[ aquarius records — Rock Pop Goth Industrial Darkwave ]

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Releasing his music under such names as Foetus, Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, Foetus Interruptus, Foetus Under Glass and perhaps the best one, You've Got Foetus On Your Breath, J. G. Thirlwell has proven himself to be one hell of a monstrous musical dynamo. Over a quarter century, with little or no fanfare, he's consistently and methodically laid his contemporaries to waste. This is his latest full length, titled Love. The visual simplicity of this, another of his trademark four-letter word album titles, stands in complete contrast to the unbelievably complex, wildly imaginative compositions contained within, however as is usually the case the chosen word (Nail, Blow, Gash, Flow, Hole to name a few others) can be interpreted and defined in oh so many many ways. Love is no exception. Often lazily compared to the likes of Skinny Puppy or Nine Inch Nails, let it be known, Foetus is another beast entirely. Thirlwell nails the soundtracks for your most terrifying, twisted dreams and beautiful, perverse nightmares effortlessly in the form of thunderously bombastic orchestrations. Epic. Includes a dvd with early live footage, three videos one of which was directed by Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O, and some trailers for Adult Swim's Venture Bros TV show for which Thirlwell composed the theme song.

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Finally reissued on cd! Nail is Foetus' fourth album which was originally released in 1985. Whoa, that's twenty two years ago! So damn criminally underrated and unjustly lumped in with the less stellar, more single-minded 'industrial' artists on the Wax Trax label, the time is right to set the record straight... Like an orchestral clash of Birthday Party, Swans and Einsturzende Neubauten set in a tawdry cabaret deep in the seediest underbelly of the darkest noir flick imaginable? Close, but better! A one-man symphony, wrecking crew, and/or runaway train, Foetus' music is truly fierce, mean, nihilistic and... absolutely brilliant, black humored and beautiful! Some might say that he works in similarly multi-genre meltdowns, enormous scopes and sprawling ranges as Mr. Bungle or Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and they'd certainly be correct, but Foetus was doing it all by his lonesome years before those groups. Furthermore, he was an influential wizard behind the scenes too, co-producing early Coil albums, and collaborating with other (in)famous aural beacons Nurse With Wound, Sonic Youth, Marc Almond, The The, Nick Cave, and Lydia Lunch to name just a few. (Re)visit this wonder... a seething, scathing, festering and perversely enticing musical menace. Highly recommended. Note: Yes, this is a bit of a pricey import, but we haven't heard any word about a domestic reissue.

Folkstrom is the solo project from MZ.412's Mr. Nordvargr, although it could be some lost leftfield recording from odd black metallers Abruptum or Vondur. It's a weird hyrbid of death industrial / power electronic brutality and Norwegian black metal misanthropy (though it only hints at that sound). Recorded live at Nar Mattaru, "Hurtmusic" is a punishing record loaded with landmine samples, electro-shock blasts of energy, and warbled megaphone shouts. The highlight of the album is a loose reinterpretation of the song "No Place" by notorious Swedish misanthropes the Brainbombs, complete with a slow grinding guitar chug perverted from the classic Stooges sound.

A couple years ago, San Francisco minimal-wave / shoegaze outfit Foreign Cinema handed us a 4 song ep - Non-Synchronous Sound - which quickly became a staff favorite around here, with its wintery atmospherics wrapped around sublime songs that reminded us of The Cure (circa Faith / Seventeen Seconds), Slowdive, and Crystal Stilts. With just four songs, we did keep on wondering (sometimes aloud to the band when they dropped off more and more copies of Non-Synchronous Sound), when a full album would come out. While we're totally stoked that the band has finished a full album, we're still somewhat scratching our heads why Foreign Cinema hasn't caught the attention of somebody like Sacred Bones, Captured Tracks, or hell 4AD for that matter. Yeah, they really are that good! Anyway as for Monochromatic, the spatiousness and spectral songs which we loved so much on Non-Synchronous Sounds continue here. The songs all have a complexity that along with those earlier references seem to meld the artful tumble of Wire with the post-rock dynamics of Bark Psychosis. Rolling basslines that slide out of noir-tinged melodies into a low-slung, darkened dub countering the synth and drum machines, all given a good old Martin Hannett style production. The spindly guitars of Dave Han leap out of the songs with a simple, graceful sadness to match his distantly mixed, minor key vocals. For all of the referecnes to darkened atmospheric pop, Foreign Cinema conjure a sound that is pretty much all their own. We'll be ballyhooing this one as much as we did the earlier ep, until they sell out of the 300 copies they pressed up for the lp, which also comes with a cd-r of the entire album.

