Hot on the heels of the recent Black As Pitch record, one man band Jabaldav returns with a much more abstract outing... Whereas BaP, and the previous release Dead As Duck, were both homages of a sort to SF black metal legends Weakling, albeit filtered through some Black Flag damage and some fucked up black studio magic, 3K Hum sounds basically like what the title would lead you to imagine. Longform drones, drawn out expansive low end soundscapes, still black and haunting, brutal in their own way, but more hypnotic, more trancelike, owing more to SUNNO))) and Niblock than Immortal and Ildjarn.�
The opening track is nearly 15 minutes of digital burble, tape hiss and amp buzz, woven into a slow simmering stretch of glitch-pocked shimmer, like strange malfunctioning machinery, floating�along a slow flowing black river, sputtering and struggling to make more than buzzes and bzzzt's, immersed in a deep resonant sonic flow. Eventually, a riff enters the fray, but it's soooo slow, and weirdly digitized, it's more like a dense cloud of overdrive tone, thick and roiling, keening and white hot, before drifting off again, leaving nothing but a strange Morse code sort of Raster-Noton click and buzz ambience...
The second track is much more smoothed out, a gorgeous languorous sun baked crawl, long distorted notes stretched way out, flecked with sharp bits of overdriven buzz, a lazy metallic minor key threnody, burning hot but slowly, smoldering and intense, very alien, but warm and hauntingly emotional. This is followed by a brief series of Close Encounters like tones, that occasionally overheat and become super distorted swells, before reverting again to gentle drifting harmonics, before the 'bonus track' (which is NOT on the cassette), a massive 44 minute epic, a gorgeous washed out drift, shades of Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck, and other masters of soft focus blur, like the soundtrack for some weightless drift through space, distant glimmers, barely there melodies, soft warm melodic swells, little shards of FX, like lost transmissions from some dying satellite, slipping effortlessly from ominous and dark, to dreamy and hopeful, this track all on its own is like an entire record in and of itself, but of course manages to be the final part in 3K Hum's multi part epic... So lovely...
And also on the cd (and not on the tape), is a brief coda, a weird robotic blur of buzzing tones and crumbling distortion, haunting and speaker shredding, but again in its own black buzzing way quite pretty...
The cd is packaged in a DVD case, with full color cover, and two full color inserts.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!!! Each one hand numbered.
As we wait for the next Jabladav full length, the ultra brutal Atta Vinter, the band have released this ambient precursor, taking it's cue from the spacier elements of Paysage D'Hiver, but also incorporating plenty of free noise drift, new age shimmer, and abstract kraut-drone.
Unlike past Jabladav ambient missives, the focus here is less on low end, on the rumble and whir and buzz, instead, it's much airier and spacier, tinkling chimes, warm swells of soft focus synths, there are some haunting things happening below, deep bellow thuds, industrial groans and creaks, but they are so far down in the mix as to just add a bit of texture and mystery. Otherwise, the sound is strangely sun dappled, glimmering, shimmering, ethereal and effervescent, and yeah, new age-y, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, David Parsons, the whole first side is slow sprawling expanse of dreamy new age-y shimmer.
The second side slips a bit more into low end, but not rumbling or buzzing, not doom drone or dirge, instead, another warm whirring, lighter than air bit of sonic weightlessness, mesmerizingly tranquil, relaxingly otherworldly, this is the sound of drifting through space, or floating amongst the clouds, sun dappled or moonlit, the sounds on Ambience are a softly shifting soundtrack to leaving your body and exploring the vast expanses of inner, and outer space.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered....
It's all been leading up to this. Seven releases in less than 4 years, we now find ourselves bowing before long anticipated (at least around here) record number eight from this Weakling worshipping, Black Flag channeling one man black metal band, who as we've mentioned before, began life as nothing more than a fun fuck-around musical HAILZ to the late great Bay Area metal masters Weakling, and heck, if you're gonna pick a band to emulate and be influenced by, you could do a LOT worse. But it didn't take long for that influence to fade, and for Jabaldav to find their own voice. And that voice was indeed a twisted one, a sound that struck a chord with aQ weirdo black metal obsessives, a twisted and gnarled blackness, jagged and harsh, hooky and heavy, and plenty weird and warped.
On Atta Vinter, Jabladav expand their sound considerably, present still are the frenzied buzzing, the relentless blast beats, the grinding Greg Ginn-ish like guitars, but the songs on AV are way more epic and sprawling, weirdly haunting and majestic, long stretches of choral drift, of looped keyboard-drenched ambience, acoustic guitar flecked streaks of orchestral sounding mellotron, strange bits of abstract vocals, soaring strings, all woven seamlessly into huge crushing slabs of black brutality, of howling pounding primitive pound.
Weirdly enough, the punk element is in full effect here too, with some of the tracks sounding like slightly more metal versions of classic Midwestern punk rock, at least one is a dead ringer for Die Kreuzen, which is NEVER a bad thing. The vocals are way more varied too, from yowled bellow, to feral yelp, to hellish shriek, most of the songs are pretty short too, with more than half under 3 minutes, but plenty of wild tangled riffing and octopoidal drumming crammed into those few minutes. And even at its punkest, the sounds are a breath away from full on furious black metal blur, and that's sort of the magic of Jabladav, a careening, lurching unpredictable punkish black metal blowout that confounds and confuses, slipping from total Norwegian style icy blast, to killer loping post punk tangle, to gorgeous shimmery drone, and back again, the various elements so disparate, but so perfectly meshed, the melodies catchy as hell, the riffs super memorable, the sound still strangely sharp and lo-fi, almost lush, but the guitars ultra distorted and super saturated, the drums pounding but buried in the mix, the flow of the record a definite sonic journey, culminating in the final 3 song suite, a long-ish expanse of downtuned doominess, that gives way to mathy grinding witchiness, whose barely there drone outro leads right into a brief blast of weirdly melodic almost power-metal sounding blackness, with harmonized guitars and a super blown out in-the-red sound, which finally, leaves us battered and bruised before the epic 11 minute closer, which begins all spidery minor key guitar, and whirring warbling mellotron, before exploding into perhaps one of the most frantic bits on the record, a lurching, twisted downtuned, buzz drenched stutter, with one of the weirdest, and most KILLER riffs ever, before again slipping into that murky spidery crawl, and then back again, over and over, the heavy riffage, getting simultaneously more and more distorted and fucked up, but more and more catchy and melodic, the weird mellotron drones only adding a distinctly creepy vibe to the proceedings, the whole track impossibly complex and dizzying, before the track stumbles to a standstill, leaving a shadowy blur, a strange funereal drift, the blackened tendrils of sound gradually shriveling up and dying, leaving nothing but darkness.
Next level shit for sure, maybe too much for the grim troo old guard, but screw them, for the rest of us, this is exactly the sort of stuff we're always dying for, buzzing, blackened, outsider, otherworldly, weird as shit heaviness that defies easy categorization. WAY recommended. Maybe the best Jabladav yet, which is saying something!
And just like the other Jabladav records, limited to 100 copies, each one hand numbered and signed, most with a little something extra inside.
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Latest missive from this Weakling-worshipping one man black metal band, whose sounds has changed quite a bit since his very Dead As Dreams beholden debut Dead As Duck, with the music growing more and more varied, and the playing getting more and more polished, the recording too constantly improving or at the very least changing, even at its lowest fidelity now, it sound intentional, an integral part of the sound. What began as a rehearsal space recorded DIY project, now sound downright professional, at times, and while in many cases we'd lament that sort of 'progress', in the case of Jabladav, it really does seem to suit the sound.
Ayr begins with a gorgeous bit of acoustic guitar, before the record kicks in proper, and while it may be more polished, that doesn't mean it's not still a bit twisted and weird, clean guitars jangle over clipped drums, howled vox, it's a weird sort of blackened pop, until the buzz comes in, and then, well, it still sounds like blackened pop, reminding us of Hypothermia, that same sort of loping jangly blackness, the distortion more crumbly and blown out than the traditional black buzz. The next track too starts out all clean guitar, and crooned clean vocals, moody and swoonsome, until suddenly lurching into a chaotic black buzz, and it's definitely chaotic, a wild maelstrom of furious riffing, drums-down-the-stairs blastbeats, and of course harsh demonic vokills. The song slips right back into the clean guitar lope, the buzz swooping in again, but this time remaining a midtempo lope, this time just wreathed in a black buzz, the whole thing driven by a prominent bassline, which gives the track a distinctly gloomy gothicky feel.
But it's not all clean and croon, "Oktober" is a frenzied blast of gnarled blackness right out of the gate, raw and feral, with some awesome stop/start arrangements, the sound filthy and crusty, blown out and in the red, which helps to balance the comparatively melodic opening salvo.
The next track, even after starting out with classic black metal intro, launches into a strange hybrid, that melds black buzz to burbling basslines, strummed acoustic guitars, more of those demonic vox, the result is a strangely washed out almost shoegazey sounding blackened metal, with definite pop elements lurking beneath the surface, the vocals getting particularly creepy and unhinged. It's a cool sound, and definitely unlike any other black 'metal' we've heard. And so it goes, the record continuing to confound, as Jabladav seems to loved doing, the next track a woozy slo-mo dirge, some killer riffing wrapped around a minimal beat, mesmerizing and hypnotic, might be one of our favorite tracks on the record, the guitars thick and buzzy but still melodic, the sound harsh and heavy, but atmospheric and a bit doomy.
The title track begins with the sound of thunderstorms, beneath weirdly processed guitars, a warped shimmery guitarscape, ambient and strangely psychedelic, the song does briefly explode into some black buzz about halfway through, but the buzz is muted, and the song is driven by a lilting melody, and everything is blissed out and becomes more so as the song morphs back into that opening pulsing guitarscape. Finally the record finishes off with another bit of impossibly melodic black buzz, the first half all chiming and shimmering, the second half more of the same, but wedded to a buried blast beat, and with slightly more buzz, but still ultimately melodic and more pretty really than grim or black.
This may in fact be the least overtly black metal Jabladav record yet (barring the ambient discs), and is most definitely the strangest, but because of all that, it might just be our favorite so far�
Packaged in a purplish-pink digipak, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, each one signed and hand numbered ON THE SHRINKWRAP, which means if you open it, that number will be gone, unless you save the plastic wrap.
Record number two from this strangely monickered black metal one man outfit, borne out of a mighty love for dead and gone SF black metallers Weakling. And who can blame Mr. Jabladav? Of the modern breed of black metal, Weakling hewed closest to the spirit of the legendary Norwegian BM royalty, while still managing to create something completely unique, off kilter and beautifully and brilliantly fucked. Pity they only managed one record, but what a record it was...
Where as the first Jabladav disc, Dead As Duck (note the Dead As Dreams like title) mixed outright Weakling worship, frosty grim riffage, furious blast beats, epic arrangements, with a distinct post rock / math rock vibe and some seriously twisted and damaged Greg Ginn-ish Black Flag like gnarled guitars, the new one Black As Pitch (hmmm...) while still rooted in the epic buzz of Weakling and the bands that came before, expands the scope and the sound of the first one, in a big way. The core is still a grim black buzz, but even at its most black metal, the arrangements are completely convoluted and confusional, with long stretches of abstract riffing, bursts of chaotic free-black-metal, if there is such a thing (and if there's not there sure as hell should be), but the BM here is still troo and completely amazing, the guitars are super hot, in the red, blown out and WAY up in the mix, the drums too, loud as fuck, the double kick sounds (and feels) like someone pounding on your chest with both fists. Thick swaths of creepy alien keyboard sometimes drift over the black blasts, and often the blackness dissipates leaving gorgeous stretches of rumbling drone or shimmering ambience, the vocals are reverbed and sound like they must be samples or snippets from some movie, giving the songs an even creepier vibe.
Then there's the 14+ minute "Vinter Meditation", an extended chunk of cinematic ambience, all strange synths and creepy sounds, mysterious voices, and random abstract sonic disturbances, but the whole song is peppered with furious bursts of black metal, the engulf everything, saturating all the surrounding sounds with thick viscous blackness, before drifting off just as suddenly, leaving more haunting ambience, minor key melodies, the sounds of wind and thunder, soft billowing bits of chordal drift.... The rest of the record is filled out with more conventional length black blasts, except for the 31 minute drone epic "St. Philip Episcopal Church", which begins as a muted whir, a distant drone, layers shifting and overlapping, until thick grinding crumbling guitars swoop in, adding a caustic layer of fuzz over the top, and the track continues like that, sort of seesawing back and forth, from minimal shimmer, to corrosive drone, that distorted guitar changing shape constantly, from prickly buzz, to pulsing Spacemen 3 like whir to FX drenched outer space swirl, to brutal black drone. That piece alone would constitute a whole release on any one of our favorite modern abstract noise cd-r labels, but here it's just part of the bigger sonic picture, the songs short and long, black and beautiful, are all tangled up, sonically and thematically, the ambience balances the buzzing blackness and vice versa.
The record closes with an Ildjarn cover, a brief blown out black stomp, relentless and furious, the guitar still way blown out, the vocals louder than ever, the riff simple and almost punk rock, primitive and furious and fierce. Somehow it seems like the perfect way to finish off, after all the extended experimental ambience and super mathy black metal weirdness, a good old fashioned, primitive, old school, spiked, leather clad, corpse painted, church burning bloody axe attack!!
