green Machine! Not sure about you, but we LOVED those Green Machine records on Man's Ruin way back when (also back in print, though not listed yet, see the 'instock not reviewed' section!) and after that they seemed to just drop off the map. Which was really too bad as they were a massive monstrous sludge / groove metal behemoth few could touch. Well, we're happy to say that Green Machine are indeed back, and more sludgy, groovy and monstrously heavy than ever. Can't hurt that Atsuo from BORIS produced the record! But it's not just the production. This band is tight and heavy and huge. And so are the songs. Bulldozing riffs, pounding drums and throat shredding vocals. Like classic stoner rock, supercharged and run through a special Japanese 'sludge' pedal. Think High On Fire, Motorhead, Venom, Eyehategod, Cavity and of course Boris' Heavy Rocks. And don't let the counter on your cd player display confuse you. Track seven is split into about sixty individual five second tracks to throw you off before the final track, number 69, "Hammer And Burner", a lighting fast, hammering barn burner, like Motorhead on 45. Fans of all the above bands and Boris and Boris-related obessives will want this for sure!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally!!! The first two Green Machine records, originally released on Man's Ruin, re-released with three bonus tracks each! And not a moment too soon considering how much we've all been freaking out for their most recent full length The Archives Of Rotten Blues. Unlike the monstrous sludge of that one, these two records are slightly more stoner rock, and a bit more melodic, but somehow harder: thrashy, noisy and chaotic, with lots of leads, almost like classic hard rock / proto metal but WAY heavier and more aggressive, very reminiscent of midwest aggro sludge like Helmet, Unsane and all that growly Amrep stuff. But all run through that Japanese bizzaro filter we love!
Plus song titles like Cunt Maniac, Burdens Of Karma, Barbarian Of Dope, Hempty God Returns To The Sky, Machinists Smoke and Holy Grinder tell you anything else you need to know.
All the metalheads around here love stoner rock, and stoner metal, from Kyuss to Sons Of Otis, Mystick Krewe Of Clearlight to Mammoth Volume, Roachpowder to Raging Slab, Church Of Misery to Elder, and of course Black Sabbath, who aren't technically stoner rock, but who sort of created the template, and then there's Monster Magnet, Natas, Electric Wizard, we could go on, but you get the drift. And we'd always been super partial to Swedish stoners Dozer, who seemingly hung it up in 2008 after five killer full lengths. So we were pretty psyched when we got this record in, from a band called Greenleaf, which features a bunch of guys from Dozer, and we were surprised to discover that Greenleaf have been active since 2000, concurrently with Dozer for almost a decade! And yet, this is the first we've heard from 'em. This is their third full length, and is produced by the guy from VAKA, whose piano driven post rock / stoner doom record Kappa Delta Phi record was a big favorite around here, but that definitely gives Nest Of Vipers some serious heft, which helps balance out the EXTREME poppiness. The band also includes members of Lowrider, Truckfighters, and features a handful of guest appearances from members of Opeth and Spiritual Beggars among others.
Allan jokes that when we mention Queens Of The Stone Age in a review, it tends to scare people off, and we sell way fewer copies than we would otherwise, but it's just unavoidable sometimes, and hell, QOTSA in the early days was only one step removed from the mighty Kyuss anyway, and the opening track here "Jack Staff" is kind of a dead ringer for QOTSA, especially the crazy catchy, super poppy chorus, with its soaring Josh Homme like vox, heck it even goes beyond QOTSA into full on commercial heavy rock, but fuck it, it sounds killer, the guitar tone is thick and deserty, the main riff is crunchy and fuzzy, the overall vibe is swaggery and snarly, the song seesawing between extreme stoner crush and total heavy pop.
Nothing else on the record is so overtly poppy, but lots of parts come seriously close, all the songs here definitely displaying a serious pop edge to them, no matter how heavy or stonery the jam is. But let's not overplay the poppiness, cuz some of the jams here are seriously fierce, fuzzy, and blown out and HEAVY. Another Swedish band whose influence can be felt throughout are the Hellacopters, which again, as far as we're concerned is not a bad thing at all. And Kiss, lots of these tracks are obviously beholden to those masters of hooky heaviness. There's some organ that pops up too on a few tracks, which definitely gives the proceedings a bit of a psychedelic vibe, but overall this is just a seriously kick ass, seriously catchy collection of fuzzed out hook heavy stoner rock radness. And if your collection features lots of records on Meteor City, Small Stone, Tee Pee, Leaf Hound, Rise Above, Elektrohasch and the rest, then Nest Of Vipers will definitely feel right at home...
We're not sure what message is sent by naming your band Gregor Samsa, but judging from this, the first proper full length from these Virginia post-math-mope rockers, it could be as simple and obvious as 'metamorphosis'. Each track here is a lush, lugubrious crawl, slithery and subtle, dark reverbed chords drift in wide open spaces, a blurry druggy soundscape, the drums sort of creep along WAY back in the background, a distant thud, a simple pulse, ethereal female vocals drift soft and angelic, sometimes hovering sweetly beside the whispery croon of her male foil, but most of the tracks shift at some point, build into a darkly brooding wave of thick guitars and keening melodies. But this isn't your typical post rock, quiet soft / loud heavy thing, as GS never really get heavy, insead they deftly ratchet up the emotion, choosing to not stomp on the fuzz box, but instead to quietly maneuver the music into a much more intense space. It's this intensity that manages to convey more pathos than a distorted guitar ever could in this context. This is dreamy and dreary, lovely and secretly dark and foreboding, with occasional swells of thick guitar, keening melody and a brooding malevolence, like Low with Mogwai tendencies, or drifting on a black, musical moonlit sea, slow and serene and absolutely breathtaking.Ô
Packaged in a gorgeous letterpressed thick cardstock sleeve, with a silver inked Japanese style obi. Wow!
Cool, non-music related footnote: this full length. 55:12, is exactly twice the length of their prior ep, 27:36!
Not too long ago we made Austalia's Grey Daturas record of the week with their killer Dead In The Woods record (now available again for a limited time, we got the last copies! See elsewhere on this list), a perfect mix of churning metallic rock, New Zealand style free noise, freaked out psychedelic space rock and buzzing rumbling drone rock. So so good. We knew there were other Daturas recordings floating around but we couldn't figure out how to track 'em down. Finally the band returned from tour and managed to dig up their last copies of their two previous releases, their debut record and a 30 minute ep, so we took all of 'em and they finally showed up. So act fast as these will be gone in no time.
This is a single song, 30 minute ep from last year, and is half an hour of drifting abstract ambient guitar bliss. Really pretty, with melodies floating to and fro, while other guitars sort of spread out a warm fuzzy blanket beneath, you can also hear voices and people talking, hard to tell if the voices were placed there or if this was a live set and that's the sound of the crowd, but either way it adds another subtle layer to the track. There is a sense of building and intensity, but before it really takes off, everything just sort of drifts back to earth and blisses out. A gorgeously druggy late night swirl of otherworldy guitars and subtle strummy ambience.
SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE OUT OF PRINT AND LONG GONE. WE HAVE THE LAST 25 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
It's weird to think about the world before the Internet. Little pockets of bands in out of the way places, producing wild and wonderful music, that outside of a few tape traders and cool record stores just didn't get heard. In some ways the advent of immediate world wide communication has been a wellspring of amazing music, since now, some kid who records in his bedroom in Finland, can now be heard by anyone in the world. Anywhere. Any time. The downside is of course the proliferation of bands whose material maybe didn't need worldwide exposure, music that was just fine where it was, in the bedroom or the basement. Thankfully this particular release is a definite example of the former. Australia has produced some killer rock over the years, from AC/DC to Radio Birdman to Lubricated Goat (one of Allan and Andee's favorites) to the Dirty Three to more obscure noiserock bands like Budd or the Dumb And The Ugly or Primitive Calculators. A few lists back we reviewed an awesome disc by the band Whitehorse, whose epic sludge-y, drone-y dirge definitely hit the Sunn 0))) / Earth / Corrupted / Khanate spot. The guys in Whitehorse suggested we check out another Aussie outift (also from Melbourne) a two guys and a gal trio called the Grey Daturas, who only a few weeks later just showed up in our store with a box full of cds, about to embark on their first US tour (some of the dates with Sunn 0))), see elsewhere on this list for tour dates). And while the Daturas are indeed heavy and droney, their sound is less slow motion sludge and more blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. The Daturas' sound is all over the map, from churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah. When they kick out the jams, it's fierce and mesmerizing, pounding and relentless, with simple propulsive percussion and spaced out swirl. Often stretching out into head nodding Krautrock jams, spacious and hypnotic. When the storms calm and the band drifts off and just sort of meanders, we're reminded of Codeine and other like minded practitioners of drowsy, druggy slow core. Still noisy, but mellow and intense, brooding and subtly aggressive.