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Former Ghosts is a primitive darkwave trio featuring two folks we know quite well, the teen goth chanteuse Zola Jesus and Xiu Xiu's emotionally wracked Jamie Stewart; but it's the third party who's responsible for penning all of the songs for Former Ghosts. That would be one Freddy Ruppert, who also records as brilliantly named solo project This Song Is A Mess But So Am I. Even though Zola and Jamie are the supporting cast in Former Ghosts, their unique theatricality is welcomed in Ruppert's dark cabaret of cheap synths wheezing out downer melodies. The Joy Division / early New Order axis is the most obvious influence on Ruppert's songwriting, alternating between peppy minor-chord tunes and maudlin electro-dirges; yet the production veers much closer to the John Maus ethos for warped home recordings. In fact, the track "Mother" could be straight out of New Order's Power, Corruption, and Lies, minus the lack of a Martin Hannett production in favor something much more jagged around the edges. Zola Jesus mostly keeps her vocals as backing chorales of sustained trills and ululations, but on a couple of tracks she steps forward to belt out those songs with operatic prowess. As affected and gloomy as Ruppert's monotone can be, the Zola Jesus tracks are probably the standouts on the album. Certainly one to place alongside Cold Cave, Blank Dogs, and of course Xiu Xiu and Zola Jesus. Great stuff.

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Invariably whenever we play this in the store, a customer will ask, "Is This Gary Numan?". We can understand the confusion. Both artists are synth-wave pioneers and share a Ballardian sense of imagery of fetish-ized car crashes and cold urban architecture. But ultimately it was Foxx's role in the first incarnation of Ultravox!, one of the first British bands in the mid-to late seventies to combine electronics and rock in a frigid form of post-punk romanticism, that makes him the true innovator of the genre. Foxx, who left that band after three albums and before they found mainstream success, ambitiously pursued a solo career in the early eighties and created an influential studio, The Garden, where many bands recorded (including Depeche Mode, Brian Eno, Trevor Horn, Bronski Beat, The Cure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tina Turner, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Tuxedomoon). Foxx, who has been having a revival lately touring with his new band John Foxx & the Maths, opening for OMD and recently doing a split 7" with The Soft Moon, might not have as well-known songs as Numan, Depeche Mode and his other contemporaries, but Foxx had decidedly more complex lyrics and a stronger sense of nuance when it comes to atmosphere and texture. This 2cd anthology is a great intro to his particular sound world, with both dystopian pop songs and Blade Runner-ish ambient themes. There are even solo recordings of some of the early Ultravox! material like "My Sex" and Dislocation". Not all of the material dates well, but as prolific as he was (this antholgy collects nearly 30 tracks), there are many more hits than misses.