The cds are limited to 100 copies, each one hand numbered, the cassettes are numbered to 150 copies, each of those hand numbered as well.
LAST COPIES EVER! We had thought they were gone already, but Jabladav just sent us a final handful of this 2009 release...
Three new songs from one man black metal band Jabladav, limited to only 100 copies, so grab one while you can. Jabladav explores some different sounds on here, the opener "Coldest Last Winter" begins with just keyboards, and clean guitar before the distortion kicks in, but instead of exploding into a frenzy of black buzz, the song lopes drearily, the keyboard remaining, plinking out a sorrowful minor key melody, while the drums pound out a doomic tempo, and the guitar buzz all washed out and Striborg like. It's heavy but more sort of dreamy and ethereal, near the end things get a little more mathy and convoluted with some cool stop starts, but for the most part it's all drift and haunting and doomy.
The second track is another keyboards and guitar jam, the guitars tangled and folky, intricate and lush, the keyboards set on some strange human voice setting, so it sounds like a stuttering choir, and again, the 'band' kicks in, a trudging plod, harsh vokills over angular distorted chug, before things build to a full on black blast, the keyboards drifting creepily below the surface the whole time.
The final track is way more classic Jabladav, the guitars sharp and jagged and buzzy, the drums frenetic and blasting, the melody epic and haunting, with some cool stumbling, lurching gnarled arrangements and a cool black ambient outro. Rad stuff as always. A bit different, but still shot through with that same twisted Jabladav vibe.
Comes in a printed color sleeve, the 7"s are each numbered, there's an insert too, also numbered and signed and each with a little drawing, ALSO comes with a cd-r featuring the tracks from the 7", that too is hand numbered.
Latest from our favorite one man, Weakling by way of Black Flag styled black metal band, but don't be expecting any gnarled black blasts or pounding frenzied freakouts, Communion With Mother & Machine falls more in line with any of the various Jabaldav ambient records, but is notable for being created using mostly Buddha Machines and Black Boxes. A slow burning sonic collage, a blackened sprawling composition, that takes those prerecorded loops, as well as the process of switching from loop to loop (including any clicks or buzzes), and weaves them into a lush, densely layered dronescape, along with samples of other Jabladav recordings, field recordings of nature at night, Mellotrons, as well as some effects and feedback, the process is detailed in the liner notes, a simple technique of setting up the boxes in a circle around the microphone, with a particular box manually moved closer to increase its volume / presence, the colors of the Buddha Machines used are detailed as well (1 red, 1 orange, 1 white and 2 blue), as is the recording gear used, and various other steps of the process. And while that stuff is definitely interesting, it's the finished recording that matters, and it's incredible, a swirling, smoldering loopscape, crickets chirping over distant whirs, slowly shifting layered melodies, the glitch and grit of the tiny speakers adding more buzz and blur to the proceedings, deep melodic swells pulsing and shimmering, the loops slipping from organic and amorphous to machinelike and repetitive and back again, creaks and groans, disembodied voices, everything building to lush heaving slabs of layered density, laced with tinkling melodies, all set amidst thick clouds of muted crunch, smoothed into gorgeous expanses of blissed out lustrous mesmer. So great.
Total nirvana for dronelords, and as with all Jabalav stuff, WAY recommended, whether buzzy or beautiful, or both.
Packaged in super swank 6 panel digipaks, each one signed and hand numbered, and limited to ONLY 100 COPIES!!!
For a band that didn't exist for very long, only had one record and who have been broken up for years now, SF's mighty Weakling still cast a pretty long shadow. We still sell Dead As Dreams like crazy, more and more people are professing their undying love for Weakling's black grandeur every day, and band after band, some more subtly than others are displaying in their music, some serious Weakling worship. Wolves In The Throne Room are a recent example, they obviously expanded on the sound but there are moments where WITTR are a dead ringer for Weakling. Then there is Jabladav, who almost come off as a sort of Weakling homage, what with the very Dead As Dreams-ish title, the album artwork, and of course Weakling topping the thanks list, which also includes Burzum, Darkthrone, Black Flag, Ildjarn and Wolves In The Throne Room. But Jabladav, seem to approach metal from a distinctly non-metal background. It's subtle, but noticeable. Black Flag in the thanks list should give you some indication. Not that this isn't black and buzzy, heavy and thrashing and brutal, it is, one man, just guitar bass, mellotron and drums, but there is a distinctly post rock, punk rock vibe that permeates much of Dead As Duck. Take out some of the thick swaths of dramatic keyboards and insane bursts of double kick drumming, and sometimes you're left with some very Greg Ginn-ish angular metallic post punk. But when all is said and done, Jabladav whip up some serious black skree, with buzzy crunchy guitars dominating the mix, some murky drumming, bits of bass here and there, a little keyboards, mostly instrumental, but when there are vocals, they are a haunting croon, much like the madman in Urfaust. There are even some dreamy folky interludes. Fucking awesome stuff for sure. We've been playing this like mad since we got it. So if you dig any of the aforementioned bands (we might even include in the list Earl Shilton, Carcass, even the Champs maybe) you'll definitely love this! LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc hand numbered.
Not one, but TWO new releases from this one man, Weakling worshipping black metal misanthrope, known as Jabladav, but maybe this one doesn't count, as it was recorded under the influence, HEAVILY under the influence, and thus is a bit of a stumbling, lurching mess. But what a glorious mess it is. If it wasn't called Drunk As Duck (a reference to the debut Jabladav record Dead As Duck) and if it didn't have a cover image of discarded corks from (presumably) bottles drunk, and if there wasn't an apology in the liner notes asking the listener to listen with a sense of humor, if NONE of that were present, we probably would have just assumed this was some super wacked, freaked out, damaged lo-fi black metal record, and we would have loved it just as much as we do now, maybe even more.
Take the normal sound of Jabladav, lower the dexterity level, slow things down a bit, make it a bit doomier, a bit murkier, add a bit more stumble, a bit more warble, and fuck, if your not left with something truly deranged and warped.
Way less mathy and complex than Jabladav proper (due, we assume, in no small part, to inebriation), the sound on Drunk as Duck, is a lurching doomic black metal, which at times reminds us a bit of Xasthur, or more specifically, the legion of Xasthur influenced black buzzers, with it's murky miserablism, it's stumbling rhythms, but a little hooch isn't enough to remove all of Jabladav's instrumental prowess, so plenty, of that tangled riffing, and Greg Ginn like gnarled guitar freakouts still surface here and there, but they tend to be draped over murky buzzing plods, or funereal dirges. When the tracks do occasionally burst into blast mode, instead of sounding shitty, or bad, or amateur, it just sounds, well, weird, chaotic, confusional, often splintering into abstract freakouts, or meandering black jams, but that stuff sounds amazing. We wouldn't dare say we like this better than Jabladav proper, but damn if we don't like it almost as much.
There seems to be a lot more keyboards going on too, adding a definite moody creepy vibe to the proceedings, but what can we say, even wasted, this guy can craft some truly demented black brilliance.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES! Each one hand numbered.
Mysterious one man band Jabladav has proven that he is much more than just a Weakling tribute, offering up his admitted Weakling inspired black buzz infused with strange gnarled Greg Ginn-ish guitaring, and furiously fucked up post rock mathed out weirdness. Grim and buzzy, but also damaged and seriously and gloriously freaked out. He also proved he could drone with the best of them on the recent 3K Hum release, a slab of deep dark dense dronology that definitely holds its own amongst the legends of drone.
So in the spirit of 3K Hum comes this latest Jabladav release, limited to only 50 copies, so we won't get too in depth, needless to say, we were pretty much sold when Mr. Jabladav emailed us to tell us about this new release, and wrote "I've never heard a Buddha Machine sound so evil." Well, heck, what else did we need to hear? Nothing in fact.
So we got as many of the 50 as he could spare and here it is!
Recorded live, using a Buddha Machine, a piano, a Casio and a handful of effects, Jabladav has created a doomy and dark ominous drift. The Buddha Machine's loops transformed into creeping lowend sprawl, bits of distortion and decay lace these long tones, a subtle throb, a deep resonant pulse, murky and muddy and sinister, spaced out, but blurred and smeared into dark dreamlike drones.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! We got way less than that. Packaged in a slim dvd style case, full color artwork and booklet, each disc signed, and numbered, the booklet signed and the insert numbered too.
It's been YEARS since we last heard from weirdo black metal / ambient soundscaping one man band Jabladav, who we were first introduced to via his Dead As Duck debut, an unabashed homage to late great Bay Area black metallers Weakling, from the title (a reference to Weakling's Dead As Dreams), to the artwork, and yeah, right down to the music. But as we mentioned before, while it was plenty black, and plenty metal, it was also pretty far out, kinda post rocky and psychedelic, home brewed and pretty fantastically fucked up. Since that first release, we've reviewed a dozen plus Jabladav discs, all of them pretty great, and all of them pretty weird. Lots of black buzz, but also plenty of atmospheric ambience.
We had actually begun to think that Jabladav was no more, when what should show up in the mail, a huge box, with not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR new releases. Two Jabladav full lengths, an EP, and James Harlow's (aka Jabladav) first solo record under his own name. Phew! We'll tackle one at a time, but if you want all four the rest are to be found on the list below in the 'In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed' section, or just ask. But be warned, they are all extremely different.
Figured we'd start with the one closest to the 'classic' Jabladav sound, which is Fin, indeed the only properly black metal release of the bunch. Like past Jab jams, it's all twisted sinewy black buzz, progged out drumming, and raspy demonic vokills. That post rockiness is still present, keeping the sound from ever being truly grim, but instead, it ends up being almost avant, with burst of double kick erupting beneath woozy minor key melodies, the sound never truly dense, more spare and expansive. There are also acoustic guitars, and some seriously weird crooned vox, as well as some distorted buzz SO distorted it almost sounds like your speakers are fried. The guitar playing also displays Harlow's Black Flag obsession, with plenty of Greg Ginn-isms, and gristly, angular gnarl, the songs lurching from fractured stop/starts to furious metallic pound.
But it's Jabladav, so there's some kosmische drift at some point, all ethereal and blissed out, as well as some sitar like buzz, and one track that sounds like jazz fusion black metal, with a weird mix, that relegates most of the sounds to the background, while the guitar howls and screams and shreds. There's also some total planetarium dreamdrone synth shimmer, and one long final sprawl of rumbling thrum, that seems to be constructed from the low notes of a piano reverberating into a slow shifting black fog, before actual notes surface right near the end.
Another baffling sonic slab of avant WTF outsider metal genius from Jabladav, and we're glad to have him back. We'll review one of the other ones next time, but they are SUPER limited, and we got most of the copies. In fact, Fin is LIMITED TO JUST FIFTY COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered and signed, on the disc itself, on the booklet AND on the tray card as well!
Yet another recent release from this long time aQ fave, who after a protected period of silence, sent us a big ol' box with FOUR new releases. Two of which we've previously reviewed, this being the third, and much like Maj, which we listed last time, Hail is another ambient affair, and might be the prettiest, most tranquil thing we've heard from Jabladav yet. It's short, clocking in at just 19 minutes, but it's really beautiful. Haunting and pastoral, guitar chords ring out, smeared across a backdrop of hushed shimmer, the vibe sun dappled and dreamy, meditative and melancholy. It almost sounds like some sort of abstract twangscape, like a way more blissed out, drumless Earth, or even maybe Scenic, but super minimal. We also hear hints of Stars Of The Lid, and other guitar based soundscapers.
The sound unwinds and blossoms gradually, not building really, just sort of slowly shifting, the spaces as much a part of the proceedings as the sounds themselves. It also has a distinctly washed out, faded vibe, as if this might be something the Caretaker might whip up if his weapon of choice was the guitar.
You definitely don't have to be a metalhead to enjoy this side of Jabaladav, in fact, this is definitely something aimed more at anyone into psychedelic Krautrock, Pop Ambience, minimal dronemusic, and experimental guitar music, which we're guessing is a whole lot of folks reading this right now!
Like all Jabladav releases, super limited (just FIFTY COPIES) and obsessively numbered and personalized. Each disc is hand numbered, both on the disc itself and on the booklet, and both the disc and booklet are also signed. We got a bunch of these, but since there were only fifty made, it's a good bet that once these are gone, we won't be getting more.
We reviewed the cd-r Fin, from mysterious one man black metal band Jabladav, on last week's New Arrivals list, and in that review mentioned not only that it was the first release we'd gotten in years, from this previously impossibly prolific artist, but in keeping with that nascent prolificacy, he sent us FOUR new releases. Fin was the only strictly black metal release of the bunch, but over the myriad of previous releases, a bunch eschewed metal entirely in favor of blackened ambience and minimal atmospheric soundscapery, which is precisely what we get on the three track Maj.
The opener is a sprawling near half hour slab of smoldering drift, softly undulating synths, pulse beneath clouds of static and grit, melancholic melodies blur into impressionistic sonic smears, the bleary, faded grey ambience at times reminiscent of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops (and their most disintegrated), the recording too, muddy and murky, only adds to the vibe, somber and somnambulant, laced with some last minute gristly, before winding down into what sounds like a dying tape machine, fantastically gloomy and dreamy.