The Grey Daturas are all instrumental which as you probably know we tend to dig, since there's nothing like a bad singer to ruin a perfectly good band, but there's always the risk of bands with no vocalists to be really really boring. But because a lot of the Daturas' tunes are improvised, and the band is willing to take all kinds of musical chances (they often switch instruments, sometimes perform as a duo with no drummer, etc...) it never gets boring, instead it becomes the perfect mix of droning free rock, kick ass instrumental post rock, buzzing druggy psych and even occasional blasts of full on metal. Mix in some cool song titles: "The Hanging Man Is No Peacock", "Force Is A Weapon Of The Weak", as well as some oddly political song titles (but more sort of Sixties politics): "For Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale", "Night Of The Barricade: Paris 1968", a gorgeous washed out black, brown and grey cardboard sleeve, and a totally kick ass live show (they performed admirably with a handful of fill-in drummers here, even teaming up with art noise outfit the Yellow Swans for one show), and you've got one of our favorite new bands / releases. AND they're recording a new record right here in SF when they get back from tour...yay!
Australia's Grey Daturas are like our very own noise rock Santa Claus. They come about once a year, and every time they show up, they have a huge bag of sonic goodies. And while Santa probably doesn't come to punish our ear drums and pummel us to within an inch of our lives, crammed into some smokey sweaty little club, we'd probably have to take the Daturas over Santa any day!!! Unless this year is the year we finally get that pony...
This time, the band brought with them a brand new record, technically an EP, but at nearly 40 minutes it's plenty long enough to be a record proper. And as always it's a corker. Somehow, it seems to be their most structured and least chaotic, which in no way is a bad thing, nor does it mean that it still isn't packed freaked out noise rock or vast expanses of abstract psych guitar because it is. And then some.
The opener is definitely the Daturas at their most rock. Simple driving drums beneath an impossible dense swirl of HEAVY guitars, drenched in FX and churning wildly. It's like the blown out psych rock endless jam outro of every Hawkwind song jacked up and compressed into seven minutes. The rest of the record is a bit less rock, returning to their abstract noise rock ambience, like a heaver, more psychedelic Dead C, from abstract guitar jangle drift wrapped around random bits of drum flutter to an explosive noisrockmindfuck halfway through the disc, thick peals of distorted guitar that crash and crush but are almost immediately turned inside out and become a strange backwards guitar squall, all warped and warbly My Bloody Valentine / Teenage Filmstars blowout, with strange rhythms created from the ssssshhhhhht sound of the guitars being sucked through time in reverse. After that it gets a bit more minimal for a stretch, with some dark rumbling dronescapes, more snippets of backward guitar, distant swirling FX, some angular Sonic Youth style guitar rock until the final track, a massive and ultra dense guitarscape, rife with acidic riffs and distorted melodies, thick clouds of clang and rrrooooaaar, each guitar piled atop one another, layer after layer of rumbling, reverberating, shrieking, shimmering, coruscating steel string skree, a bit like Skullflower at their riffiest mashed up with Acid Mothers Temple at their least. Amazing.
Huzzah! Our favorite instrumental down-under doom-bringers return (to disruption) with this new
full-length, the prolific Melbourne trio's debut for Neurosis' Neurot label. It's a good fit, of course, this should go over well with the whole post-rock/metal crowd, this album often grindingly hypnotic, the Grey Daturas' lumbering sheets of distorto-drone skullflowering forth over a roiling bed of precision percussive clangor right from the get-go! Their threatening waves of pure heaviness, sharpened into a drill-drone of an attack, also occasionally take detours into areas of abstract ambience, the guitars of Bonnie Mercer and Rob MacManus carving psychedelic feedback sculptures, then tightening again back into full metallic impact, driven by the skittering drums of Robert Manson.
As heavy as they are (which is HEAVY) you can't really call the Grey Dats a metal band. They're in that quasi-metal realm with the likes of SUNNO))), Boris, Harvey Milk, and Nadja, perhaps, with a certain amount of experimental lo-fi fuckery going on that reminds us of many of their freenoise comrades over in nearby New Zealand... The title track itself is a clattering, pottering about, like something the Dead C would come up with, while the track called "Undisturbed" is anything but, sounding like a violin or creaking door hinge dying a slow and dismal death. And the high-end scraping skree of "Balance Of Convenience" should peel some paint. And then, as already mentioned, there's all the juggernaut, trance-inducing, spaced-out, instrumental doom rock post rock surging through tracks like "Beyond And Into The Ulimate" and "Neuralgia".
The Grey Daturas definitely like all the varieties of drone! And fans of, what should we call it, avant-doom, or drone-doom, or whatever, should like all varieties of the Grey Daturas, starting with this disc if you haven't already made their acquaintance, covering all the bases as it does!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not too long ago we made Austalia's Grey Daturas record of the week with their killer Dead In The Woods record (now available again for a limited time), a perfect mix of churning metallic rock, New Zealand style free noise, freaked out psychedelic space rock and buzzing rumbling drone rock. So so good. We knew there were other Daturas recordings floating around but we couldn't figure out how to track 'em down. Finally the band returned from tour and managed to dig up their last copies of their two previous releases, their debut record and a 30 minute ep, so we took all of 'em and they finally showed up. So act fast as these will be gone in no time.
This is the band's first full length from way back in 2002, and finds the band in a much driftier dronier place. The first two tracks are extended guitar workouts, slow shifting waves of distorted guitar and rumbling bass, alternately ominous and atonal, and lilting and lovely, it's not until track three when the drums kick in, just sort of offering a bare bones framework for the super saturated sludge guitar, a SUNNO))) worthy guitar drone indeed. Not long after that the band gets seriously revved and kicks out the drug addled psych space jams, with wild super nova guitars, acid fried riffs and pounding relentless drumming. The last two tracks, clocking in at 20 minutes each, are pretty much the core of the record. The second to last track "I Talk To The Voices" is a haunting soundscape of heavily affected guitars, simple percussion, that builds and builds and builds into a swirl of psychedelic fuzz, before splintering into a sixties freakout of delay and splattery free drumming. The final track "Bloodcloth", is about as heavy and harsh as the Daturas get, a full on freaked out ultra noise deconstructed Dead C sort of racket, strangled squealing guitars, weirdly atonal piano, layer after layer of fuzz and feedback and noise and hiss, all mixed up into a dizzyingly chaotic swirl.
SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE OUT OF PRINT AND LONG GONE. WE HAVE THE LAST 30 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
A while ago we were informed that French ultradoom combo Monarch had called it a day. We were crushed. One of our favorite purveyors of filthy slow motion doooooooooom, fronted by a woman, a rarity in doom for sure, and with a penchant for smiley skulls and Hello Kitty. A band that seemed tailor made for the very bizarre tastes of the AQ faithful, seemed to be no more.�
But before we could begin our campaign of mourning, black clothes spray painted with cute skulls, black Hello Kitty armbands, we discovered that in fact we were misinformed, or maybe the band had taken a break, or something, but we cared not, for whatever reason, Monarch was still alive, and would live to doom another day. And doom they did. Gracing us with more and more glorious downtuned heaviness, including their bad ass cover of Turbonegro's "I Got Erection"!