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We first discovered the oddly monikered Frkse (pronounced 'forks' we think?) via aQ pal Matt, one half of industrial doomdirgedrone duo Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead, who was raving about this lp, and got some from the 'band' to pass on to aQ. It was suggested to us, that anyone who loved the weirdo power electronic abstract industrial weirdness of former Record Of The Week-ers Will Over Matter, would also dig Frkse, which was definitely enough for us, but barely prepared us for what Frkse was really all about. A one man band / mad scientist / audio alchemist, who takes loops and rhythms, weird murky samples, and all manner of noise, hiss and whir and hum, and deftly arranges them into strangely robotic grooves, android symphonies of rhythm and textures, sounding at times like some impossible hybrid of Pierre Bastien, Philip Jeck, Thomas Brinkmann, and Strotter Inst. There's the warped warble of experimental turntablism, the lush hazy washed out textures of that sort of blurred ambience, and the rhythms and grooves all sound very machinelike, as if Frkse simply built an army of machines to do his bidding, that bidding just so happening to be creating these stripped down minimal loopscapes and tripped out abstract constructs. Each track here seems cobbled together from building block like sonic elements, a loping beat, a strange detuned strum, a disembodied melody, a whirring buzz, all strung together into an ingenious series arrangement that manages to be impossible catchy and mesmerizing, even at its most minimal. Robotic loops churning through clouds of hiss and buzz, a woozy rhythmic drag, like some strange melted tape 33 rpm jams spinning at 16rpm, the sounds saturated and warm, lush in the way only 4 track tape hiss and old busted analog machinery can be, it's hard not to imagine Frkse's strange underground lair, dusty piles of corroded equipment, nothing grounded or properly shielded, arcs of electricity leaping between various hand built implements, the vast array of buzzes and strains of hiss, carefully cataloged to be used later, and to perhaps be mixed with other separate strains, creating whole new breeds of low fidelity noise. And for all its raw primitivism, each track tends to reveal gorgeous expanses of hissy, buzz drenched minimal mesmer, like a steam punk android Steve Reich, tracks peppered with sudden bursts of almost jungle like drumming, which upon closer examination reveals themselves to be simply endless rhythmic loops piled atop one another, in such a way, that they create glorious cascades of kinetic rhythms. At times it's like a home brewed, post industrial minimal techno, at others, it's a thick caustic almost shoegazey blacknoise blur, and still others a noise drenched abstract electronica. The sound constantly shifting, a burst of gristled crumbling industrial churn will transform into a stretch of mournful almost Slint like minimalism, gradually expanding into a loping post rock drift, all skitter and stutter, unwinding hypnotically like a super stripped down lo-fi This Heat, everything caked in a dusty patina of chordal hum, a glorious maddeningly mesmerizing collection of robo-rhythms and psych-kraut dirgery, of hazy soft focus loop-grooves and tranced out motorik mesmer. And yeah, fans of Will Over Matter will flip, fans of M Ax Noi Mach too, but even more so, folks into haunting low fidelity experimental loopscapery: Jeck, Strotter, Caretaker, Bastien, Tim Hecker, Belong and the like. SUPER LIMITED!!! Housed in hand silk screeened / hand stamped covers with a photocopied insert.

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Calling this an industrial record certainly does this record no justice... Although Fuckhead's overblown testosterone laden angst is clearly presented through digital technology, thankfully none of the dated Front 242 or Rammstein references appear. Instead dense hyperactive sampling and digital noise processing dominate the album. Certainly an odd choice for digital electronica saboteurs Mego to release, but nonetheless an brutal and beguiling album. Recommended.

We were really excited about this match up, Hospital Productions head honcho Dominic Fernow's gothic industrial techno project Vatican Shadow, teamed up with David Sumner of Sandwell District's ominous minimal techno alter ego Function. We could only imagine what sorts of fantastically grim and murky sounds would emerge from this unholy union, would it be monolithic slabs of heartless black techno, or swirling rhythmic sprawls of pulsing murk? Our imaginations sort of ran wild, and yet somehow, we never imagined THIS. The sound is definitely still plenty moody and dark, but instead of being harrowingly abject, or bleak and brutalist, it's actually sort of blissed out, and pretty dreamy much of the time, the vibe more hazy and soft focus, lots of atmospheric drift and Pop Ambient style swirl. There are beats too, but they're not so much beats as pulsations, often buried and barely there, almost always skeletal and ultra minimal, drifting amidst gauzy stretches of woozy, washed out nocturnal murk, soft focus atmospheres, and blurred dream-state ambience, the vibe ethereal and airy, almost like a blackened new age, but one that often drifts into fields of dark, swirling, chordal thrum, and softly tangled sheets of smeared melody, glistening and glimmering and prismatic. There are hints of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas, the Caretaker, the whole Pop Ambient series, Emeralds, lots of drift and shimmer for sure, but a few spots that get downright sinister and soundtracky, like on the "nemesis Flower", an ultra minimal John Carpenter style sprawl of murky throb, rumbling synth blurts, and distant melodic shimmer. It's not until the second to last track, "Red Opium" that we get any actual techno, and even then, it's a sort of laid back, blissed out mid-tempo house music groover, the tempo loping and hypnotic, the beat surrounded by soft billows of resonant overtones and blurred melody, which leads directly into the closer, "Bejewelled Body", which is about as close to a 'banger' as any track here, a churning, four-on-the-floor throb, wreathed in electronic squelches, keening fragmented melodies, and underpinned by some seriously droned out kosmische raga-like shimmer.