The second track is a bit less grim, almost pastoral, a haze of faded melodies slowly builds to a soft cacophony of blurred, layered thrum, before again, dissipating into a swirling, skeletal, soft focus fade out. Finally, the 12+ minute third track reveals itself as the most 'noisy' of the bunch, pairing a hushed dreaminess, with dense billows of reverbed noise, fields of sculpted static, and bursts of muted crunch, but even at its noisiest, the sounds are world smooth, and sound more dense and dynamic than caustic, and beneath these noisier bits, lurks an almost choral sounding ambience, dreamlike and prismatic, the sounds seemingly washed out and in a state of beautiful decay, and as the noise abates, they're revealed as a warm, barely-there shimmer, that gradually, and drowsily plays us out.
As with all Jabaladav releases, these are EXTREMELY LIMITED. Only FIFTY COPIES made! And a we got a good chunk of those. Each one is hand numbered, and signed by the man himself. Also includes a DVD-R which seems to contain the WAV files of the songs on the cd-r.
What began as an homage to legendary SF black metallers Weakling, and maybe even a joke (not a ha ha joke, more of a fucking around, we're bored so we might as well record some grim black metal joke) has pretty rapidly morphed into a serious black metal contender amongst weirdo black metal aficionados.
Jabladav is a one man band who owes as much to Weakling as they do to Black Flag. Their first release, Dead As Duck, was a gnarled Greg Ginn-ified blast of intense blackness, blown out guitar buzz, insane blasting drums, some killer riffing and huge heapings of black atmosphere, channeling Weakling through all sorts of random not-that-black business, drone, post rock, math rock, no wave, and yeah Black Flag. The thing was, whatever inspired it, was soon eclipsed by how fucked up and far out the finished product was. A baffling and fucking genius collection of convoluted black buzz. Hot on the heels of the debut, came a second disc, Black As Pitch, which was like part two of Dead As Duck, but expanding the sound, making it even more metal, more chaotic, the songs got longer, and way more complex, even introducing some intensely blackened ambience. Which led to the next record, 3K Hum, a mostly ambient affair, huge stretched out slabs of glacial blur, massive roiling low end rumble, shimmering black ambience, hypnotic and mesmerizing, and while ambient, still extremely dense and heavy.
As if that weren't an exhausting spurt of creativity, now, not all that much later, comes the latest from Jabladav, the even more expansive and sprawling 2 cd-r set Primland, two hours of incredibly tangled black riffing, super blown out buzz drenched production, creepy keyboards, and deep dark ambience, super mathy drums, demonic vocals, all wound into super extended black jams, shot through with head spinning Ginn-ish squiggly leads, stop start riffing, but all strangely melodic, a moody mournful undercurrent beneath the roiling black heaviness. And the drums, shit, the drumming is insane, WAY up in the mix, louder than the guitars even, mathy and calculus complicated, like the guy was sitting at the top of a concrete stairwell in a 40 story building, each landing mic-ed, and then proceeded to hurl drum kit after drum kit into the black abyss, only in such a way that the resulting crash and clatter coalesced into impossibly deranged black rhythms.
But then out of nowhere, there'll be a track, all murky and muddy, lo-fi and practice space style, that sounds like it could be some lost nineties BM demo. EXCEPT, it's Jabladav, so even those tracks, are layered with slow doomy tones, deep rumbling chimes, and raspy vocals, threatening to swallow up the thrashing blackness below.
The tracks are definitely tweaked, and damaged, and a little bit spaced out and acid fried, druggy and mathy, but at their core they are pure black, the riffs are blown out, recorded so loud and in the red, the chords threaten to crumble. The record careens wildly from stumbling doomic Burzum style lope, to manic crazed thrashing black blasts, often both in the same song, the strange production only adds to the mood and weirdness, the songs on Primland even more epic and far out and convoluted and fucked than any of the Jabladav we've heard before, which is saying a lot. WAY recommended black metal weirdness/brilliance.
While they last, we have the ULTRA LIMITED, wax sealed wooden box version. If it's too pricey for you, hold off and we'll relist the normal version once these are sold out, but c'mon, this music deserves more than a jewel case. These are hand assembled, hand stained wood boxes, with a removable lid, that slides out, inside are the two cd-rs, in jewel case, and a printed color insert. The box is sealed shut with a silver wax seal. Each box signed and numbered on the bottom. But be warned, these are not had crafted keepsakes, the kind on a glass shelf at your grandma's house, no, they look grim and ancient, like the music within, weathered and worn, they're beautiful, but they look like they were unearthed from some cursed tomb, left on a shelf in a locked room, in an abandoned house, where they were discovered years later. Meaning that they are not perfect, the coloring is different on each, as is the wax seal, and the seal is quite fragile, so no matter how carefully packaged, the seal might crumble, or come off in transit, but you have to remove the seal anyway if you want to listen to the music.
You have been warned...
Primland was originally released as a super limited (100 copies) double cd, housed in a hand painted, custom built wood box, sealed with wax, and thus had a price tag to match. The box is now out of print, but Primland is now available as two much more affordable single discs, the first of which we reviewed a few lists back, a serious slab of crushingly twisted blackness, this is the second disc, the abstract ambient accompaniment to the first disc's more furious fucked up heaviness. But in its own, way just as intense and black.
Whereas Jabladav typically sounds a bit like some gnarled tangled up hybrid of Black Flag and SF black metal legends Weakling (Jabladav began as an homage to Weakling in fact), this second Primland disc is something else all together, a collection of sprawling dronescapes, thick with crumbling drones, black ambience, abstract piano, long drawn out epics, expansive worlds of bleak and blackened mystery. Think MZ412 or the more recent Nordvargr / Drakh collaborations, this is brooding, haunting, malevolent minimalism, but shot through with plenty of texture and mood, layered sounds woven into organic slow moving black drifts, bits of percussion surface here and there, jarring amidst the bleak slow shifting backdrop, streaks of sound that resemble strings, the piano pounding out doomy almost-melodies, drones swelling and throbbing and pulsing beneath, some of the layers processed into dizzying loops, super hypnotic and truly strange.
One track does flirt with heaviness, offering up a sport of crumbling dirgedrone, but wrapped in static, and grinding electronics, oozing over deep dreamy swells, disembodied squalls of processed noise, so distorted they threaten to blow your speakers, before being reeled in, and swallowed whole by an impossibly thick wall of dense black hole low end, shot through with glimmering upper register tones and streaks of fragmented melody.
The final track is like a slow motion raga, all hypnotic buzz and slow burning minimalism, the speed shifting subtly throughout, the track oozing and swerving and slithering, playing tricks on the listeners ears, invoking a glorious disorienting sort of audio sea sickness, woozy and druggy, and strangely irresistible.
No metal to be found here, but that's not the point, taken with disc one, this completes Jabladav's high concept Primland epic, a massive chunk of confusional outsider black art, combining dense blackened minimalism with cracked and damaged black metal weirdness, the two halves somehow reflected in each other, both able to stand on their own, but together, making up a singular organic sonic entity.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
We've been sitting on a handful of these, the most recent release by Weakling worshippers Jabaladav, a ridiculously limited edition of just 50 copies, with the intention of eventually getting a bunch more to list and review. Well, we were informed recently by the man himself that The Cold Warmth was out of print, and thus we have the last handful of copies. And while there is a new full length on the horizon, this is most likely your last chance to get your grubby mitts on a copy of this, a collection of tracks recorded at the same time as Atta Vinter, but that were left off the final version. So Jabladav fans, if you dig AV, this is almost like a part two, all the usual Jabladav-isms are present, gnarled black blasts, mathy rhythms, killer riffing, the songs soaring and majestic one second, murky and dirge-y the next, the arrangements complex and almost proggy, with the sound switching from grim black, to grinding distorted churn, from strange processed vox flecked clean guitar moodiness to hazy, minor key almost post rock ambience, it's all good stuff, heavy and twisted, dark and tripped out. Apparently, according to the liner notes, Atta Vinter was meant to be 'to the point' and not at all epic, which is why these tracks were left off, but now with Atta Vinter AND The Cold Warmth in your clutches, the potential for grim black epicness is endless.
As with all Jabladav releases, the packaging is pretty deluxe, housed in a dvd case, with a cool color cover, signed by the band, there's a xeroxed insert, also signed by the band and numbered, as well as a smaller color insert, which is numbered, as is the disc. And again, this is out of print, and these are THEE last copies we will ever be able to get.
Seems like only yesterday we were listing a Jabaldav record... Well it was in fact the last list, but where that one was a Buddha Machine driven drift of dreamy dronemusic, Trostlosigkeit finds the Jabladav sound moving back to the Burzumic black buzz we love so much. And Burzumic is right, the first track begins as a sprawl of slow moving glacial buzz, laced with a haunting, very Filosefem sounding synthesizer melody, haunting and dreamy, but it's not long before Jabladav swing back into his Weakling meets Black Flag gnarled blackness. But the sound here is much more melodic, and blissful, lots of acoustic guitar woven into the proceedings, more midtempo then blast, and that synthesizer melody resurface throughout, giving the opening track a definite woozy melancholy vibe. "Loss" is similarly dark and dreary, like Jabladav got a depressive black metal makeover, spidery guitars give way to a muddy, murky dirgey doom-ed black buzz, more dreamy synth, the overall sound is way more lo-fi than usual, but it definitely suits the new mood and sound, weirdly pretty, but still grim and mysterious and heavy.
The title track is a sprawling 19 minute doomscape, all tangled glacial guitar, muted chug, hissed hellish vox, super spare drumming, lots of space, almost ambient really, peppered with bursts of insectoid riffing and buzzing black blasts, but always slipping back into that lugubrious doomdrone crawl, the guitars especially distorted, a weird warped bit of blackness that definitely ranks with the best we've heard from Jabaldav.
But if you though 19 minutes was epic and sprawling, prepare yourself for the record closer, "Reflection", clocking in at a hefty 33 minutes, no black metal to be found here, just some serene tranquil shimmering dronemusic, washed out and ethereal, a dreamlike drift, trancelike and meditative, and really quite lovely.
As always with Jabladav stuff, EXTREMELY LIMITED. This one to ONLY 50 COPIES, of which we got about half, housed in a DVD style case, with a full color cover, inside there's an elaborately folded insert, sealed with wax, the case also features a wax seal, the liner notes, case AND disc are all numbered and signed, grab one of these before they're gone, cuz these will blow out of here...
What's the scariest and creepiest of instruments? Could it be the downtuned electric guitar, that sound that marks all things dark and heavy and brutal and grim? Or could it be the cello with its soaring keening deep throated moan? Well we might posit, especially in light of this Jacula record, that the creepiest of all instruments is most certainly the church organ. Surprising that an instrument used chiefly to inspire and praise can illicit such utter unease and create such a pervasively creepy ambience. And that's pretty much what Jacula is all about, creepy ambience. Thick and haunting washes of warm rich church organ drone, resonant and reverberant, sometimes accompanied by simple pounding drums or mournful folky guitar melodies or wild psychedelic freakouts or soaring female operatic vocals or even occasional lyrics spoken ominously in Italian, but more often than not it's just the massive and ominous swells of a church organ. So effectively and utterly evil sounding. Jacula are sort of like a doom metal soundtrack to a Dario Argento movie. Goblin meets Skepticism! A Krautrock Thergothon? But is's not all mellow murky moodiness, tracks three and four, "Triumpratus Sad" and "Veneficium", both feature seriously fuzzed out, almost punk rock riffs, that sound about a decade before their time, insistent and completely heavy, even more so when they're eventually joined by a pounding one-drum beat or strident atonal piano or wild swirling progrock keyboards. Amazing! It's no wonder we sold the first couple of copies we got in of this to members of local black metal bands Ludicra and Leviathan!
In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum (literally "The Poison Is Always At The End"), which was supposedly recorded in an English castle, was originally released in an edition of only 300 copies in the late sixties and has been completely unavailable until just recently (this reissue cd is not entirely new, but it took us until now to get enough copies to list). Formed in 1968, Jacula even counted a medium as a member of their band who we assume was critical to the process of creating this record, considering that In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum was "Composed By Spiritualist Seance (1966-1969)" Woah! And for those of you well versed in sixties and seventies prog, be aware that this reissue is NOT the same as the Jacula record released in the early seventies (1972's Tardo Pede In Magiam Versus), even though for some strange reason Black Widow has given it pretty much the exact same cover.
Wow! This kicked our asses. Traditional '80s metal done real well -- probably 'cause these guys released their first album way back then ("Ample Destruction" circa 1984). After a looong hiatus, they began a comeback attack several years ago, somewhat
Another three inch chunk of demented black metal weirdness from the UK. If you love the grim bizarre buzz of Old Forest, who recently returned after nearly 7 years, and whose own 3" cd-r we reviewed a few lists back, or the medieval madness of Meads Of Asphodel, then odds are you're gonna love Jaldoboath. From the same strange land, and featuring at least one dark knight who has done time in both Meads and Old Forest, Jaldoboath sound a bit like the Meads mixed with power metal thrashers Bal Sagoth, if they were a bit less serious and had recorded a holiday album. Seriously. The guitars gallop, the riffs and melodies are soaring and triumphant, the vocals are gurgly and growly, but there are horns, fanfares, fluttering flutes, jaunty little jigs, strange little sound effects, proggy organs, it's almost like listening to the strangely metal court musicians of King Arthur's court in some alternate reality.