So now that we're pretty comfortable with the continued existence of our favorite cute doomsters, we can wait patiently for each new, massive slab of harsh slow motion glacial dooooooooooooooooooooom. And for folks new to Monarch, don't go expecting this to actually -sound- cute. They may be fronted by an adorable French girl, who spins playfully on the beach in their videos, but when she opens her mouth to sing, it's the sound of blackness and misery, a demonic caterwaul, unrivaled by most male metal vocalists. And sure the art on their records may be cute cartoon burning churches and big eyed ghosts, but the sounds inside are slow and black as tar, guitars tuned so low they rumble instead of roar, drum beats so far apart, the drummer can probably smoke a cigarette between beats.�And we're happy to report that this 16+ minute chunk of doom is all that and more. The more being the haunting ethereal female vocals partway through... Crushingly heavy, weirdly beautiful. A plodding symphony in slow motion. Essential Monarch beautiful brutality.
The surprise here is the Grey Daturas track, also a 16 minute epic, that on first listen sounds surprisingly doomy, and a lot like the Monarch track. The Daturas are often heavy, but rarely doomy like this, but it suits them. And they pepper their doom with all sorts of sonic weirdness, bits of electronic fuckery, strange modulated feedback, subtle FX, until about 13 minutes in, when the song suddenly morphs into a muted wall of smeared and crumbling white noise, a blast of blurred sound that eventually fades into nothingness.�
Pretty amazing stuff, from both bands. Doom hounds will be well pleased. Super fancy gold inked black cardstock gatefold sleeve too...
Finally, the full length has landed, a killer collection of industrial, electronic flecked, dubbed out metallic pummel from Grey Machine, three parts Jesu, one part Isis, the long anticipated team up of Justin Broadrick and Aaron Turner. We were treated to a teaser in the form of a super limited 12". We still have a few copies left, actually, with an exclusive super rad dubby remix B-side. The A-side, "Vultures Descend" is found on Disconnected as well, we described it thusly:
"A wild cacophonous chaotic noise jam, that features crunchy post industrial rhythms wrapped around a thick blown out blast of dubstep style bass, the vocals fuzzy and lo-fi buried way down in the mix, some woozy dark descending riffage, the timbre prickly and abrasive, but beneath all the churning and roiling heaviness (and it IS heavy) are some awesomely melodic guitar lines and some tripped out spacerock FX draped over the almost jungle bass and drums (or should we say drum + bass)."
Sounds good huh? Cuz it IS good. Really good. Although the whole record isn't quite as chaotic and abrasive, every song is pretty dense and sprawling, much of it sounding quite a bit like Broadrick's former outfit Godflesh, but with way more weirdness mixed in, be it extra programmed beats, layered guitars, explosions of thick oozing psych buzz, whatever. The opening track is the perfect example, with its low slung bass and industrial drumming, weaving trancelike through clouds of electronic hiss, mysterious creaks and groans, the vocals processed and chopped up, the song a lurching, unstoppable beast, but all around it, strange sounds are surfacing, transforming, becoming tangled up in that lumbering crush, as the guitars get thicker and more distorted, but seem to be twisting and warping... Eventually the drums drop out leaving just a sky full of high end streaks and a feedback skree drone drift.
So yeah, the sound here is Godfleshy, definitely not as blissy as Jesu, although some of those elements still remain, wrapped around a dense rigid industrial framework, with some surprising bits of modern electronic music (dubstep!) deftly woven into GM's sound without sticking out or sounding forced.
"When Attention Just Isn't Enough" begins life as another gloriously plodding dirge, but chiming guitars and fat fuzzy dubby bass transform it into something much more moody and groovy. "Wasted" begins with that sort of super heavy synth bass that defines most dubstep jams, but here it's laced over skittery metallic percussion and squiggly psychedelic leads, and lots and lots of noise. But it does rear up and buzz wildly every few measures, making it almost feel like some sort of industrial metal dubstep. But the wah guitars and squalls of freaked out FX also give it a distinctly Loop / Hawkwind sort of drug jam vibe as well. A killer combination for sure.
"Sweatshop" is the only really electronic sounding track, still thick ropy basslines, but with a killer loping programmed beat, super distorted and sort-of-funky, the whole thing super skeletal and dubby, with tons of texture and ambience, before giving way to the final track, probably the most blissed out of the bunch, still industrial and murky and washed out sounding, but everything is wreathed in a warm haze, the guitars muted, the drums minimal, the bass rumbling and fuzzy, lots of tape hiss and amp buzz, almost dreamy, but still appropriately ominous and intense.
Killer packaging too, blacks and greys and metallic silvers, printed on transparent vellum, with the other pages of the booklet visible through the cover, inside all sorts of high contrast video stills, a look both modern and reminiscent of the old Earache / Godflesh days. Cool.
The long awaited debut from Grey Machine, the collaborative beast featuring Justin Broadrick of Jesu, and Aaron Turner from Isis, just two songs, it's a teaser for the forthcoming full length, the A side a track from the record, the B side an exclusive remix available only on this here 12".
So what exactly does Grey Machine sound like? Definitely not as blissy as Jesu, although some of those elements still remain, if anything, it's closer to Godflesh in tone, lumbering and industrial, wish some surprising bits of modern electronic music (dubstep!) which manage to be deftly woven into GM's sound without sticking out or sounding forced.
The track from the forthcoming full length is a monster for sure. A wild cacophonous chaotic noise jam, that features crunchy post industrial rhythms wrapped around a thick blown out blast of dubstep style bass, the vocals fuzzy and lo-fi buried way down in the mix, some woozy dark descending riffage, the timbre prickly and abrasive, but beneath all the churning and roiling heaviness (and it IS heavy) are some awesomely melodic guitar lines and some tripped out spacerock FX draped over the almost jungle bass and drums (or should we say drum + bass).
The B-side is a super stripped down dubbed out groove, tons of space, the beats spare and skeletal, rubbery and bassy, over the top of some howled distorted vox (a la Godflesh), in the background streaks of guitar buzz, blurred bits of droning ambience, all sorts of space-y effects, the track pounds away, drifting through little clouds of blissed out crunch and more of those seriously bassbin destroying, thick buzz drenched dubsteppy basslines. Super cool. Bodes well for the full length!
Old school 12" style packaging. Black vinyl, no labels, plain white sleeve, with a black and white sticker affixed to the front. And of course, LIMITED!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've said it before and we'll say it again, but oh how are grindcore hearts were broken when Discordance Axis called it a day. Sure there were plenty of grind bands, but few were able to capture the magic, and conjure the sort of grind metal magic those guys could. Even the briefest songs were jammed with intricate rhythms, and incredible melodies, so impossibly fast and furious, but catchy as fuck. Various Disc Ax members went on to do other things, most notably drum god Dave Witte, but even with him behind the kit, none of the post-Disc Ax bands pulled it off in quite the same way. Until recently. Until vocalist Jon Chang joined the living, returning with his insane Japanese hyper metal outfit, Hayaino Daisuki, who melded the techgrind of DA with total over the top power metal. Seems like a bad idea, but au contraire, we hadn't heard anything that fresh, that fucked up and gloriously heavy in forever. So here we are with another of Chang's new bands, one that has been in the works seemingly since the death of DA, seeing as there was a Gridlink track on that posthumous DA collection that came out way back in 2005. Even then we were thrilled at how much Gridlink seemed to channel the sound of DA, they seemed to be THE band poised to carry on Discordance's art-grind torch, but then nothing. For three years. But now. Shit. We feel silly saying it was worth waiting three years for 11 minutes of music, but the more we listen to this the more we're convinced it actually was.�
This is mindblowing. So heavy and insanely fast, so complex and furious, more than 12 minutes would probably kill you. Or maybe not, as we've been listening to this on repeat nonstop. Beyond just being brutal and lightning fast, it's also insanely dynamic, and so catchy, little squalls of grinding metallic mayhem offer up unlikely harmonies, killer hooks, some Maidenish guitar parts, Chang's vocals a hysterical banshee like shriek. And actually, Gridlink does seem to be the sonic link between Discordance and Hayaino, the over power metalisms of Hayaino tempered into something much less over the top, and the obtuse artiness of DA reigned in a bit, both sounds forced into one swirling sparks-spitting white hot ball of mind melting metallic art grind genius. So recommended. As is setting your cd on repeat and listening to this 5 or 6 times at each sitting!