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Fragments From The Aethyr is the latest blast of caustic cinematic black ambience from this Vancouver based audio alchemist, although it's the first FC record to get reviewed on the aQ list, which is strange, since this is the sort of dense black mesmer that many of you can't get enough of. With a sound that lurks somewhere betwixt Gnaw Their Tongues, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Tenhornedbeast, MZ412 and Wolf Eyes, this band weave gristly sprawls of feedback drenched buzz, and keening high end squalls of swirling black psychedelia, the sound driven by what sounds like a violin, but a violin possessed, wreathed in effects and sent spiraling into the ether, a weird sort of droned out black folk drift, that manages to be lilting and lovely, even while being face meltingly brutal. The sound slips into a long stretch of haunting hushed shimmer, laced with chiming minor key harmonics, and lush rumbling drones, and oozes through clouds of blackened sonic murk, growing quite minimal, and almost modern classical sounding, the violin to the fore, soaring above the abyss, a harrowing bit of minimal modernism that broods ominously, and blossoms blackly into a gorgeous blackdrone cinematic epic, that ends up being far too short, even at nearly twenty minutes, before finishing off with a dense sprawl of echo drenched ritualism, processed vox and heavily layered tones, dubbed out and smeared into hazy blurs and almost liturgical sounding chants, seriously sinister and gorgeously grim. Fans of abject minimal blackness and any of the above mentioned purveyors of sick sonic miserablism, heed the call.

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By now everyone should be familiar with SF black metal legends Weakling. A brief existence, a handful of shows, and a single amazing record (released on Andee's tUMULt label, we should mention). Members of Weakling played in and/or went on to play in Amber Asylum, the Champs, Drunk Horse, Asunder, Sangre Amado, Saros and the short lived but now totally cult blackened gothic doom outfit The Gault. Recorded way back in 1999 by Tim Green, The Gault's Even As All Before Us languished for years before the band finally agreed on a mix and a label, and now five years later this mighty slab of depressive doom finally sees the light of day. Some of you may be wondering why we're only getting around to reviewing this now, since it was released a few months ago... and, the entire first pressing is already sold out. So what's the deal? Well, bad news for any of you who already picked up a copy somewhere else. The ENTIRE first pressing was, in fact, defective. But not defective enough apparently for the label to care, as they refused to repress it and continued to sell the defective copies anyway. To our ears though, the harsh digital glitches inadvertently inserted between every track totally detracted from the gorgeously bleak and harrowing ambience. So the band took it upon themselves to have corrected copies pressed themselves, and thus we finally have the Gault record the way it was meant to be heard. Imagine those Weakling riffs, slowed down and wrapped in dense '80s-ish reverb, smeared and stretched into serpentine minor key melodies, throbbing and pulsing and slithering through midtempo dronescapes of shimmering guitar buzz, creeping basslines, ghostlike female vocals, crashing steady drumming all cloaked in a rich blackened haze, suffocating and claustrophobic, but somehow completely epic at the same time. Think a black metal Joy Division and you might be close, due in no small part to vocalist Ed Kunakemakorn's distinctive wail. Equal parts Ian Curtis, Interpol's Paul Banks and weirdly enough, Dutch weirdo black metallers Urfaust, a soaring mournful croon, rich and velvety and quite haunting. Each track is a twisting complex doomscape of fuzzed out drones, pounding downtuned riffage, swirling psychedelic ambience, slow motion crawl and creep, building and building into massive black swells. A gorgeously creepy collection of heaving, lurching, dark and delicate, doomy and dense epics. So emotional and so totally and completely intense!

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Not only referencing a rare strain of flower, but also an AQ favorite collection of ghost voices, otherwise known as the Electronic Voice Phenomenon, the Ghost Orchids stand in direct contrast to the confrontational screamo-spazzcore of most of their San Francisco contemporaries, with their cold, detracted aesthetic of new wave electronics and goth theatricality. "The King Is Dead" is the Ghost Orchid's debut full length, having recorded the album at I Am Spoonbender's Seismic Seance studios. Much of the avant-pop plasticity which coats the Spoonbender aesthetic carries over into The Ghost Orchids' sound, although the Ghost Orchids have dropped all of the Factory label references of their "Architecture" EP in favor of the detached electro stares of contemporaries like Adult. but keeping truer to the '80s darkwave electronics of Clock DVA or Cassandra Complex with spartan, repetitive programming and hard EBM rhythms. Black eyeliner required. MPEG Download: "A New Bloodtype" [/audio/ghostorchidsanewblood.mp3] MPEG Stream: "A New Bloodtype" [/audio/ghostorchidsanewblood.m3u]