Songs like "Bring Me The Head Of Metatron", "Seek The Grail", "Hark The Herald" and "Da Vinci's Code", each track plays like the theme music for some insane medieval Monty Python metal sitcom. On "Seek The Grail" you can almost picture the credits, the freeze frames as each character is introduced, and the horns, make it sound almost ska at times. "Jargue De Molay" is the least goofy, playing instead like some metallized Emerson Lake And Palmer, with awesome organ jams, creepy crackly breakdowns, a wicked main riff, all peppered with hand claps, blasting double kick, minor key trumpets, throbbing bass.
But then right after that comes the title track, which has a strange sing song vocal line, over a lopped trumpet fanfare, and a very holiday sounding main melody. Like a legion of musical mall Santa's gone metal and marauding through the hordes of innocent holiday shoppers. But then the last track swoops in, sounding a bit like Tool filtered through UK black metal buzz, all brooding buzz, Eastern sitar like melodies, and crooned baritone vocals. Over the top and dramatic, and weirdly hooky. WTF?
So fucking far out. But if like us, you're already a loyal knight of the Meads round table and sometime dweller in the Old Forest, well then this is just the sort of thing you can't get enough of.
WAY recommended, but only for truly twisted musical souls...
And like the Old Forest 3"cd-r also on Death To Music, SUPER LIMITED!!!
Ah, the glory that was NWOBHM! (Do we need to spell it out? The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a wondrous musical phenomenon of the late '70s/early '80s, yeah, you know.) A couple lists back, in our review of the killer Wolfbane disc released by Shadow Kingdom, we mentioned there were several other cool recent NWOBHM reissues we'd be listing soon, here's one of 'em, also on Shadow Kingdom, an archival collection of material by this fairly obscure Birmingham band (named for a historical incident from the Boer War) who never made proper full-length record but nonetheless did put out some cult classic tracks, including a contribution to the Metal for Muthas II compilation. For some reason, that one's not here, but you do get 14 tracks taken from various eps and demos, etc., among them the three songs from Jameson Raid's 1979 debut single, starting off with the triumphant "Seven Days Of Splendour" (a positive story about a UFO encounter, which, for those of you who were paying attention to our Roxxcalibur review a while back, was one of the songs covered by that NWOBHM tribute band on their highly enjoyable album). The other two are the punky "It's A Crime" (which reminds us of Crushed Butler!), and "Catcher In The Rye" (that's right, inspired by the J.D. Salinger novel). While this band boogied hard for sure, they also apparently liked to have their songs be -about- something, it's thinking man's NWOBHM in a way, quite melodic too, and a bit garagey, really more '70s hard rock proto-metal than anything '80s metallic, harking back to early UFO and Thin Lizzy. Good stuff, and all the tracks here share these charms, some of the songs with sad and weary vibe derived perhaps from Lizzy, others rockin' out like greasy AC/DC...
Packaged with a thick cd booklet stuffed with lyrics, liner notes (including reminiscences from original band members), vintage photos, etc.
We read about this recently on Julian Cope's Head Heritage website -- he picked it as his Album of the Month for July 2005. We had to hear it. And having heard it, we liked it enough to order a few of 'em in! The punningly titled Jamnation isn't quite like anything we've come across before. It's, um, stoner rock spoken word. Huh?
We've never been all that big on the "spoken word" thing here at AQ, not really. Stand up comedy, maybe -- of course we like our David Cross records. And Bill Hicks. Even there, the good stuff is a rarity. But spoken word? You say spoken word, we start thinking poetry slam. Not good. Though we'll concede that there's been some worthwhile practitioners of the form. Steven Jesse Bernstein was interesting. And Rollins we have to say has had his moments. And we'll listen to This American Life all day -- we guess that stuff counts as spoken word, right?
But get this. Jamnation is a spoken word album, the voice and words of one Dan McGuire. But it's also a killer stoner/psych rock compilation of sorts. That's 'cause McGuire has gotten it into his head to speak his spoken words not over some tired Beat-style bongo jam or loungey jazz backing, but over searing electric guitar ramalamajama, epic-length tracks he's chosen out by some far-out and obscure heavy rock bands who happen to be faves of his, old and new (American '70s psych monsters the JPT Scare Band and Josefus, modern day stoner space rockers Gas Giant and ILD HU from Holland, and Japan's retro doom hippies Eternal Elysium). Which goes a long way to explaining just how McGuire's Jamnation wound up being so honored by Julian Cope. We certainly can't improve on what Cope wrote -- fella's got a way with words, y'know -- so we suggest you go read it yrself. 'Specially since you should be checking out his site anyway, a recommendation we've made before to all AQ-list readers who are into the psych/heavy side of things. Visit it at www.headheritage.co.uk.
Having picked these tracks out of his record collection (much easier than actually working with actual live musicans, claims McGuire, and we're sure he's right) he then finds the space in each song for his verbal embellishments. It's the same idea really the old Jamiacan DJ's had when they first started "toasting". This really works 'cause McGuire's verbiage is equally billed with the music. Actually it takes a back seat to the music a lot of the time, really. It's not all about him, its about the jams. Sometimes it seems whole minutes will pass while McGuire lets the guitars take center stage. Wow -- a spoken word dude that shuts up when necessary. Cool. And when he is talking, he weaves his words perfectly into the rhythms of the music. His voice is husky and laidback, a little bit like John Wayne / Henry Rollins hybrid, spinning visions of gritty reality and far out freak scenes. What he says is sometimes amusing, often cryptic, and never laughably embarrassing at any rate. It's sorta druggy rambling ranting stuff that fits perfectly with this tunage! Truly, we need to let what he's saying sink in more to give a good account of it...the thing is, McGuire's speech goes so well with the wailing guitars and chugging riffs that we're not always paying the closest attention to what he's on about, we're just digging the totality of the listening experience.
So, in sum Jamnation is a pretty excellent heavy jams comp with a guy talking over it at times, in a pretty cool, Lizard King way that fits in with the music anyway.
Furious and ultra complex jazz/grind from Seattle. Produced by the guy from Converge. Lots of insane tempo changes, stumbling free-noise and crushing walls of grinding guitars. On UK label Rage Of Achilles.
Any record that starts with a solid 30 seconds of feedback is definitely gonna be good, and then when it explodes into a frenzy of melodic crusty metal, with super distorted howled vocals (and some competing black metal shrieks), spidery harmonized guitar melodies and thick swells of stonery sludge, it pretty much seals the deal. Which is precisely the case with Beasts Among Sheep, the latest from Philly's Javelina, named for a tusked swine that terrorizes the Southwest, killing small animals and destroying gardens, but this Javelina is something way more imposing and terrifying, a lurching, ultra distorted sludge metal juggernaut, that takes what could be a head spinning kitchen sink approach to their craft and instead fuses all sorts of disparate elements into something super heavy, groovy, melodic and rocking, definite references would include NOLA bands like Kylesa, Baroness, Down, Eyehategod, Crowbar, that same sort of swampy groovy and downtuned sludge, but the guitars are straight up NWOBHM, often busting out incredible harmonized leads right in the midst of a plodding tarpit sludge workout. And the vocals, flip from cookie monster growl to demonic shriek, giving the record a totally different vibe, the bass driving everything, especially when they slow it down and get all brooding and doomy, but shit, the riffs, some of the most kick ass riffing we've heard in ages. Fans of Mastodon and High On Fire will probably dig the shit out of this too, but it's away weirder and rawer and so much more catchy and fucked up and original as far as we're concerned. Be sure and stick around after the records' doomcrustprog blowout closer "Beware The Wrath Of The Patient Man", for the frenzied crust sludge secret track tucked away at the end.
Absolutely essential heaviness for sure...
Savage Pencil cover art. Gothic font. Grim graphics. Black metal sonics. So this is the new Jazzkammer?! Metal Machine Music sees this Norwegian electronic noise duo changing their name (slightly) and suddenly adopting a black/death/doom metal sound. Maybe in this case we should say Metal, using the capital M for it like The Wire magazine does. Not sure what inspired this new direction, we'd hate to think it was just that in avant-experimental-indie circles Metal is now 'cool', and that they thought hey if SUNNO))) can do it, why not us? But chances are that being from Norway they're well aware of the black metal scene and dig a lot of the same stuff about it that we do, the perhaps unintentional avant-gardisms of bands like Abruptum for instance, and figured it was time to delve into it fully themselves. What matters, anyway, is how did Jazkamer's Metal Machine Music turn out? Well, we like it! First off, Jazkamer, as opposed to Jazzkammer, is not a duo, they've brought in some other folks to help out, including a real ringer -- Ivar Bjornson of AQ fave Viking black prog metallers Enslaved!! So we're taking it pretty seriously already.
The first track, "Friends Of Satan" is a pretty harsh intro, and should serve to weed out listeners who AREN'T in fact friends of Satan. It's a blurred, blasting battery of drums and distortion, not unlike that sampled death metal disc by Francisco Lopez, Untitled 104. Or the Dave Lombardo track on Jonathan Bepler's Cremaster 2 soundtrack. The chorus of anguished vokills at the end of the track further nail down Jazkamer's black metal ballsiness. They'd be pleased to know that someone here asked, when this was playing, "What's that? Besides headache-inducing?" Following that, we encounter one of this album's main events, the 16:51 "The Worms Will Get In", a study in slow-motion, doom-dirge minimalism a la SUNNO))), Earth, and Khanate. Simple but effective. When it ends, it's a jarring segue into the next track, the jagged "Abomination". Probably the thing on here that most sounds like it could be from a "normal" black metal album, albeit with No Wave / Voivodian influences. Next up, the title track, that's along the same lines as "Abomination" but, like, ten times noisier. And then, the finale, the 12 and a half minute "Occult Glider" that's a menacing ambient fuzzed-drone soundscape, beautiful and powerful.
We're impressed. Our doubts were quashed. Better than any Jazzkammer album we'd previously heard, as a matter of fact!
One of two new releases on this week's list from Ukrainian metal label Arx Productions, strangely both of them French, and even more strangely, both of them part of that new breed of 'post' black metal. But where the other, Smohalla, is a much weirder twisted psychedelic proposition, the sounds here are more in keeping with the sort of post rocky jangle of groups like Amesoeurs and Alcest, but there's plenty of weirdness going on with this too, especially in the arrangements. Take opener "Chute De L'Etre", which plays out all sweetly sorrowful minor key jangle, spidery melodies and meandering drumming, with some soft crescendos, a little bit Mogwai, a little Godspeed, but when the metal finally kicks in, it's not a subtle slow build, thick chugging guitars just explode, surrounded by a second guitar wrapping everything in psychedelic leads, the sound dizzying and heavy, more classic metal than black metal, but with such a twisted production, it's pretty awesome, and strange. And much of the record plays out similarly, with Je fusing hushed delicate jangle with bursts of chugging crunchy classic metal riffage, often the two combining for some super heavy melodic metal that should definitely hit the spot for fans of the above mentioned post black metal outfits. The vocals are more a sort of black metal screech / noise rock yowl hybrid, but they don't really play that big a part, the band instead weaving gorgeous brooding expanses of post rock, with distorted metal crunch, and in fact, the second half of the record definitely leans way more in the metal direction, with even a few blast beats popping up here and there, but even at it's most metal, the sound is still poppy and melodic, and will definitely leave grim true metalheads wanting, but for the rest of us, who like our black buzz with some fuzzy shoegazey melody, this will definitely hit the spot.
Here's one of those albums that we KNEW we'd make Record Of The Week - IF ever it was reissued. And now it has been! Here's a fully legit reish of this cult '70s hard rock rarity, a record by one of those bands who seem simultaneously to be both testosterone-tanked young men and wizened ol' wise wizards. Yeah, a Record Of The Week easy, on account of it not only being an old fave of some of us here, but something that immediately caught on with the AQ staffers who hadn't heard it before, this reissue getting played in the store quite steadily (and loudly!) since it arrived. Let's listen in, as Jerusalem's vocalist belts it out, in an emotive yowl a bit like Robert Plant but with Ozzy Osbourne's paranoid feelings: "Hey girl, will you never learn? Who d'you think you're fooling with your lyin' and your cryin'? You'll only be happy the day you see me dyin'!" But then, in more of a normal speaking voice, we get the casual aside: "Oh yeah, that's the way it happens sometimes. Ha."
Right on, brilliant. That's from "Frustration", the first of nine fantastic tracks on the one and only album by this English band, recorded in 1971, released in '72 on Deram/Decca, produced by Deep Purple's Ian Gillan. Why Jerusalem didn't get big is a mystery, though the liner notes give some clues as to why they disbanded. Heck they're even fairly unknown (or a well-kept secret) among connoisseurs of '70s heavy psych and hard rock, with this being its first ever official, non-bootleg reissue on compact disc. Now, there's lots of great obscure heavy rock rarities from the early '70s. We've raved about reissues of many of them (Dust, Leaf Hound, Toad, Bang, T2, etc.). But as far as unheralded proto-metal goes, this belongs pretty much at the top of that longhaired, bellbottomed heap, as essential as any of 'em anyway. Pentagram, Bedemon, Blues Creation, Budgie, Night Sun, you name it.