Record number two from Jon Chang's post Discordance Axis outfit Gridlink. Unlike his OTHER post DA combo Hayaino Daisuki, which was like a super charged hyperspeed power metal grindcore combo, Gridlink is more aligned with the avantgrind of Discordance Axis. A dense million parts a minute flurry of hyperblasts, hellish howls, and impossibly gnarled riffage. And like Amber Gray before it, Orphan is a dizzying micro-epic, 12 songs in 12 minutes, almost a minute longer than Amber Gray, and somehow more focused and even more intense than its predecessor.
A twelve minute full length might seem laughable to some, but not sure most folks could handle more than 12 minutes of this stuff, and we doubt Gridlink could keep up this sort of intensity for much longer, either. Each track is a furious, frantic, frenetic, frenzied blast of grinding proggy metallic mayhem, the guitars liquid and serpentine, slipping from chug to noodle to maniacal hammer-on's, spewing a million notes a second, offering up rhythmic heft and tangled melody. The drums are right there with the guitars, impossibly rapidfire bursts of machinegun beats, endlessly relentless fills, the tempo changing every few second, blasting and pounding, a confusional bafflingly brilliant sonic battle, a non stop guitar / drum duel, the musical version of the Tasmanian Devil, a roiling, churning black cloud of sound, laying waste to all in its path.
But for all the grind and shred, pound and pummel, blasting and thrashing, the songs here are rife with hooks, killer melodies, and kick ass riffs, all surprisingly catchy, and dangerously hummable for a 12 minute, 200 part, million bpm, grindmetal blowout...
Featuring members of Discordance Axis, Mortalized, Human Remains, Kill the Client, Burnt by the Sun, Hayaino Daisuki, and more, might just be one of our favorite metal (grind or otherwise) records of the year so far...
The limited lp version is pressed on 180 gram vinyl, and features BOTH Gridlink albums (Orphan and Amber Gray), at 45 rpm, one album on each side, it's housed in a swank full color gatefold and includes a coupon for mp3 downloads of all the tracks AND karaoke versions of the songs so you can sing along at home! The vinyl is limited to 500 copies. The cd version includes the downloadable karaoke versions of the songs...
Took some close listening, with some serious headphones, to actually discern the black metal happening on this double vinyl epic from the mysterious Grief No Absolution, who traffic in their own brand of 'bleak metal', which to these ears, at least at first sounded less like metal and more like noise, but cool noise for sure, but after a few listens, the blackened underbelly began to reveal itself, this one is definitely gonna hit the spot for folks into black metal noise hybridists like WOLD or Nekrasov, people who like their blast and buzz obscured by hiss and crunch and rumble and skree.
The 7" is the noisier component of this twofer. Psychedelic squall, a buzzing organic fog of sheer white noise shot through with shards of melody, and jagged sheets of processed feedback, layers of grinding fuzz collapsing in a swirling black hole of sound, but every once in a while, a streak of Merzbowian crunch will become a howling vokill, or a smear of caustic hiss will morph into an icy bit of riffage, but never for long, always quickly swallowed up by the roiling blacknoise nipping at its heels.
The 10" component is the darker dronier of the two, and is all about the slooow and looow, deep rumbling tones, SUNNO)))-y swells of slow motion riffage, so slow it's rendered ambient, a gorgeous drifting doomdrone, soft edged buzz, swirling and blurring into lush expanses of blackened shimmer. Abstract, skeletal, deep and minimal, ambient and atmospheric, but still plenty grim and blackened.
From the Flingco label who last list brought us The Black Box. Cool packaging as always, black on black printed sleeve, with a printed Japanese style obi, inside, a white on white printed insert, and it comes with a download card as well!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've been looking forward to listing this, holding off on getting the import 'cause we knew that the label it's on, Van, was working on a US distribution deal. Finally it's here, and with appropriately dismal delight we can share this digipack'd slab of supreme doom metal with you. The debut full-length from Swedish band Griftegard (meaning, "burial ground") is an impressive one. Massive, morose, melodic, epic doom, a bit like the early work of ultimate Swedish doomlords Candlemass, also reminding us of Trouble circa Run To The Light, Warning's Watching From A Distance, The Wounded Kings, Fall Of The Idols, and other class acts. Maybe even a little Nick Cave! One of the guys in Griftegard used to help run the I Hate Records label, so it's no surprise that his band knows how doom should sound from the get-go. Slow and plodding, of course, and with much depth of feeling. The ragged edge to the singer's voice gives these dirges extra emotion, as if the crushing riffage needed any help, so very lumbering and slumbersome it is. Quiet parts, piano and organ interludes, add to the atmosphere.
Solemn, Sacred, Severe IS the perfect title, and review tagline.
Griftegard, like many doom bands, have a religious vibe to them. We don't think they ARE Christian, but these songs are often ABOUT Christianity (and its discontents), in particular, the apocalyptic Jehovah's Witnesses sect. Lead off track "Charles Taze Russell" is in fact named after an important historical figure in that church. We first heard it in demo form, on a cd-r comp that came with an underground doom metal 'zine, and by itself that track put us on the lookout for an album from these gloomy guys, and again here it is, one of the most accomplished doom debuts in recent memory. Well, the Garden Of Worm we listed last time was pretty good too, and if you liked that you're probably gonna need to hear Griftegard's moans of misery as well...
At last, a two-on-one disc reissue of the 1st and 2nd albums by this mid-eighties British metal outfit. The first album's title track, a minor hit at the time, is now considered a cult classic, having special significance to our own Andee Connors as it is the first song he ever learned to play on guitar. Melodic, chugging heavy metal, with soaring, semi-evil vocals, that'll make you raise your fist and yell, see you in hell (my friend).
Latest blast of buzzing black filth from this Belgian horde and it's a doozy. Nothing avant or freaked out, fucked or damaged, nope these guys are masters of the pure black arts, channeling the spirit of Darkthrone, through a wall of murky majestic riffing, blasting beats almost totally obscured and buried by the massive amounts of murk and buzz, the vocals a reverb drenched, an animalistic growl that comes as close to throat singing as any "vokills" we've heard, a raw rough sort of slow guttural roar.
Minus some awesome almost Sabbathy doom style riffing (complete with tolling bell right at the beginning of the first track), and some lurching woozy eighties style classic metal (sometimes underpinned by strange sounding double kick rumbles), the band spend most of their time in a wintry flurry of blown out buzz and furious blast.
Fast, primitive, ugly and raw, Grimfaug unfurl track after track of mesmerizingly hypnotic old school Nordic style buzz, and sometimes that's really all you want or need.
For a band who existed so briefly, with only handful of live performances, and a single record to their name, San Francisco's late great black metal masterminds Weakling cast a mighty long shadow. Many consider their Dead As Dreams debut/swansong to be one of the best US black metal records EVER, and hell, who are we to argue. Andee's tUMULt label put it out, after all. It's also inspired at least three tributes/homages that we can think of, Jabladav's weirdo worshipful Dead As Duck album, then there's the band Dead As Dreams, and now there's this two song tape from Texas/Oregon black metal outfit Grst, entitled Fire Therein, on which the trio tackle two Weakling tracks, "Cut Their Grain And Place Fire Therein" and "Dead As Dreams". And on first listen, these guys do a pretty good Weakling, especially the anguished wailed shrieking vokills, the music itself is a lot more polished and less raw than the original, the organ/synth way higher in the mix, the drums too, it sounds like they've added some subtle twisted of their own, but it's obviously a pretty reverential homage, and for anyone who loves the original, which should be all of you, it's pretty cool to hear someone else's interpretation, and the fact that it still sounds so good, most definitely speaks to the power, the energy, and the uniqueness of the original. Same with "Dead As Dreams", a song we've loved so much for so long, that even hearing an entirely different version, the minute we hear that riff, that instantly recognizable melody, it gives us chills, and again, hearing a different version/interpretation, gives us new perspective, and makes us want to dig into the original all over again. Which is pretty much everything you want from a tribute/cover/homage...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. With cool pitch perfect Dead As Dreams styled cover art.
Any band described as 'the Melvins playing King Crimson', well, how could you not want to hear that, assuming that were it true, you might have a new favorite band!! But, those sorts of descriptions are usually hyperbole, and while we love us some hyperbole, claims like that definitely bear some deeper digging.