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One of the earliest releases from the nascent 4AD label, issued in late 1980, 3R4 marked one of many facets to the structuralist experiments of Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis. Those two had parted ways with the other half of Wire in 1979, bringing forth a deluge of exemplary projects of adventurous post-punk including Dome, Duet Emmo, and Cupol, with this album being one of the few things ascribed to their birth names. It follows relatively closely - or rather as closely as one could - to the deconstructionist approach to the song espoused by Dome, with angular mechanical noises, tape loop miasma, psychological-drone slumber, and flanged noise engineering. The pastoral swell that grounds the first half of "3.4" could very easily have been the inspiration for William Basinski's baroque anthology of crumbling tape loops, through a languid melodic fragment whose origins could hail from a similarly decontextualized Muzak via slow-motion pitchshifting. It's quite a stately progression that takes a rather lumbering turn upon the introduction of a series of tape loops of orchestral flourishes, wooden rhythms, and a hypnotic lurch that tumbles out from Lewis' bass. The flipside "R" builds on a rhythmic interplay between two chiming sets of guitars glides from urban gamelan grittiness to flanged tape loop exploration with a drone-on dubbiness that easily parallels the anti-rock stupor of This Heat's posthumous album Repeat. Another necessary reissue from Superior Viaduct!

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At one time, the collaborative project between Michael Gira (Angels of Light / Swans) and Dan Matz (Windsor For The Derby) was called Ourselves, but the two had opted against that in favor of their names. While this may be a silly semantic decision, it

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Awesome new 12" from one of our favorite seductive late night dance floor duos. What makes this 12" extra cool is that it's not just one song and throwaway unessential different versions of the same track, instead the record features two brand new new totally melt worthy tracks, the stand out and weirdest one being "Covered In Bugs" which is a demented paranoid sensual freak out, complete with some sexy screaming from Ida No, and a wonderfully stretched out and hypnotic instrumental ending that gets locked in a smoked out hazy trance. And that ending is kind of a preview for what comes next on the scene-stealing flipside of this 12". "Shine Like Gold & Diamonds" an instrumental track that really shows off how damn talented Johnny Jewel is, the track is like some amazing version of someone like Oneohtrix Point Never covering an instrumental passage from a classic Kraftwerk track. The next two tracks are also mostly instrumental versions of two of the songs from the first side, but totally given a different feel and sound. Beyond suave and seductive. At over 26 minutes of music, this is a total must have for Glass Candy fans, and even those who might not always love the the vocals, as the majority of this wax is about Johnny Jewel's ability to capture such a specific vibe and feeling with the beats and music he creates. So good!

Glass Candy's debut full length sounds not unlike a severely chemically altered collision between the Missing Persons (y'know, the '80s new wave group from L.A. responsible for "Destination Unknown", "Mental Hopscotch" and "Walking In L.A." with squeaky-voiced, hottie chanteuse Dale Bozzio) and Altered Images (remember them? the '80s British pop band with squeaky-voiced, cutie chanteuse Clare Grogan who were responsible for "Happy Birthday" and "See Those Eyes"). However, the music that backs GC vocalist Ida No (who, for the record, has a voice much richer, if no less affected, than the aforementioned ladies) is nothing like that of either of those groups whatsoever. Glass Candy (formerly Glass Candy & the Shattered Theater) push a dark, stripped-down aesthetic of big guitar, streamlined, insistent, pounding drums, and stylized vocals bathed in delay, with the occasional addition of heavy, A Certain Ratio-esque basslines and synths. At their hair-raising best, Glass Candy remind me of an unholy combo of Christian Death ("Romeo's Distress," "Jesus, Where's the Sugar" -- when Christian Death was good, they were amazing, OK?) and the Stooges. Before it was goth, it was death rock, and before that it was just punks wearing a lot of eye make-up-- and Glass Candy embody that tough, raw rock n' roll energy mixed with sexy, theatrical glamour perfectly. It's a tough task to fully capture the insane energy of their live shows (which are well known to be trainwrecks of throbbing, writhing dramatics) on record, but I think "Love Love Love" is to the challenge. An impressive and satisfying debut that situates Glass Candy near the top of a current group of bands (including fellow Portlanders Get Hustle and Baltimore's Love Life) referencing the darker side of post-punk. Includes an appropriately intense, wrenching cover of the Screamers' "I Wanna Hurt."