Allan here first heard Jerusalem a few years back when a friend who shares his taste for proto-metal passed along a cd-r copy of this otherwise unavailable album (thanks, Glenn!). Killer stuff indeed, damn it was good. One of the heaviest things from the era he'd ever heard, Jerusalem took it to an extreme that most of their peers didn't approach. With elements of both biggies Sabbath and Zeppelin, but more frenzied and frantic on one hand, more plodding and suicidal on the other.
Crashing, fuzzed out guitars. Energetic hectic riffage. Doomy, thudding blues. Wicked stinging, sliding soloing. Punkish attitude (competitive with contemporaries Crushed Butler). The vocals often hoarse, on the verge of screaming, or gone over that edge. Yeah, pretty heavy for '72! This is rough, raw, proto headbanging mania mixed with mystical, melodic proggy interludes, of course we love it. Plus it's got a genuine dark, occult, despairing vibe, with poetic lyrics about madness, murder and death... And you can't get much more "downer rock genocidal" sounding than the truly, uh, primitive bludgeon what might be the heaviest track here, "Primitive Man".
Pretty darn metal when it comes down to it, forget the "proto". In their own way though, Jerusalem sounding halfway betwixt '60s garage rock and '80s New Wave Of British Heavy Metal... which on balance puts them a bit ahead of their time. In fact, since what's old is new again, this actually sounds like if could have been made now, not because it sounds modern (it doesn't) but because it's so line with certain stonery retro-stylings popular today, particularly in Sweden. In other words, if you like Witchcraft, you'll love Jerusalem!! We always thought that of all the obscure '70s bands that are their forebears, Witchcraft sound most like Jerusalem (well, next to Pentagram). Remember what we said in all caps about Witchcraft's debut? "PERHAPS THEE BEST '70s INSPIRED DOOM ALBUM EVER!" Well the same would go for this, except that it's the real deal, which makes it even better.
Anyway, to return to our story, after Allan got that cd-r dub, he knew he had to find a proper cd. There HAD to be one, this was too good not to have been reissued, right? But, after looking and looking, no luck. Then, one day, Allan came to work at Aquarius and lo and behold what did he hear, but Jerusalem blaring from the store stereo! No, it wasn't this reissue. This was still a few years ago. Turns out, Andee had found a used copy of a bootleg cd someplace, and had bought it simply 'cause he thought the cover looked cool (he's like that), without knowing anything about the band. Life is so unfair, thought Allan. But he was able to eventually guilt Andee into giving him the cd for a birthday present (thanks, Andee! You can have that one back now). Later on, we discovered a Japanese reissue that may or may not have been a boot but in any event was way too expensive and hard to get, nothing we could easily stock and sell for a reasonable price. But NOW, we happily are able to share Jerusalem with you thanks to this nicely done reissue on the Rockadrome label's Vintage imprint! Yeah!
In addition to the nine songs from the original LP, this cd comes with five bonus tracks, including non-album single "Kamakazi Moth". The thick booklet is filled with lengthy liner notes, complete lyrics, vintage photos, all that good stuff you want in a reissue. Once more, yeah!
Nobody here except for Andee (who was already a fan!) had ever heard of this band before Circle mainman Jussi Lehtisalo told us he was reissuing their 1986 debut LP on his label Ektro. He also said, "Jesters will blow up the whole world!!!" Those familiar with
Duff: "Diggin' back through my life circa 15 years ago has been an emotionally unnerving experience. The music, the jams, the changing line-ups, the convoluted recording contracts, the hallucinations, the revelations, the girls, the divorce, poverty, doom, despair, joy, the extremely loud amplifiers�But that's my business. I will tell you it all began when my friend Ray Violet invited my roommate (drummer and multi-instrumentalist Doktor Stixx) and me (the bass player) to be the rhythm section on a songwriting demo he was organizing along with his buddy Bill Irwin. Ray offered to 'pay' us by allowing us each one song of our choosing produced to our individual satisfaction. I picked a metallic, psychedelic, existentialist war yelp I'd bashed out called 'End of Time.' During the sessions, which culminated on Halloween, 1984 (talk about Doom!), Ray played me the unforgettable riff to a song about a mosh pit dance in which the participants beheaded each other with shovels -- 'Diggin' That Grave.' Together, we finished the tune, and when all of the songs were completed, it was clear that 'Grave' and 'Time' stood alone and apart from the rest. We decided to form a band."
Duff goes on to recount the whole sordid saga of the band and its successes and failures, ins and outs (of the band members -- who included past present and future members of such acts as 45 Grave, The Mentors, and Poison!). Highlights for them included signing to Metal Blade imprint Dimension, after "End of Time" appeared on "Metal Massacre V", and playing shows with the likes of Janes Addiction, Flaming Lips, and the Dickies. Lowlights include, well, uh, signing to Metal Blade imprint Dimension, plus all the stuff you'd expect to befall an '80s LA metal band that didn't "make it".
What's really funny (and not discussed) is how their saga ends with this reissue 15 years later on a strange Finnish art-rock label! From Metal Blade to Ektro!
This disc contains their entire "Fun at the Funeral" debut (seeing release on cd for the first time), plus eight bonus tracks consisting of punkier material recorded for their never-released third album (including "Diggin' That Grave '87", a more Talking Heads-ish take on their impossibly catchy signature tune), a home demo, and a live version of Black Sabbath's "Electric Funeral" (can't get away from graves and funerals with these guys!). Their studio cover of that song appeared on their second, all-covers album "In A Nostalgic Mood", the material from which both Duff and Jussi decided was unfit for reissue -- too bad, we want to hear it! Anyway, their live "EF", Duff says, "shows the kind of heavy metal Ornette Coleman spazz attack the band was capable of live." Dunno about that, but it's a fine way to end the disc nonetheless, summing up the fucked up "gleeful gloom" rock that Jesters of Destiny created.
To wind up, thanks Jussi for reissuing this masterpiece of heavy psychedelic pop metal weirdness! Now it's not just Andee here who's a fan. For my part (Allan speaking) I could listen to "Diggin' That Grave" on auto repeat a hundred times and not get tired of it, it's that great a song. To get that and the rest of the album too, plus all the bonus tracks -- well it's a happy day here at Aquarius!
Now this is a holiday record we can get behind. Originally released a couple years back, now reissued with a bonus remix, Justin Broadrick, of Godflesh, Ice, Techno Animal, JK Flesh, Final, Pale Sketcher, etc., tries his hand at writing a modern metalgaze Christmas carol, and pretty much pulls it off. Although the only real Christmas-y bits, are the lyrics, some chiming holiday bells, and the song's sort of wistful lullaby like vibe - otherwise, it's a primo slice of blissed out psychedelic shoegaze post metal chug and shimmer, Jesu style, with swoonsome swirling verses, all hushed vox buried beneath whorls of woozy crystalline thrum, and churning chugging downtuned choruses, laced with strange squiggly melodies and distant tangled melodic filigree, much of "Christmas" plays out like a slowed down, super distorted M83, which seems to a reasonable shorthand description of Jesu's sound in general. The song balances heartfelt melodic dreaminess, specifically the Christmas-y break midsong where the aforementioned bells toll over lush acoustic guitars, and the hazy dreamy vox, with some serious metallic heft, the results perhaps not appropriate for your family holiday get together, but perfect for that heavy holiday mixtape.
Broadrick tacks on three remixes, each by one of his other projects/alter egos. Up first is the new track, credited to JK Flesh, which hadn't really happened when this was first released, but in that guise, Broadrick, pushes the sound back a bit toward his bleak industrial roots, transforming the blissful holiday shimmer into a brooding expanse of grim blackened ambience, anchored to a plodding death march beat, which is soon augmented by some murky jungle breakbeats, the tolling bell drifting on long stretches of droned out minor key shimmer, the vocals too reimagined, and transformed into a strange alien chant, a serious slab of not very Christmas-y electro-industrial blackened jungle grimnity. The Pale Sketcher version heads for the exact opposite of the sonic spectrum, stripping the original down into a hazy swirl of barely there beats, echo drenched vox, lots of softly billowing synths, everything gauzy and sun dappled and so dreamily washed out. And finally, Broadrick slips back into his Final persona, originally more of a solo guitar project, and takes the original version of "Christmas" and Caretaker-izes it, blurring the sounds into ghostlike ambience, and long softly undulating tones, a smeared sprawl of drifting melodic fragments, of soft focus sonic shards, the track building to a sort of crescendo, a softly roiling, dreamily psychedelic climax, before settling right back down into something even more muted and minimal, a bleary stretch of shadowy, soft around the edges chordal shimmer.
SUPER LIMITED!! Once we run out, odds are we won't be able to get more.
Who thought the dreamiest, fuzziest bliss pop record of the year would come courtesy of the same man responsible for the soul crushing might of Godflesh's Streetcleaner, and someone who once called Napalm Death home? Well, actually we sort of did. Especially since last year's Silver ep, on which Justin Broadrick's Jesu took the already fuzzy dreamy metallic crunch of their debut, and injected it with all sorts of unlikely glistening pop and muted indie jangle, creating an impossibly pretty metallic dirge pop, equal parts Godflesh, My Bloody Valentine and M83.
And as if to prove that Broadrick indeed has a heart of pop beneath that crushing downtuned exterior, we now have the Conqueror, which if anything, pushes Jesu's sound even further into the glistening dreamy realm of pure pop. But fear not, we're not talking sugary sweet, treacly pop music cheese, no this is Jesu after all, spawn of Godflesh, so there's no shortage of dirgey rhythms, BIG crushing guitars, lurching tempos, thick swaths of buzz and fuzz, but it's all just window dressing for some seriously pretty pop. The opener is shockingly poppy, with sweet melodic hooks, tinkling piano, breathy vocals, all processed and wrapped in a fuzzy dreamlike haze. An immediate classic for sure. The rest of the record strikes a delicate balance between the dirgier heaviness of the first Jesu record and Broadrick's newfound love of the jangle and swoon, each track a glistening pop gem, placed delicately into a blown out landscape of loping drum crush and thick shimmery guitar buzz, coruscating sheets of distortion wrapped tenderly around heartfelt epics, soaring vocals, and dreamy melodies.
We don't so much hear some Godflesh / M83 hybrid now as we do the dirgey dreamlike murky bliss of nineties New Zealand legends Bailter Space, or the heavier side of the shoegazer spectrum, Swervedriver, Chapterhouse and the like. It's a captivating sound for sure, and a logical progression, and while it's distinctly less metal, there is still much heaviness to be had, even at its most soft focus and glimmering, the guitars retain their buzzy crunch, and the tempos are always dirgey and machinelike, but all the sharp edges have been smoothed out, and the rhythms maybe seem more languid than mechanical, and the fuzzy blissy poppy core of each song seems to radiate from within like some alien sun, giving each song, no matter how heavy, a soft burnished glow.
So you might wonder why the heck the new Jesu is $28.00? Well, we figured that like us, you'd probably rather spend a little bit extra and get the gorgeous Japanese version, with its elaborate silver printed slipcover and more importantly, an ENTIRE EXTRA DISC nearly thirty three extra minutes, two epic tracks, featuring in its entirety, the music from Jesu's new 12" on Aurora Borealis (which we haven't even gotten yet). And it is most definitely worth it. Two 15 minute tracks, each epic and majestic, huge throbbing fuzzed out guitars, pounding rhythms, drifting minor key melodies, thick washes of blissy psychedelia, soft processed vocals, the first a crushing dreampop dirge harkening back to the first Jesu record (albeit a bit poppier), the second an almost ambient guitarscape of layered melodies, murky vocals and shimmery rhythms, so good. So worth it.
And the packaging, WOW! A double disc digipak, housed in a thick plastic slipcover, a silver cityscape superimposed over the washed out grey of the digipak, with a booklet, lyrics, Japanese liner notes and of course a Japanese style obi.
Since we made Jesu's debut full length on Hydrahead one of our records of the week a couple lists ago, it was pretty much a no brainer that Jesu's Heart Ache ep would have to be a record of the week as well. Especially since some of us might actually even like it a little better than the full length, and unlike the Hydrahead release, this one has been impossibly difficult to track down, until now.
Heart Ache, released on Dry Run, a tiny UK independent label, was to be our first glimpse of Justin Broadrick's much anticipated post Godflesh project (but for most of us, it's actually a second glimpse since it's taken until now for us to get copies to list) and sonically it sounds exactly like you might imagine a record between the last Godflesh record and the totally amazing Jesu full length would sound.
We had all pretty much given up on Godflesh. Gone was the glorious industrial pummel of Streetcleaner and gone too was the dubbed out machine metal of Slavestate, and in their place, tired rehashed riffs, shouted atonal vocals, and uninspired songwriting. So while our age-old love of early Godflesh had us super excited to hear this Jesu everyone was talking about, we were pretty much ready to be disappointed. Which was precisely why we were so blown away when we finally heard it. Everything we loved about Godflesh was there, plus a new found love of melody, swoonsome clean vocals, expanded insturmentation (piano!) and extended slow building tracks of brooding intensity and smoldering instrumental ferocity, all smeared into dreamy industrial bliss drone epics!