That said, this stuff is pretty close to that Melvins meets KC claim, a sort of avant sludge, or prog-doom, or avant-prog-sludge. In addition to the Melvins and King Crimson, we're also thinking Harvey Milk, Dot [.], Moss, Swans, Black Shape Of Nexus, Blutch, Slomatics, and tUMULt's Like A Kind Of Matador, in fact, pretty sure that Gruel features the guitarist from LAKOM, and thus it has a similarly epic sludge prog feel. Four loooong songs, all clocking in at about 15 minutes, sprawling and epic and intricate, loads of parts, riffs, bombastic drumming, the sound slipping from classic sounding rock, to glacial sludge, to slo-mo ambient drift, to math metal churn, midtempo caveman pounds to frantic thrashing crush to super spare abstract ultra-mega-doom, to almost pretty shoegazey buzz to hushed barely there shimmer, the various parts laced with wild leads, mysterious percussion, children's voices, harsh hellish vox, bellowed yowls, weird field recordings, thick rib cage rattling low end, and a massive milk curdling guitar sound. So while it might not exactly be Melvins meets King Crimson, it's close enough, and most definitely plenty proggy and doomy and sludgey, and will no doubt hit the spot for fans of all the above mentioned bands, and all things slow and low, heavy and heady.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, packaged in a PVC sleeve, and wrapped in a full color sleeve that folds out into a big two sided full color poster!
- MPEG stream: I
- MPEG stream: II
Latest disc from these mysterious slowcore black doom drifters, whose last disc on Eichenwald was a big time favorite around these parts. If anything this new one takes the first record and pushes it into even darker, creepier, more minimal directions.
The self-titled debut was a strange blackened blend of Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore and Low, lots of low end, muted guitar strum, delicate skeletal melodies, barely there percussion, slow burning and darkly evocative, a gorgeous almost jazzy minimal black crawl.
On II, all of those elements are still present, even the haunting spoken vocals, delivered in gruff German, rumbling and ominous, here, sprawl over a delicate web of intertwined guitar melodies, crystalline and shimmery, when the drums come in, the sound takes on a strange power, a smoldering black energy, right below the surface, eventually, the band launches into full scale rocking, a loping mathy groove, the guitars more clean and chiming, than downtuned and distorted.
Other tracks find the vocals slipping into proper singing, a creepy operatic croon, over the same sort of muted soft drone and drift, the vibe commanding and Teutonic, the music spidery and surprisingly Slint like, most of the record never moving past a glacial drift, at its most propulsive, burring that one burst of heaviness, the record lopes, bathed in greys and browns, super dynamic, with tons of space, the band letting the sounds breathe, ring out, dissipate, creating expansive, slow and low, minimal dark jazz doom epics. Amazing stuff. Definitely recommended to fans of Bohren, Angels Of Light, KLV, and other practitioners of the dark (and slow) arts...
After two kick ass releases. The buzzing black metal of Dwellers Of The Twilight, and the epic doom of The Wounded Kings, comes two new records on the newly launched Eichenwald label, an offshoot of longtime faves Paradigms. We originally assumed that Eichenwald was meant to be more metal, but they seem to be displaying the same sort of sonic breadth as the mothership.
This is the debut (we think) from these German slowcore doom atmospherists, who weave a dreamlike minimal murk somewhere between Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore and Low or Seam. Three long tracks. Beginning with a muted bass heavy crawl, with spidery guitar lines and a distant shimmery drone, not unlike some mix of Codeine and Low, woozy and ethereal and dreamily fuzzy, until the song kicks into gear, and suddenly the sound is more glistening, with German vocals, crooned over skittery minimal drumming, and soft almost jazzy chords, the bass slippery and underwater sounding. Chiming harmonics drift in a hazy patina of warm reverb, the song sprawling and spreading out in slow motion, there's definitely a Necks vibe too, soporific and wearily lovely.
The second track, begins with another distant drone, and more skeletal guitar figures, and once again shifts into something moodier and jazzier, lush minor key chords, sizzling clouds of cymbal shimmer, ending with a long stretch of rainy day strings, and moaning low end swells, wrapped around a haunting guitar progression, still jazzy, but strangely cinematic.
The final track clock in at nearly 20 minutes, and begins with a creepy intro of layered drones and processed vocals, very atonal and a bit liturgical sounding, before woozy moody guitars roll in, rumbling bass, and then the drums explode and the sound becomes a super dramatic math rock a la Explosions In The Sky, but only briefly, while the rest of the song unfurls lethargically, the bass thick and muddy, the vocals spoken, the guitars offering up glistening shimmers of feedback, until the drums kick in again, and ups the drama and urgency. There's one more long-ish Bohren like crawl, before the song finishes off with a lovely and subtly epic Godspeed like flourish.
Definitely required listening for the moody dramatic post rock set: Bohren, Godspeed, Explosions, even older stuff like the aforementioned Seam, Codeine, Low, and to our ears, sometimes a bit like a softer lighter take on some of the more blissed out Jesu moments.
Okay, let's get it out of the way right up front. Yeah, we know, Gruntruck is a terrible name for a band, and yeah they do have a song called "Crucifunkin'" which is unfortunately, as the title might lead you to believe, a little bit funky. But be that as it may, these guys slayed, early nineties Seattle grunge, always underappreciated, but so heavy, and hooky, and groovy, channeling the same sort of sound as Skin Yard and Soundgarden, big downtuned riffage, wild scrabbly leads, and vocalist Ben McMillan's killer yowled vox. Need proof, just check out the sound sample for "Inside Yours", a track that we would definitely put near the top of our list of best grunge jams ever, with its woozy, druggy, slow build intro, and lurching lumbering, stop / start arrangement, slinky and sludgey, with some killer weirdly effected guitars, reminding us of Green River, the same sort of junkie blues grunge metal groove. And while that 's definitely our favorite jam here, there are plenty that are just as good.
Gruntruck played constantly with grunge legends like Screaming Trees, Alice In Chains (supposedly they opened for AiC more than any other band), not to mention touring with Pantera, and featured at least one of The Accused as a member, but for whatever reason, they sort of slipped through the cracks. Which makes no sense listening to this now. This double disc collection gathers up the group's two full lengths, 1990's Inside Yours and 1992's Push, with two bonus tracks. Inside Yours is the grungier of the two, definitely sounding like it could easily have ended up on Sub Pop, although it's maybe a tad more metal, with a sound that was definitely dangerously close to fellow grungers Skin Yard, while Push was a bit more commercial, probably reflecting all those shows with Alice In Chains, their sound definitely moving in that direction. Record label bullshit hastened the end of the original lineup, and while the band soldiered on, releasing another ep in 1996, and reuniting in 2000, it's these two records that should have made them as big as their grunge brethren. Super rocking, grunge-y hook filled heaviness that should most definitely hit the spot for fans of Skin Yard, Tad, Green River, Soundgarden, The Fluid, Afghan Whigs, Swallow, Love Battery, Nirvana, etc., who somehow missed out on these guys the first time around.
Packaged in a super fancy six panel double digipak, with two booklets, lyrics and liner notes.
We really weren't sure what to expect from the oddly monikered Guardian Alien, knowing that two of the members also played in black metal outfit Liturgy, but that this was drummer Greg Fox's project, Fox also apparently recording as GDFX, whose tripped out experimental electronic tape on Ormolycka we reviewed a while back. We were even further confused when we got a look at the record cover, a weird painting of a Rasta alien in a tracksuit, in a field full of animals and campfires, and a sky full of deer with books in their mouths and exploding suns, and of course the tracksuited alien is holding a copy of the record, whose cover depicts the same alien holding a copy of the record and so on and on and on ad infinitum. The title too, "See The World Give To A One Love Entity" has a definite Rastafari bent, so we were definitely feeling some serious trepidation as we pushed play, which at first unfurled what sounded like field recordings, birds and insects, and then footsteps, maybe the footsteps of that alien on the record cover, then a brief bit of Eastern style drone, before BLAM, the song explodes in what we can only describe as Liturgy by way of Sunroof!, which you have to hear to believe.