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After the four song Decline & Fall ep from earlier this year, legendary industrial metal duo Godflesh follow it up with their first full length in THIRTEEN YEARS, the first since 2001's Hymns, and like Decline & Fall, it's a total time machine trip, the band sounding pretty much as good as they did back in the day. All the elements are present, the robotic drum machine pummel, the crushing down tuned riffage, the thick rumbling bass, Justin Broadrick's throaty bellow. When we first heard about Godflesh's reformation and return, we were sort of expecting it to be more of a Godflesh lite, with some of Broadrick's other more poppy band Jesu finding its way into Godflesh's new sound. But that new sound is pretty much their old sound, and we're definitely not complaining. Other than the first couple Pitchshifter records, which were widely considered to be Godflesh ripoffs anyway, no other industrial metal band has managed to pull it off like these guys, creating epically tranced out mechanical metal mesmer, pounding, and churning, a bleakly psychedelic mechanoid doom, that at times had us thinking of modern, machine-making, one man doom band Author & Punisher, which makes sense since he no doubt owes pretty much his whole sound to Godflesh, but for folks late to the party, young 'uns who maybe missed out on Godflesh the first time around, and who have been digging stuff like A&P, this is the OG shit, or the OIM (original industrial metal?) shit. And it's not just the sound, the songs too, long stretches of grinding riffage, give way to more spaced out psychedelic passages, cascades of minor key melody draped over stuttering drum machines, and undulating bass buzz, the vocals too, even occasionally slip into a more sort of monk-like chant before returning to that distinctive bark, the songs weirdly catchy, which is quite a feat for music like this, but for every atmospheric bit, every buried hook, every melodic moment, it's more than made up for by some seriously brutal metallic crush, flurries of pounding behemoth beats, and probably some of the most punishing, skull-caving, down-tuned distorto, industrial-doom riffage you've likely heard in a long, long time. Killer.

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Listening to "Ringer", the first track on Godflesh's new Decline And Fall ep, it would be easy to imagine that this wasn't in fact the duo's first new record since 2001, the sound, as we were assured by folks who heard it before us, was very much like old Godflesh, and now that we -have- heard it, we most definitely concur. Sure there are some subtle differences, the production for one, less raw and abrasive, a bit warmer, as well as some strange sonic filigree that sounds like it could have been lifted off of a Jesu or Pale Sketcher record, and more dynamics too, with some cool psychedelic passages, and more minimal soundscapey bits, but at it's core, and for the bulk of the ep, the new Godflesh hews pretty close to the old. The guitars gristly and crunchy and abrasive, the bass thick and buzzing and corrosive, the drum machine locked into churning, unwavering, industrial rhythms, Broadrick's vocals the same sort of pre-Jesu bellow, the songs strangely catchy, with the occasional soaring melody draped over that instantly recognizable industrial machine metal, laced with shards of feedback, and arc of grinding down tuned crush. The whole thing tranced out and hypnotically headbangable, and a serious return to form, one that has us hankering for a proper full length.

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It's weird to think that amongst the legions of fans out there who LOVE Jesu, there are probably loads of folks who don't realize that Jesu was born out of the mighty behemoth that was Godflesh. Justin Broadrick, who started off in grind pioneers Napalm Death, made a quick pitstop in Head Of David, and eventually struck out on his own in Godflesh. These days, drum machines and metal are not strange bedfellows, but back in the day, this was some seriously what-the-fuck action. Metalheads and punk rockers alike were confused, but got over it pretty quick once they realized that Godflesh might just be the heaviest fiercest thing they had ever heard. And Godflesh at their heaviest was to be found right here, on Streetcleaner, adorned with the now iconic image of crucified men on crossed in front of a cascade of burning lava (a frame from the genius movie Altered States), this record, originally released in 1989, still sounds as fearsome as ever. And now that we have a handful of Jesu records to reference, it's easy to hear that some of the seeds that would eventually blossom into the dreamy shoegazy metallic bliss of Jesu, were present even back then, albeit buried beneath a black hole crush of churning downtuned riffage and blistering skull rattling programmed beats. Our old three sentence, 14 word review of this still says it best: "One of the heaviest, scariest "metal" albums EVER. Drum machine doom death. Godflesh's best." NOW ON VINYL!!! And holy crap if that cover doesn't look even more amazing all blown back up to its proper lp size!!