Unlike the full length, on which Jesu is a full band with a live drummer, on Heart Ache, Jesu is just Broadrick, a guitar, a piano, and of course a drum machine. Ahhh, the drum machine. How it warms our Streetcleaner worshipping hearts. Clangy and clattery, brittle guitars soar over crumbling distorted rumbles, all machinelike and clinical but imbued with a weirdly organic lushness. Drifting clouds of ghostly feedback, sonic vapor trails of haunting minor key swells, all slip and shift into vast stretches of shimmering cinematic ambience, with slowly pealing guitar tones and synthesized chant-like vocals, gorgeously melancholy almost Goblin-esque in its creepy beauty. Everything held together by smooth, clean, barely affected vocals, all dreary and weary, repeating simple mantra-like lyrics, distant and otherworldly. The whole thing sheds its industrial armor as it moves forward, showing more skin, becoming more vulnerable, becoming less and less rigid, and more and more soft and indistinct. Pretty, dreamy, blissed out and sweetly sorrowful, with Broadrick's endlessly repeated, haunting refrain drifitng and fading, like a mirage that may have never been there at all. And that's just the first track.
The second track is just as surprising as the first, starting off with spare solo piano, joined eventually by simple, finger-picked guitar, eventually drifting into a simple low end piano chord, repeated over and over and over, floating in the inky blackness, until the song lurches into a sludgy crawl, with huge murky downtuned riffs (think Fudge Tunnel's "Hate Song" at 16rpm), but then Broderick confounds again with heavily delayed, clean vocals, singing in a strangely hypnotic counterpoint to the main riff. Dizzying and quite lovely. It's a constant tug of war between the black hole tar pit dirge and the almost hopeful sounding vocals. Like the first song, track two devolves into a whole 'nother beast, as it slows down and blisses out, with lilting melodies creeping into the sludge and making what was only moments before a metallic behemoth crushing all in its wake, into a creepy rickety, buzzy back porch crawl, spare and skeletal, with distorted piano, buzzing fret noise and lots of ambient reverb that's gradually smoothed out into a fuzzy smear of static, beneath a simple low end piano figure, chiming and ringing out into nothingness. One of those rare records that manages to be heavy yet pretty, beautiful but scary, sweet and sorrowful, darkly doomy and gloriously luminous!
Finally reissued, the very first release from Justin Broadrick's post Godflesh combo Jesu, the two track Heart Ache was a Record Of The Week way back in 2005, and this updated version tacks on the previously unreleased Dethroned ep, which Broadrick started way back in 2004, but only finished recently, the perfect accompaniment to Heart Ache for sure.
Most readers of the aQ list are now well familiar with Justin Broadrick's (Godflesh, Final, etc.) bliss metal behemoth, Jesu, but when Heart Ache first hit, we were blown away, totally knocked for a loop, all the heft and grit and pummel of Godflesh, but blurred into gorgeously washed out shoe-gazey swells, a new sound that was, and still is all we wanted to hear. And still remains, to this day, quite possibly our favorite Jesu recording yet. Which is most definitely saying something considering how much we love pretty much everything Jesu has put out.
But right before Heart Ache was released, we had all pretty much given up on Godflesh. It seemed like maybe that band had run its course. The sounds were there, but it sounded like Broadrick had his mind elsewhere. Gone was the glorious industrial pummel of Streetcleaner and gone too was the dubbed out machine metal of Slavestate, and in their place, more-of-the-same riffs, shouted atonal vocals, and songs that played out more like assembled parts than actual SONGS. So while our age-old and undying love of early Godflesh had us super excited to hear this Jesu everyone was talking about, we were prepared for it to not live up to the hype. Which was precisely why we were so blown away when we finally heard it. Everything we loved about Godflesh was there, plus a new found love of melody, swoonsome clean vocals, expanded instrumentation (piano!) and extended slow building tracks of brooding intensity and smoldering instrumental ferocity, all smeared into dreamy industrial bliss drone epics!
Unlike the following full length, on which Jesu was a full band with a live drummer, on Heart Ache, Jesu was just Broadrick, a guitar, a piano, and of course a drum machine. Ahhh, the drum machine. How it warms our Streetcleaner worshipping hearts. Clangy and clattery, brittle guitars soar over crumbling distorted rumbles, all machinelike and clinical but imbued with a weirdly organic lushness. Drifting clouds of ghostly feedback, sonic vapor trails of haunting minor key swells, all slip and shift into vast stretches of shimmering cinematic ambience, with slowly pealing guitar tones and synthesized chant-like vocals, gorgeously melancholy almost Goblin-esque in its creepy beauty. Everything held together by smooth, clean, barely affected vocals, all dreary and weary, repeating simple mantra-like lyrics, distant and otherworldly. The whole thing sheds its industrial armor as it moves forward, showing more skin, becoming more vulnerable, becoming less and less rigid, and more and more soft and indistinct. Pretty, dreamy, blissed out and sweetly sorrowful, with Broadrick's endlessly repeated, haunting refrain drifting and fading, like a mirage that may have never been there at all. And that's just the first track.
The second track is just as surprising as the first, starting off with spare solo piano, joined eventually by simple, finger-picked guitar, eventually drifting into a simple low end piano chord, repeated over and over and over, floating in the inky blackness, until the song lurches into a sludgy crawl, with huge murky downtuned riffs (think Fudge Tunnel's "Hate Song" at 16rpm), but then Broadrick confounds again with heavily delayed, clean vocals, singing in a strangely hypnotic counterpoint to the main riff. Dizzying and quite lovely. It's a constant tug of war between the black hole tar pit dirge and the almost hopeful sounding vocals. Like the first song, track two devolves into a whole 'nother beast, as it slows down and blisses out, with lilting melodies creeping into the sludge and making what was only moments before a metallic behemoth crushing all in its wake, into a creepy rickety, buzzy back porch crawl, spare and skeletal, with distorted piano, buzzing fret noise and lots of ambient reverb that's gradually smoothed out into a fuzzy smear of static, beneath a simple low end piano figure, chiming and ringing out into nothingness. One of those rare records that manages to be heavy yet pretty, beautiful but scary, sweet and sorrowful, darkly doomy and gloriously luminous!
The second disc included with the long anticipated Heart Ache reissue is an ep called Dethroned, recorded just after the Heart Ache sessions, but only completed recently, and while there are obvious references to those early days of Jesu, the fact that the songs were completed recently is evident in the songs' distinctly shoegazey vibe, the poppiness, the songcraft, these 4 tracks hover right in between the two eras of Jesu, the washed out almost M83 dreamy blissed out modern Jesu, and the chugging, industrial, post Godflesh chug and pound, and the result is actually pretty fantastic, super heavy, subtly poppy, kick ass riffage, that slips from almost groovy to crushing and downtuned, the vocals are super effected, almost vocodered sounding (autotuned?), which gives the songs a weirdly almost new wave vibe.
"Dethroned" almost sounds like nineties noise rock, a little grunge, a little pop, but woven into a sort of post industrial shoegaze framework, the vocals and melodies are all super heavy on the effects, the rhythm is almost groovy, definitely demonstrating in a single song the evolution of Jesu, which gives way to "Annul", the most Godflesh-y of the bunch, with its churning chuggy main riff, and machinelike drum pound, a little Godflesh, a little Helmet (!), but again, still with some of that blossoming shoegazey poppiness that would later inform almost everything Jesu.
"Aureated Skin" is total ballady bliss, all big chiming guitars, and blurred shimmery distortion, not to mention some lush keyboard swells and some seriously poppy melodies, while "I Can Only Disappoint You", is super stripped down, and almost sounds like Three Mile Pilot or something, the drums super spare, the guitars brittle and metallic, but the song is laced with cool backwards guitars, and hazy atmospheres, it almost sounds like some strange hybrid of Godflesh and the Cure, which is most definitely very very cool.
This debut ep from Justin Broadrick's (of Godflesh) new outift Jesu has been a bit tough to keep in stock, and since when we originally had it we loved it so much we made it Record Of The Week, and since we finally managed to get more, we figured we'd relist it so those of you who missed out the first time can get another crack. Here's what we had to say about it last time:
Since we made Jesu's debut full length on Hydrahead one of our records of the week recently, it was pretty much a no brainer that Jesu's Heart Ache ep would have to be a record of the week as well. Especially since some of us might actually even like it a little better than the full length, and unlike the Hydrahead release, this one has been impossibly difficult to track down, until now.
Heart Ache, released on Dry Run, a tiny UK independent label, was to be our first glimpse of Justin Broadrick's much anticipated post Godflesh project (but for most of us, it's actually a second glimpse since it's taken until now for us to get copies to list) and sonically it sounds exactly like you might imagine a record between the last Godflesh record and the totally amazing Jesu full length would sound.
We had all pretty much given up on Godflesh. Gone was the glorious industrial pummel of Streetcleaner and gone too was the dubbed out machine metal of Slavestate, and in their place, tired rehashed riffs, shouted atonal vocals, and uninspired songwriting. So while our age-old love of early Godflesh had us super excited to hear this Jesu everyone was talking about, we were pretty much ready to be disappointed. Which was precisely why we were so blown away when we finally heard it. Everything we loved about Godflesh was there, plus a new found love of melody, swoonsome clean vocals, expanded insturmentation (piano!) and extended slow building tracks of brooding intensity and smoldering instrumental ferocity, all smeared into dreamy industrial bliss drone epics!
Unlike the full length, on which Jesu is a full band with a live drummer, on Heart Ache, Jesu is just Broadrick, a guitar, a piano, and of course a drum machine. Ahhh, the drum machine. How it warms our Streetcleaner worshipping hearts. Clangy and clattery, brittle guitars soar over crumbling distorted rumbles, all machinelike and clinical but imbued with a weirdly organic lushness. Drifting clouds of ghostly feedback, sonic vapor trails of haunting minor key swells, all slip and shift into vast stretches of shimmering cinematic ambience, with slowly pealing guitar tones and synthesized chant-like vocals, gorgeously melancholy almost Goblin-esque in its creepy beauty. Everything held together by smooth, clean, barely affected vocals, all dreary and weary, repeating simple mantra-like lyrics, distant and otherworldly. The whole thing sheds its industrial armor as it moves forward, showing more skin, becoming more vulnerable, becoming less and less rigid, and more and more soft and indistinct. Pretty, dreamy, blissed out and sweetly sorrowful, with Broadrick's endlessly repeated, haunting refrain drifitng and fading, like a mirage that may have never been there at all. And that's just the first track.
The second track is just as surprising as the first, starting off with spare solo piano, joined eventually by simple, finger-picked guitar, eventually drifting into a simple low end piano chord, repeated over and over and over, floating in the inky blackness, until the song lurches into a sludgy crawl, with huge murky downtuned riffs (think Fudge Tunnel's "Hate Song" at 16rpm), but then Broderick confounds again with heavily delayed, clean vocals, singing in a strangely hypnotic counterpoint to the main riff. Dizzying and quite lovely. It's a constant tug of war between the black hole tar pit dirge and the almost hopeful sounding vocals. Like the first song, track two devolves into a whole 'nother beast, as it slows down and blisses out, with lilting melodies creeping into the sludge and making what was only moments before a metallic behemoth crushing all in its wake, into a creepy rickety, buzzy back porch crawl, spare and skeletal, with distorted piano, buzzing fret noise and lots of ambient reverb that's gradually smoothed out into a fuzzy smear of static, beneath a simple low end piano figure, chiming and ringing out into nothingness. One of those rare records that manages to be heavy yet pretty, beautiful but scary, sweet and sorrowful, darkly doomy and gloriously luminous!
Seems like Jesu's Justin Broadrick is making up for lost time. Following the sporadic releases in the later years of Godflesh, and a long period of near silence immediately afterwards, since the launch of Jesu Broadrick has been offering up one disc after another, as if there was some untapped wellspring of blessed out metallic pop that had been building pressure since well before he folded Godflesh. And this record seems to cement the fact that he's gradually moving away from the metallic pummel of his former outfit, toward a soundworld of glistening light and fuzzy shimmer. After the very Godflesh sounding self titled debut and Heartache ep, the sound of Jesu began to morph into something much softer, much dreamier, and very evocative of the late nineties shoegaze scene. Lifeline pushes it even further. The sound still wrapped in distorted guitars, but the sound and melody sounding even more like eighties mainstream pop. Like if John Hughes was making movies today, the big climactic scene at the end where the guy finally catches the girl at the airport to declare his love for here, well we can guarantee the title track of Lifeline would be blasting on the soundtrack. And it's not hard to imagine John Cusack, standing in the rain, holding up a boom box blasting "You Wear Their Masks." None of this is a bad thing, just a little surprising. Well, maybe not so surprising anymore. But looking back on the first Jesu, and of course Godflesh, who would have thought Broadrick would be weaving dreamy blisspop jams that sounded more like Ride or Slowdive or even Simple Minds than Pitchshifter.
That said, the guitars here are still crunchy, they definitely chug now and again, but the vocals are breathy and wistful, the melodies are sweet and melancholy, the drums don't really pound any more, they sort of shuffle.
But hold on. "End Of The Road" is all metallic guitars and simple pounding drums, and a hook to die for, not hard to see this track on MTV right next to Blink-182 or whoever. Which we're all for, but halfway through the track changes direction again, becoming all clean and super poppy and downright dreamy.
The only real 'oof' to be found here, are the guest vocals on "Storm Coming On", a crooned sort of R&B female vocal line, maybe they were going for something Portishead-y, and for the first part of the song it sort of works, but when she starts to wail soulfully, OOF. Not so good. You might just want to skip this track...