It's a furious raga-blast, the drums relentless a splattery chaos of wild octopoidal drumming, the guitars following suit, sounding like a transcendental Mick Barr, it's frenzied and tangled but infused with a serious does of droned out tranciness, and then as the song lets up briefly, we were expecting that whole bit to just be the intro, but then the furious raga-blast starts up again, this time even more intense and explosive, and this time with vocals, a strange chanting buried in the mix, very ritualistic and meditative, and even though the band is pounding away frantically, the whole thing manages to be totally mesmerizing and utterly hypnotic, and after three minutes, although it feels like much more, the sound settles down into something much more stripped down and meditative, the drums no less busy, but instead, weaving a dense percussive backdrop over which woozy guitars waver and buzz, the vocals become more distinct, the melodies stretched out into gorgeously buzzy ragas, we're reminded of Astral Social Club at time the same sort of noise-raga thing, but here blissed out, the sound like some wild ritualistic drum circle wedded to some serious free jazz raga exploration, the vocals doused in effects, sounding truly alien, in keeping with the cover and the concept, the sound swirly and tripped out and super psychedelic, until eventually the drums drift off, leaving just a sky full of layered undulating guitars, a blur of shifting overtones and wild sonic squalls, before the drums come back in, a dense mathy, driving percussive groove, wreathed in swirling effects, the song shifting constantly, arranged like an epic black metal song in some ways, it's dynamicism in no way taking away from the tracks overall mesmer, and it is a single track, nearly 40 minutes of blast beat driven raga ur-drone psychedelia, dipping into ultra minimal drones and chant like vocalization here and there, chiming Tibetan bowls elsewhere, the field recordings that opened the record returning occasionally, a gorgeous droned out slow build to a final movement, a gloriously cosmic free jazz psychedelic drum heavy raga drone blowout, that builds to a sort of Boadrum like rhythmic frenzy before finally fading out in a cloud of deep bell like tones and slow fading shimmer. Wow.
Most of you weird music obsessives should probably remember Dutch black ambient freaks Stalaggh, whose MO was creating harsh atonal drones and buzzes, hellish noise drenched soundscapes as backdrops for various vocalists, those vocalists all inmates at a local psychiatric hospital. Yup.
The results were chilling, and creepy, and pretty fucking demented and incredible. Those Stalaggh recordings made even the evilest black metal sound totally tame in comparison. Some seriously emotional, demented and damaged, psychological sonic terror.
Since then, the band has regrouped, now called Gulaggh, with a similar plan of attack, with one little twist, according to the band, Gulaggh will be about "the perversion and inversion of Classical music combined with the vocals of the mentally insane". Definitely sounds good. Or maybe good is not the right word. But like Stalaggh, it seemed like Gulaggh would be equally disturbing.
So here it is. One track, 45 minutes, of totally haunting, mysterious... music? Sound? Soundart? Hard to know how to classify this. The sound of a voice, reverbed, over a deep distant thrum, all wrapped in little bits of hiss and creak, long tones rumble and drone, and then the voices begin to surface, mewling and moaning, groaning and mumbling, all over an insidious low end thrum, horns bleat, various bits of percussion pound scrape, and still the various voices get louder, more and more frenzied, the overall vibe ever more terrifying. The sound does seem to get classical, but more like an orchestra tuning up, abstract tones and atonal bleats and blurps, and then things go fucking apeshit, with all the vocalists, shrieking and screaming and howling, pounding on walls, stomping on floors, the cries growing more and more anguished, then out of nowhere some random drumming comes in, just in the middle of this cacophony of howls and shrieks, building to a frantic climax, before the voices begin to fade, swirling screams, sounding more like kids on a playground, but still intense knowing these aren't kids and they aren't on the playground. The horns step it up, honking and skronking and bleating and moaning, the drums skittering to a halt, then it's a weird fade out, quite voices, humming and murmuring and squeaking beneath the slowly fading horns, streaks of feedback, and that commanding, authoritarian voice from the beginning returns, the track ending how it started.
Holy shit, definitely super intense, and squirm inducing, somewhere between abject black ambience, a horror movie soundtrack, an educational film, a field recording, and a smattering of stumbling musical experimentation. Freaky as all get out, but in it's harrowing miserablism, does lurk moments of beauty, bits of melody, but for the most part those are definitely overshadowed by the evil and misery and terror, that the maniacs in Gulaggh have somehow rendered into music. Or at least sound.
Reservedly recommended. Difficult listening of the highest order, but would definitely be right at home on your cd shelf next to the Conet Project, the Ghost Orchid EVP recordings, and other mysterious and challenging collections of sounds found and otherwise.
Ultra noisy chaotic hardcore from South Carolina featuring ex members of Initial State and In/Humanity. Blazing fast, frenzied and abrasive, shrieking and furious, with a wry, thoughtful/humorous lyrical bent (ala Dead Kennedys or In/Humanity). Great.
All right, another "hawk" band. Lately there's been Freedom Hawk, and Doomhawk. Being somewhat "stoner rock", this is one that should also appeal to the same folks who liked Freedom Hawk. And going way back, maybe even Hawkwind. Though the classic '70s rock band that these guys most remind us of is Thin Lizzy. A LOT. They're overtly, utterly under the spell of Thin Lizzy (a band that's more influential now than ever it seems). The melodic but husky vocals are like a gruffer Phil Lynott, the twin guitars twine together harmoniously in classic Lizzy fashion. And heck, in case we didn't get it, they even do a song entitled "For Those Who Love The Lizz" that not only sounds like Lizzy, but has lyrics that cleverly consist of references to that band's songs, like "the hero and the madman", "renegade boys back in town", "that blue orphanage in the shade", etc., as a tribute to their Irish inspiration! Although, overall, Gypsyhawk are more than a tribute, bringing in elements of garage, doom, punk, prog, and good ol' metal along with the specific Lizzy/Lynott influence.
Turns out, Gypsyhawk vocalist/bassist Eric Harris used to be in blackened thrashers Skeletonwitch, another killer band we like quite a bit. What we heard was that he got kicked out of Skeletonwitch, or otherwise quit the band, while they were on tour. This happened in Los Angeles, and instead of catching a Greyhound bus back home to Ohio where Skeletonwitch are from, though, Harris decided to stay in LA and start his own band there! Which, we gotta say, is a pretty darn rock n' roll thing to do. Thus, Gypsyhawk was born. And they're quite a bit different from Skeletonwitch (whose dual guitars dated from a different era) but equally awesome. For those into more melodic stuff, anachronistically proto-metal, especially so. These guys have the riffs, the leads, the melodic hooks, and the heaviness, to be right up there in the "hawk" band pantheon. Rockin' and majestic stuff that should go down well with fans of Lizzy-lovin' bands like Bible Of The Devil, Hot Fog, Falcon, and Valkyrie.
A fine debut, and it's adorned with fantastic purpley-blue and gold artwork (that looks a bit Erol Otus-y), nicely packaged in a digi (the cd) or gatefold sleeve (the lp). And the vinyl version is limited, there's 200 on purple wax, 200 on half-and-half purple/multicolored splatter, and 100 clear with color splatter, we've got an assortment of the first two.
Hopefully we made it clear, we're stoked on this!
Rambunctious 2nd full-length here from these Pasadena, CA heshers, now on Metal Blade, whose rippin' retro rockin' sure as heck still worships Thin Lizzy and also, to a lesser extent, Motorhead. The twin guitar harmonies, the rollicking riffage, the gravely whiskey soaked vocals - yeah it's all about those two '70s proto-metal, partly punky gods, especially Lizzy. Though their influences don't stop there, of course� they do a decent NWOBHM gallop, and channel KISS catchiness and psychedelic Priest too; but not much after, say, 1980 makes it into the mix! And Gypsyhawk do it all damn well, kicking ass here with triumphant fervor, building on the promise of their debut which we also dug a lot. They've got the sound, and the songs, sheer good times for anyone who likes some '70s inspired, high energy hooky heaviness - though, we wonder if the closing cover of Rick Derringer's "Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo" isn't taking things a bit far�? Naw, they're just having fun, as will you. (Did the original version of that song have somebody yell "Smoke weed!" right before the lead break? Well if not, Gypsyhawk has rectified that oversight.)
Put this on, and sure you're probably gonna wanna follow it with some Lizzy, but not before you give the Gypsyhawk another few (or many!) spins. And it just begs for the volume to be cranked to ten or eleven. What else can we say? Really recommended for those who wanna rock! Especially fans of Thin Lizzy, Bible Of The Devil, Slough Feg, and heck that other AQ fave 'Hawk band, Freedom Hawk.
A while back we reviewed a record by Scottish depressive doom laden black metal outfit Vostok, which ended up being a favorite among the aQ black metalheads, so we were psyched to discover that there was a Vostok offshoot called Haar, who take a similar approach to black metal, imbuing it with plenty of gloomy creep and midtempo lumber, even opening up the proceeding with a almost Sabbathy sounding stoner metal dirge, before launching into some proper black buzz. But even over the course of that first track the band constantly slip into a sound much more lurching and dynamic, mathy and a bit proggy, with some dirgey guitar chug, cool double kick drumming, and soaring guitars, all wedded to the weirdly lumbering tempos that only occasionally erupt into full on blast. "To Forgive An Enemy" offers up some darkly melancholy riffage, gnarled and blackened, wreathed in strange spidery melodies, the drums pounding away underneath, which gives way to closer "Without Form Or Void", which is the weirdest of the bunch, all woozy, warped start/stop chug and churn, super mathy and complex, the song's arrangement dizzying, flitting from grinding blast, to classic metal majesty, to murky dirgery and back again, weirdly dissonant, with bellowed clean vocals and hints of classic true doom infused into the band's otherwise twisted black doom crush.
One of two new tapes this week from the Brotherhood Of Light label, who over the last few months have brought us a bunch of killer releases from Sunchariot, Surt, Uruk Hai as well as a bad ass label sampler. This latest comes from a one band band called Haar, who as far as we can tell, is the work of the man behind the label, as well as both Sunchariot and Surt (or at least someone also involved in the Brotherhood Of Light horde), and like those two groups, Haar traffics in a mournful blasting black metal, super lo-fi, with frenzied insectoid riffing, bellowed vokills, and drums blasting away, but those drums mostly buried WAY down in the mix, the overall result definitely benefits from the raw production, turning minimal black buzz into something droney and almost psychedelic, the sounds blurring into one another, washed out and super hypnotic, doused in what sound like weird FX, but could just be fucked up tape and recording process, the tape hiss almost as loud as the guitars, which give the whole thing a sort of BM by way of Jeck or Tim Hecker vibe, at least a little bit. And yet, as primitive and low fidelity as the sound is, the guitars here are fucking fierce, some seriously bad ass riffing, that sometimes seem to soar into dense tangles of blackshred, the whole thing a dizzying blackened slab frantic blast and buzz, all underpinned by a haunting moody shimmer. And be warned, even with our Walkman as loud as it would go, it was still not very loud, so be prepared to CRANK IT, and be rewarded with ears full of glorious lo-fi hypno-trance, black buzz.
We originally thought these Southern sludgelords were just adding a letter to their name to make it cooler, you know, like Mutiilation with two 'i's, or Wooden Shjips with a 'j', or Celestiial also with two 'i's, but it seems that perhaps they are named after a certain High Frequency Active Aural Research Program, a program seemingly designed to explore radio communication via the ionosphere, but it reads more like some sort of weaponized sound to us. And hell, if weaponized sound is what you're after, look no further than these New Orleans heavies, who we had previously heard sharing a split with fellow Southern crushers Thou, and you know any band with the sonic balls to throw down with a group like Thou, well, needless to say, prepare to have your ass handed to you.
Which is precisely what'll happen, about 10 seconds into this, Haarp's debut, a crusty, filthy, pummeling slab of epic downtuned NOLA style crush. It's pretty impossible to not think of Eyehategod when it comes to this sort of stuff, and seeing as these boys were drinking the same water, it makes sense that The Filth definitely has the feel of EHG worship, but like Thou, they definitely have their own take on this sludge/doom/dirge thing, most notably the vocals, a fierce, monstrous bellow, WAY up in the mix, that sounds more death metal than sludge metal, sort of Chris Barnes crossed with Phil Anselmo (this was released on Anselmo's Housecore label after all), a voice that perfectly suits Haarp's slow-mo swagger and caveman pummel.
Slow, groovy, heavy as fuck, but with some surprising bits mixed in here and there, surprising super melodic stretches, psychedelic guitar leads, some classic metal harmonies, but for the most part this is an epic skull caving rib cage rattling avalanche of black hole slo-mo sound, absolutely required listening for doomlords into the usual slow and low suspects: Eyehategod, Cough, Thou, The Body, Buzzov-en, etc...
NEW ON tUMULt!!!!
It's starting to get seriously tUMULtuous around here. One killer disc just out and still fresh, The Memories Attack, (one of ,if not THE pop record of last year, this year and any year, in Andee's humble opinion), THREE new releases about to drop (Diamatregon, Amocoma and the Ovens) and this, the first full length record from French ultra-mega-abstract-doom trio Habsyll, which just so happens to feature one member of the mighty Fantastikol Hole, as well as the former drummer of faerical punk blasters Nuit Noire!
But nothing, and we mean nothing will prepare you for Habsyll's particularly virulent strain of ultradoom. Heavy and slow, yeah obviously, but it's HOW heavy (very) and HOW slow (ummm, so slow the songs seem to have almost zero forward momentum) that makes Habsyll something much more than a metal band or a doom band, it's almost like twentieth century classical played with downtuned guitars and massive drums. So much space, the notes and drum beats miles apart, the drums not so much beats and rhythms (although those do pop up occasionally) as brief explosions or percussive squalls, more for dynamics and texture, or if they are actually engaged in some sort of actual beat, it's mind bendingly abstract and extended and slow to the point of hovering around 2 or 3 bpm. Think Khanate, Monarch, Moss, Bunkur, Fleshpress? You're already thinking too fast, too structured, too riffy. This is some excessive extremist radical dooooooooom, the sort of chug and plod and buzz and bombinate that makes the rest of those bands sound like speed metal.
But in this slow sprawl, and these long stretches of decay, these sudden flurries of drum splatter and downtuned chug, there is a buried beauty, occasionally, these disparate parts mesh into a brief flicker of melody, or a single epic majestic hook filled swell, before slipping back into blackness. And once or twice the band ramps it up, and locks into some serious pounding crushing black hole sludge, but even then, it's a crawl, a glacial black ooze tempo, and before too long, the band abandon any sense of rhythm or tempo, opting instead to drift through some wide open stretch of outerspace ultra doom emptiness.
The guitars go from grinding and sharp, to muddy and massive, the chugs flung into the ether and carried along on streaks of whirring hiss and blackened buzz, spitting out huge jagged shards of feedback, and long smears of blurred anti-riffage, the bass is a massive cloud of low end, throbbing and pulsing, exploding like a brick wall to the side of the head before slipping back into a shadowy rumble, the vocals a caustic demonic shriek, raspy and hellish, slipping into an almost hysterical falsetto, and just as often offering up some alien ululations, and the drums, oh the drums, any drummer can tell you how hard it is to play slow, but they're talking slowcore slow, or even regular doom slow, this is something else entirely, this is doom drumming gone free jazz, pound and skitter in equal measure, meting out beats one at a time, like some sleek black submarine releasing depth charges.
Two lengthy epics, 17 minutes and nearly 29 minutes, neither very traditionally doomlike, but both most definitely doom, maybe more 'doom', than most actual doom we've heard. Like staring into the abyss, or looking up at a black moonless night sky, these sounds are the sounds of emptiness, of bottomless depths, of never ending expanses of space and time, the end of the world, the birth of new universes, the sound of black holes, of exploding stars, the soundtrack to the end of the world, to the end of everything. Slow and heavy and low and spaced out and damaged and fucked up and strangely beautiful and mysterious and abstract and far out and completely kick ass while remaining very very very difficult listening indeed!
This is a split label release, tUMULt of course, along with 5 other kick ass labels: At War With False Noise, Obscure Sombre, PsycheDOOMelic, Skyr and Odio Sonoro.