Barring the aforementioned number, which we'll choose just to ignore, Jesu is all about texture, and Broadrick does some amazing thing with his guitar and laptop, whipping up orchestral chordal swells, lush soundscapes, wrapping billowy spaced out FX and warm sun dappled reverb around everything, making every note sound like big glorious snow flakes of sound.
We can get the domestic version on Hydra Head, but as is usual, the Japanese import has extra stuff, in this case, two bonus tracks, in this case alternate versions of two of the tracks on the record. The version of "Lifeline" is slower, a bit more lo-fi and lazy, actually a nice and subtle variation. But it's SO worth it for the alternate version of "Storm Coming On", which ditches the soulful vocals, replacing them with Broadrick's buried in the mix whisper, and adds TONS of crunchy metallic guitar, making this version maybe the heaviest track on Lifeline.
And as with all Daymare releases, the packaging is super striking, an ultra glossy digipak, Japanese obi, a glossy 2 panel color insert and a foldout insert with loads of liner notes, all in Japanese.
At this point, it's pretty much a given: Justin K. Broadrick can do no wrong. The man is a living legend, from his days in Napalm Death to Head Of David to Godflesh to Jesu to Final, he has always been pushing the boundaries of heavy music to beautiful extremes. And speaking of "beautiful," nothing from Broadrick's catalog quite takes the cake like the mighty Jesu. This project has always been loaded to the brim with maximum dreaminess, but goddamn if Opiate Sun doesn't one up what has already been perfected. And it's STILL heavy! Every one of these four songs pretty much exhibits the most gorgeous, melodic, and melancholy sounds you could ever pull out of your mind if you were Justin Broadrick. They're so damn beautiful it hurts, but in the best way imaginable. You just want these songs to go on forever so you can tune out the rest of the world and celebrate how good it feels to be sad. And with titles like "Losing Streak" and "Deflated", you can safely count on sadness to the Nth power, so when you're done wiping away those majestic tears, you'll probably just want to add this one to your cart.
We missed out completely on the cd version of this, as it was only available direct from the band, we finally managed to strike up a deal with Avalanche, the record label of Justin Broadrick, so hopefully from here on out we'll be able to get anything and everything Avalanche, on this list alone we have the most recent batch of releases, Heart Ache on vinyl, a brand new Final album on picture disc, and this, a compilation of old and unreleased tracks recorded between 2000 and 2007.
Apparently, up until now, most Jesu records were made up of parts and tracks recorded in the past, so in a bid to start new and fresh, Broadrick decided to gather up everything he had, and stick it all on a record, and start from scratch.
So here it is, seven years of unreleased Jesu, and while from the above you'd think it would be mostly fragments and song parts and experiments, most of the tracks here are fully realized songs, although sonically the differ a great deal from much of the Jesu you've heard. More stripped down, way more poppy, almost new wave-y here and there, definitely not as heavy, but occasionally dark and intense, occasionally blissed out and shoegazey, and surprisingly cohesive and listenable and really great for a collections of odds and ends.
It starts out strangely enough, with "Don't Dream It", which sounds like a classic Jesu jam, except for the fact, that the vocal line is a snippet of the final number from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but Broadrick, takes that melodramatic croon and sets it amidst minor key piano, warm whirring buzz, skittery rhythms, squalls of distorted downtuned guitar crunch, and wraps the samples in delay and reverb giving it a cool dubbed out vibe.
The drums throughout are way more electronic sounding, skittery and glitchy, less POUNDing, which makes a lot of this sound almost Boards Of Canada like, but with those floaty weary vocals, and lush swaths of woozy drowsy keyboards. A couple of the tracks get all loping and post rocky, a few others are super laid back and glimmery and down tempo, like the perfect soundtrack for some mysterious late night wandering. Here and there, things do get a bit heavy, like the crunchy chug on "Dummy", although even there it's all tangled up with some stuttery almost krautrocky keyboards, but for the most part, this is a whole different side of Jesu, one we're super into, and now that we've heard it, we hear more within proper Jesu records, but with all the skitter and jangle and shimmer, this also reminds us of another past aQ favorite, the sort of post rock electronica of Asbestoscape.
Needless to say, Jesu fans NEED this. But anyone into M83, anything on Gooom, or any sort of cool skittery electronic metallic pop weirdness should definitely give it a listen as well. check it out.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Pressed on super thick 180 gram vinyl, and housed in swank full color gatefold jackets. Hopefully we'll be able to get more when we run out, but just in case, probably better not to risk it.
Wow, is this ever a surprise. The sensitive side of Jesu. Which is weird since Jesu was sort of the sensitive side of Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Final, Techno Animal, Napalm Death). Maybe sensitive is not the right word. Poppy? Yeah, that might fit too. Hot on the heels of two epic mindblowers, the self-titled full length and the Heartache ep, Silver finds Broadrick exploring the pop side of his personality. Writing proper songs, even SINGING. Weird but still cool. Just a bit... unexpected.
The two previous Jesu records took the bleak mechanical pummel of Godflesh and doused it with My Bloody Valentine guitar bliss out, and huge swaths of M83 guitar fuzz. A truly unique blend of ominous crunch and swirly shimmer. Pulsin, lengthy epic jams, sparkling, glistening and gauzy, a sort of soft focus alien krautrock. We were obviously immediately smitten.
So this half hour long 4 song ep is basically a pop record. Seriously. Hard to believe but it's true. Melodically and songwriting wise, these tracks sound like they came straight off of an early nineties Sebadoh or Superchunk record. Lilting and sort of bittersweet. Classic sounding early nineties indie rock wrapped in thick glistening swirls of fuzz guitar, that guitar being the only thing keeping it from sounding like something on Merge records. Not sure what to call it, maybe industrial indie rock, fuzzy jangle dirge, both are pretty accurate. Too bad this ISN'T a nineties college rock record, it easily would have been my instant favorite back then. Sweet sad boy bedroom mope rock but with super fuzzed out METAL GUITARS!!?? C'mon, how much would that have trumped every record you had back then? But even now because of the unlikely mix of moody indie rock and pounding dirgey fuzz, this still sounds pretty fresh. Thick walls of fuzzy guitars, warbly warped melodies,Ôsweet melodic jangle, some killer catchy hooks, and those sort of classic plaintive, mopey Mac / Lou sad boy vocals. Track three is the first one to get all M83, blissy and blown out and sweetly shimmery, a plodding sun dappled dirge, but the more we listen the more this sounds like a record Codeine would have made if they were still making records. Sort of sweetly depressive, but with a dark tail dragging vibe. On first listen, we were sort of bummed out, this is SO different than the other two Jesu records, but the more we listen, the more we're beginning to think this jus might be our favorite yet. A record that is both soft and sweetly melodic, but thick and heavy and blown out is a rare beast indeed. And now that we hear the Codeine in Jesu, we're even more sold. For our money, Codeine left a gaping hole when they called it quits, slowcore or moperock or whatever continued to move forward but never with the same intensity or emotion, until now perhaps. The final track is the strangest. A sort of M83 / Jesus And Mary Chain style effects laden bliss out, with loads of swooshing backwards loops, shimmery stretches of light as air vaporous guitar, and even a super chunky Godfleshy break part way through. Awesome. The best industrial dirge jangle indie bliss slowcore doom pop ep ever??
The long awaited Jesu 12" Sun Down / Sun Rise is finally here. Might be a tad bit anticlimactic for Aquarius customers, as these two epic tracks populated the bonus disc that came with the Japanese version of Jesu's latest and greatest, The Conqueror. Not sure what the hold up was, and pretty sure, the vinyl was meant to surface before the cd, but so what?! Jesu fanatics and vinyl nerds, it was well worth the wait. Two long tracks, more in keeping with the more aggressive sound of the first couple Jesu records, that the more recent shift to dreamy fuzzy bliss pop. Not to say we don't love the new sound, we do, but we still dig hearing Justin Broadrick and company unleash the Godflesh pound, which they do in a big way on these two loooooooong tracks.
Thirty three minutes, of epic and majestic, huge throbbing fuzzed out guitars, pounding rhythms, drifting minor key melodies, thick washes of blissy psychedelia, soft processed vocals, the first track a crushing dreampop dirge harkening back to the first Jesu record (albeit a bit poppier), the second an almost ambient guitarscape of layered melodies, murky vocals and shimmery rhythms, so good. So worth it. Even if you already have the cd. Cuz like all the Aurora Borealis releases, the sound is pristine, the vinyl is thick and the packaging is beautiful.
Pressed on super striking grey and clear swirled vinyl (looks like storm clouds) in a gorgeous hazy full color sleeve (with photographs by Seldon Hunt) that is the perfect visual analogue to the blissy droney buzz inside. LIMITED TO 900 COPIES!!! Got a bunch, but not sure how long they'll last...
Not a brand new Jesu record, instead, this ep collects the three tracks from Jesu's split lp with Eluvium from last year, and adds two alternate versions to flesh it out a bit. Folks who missed out on that now out of print 12", or those amongst you who remain turntableless, will for sure want to pick this up, and Jesu fanatics, might just find this worth it for the two extra alternate takes. First the songs proper:
Three new songs from Jesu, and as if we didn't already see Broadrick and Co. heading in this direction, they've almost entirely jettisoned the heaviness, in favor of a blissy new wave-y drift. Really! No massive sludge, no blissed out crunch, in fact, most of this sounds like Jesu doing the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, all drift and croon and no crunch and pummel, but it's really nice, and pretty, and still suitably Jesu-like. Imagine Simple Minds or the Cure but raised on Slowdive and Chapterhouse and Swervedriver and My Bloody Valentine, doing the theme song for Sixteen Candles 2008 (which if our calculations are correct would be more like Forty Candles). The first song would be a massive hit, sort of melancholy and romantic, dark and dreamy, but still sort of catchy and hopeful, like sunbeams barely making it through grey storm clouds. The final track sounds like it could be from that last scene in Sixteen Candles 2008, the one where the boy and the girl finally make it to the dance after all of the crazy mishaps and misunderstandings and are finally sharing that slow dance... lugubrious and fuzzy, and soft focus and so great actually. It's weird, and a bit unexpected, but as much as we love the glacial crush of past Jesu discs, this new-wave-y drift really suits them, which is a good thing, since they seem to be heading even more and more in that direction with each new release.
The two extra tracks are definitely not -drastically- different, but different enough certainly to make them worth having. "Farewell" gets even more washed out, the whole thing muted and over saturated, the chugging guitars, disembodied and more textural than heavy, the whole song suffused with chiming harmonics and sun dappled soaring bittersweet melodies. "Why Are We Not Perfect", the above mentioned Sixteen Candles 2008 closer, hews closely to the original, the change more in timbre and texture than anything, the vocals still weary and woozy, the beat a loping skittery shuffle, surrounded by shimmering clouds of effervescent streaks of warm buzz, swirls of backwards melody, all whirling softly and dreamily.
Beautifully packaged in a super thick oversized Japanese style mini lp cd jacket, with a thick printed inner sleeve.
What the hell happened to Godflesh? We've been wondering that for years. Streetcleaner was a stone cold classic. Heavy and clinical and completely brutal. Slavestate, Pure, Selfless all great records as well. So what the hell happened? The riffs got more generic, the vocals, always the possible sticking point, got louder and louder and more pointless and distracting, until Godflesh became a shadow of the industrial metal legend they once were. That's why we thought it was a bit funny that people were chomping at the bit for this Jesu record, the first we've heard from Justin Broderick AKA Godflesh since 2001 and the godawful Hymns record. Why would anyone expect anything but more of the same watered down industrial crap? Well, that'll teach us for having so little faith as this record is something else. Figuratively AND literally. It's great. no doubt about it. Heavy and beautiful, haunting and crushing. But at the same time, it's not a Streetcleaner rehash, which we all certainly would have been happy with. Instead, Broderick has taken the harsh industrial crunch of Godflesh, and tempered it with layer after layer of thick sonic grandeur and lots and lots of melody. And gone are the shouted vocals WAY up in the mix, and in their place, actual singing. Melodies, harmonies, some serious crooning by metal standards, but thankfully, the vocals are nestled way back in the mix, cozied up next to the warm thick guitars and the rumbling bass. Unlike the cold clinical fury of Godflesh, Jesu is dark and warm, thick and harmonically rich. These tracks are massive, glacially creeping epics, spelling out minor key melodies in lurches and bursts, haunting vocals draped over the thick riffs like sparkling Christmas lights, barely visible through the snow. Sort of like a metal northern lights, a thick rippling curtain of subtle disonnance, My Blooody Valentine filtered through the epic sludge of Neurosis. M83 playing at 16rpm. A gloriously hopeful, sonically sparkling dirge-y doom pop. Yes, pop. Because underneath the wall of guitars, and the dubbed out melodies, and super affected vocals, and lugubrious tempos, are actual songs. Good songs. Heavy sure, but beautiful and strangely delicate, especially for a 'metal' record. Reminiscent of Slint's Spiderland in the way it takes minor key moodiness, and imbues it with a gleam of hope, a hint of joy, barely discernible through the suffocating cloak of despair.