- MPEG stream: II
- MPEG stream: I
We first heard about these guys via the awesome Hammer Smashed Sound blog, described as "black rituals for the vastness-appreciative", the band listing their influences as "Movement of woods, rocks, plants & nature as such - plus the vastness of it all. Abyssal fear, fire, wholeness, monolithic things, megaliths, human insignificance, occult systems of cosmology & meaning, open systems of cosmology & meaning, clean violence, swift violence, enlightenment..." PLUS there's the fact that this, their debut record, came housed in a hand crafted leaf encrusted wooden sleeve, so we were pretty much already sold. Thankfully, their blackened sonic rituals more than live up to those obtuse and abstract descriptors, and the stunning packaging.
Black ambience might be too reductive when trying to describe Hadewych's mysterious soundworld, but it's a start. Occultic, ritualistic, grim, mysterious, haunting, all of the tracks here exist in some sort of moonlit nether region, the whole record some sort of fantastic journey, rendered in abstract sound, huge heaving swells of dense drone, muted pits of abstract percussion, softly crumbling bits of ambient whir, the sounds clipped and layered and assembled into lumbering skeletal rhythms, deep processed vocals, intoning some strange prayer, while a bleak black melody plays out in the background, and some super freaky demonic vocals surface, belch out some wordless filth, before splintering and collapsing back into the swirling blackness below.
Dense walls of SUNNO)))-ish rumble dissolve into some skittery almost-electronica, wrapped around more of those freaky belchy vocals, and some shimmery choral vocals overhead, before the record switches gears, and sprawls into some softly glitched pop ambience, all shimmer and drift and hover, laced with haunting strings and whispered vox buried in the mix, chimes ring out, voices are stretched out into warm whirling sun dappled streaks of sound, layered acoustic guitars explode into squalls of blown out psychedelia, infused with intercepted radio broadcasts, a woozy washed out cloud of lumbering crunch and majestic soft noise, only to dissipate into another sprawling bit of rhythmic ambience, with warm soft focus guitars drifting over skittery electronics, and more hushed vox, giving way to a blown out, muffled in-the-red black folk drone, the notes and chords so saturated they sound almost percussive, and the more you listen, the more the various sounds ooze and blend and bleed into one.
Lilting echo drenched folk leads us toward the end of our journey, atonal and buzzy, the steel strings soon fade out, leaving a gorgeous low end stretch of looped and layered tones, a sort of murky minimal pulse, haunting and ominous, and totally hypnotic, a quick burst of clatter and crunch leads us into a field of dense harmonium drone, hissing and wheezing, a gloriously textured expanse of warm whirs, peppered with strange field recordings, the crunch of footsteps, the panting of panicked breathing, which finally leads us to the black path, leading to an emptiness in the center of the black forest, the sound emanating from that void a deep rib cage rattling rumble, shot through with bits of glitch and hiss, and long streaks of some mysterious reverbed rasp, tendrils of feedback, fragments of melody, the shimmer of vibrating steel strings, tolling bells, all gradually blurred into blackness. So intense. Epic and cinematic, like the score to a life lived beneath the looming shadows of the great black oaks, or the soundtrack to a doomed expedition to the underworld, mysterious and evocative, and so so hauntingly beautiful.
LIMITED TO ONLY 165 COPIES, housed in a red felt lined handmade wooden case, with four double-sided cards, the whole thing packed in incense-dried Norway maple leaves. Wow.
We've said it before. A bunch of times. In lots of reviews, but we'll say it again. There's just something about FRENCH black metal. Not sure what it is exactly, some of it sounds similar, but plenty of it definitely does not, but somehow, there's some ineffable -thing- that makes French black metal, special, hell, maybe BETTER than most black metal. Just off the top of our heads here's a list of French black metal bands (one that we've probably enumerated in other reviews before, but again, it bears repeating): Deathspell Omega, Katharsis, Mutiilation, Antaeus, Blut Aus Nord, Diamatregon, Peste Noire, Vlad Tepes, Aosoth, Hell Militia, Alcest, Otargos, Arrival Of Satan, S.V.E.S.T., Wolok
So yeah, we love French black metal, and one band we've dug for ages, but never reviewed on the list is this one, Haemoth, who released a couple full lengths back in 2003-2004, but this is a collection of all the band's demos, from 2001-2004, and they KILL. The sound appropriately raw and black, the guitars super distorted and blown out, the vocals sick and processed, and the songs oozing all sorts of crazy atmospheres, the opening track, with headphones on, there's all this weird low end thrum, and strange buried melodies, all swirling and pulsing beneath the buzz and pound, even without headphones it makes the song sound creepy and dense and really really cool. It might be some sort of bass or synth or processed guitar, cuz it's on the next track too, which has some seriously thick crumbling distortion, all laced with lots of drone and weird murk, the sound SO in-the-red, and so crazy heavy, check out the first couple sound samples, you'll be sold.
The older demos are more brittle and lo-fi, but still ooze menacing alien atmosphere, and are bizarrely arranged, and slip from crusty creepy plod to blurred and buzzy blast, the drums murky pulses in the thick swirls of guitarbuzz and howled vokills. There are plenty of drones and ambient breakdowns and lots of weird experimentalism scattered throughout, enough to satisfy folks into the more twisted shit, but raw and grim and black enough for the true / old school black hordes.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We first discovered this local black metal horde via a visit to radio station KFJC, who always invite aQ to be part of their annual 'Christless Eve', where the night of December 24th, they play the darkest, heaviest, sickest, weirdest black metal / noise / experimental music, with the aim of casting a black shadow over the cloying holiday cheer. This most recent year, heading home around 3am Christmas morning, after having been listening to crazy heaviness and warped black buzz for hours, we left with just one thing on our minds (well, two, if you count getting home and going to sleep), which was a newfound obsession with some band called Hagor. Whose single track that was played that night, lodged itself in our brain, and infected us with its whathefuck genius. It took some doing, but we finally got in touch with the band, and they brought some copies by of their cd-r, and holy shit, this stuff is so twisted and fractured and fucked, obviously influenced by classic blackness, but somehow on the way from listening to the classics, to making their own, the DNA got all tangled up, and the resulting sounds are some of the coolest weirdest black metal we've heard in ages, with much of this being so twisted up it's barely black metal at all. In fact, the opening track, "Accursed", is at the outset, a galloping rhythm, and a clean guitar riff, we were prepared for it to explode into some buzzing blackness, but then those elements just seem to lock into a dizzying loop, the guitar getting occasionally more distorted, but for the most part, it's a strange sort of hypnotic rhythmic psychedelic jam that reminds us a bit of 'wooden metal' weirdos Varghkoghargasmal. The second track is most definitely black metal, but it's SOOOOO lo-fi, it doesn't just sound like a rehearsal tape, it sounds like it was recorded on a lapel mic, super tinny, mostly just drums and vocals, but in its twisted minimalism, it becomes something else entirely, especially the burst of cymbal skree that sounds more like blasts of white noise. "Blitz-Krieg" is about as close as these guys get to traditional blackness, a loping midtempo blackbuzz blowout, that's blurred and smeared into a sort of greyed out drone, again those weirdly recorded drums give it a super twisted experimental vibe, even here when it's essentially super primitive raw blackness. And it doesn't get any less twisted as the record progresses, the strange soaring rhythmic synth prog of "Life In Death", or the crazy ULTRA lo-fi black pound of "Window Of Transparency", the warm, buzz drenched, woozy dirge of "Vigorous Forests"(great title!) or the -second- "Window Of Transparency", which manages to take the first one, and make it even more bizarre, the cosmic synthiness of "The Shift Of The Galaxy", or the droned out brittle buzz of "Spectrum", with some of the sickest vokills ever, the blown out, lush crumbling dirge of "Argus", replete with a sort of Burzum-y synth melody, over a dense black churn, to the record closer, which takes grim blackness and weds it to sort of primitive cold wave, minimal, tripped out, distorted and fucking bafflingly brilliant.
Absolutely essential listening for folks into twisted lo-fi blackness and warped outsider whathefuck buzz...
LIMITED TO ONLY THIRTY COPIES!!! We have almost half of the pressing, but needless to say, if you want one, best grab one quick...