Yay, we mean uh oh, we mean yay, heck it's a new ep from the controversial ('round here anyway) psychedelic doom chanteuse Jex Thoth and her band of the same name. Controversial? Well, let's just say her trademark theatrical vocal stylings are a subjective, love 'em or hate 'em proposition, though we all pretty much agree the band's heavy, hazy music is awesome. And among the AQ staff, Allan at least has finally succumbed entirely (it was inevitable) and now proudly declares himself a true Jex Thoth fan, which means he was quite happy to see 'em play last week at the Roadburn Festival in Holland. In live performance, Jex's apparent thespian background proved quite effective, she had excellent stage presence not to mention witchy sex appeal, cape-draped and with candles burning. They played to a packed house and it was quite obvious they had lots of fans in the audience!
We also know Jex has plenty of fans out there among the AQ faithful, and they'll be pleased with Witness, comprised of three new recordings, suitably dramatic and lugubrious, clocking in at just over 15 minutes total: "Raven Nor The Spirit", "Slow Rewind", and "Mr. Rainbow", the latter a cover of a song by '70s European art rockers Slapp Happy (a good choice, if you didn't know better you'd think it was a Jex Thoth original). Bearing a dedication to the late Jack Rose, and again graced with cover art by Reverend Bizarre's Sami "Albert Witchfinder" Hynninen, this ep is a fine continuation of the eccentric underground doom-prog sounds heard on Jex Thoth's 2008 self-titled full-length, although apparently there's been another lineup change in the band since that release (for one thing, Silas Paine, aka Jewelled Antler's Glenn Donaldson, is no longer playing guitar). However, they still sound like a bit like Curved Air taking downers with Electric Wizard (or something), totally vintage, bass heavy '70s psych sounds with prominent Hammond organ action, both bombastic and atmospheric, over which Jex's cleanly-sung, clearly enunciated vocals soar. Probably if you're at all interested in this ep, you've already got the earlier full-length, and if you liked that, you'll like this, need we say much more? Uh, how 'bout for fans of Jacula, Blood Ceremony, The Devil's Blood, and Witchcraft (capital 'W' and otherwise)?
Here we go again. Maybe you remember our review a year or so ago of an ep by a psychedelic doom band from Wisconsin called Totem, related to "New Weird America" folkies Wooden Wand? We thought it was great, EXCEPT for one, possibly deal-breaking catch: the female lead singer's soaring vocals, which put it in the love 'em or hate 'em category, with most of us at AQ unfortunately forced to select the latter option, or at least do our best to live with 'em since we liked the music.
Well, as if to challenge us, Totem have changed their name to Jex Thoth (after the "stage name" of that selfsame singer!), and are back with their debut full-length album, again released by the doom metal purveyors at Sweden's I Hate Records, who previously have brought us music from Burning Saviours, The Puritan, Fall Of The Idols, Lord Vicar, Gates Of Slumber, and lots of other awesome heaviness.
That we have to have any reservations about this album at all is too bad, 'cause on the face of it, you probably couldn't deliberately design anything more likely to appeal to us at AQ, really! Not only is it psychedelic pagan DIY doom metal, to begin with, but check it out: Jex Thoth's guitar player Silas Paine is actually Jewelled Antler linchpin Glenn Donaldson (Thuja, Skygreen Leopards, Blithe Sons, etc. etc.). Also in the band, another AQ friend, Clay Ruby (Davenport, Burial Hex). The cover art is by our Finnish pal Albert Witchfinder from doomlords Reverend Bizarre. And the album itself is dedicated to the memory of Cayce Lindner, from Flying Canyon, whom we too miss very much.
Also, Jex Thoth's "thanks list" is very much up our alley: they give props to Circle, Slough Feg, Silvester Anfang, Bobb Trimble, and Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, among others. And why are they thanking Bobb Trimble, whom hopefully you know as the '80s psych singer-songwriter outsider genius whose at-long-last reissued albums we made Records Of The Week last year? Because they do a cover of his apocalyptic song "When The Raven Calls" from Iron Curtain Innocence on here!! Yep, a Bobb Trimble cover! Brilliant. (And actually, we'll admit, a good choice for Jex Thoth's vocal style.)
So... plenty of indications that this is going to be something we'd LOVE. The music here is great, kind of an acid-folky New Weird Doom, all about ye olde '70s Sabbathy guitar riffage and Purplish organ jamming, fuzzed out and dirgey and druggy, full of spaced out fx, droning synth, lumbering distorted wah-wah riffs. It's not always so heavy, sometimes more of a melancholic moodiness, as much trippily atmospheric freek-folk psych and prog as it is doom (especially on the epic four-part "Equinox Suite"), their style of "metal" not solid steel or iron, but softer precious metals unearthed from an ancient treasure trove, like gold, silver and mythic mithril. We WANT to love this, and it shouldn't be hard... except for Jex Thoth's singing (again), which for most of us is just too high in the mix, too dramatic in a "thespian" sort of way, too sleek and clean and earnest, drawing out each word, each syllable with forced emotion... we're reminded of Grace Slick, with a side of Geddy Lee. But such things are subjective, your mileage may vary, and certainly Jex Thoth (the band) consider Jex Thoth (the vocalist) to be their major focal point, for better or worse. Her vocals ARE distinctive, and do give this band quite a unique vibe all right. And maybe they'll grow on us, actually they already have on Allan here, he'll admit, who while he still cringes a bit at some of her delivery, finds this working for him more often than not. So although we can't give this an unqualified recommendation, we're gonna highlight it anyway, and you can listen to the sound clips and see what you think. (We DO know some peeps who love her singing, actually, so maybe it's just us.) After all, in a lot of ways, this is the Jewelled Antler meets Jacula doom trip we've always dreamed of! A "New Weird Witchcraft" isn't far off the mark either. Acid folk classic doom, we approve of that!
Oh, and if you are already a Totem/Jex Thoth fan, you might be interested to know that we also have just a couple copies left of Jex Thoth's limited edition split 7" with '80s UK doom legends Pagan Altar (!), featuring the track "Stone Evil" from this album, we weren't able to get enough to list, but you might get lucky if you ask us quick, they're $12.98.
This disc has occasioned major debate here at AQ as to its merits... or demerits. Released on Sweden's usually pretty reliable I Hate Records label, home to such doomy acts as Gates Of Slumber, Fall Of The Idols and big AQ faves Burning Saviours, this debut ep from Wisconsin's Totem is a three-song doom trip of '70s inspired hippie heaviness in the retro-proto-metal vein of both Witch and Witchcraft, those three tracks being "Kagemni", "Luna Moth Speaks", and the 11-minute "Tauti" (featuring a major freeform freakout). Their backwoods pagan image and DIY production are probably a big part of what attracted I Hate to this band, as Totem really do capture a special, "authentic" vintage stoned doom vibe. The riffs are worthy. And the truly blown-out low end bass heaviness, psychedelic wah wah guitar and Hammond organ jammage are fully to this band's credit. Sounds pretty good so far, eh? So what's the problem? Well, simply put, most of us here at AQ simply couldn't stand the singing. The vocal stylings of Jex Thoth are presented as Totem's main draw when we think this would be so much better without her. Granted, liking someone's voice or not is a fairly subjective thing, and we know people who don't mind hers at all, but since the entire AQ staff gives it the thumbs down, you might want to check out the sound clips before buying, that's all we're saying. Part of what's hard to take about her singing isn't just the timbre of her voice, it's that she just *enunciates* everything way too clearly, like she's doing musical theater. It's not very rock and roll. That said, Allan DID end up digging this, after spinning it a bunch and performing the mental exercise of pretending the singer was a guy, which made it seem that much weirder, like he was some sort of insane androgynous metal weirdo, making up for the cringe inducing elements of her vocals that everyone else here just couldn't get past. And it's truly her singing that bugs us, not the idea of another set of indie psych folksters jumping on the doom bandwagon (as this is actually a Wooden Wand side project!), really. Heck, half of Witch are members of Feathers and we LOVE Witch.
FYI, this band has a full-length coming out on I Hate, as well as a split 7" with cult British doomsters Pagan Altar! And Allan at least is curious to hear those upcoming efforts. Also, apparently they've changed their name from Totem to Jex Thoth... so it seems unlikely they're gonna take our advice to ditch the singer, eh? Ah well...
Okay. Jex Thoth. The band. The woman. A very polarizing proposition for doom fanatics. The music is pitch perfect, a folk flecked fuzzy groovy, dirgey doomy seventies style classic doom, the vocals, clean and dramatic and soaring and way up in the mix. Definitely changes the vibe and feel of the music. But anyway, you can read all about the full length elsewhere on this list, but this single track, from the album, might just be the best thing we've heard from Jex Thoth (the band) yet.
Beginning all spacy and seventies folky, fluttering acoustic guitars, all drifty and dreamlike, the track soon gives way to some SERIOUS classic doom. Like we mentioned above, druggy and fuzzy and groovy, wah wah guitars, distortion, fuzz, leads, a stone cold killer, then Thoth (the singer) joins in and the song is transformed into something less distinctly doomy, into something more classic rock, the Jefferson Airplane comparison is apt for sure, which is not a bad thing, the vocals not so high in the mix, less clean and measured, a little more loose and feral sounding. Which makes this probably our favorite track from the full length. Pretty damn great.
But the flipside, holy shit how much do we love Pagan Altar?! That's a rhetorical question, cuz if it wasn't the answer would be SO FUCKING MUCH!!!! Super blown out fuzzy groovy doomy brilliance, a re-recorded version of their second recording ever from 1976. Recorded in 2007 but you'd never know it. And the sound of Pagan Altar here is not so much doomy, as classic rock, like Jex Thoth, but where JT are channeling Jefferson Airpolane, PA are whipping up some Blue Oyster Cult shit, seventies arena rock heaviness, slightly doomy sure, but totally rocking!
Packaged in a super heavy sleeve with original artwork from Reverend Bizarre / The Puritan mainman Albert, pressed on thick vinyl with a printed color insert.
Already out of print we think so these are the last copies we'll get...
Record number two from this heavy rock super group, featuring Aaron Turner from Isis, House Of Low Culture, Hydra Head, etc., James Plotkin of Khanate, O.L.D., Phantom Smasher and Tim Wyskida also of Khanate, and like the first record, Black Curtain too is a spare, haunting affair, all atmospheric and lovely, drifting and ghostly, psychedelic and abstract, but where that record hinted at a slowcore side to the group, this new one full embraces that part of the band, the vocals way up in the mix, sounding like an actual pop band at time, pop in the sense that it's not so explicitly experimental, like much of these three guys' output. Granted this is still experimental, but it's a sort of experimental pop, the guitars unfurl lush layered streaks, the drums are minimal, and restrained, it never gets really heavy, instead the vibe is super space and shimmery and surreal, the guitars crunch and howl and feedback, moan and squeal, but those elements are deftly sculpted into something downright lovely. And while opener "Broken Ground" is pretty open, and free, lots of space, lots of long notes and slow decay, by the end, it sounds more like Talk Talk or Cave In, and the next track, "Silent Temple", pushes that sound even further, definitely reminding us of a slightly heavier Codeine or Seam, but the vocals, it's uncanny how much they remind us of Cave In, which is not a bad thing at all, just surprising.
There's still plenty of tension, in fact every song here remains an exercise in patience, push and pull, slow release, gradual ratcheting up and down, the band's at their best when they harness that tension to something impossibly melodic. "Red Bough" sounds like some strange otherworldly Peter Hammill ballad, brooding and majestic, epic and expansive, and yeah, downright pretty. It's definitely possible that heavy music fans will be bummed out on this, which would be a shame, cuz while it's not traditionally heavy, it is dense and dark, and emotionally heavy, even sonically in places, but that heaviness is wielded not as a hammer, but as something much more delicate, but no less dense and devastating. The final track does get downright heavy, the guitar is fierce, downtuned and distorted, the drums pounding, but even here, the vocals soar and melodies abound, a gorgeous fusion of melody and emotion, dark energy and sonic heft. A gorgeous surprise, and a new favorite for sure.
If the cover art (some sort of scantily clad Wendy O. Williams character riding a giant wolf through a post-apocalyptic urban landscape) and album title (Inner City Wolves!!!) haven't convinced you already about how awesome this might be, then there's the matter of this Australian heavy metal band's name. JOHNNY TOUCH. Gotta give 'em props for picking a name that's cheesy, goofy, and great. You call your band something like that and you'd better be good - and they ARE, at playing very classic '80s sounding metal, super melodic and hot rockin', that's got some ballsy, speed-riffing heaviness to it, as well as a pop sensibility (circa LA, 1985). The sticker on the front of this, their debut album, mentions Judas Priest (we'll concur, specifically citing Screaming For Vengeance era or thereabouts) and Yngwie Malmsteen. At first we didn't really hear the Yngwie so much, but then we hit track 4, the instrumental "Radiation Axeposure", and yeah, the guitarist sure busts out some crazy fast shredding soloing acrobatics there, and elsewhere too!
Other reference points could include Dio, Savatage, Queensryche, early Metallica, Lizzy Borden, Riot, and, outside the '80s, fellow modern day retro metal bands like Enforcer, White Wizzard and local boys Hot Fog.
What we really like is that while Johnny Touch have a sense of humor (the name, and certain song titles, indicate as much), at the same time, they definitely aren't just foolin' around. Emotion-laden tracks like "Lady Stutter" are delivered straight, serious as can be. Solid '80s style metal with pizzazz and plenty of chops. The metalheads here have definitely felt the Touch.
(See elsewhere this list, though, for another Australian band with an even better/worse name, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard!!)