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Not many artists can lay claim to their very own musical genre, but Hollywood, Florida's The Goslings are among the elite few who most definitely can. On first listen their sound seems to fit pretty comfortably amongst the current crop of distorted deconstructed decaying blissed out dreamy dirge rock that seems to be all the rave (Nadja, Alcest, Hjarnidaudi, Procer Veneficus, etc.), after all they often get described as half SUNNO))) and half My Bloody Valentine, but that's really only half (again) true. And while their sound does share some of the elements of those other bands, The Goslings are their own perfect, synergetic sonic force, an organic, original soundworld that has absorbed and re-synthesized those influences entirely. In other words, on this latest record, they somehow manage to sound way, way heavier and much, much more lush, transforming any vestiges of other bands' sounds into something distinctly theirs. Formerly just a husband and wife duo, Max and Leslie Soren, Occasion finds the couple joined by two apparently full-time members which does nothing but help make their sound, thicker, and more dense, more intense, more distorted, and impossibly, more beautiful. It's not a huge departure from the sound of their previous outings, but that's not really a bad thing. Occasion just serves to demonstrate that their sound is now even more of a particularly refined and menacing chunk of skull crushingly gorgeous sound. Each of The Goslings' records has been self-recorded straight onto tape in their $15 an hour rehearsal space. Before it was a 4-track, now it's a reel-to-reel 8-track tape, with any additional tracks being added at a friend's house in Pro Tools -- a slight upgrade, but again, one that merely serves to push their sound even further into some hellish sonic realm. Mastered by James Plotkin, their commitment to relatively lo-fi, analog recording a significant part of why each and every track is so totally ear-stabbingly, skull-fuckingly shit heavy. But beneath the obvious doom veneer, the crushing sludge, the washed out hiss and buzz, there are buried some lovely melodies and more of the Goslings' near perfect pop songs. Fear not though, it's not like Nadja or Jesu, where there is potentially enough of said pop to turn-off those more dedicated to the seriously heavy and/or utterly grim. Regardless of the surprising melodic structures lay hidden beneath the blown out bluster, or the prettiness of Leslie's vocals drifting ethereally throughout, the music, the sound, the Goslings' sheer power continually threatens to overwhelm, a bludgeoning slab of sonic destruction that's systematically destroying your entire life, note by note. Then out of nowhere, there's a weird little bluegrass number, a brief respite before the band lurch back into motion, unleashing another avalanche of village crushing, ultradistorted, stumbling, downtuned beautiful brutality. A higher recommendation would be difficult to give. Essential!

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Gothdammit, we love the Grave Babies! Their sound the perfect mix of noisy, super distorted jangle punk and garage-y gloom pop, every record better than the last. And as much as we loved their recent Gothdammit lp, this new one finds them taking that same sound, all blown out shoegaze crunch, and gloomy miserablist dream pop, and making it even better. Somehow noisier and more off kilter, but impossibly, even more catchy. The opening one two punch is tough to beat. "Over And Underground" sounds like the Wavves with a gothic makeover, and a ridiculously anthemic vibe, the vocals gloomy but belted out dramatically, hooks galore, but all wreathed in distorted murk and crumbling fuzz, Grave Babies at their poppiest for sure, the sort of thing you wouldn't be surprised hearing on Castle Face, in fact, it sorta sounds like the Fresh And Onlys, albeit, noisier and grimier and gloomier. The second track is even better, "Skulls" is a twisted, noise drenched downer pop dirge, with some seriously twisted guitar sounds, the whole thing ultra lo-fi and weirdly and psychedelically washed out, skittery drum machines, and more woozy cold wave-y vocals, and again, catchy as all get out! And while we can't say it only gets better, it most definitely stays goddamn great, GB weaving a dark sonic spell that's equal parts eighties new wave, shimmery shoegaze pop, and angular distorto death rock, from the dreamy wistful fuzzed out balladic "Slaughter", to the Jesus And Mary Chain via Blank dogs jangle crunch of "Count Cuts", replete with some seriously dreamy harmony vox, to the warped Chrome-gone-garage-pop of "Breeding", with some super over the top emotional vox, not to mention more crumbling guitar crunch. With a different production, and some of the gloominess toned down, this would be some perfect jangly pop music, but as it is, it's a fantastic, and fantastically warped chunk of noisy shoegaze gloom pop, that we can't get enough of!

MPEG stream: Over And Under Ground
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Gothdammit might just be the best album title EVER. The latest from Seattle goth/gloom/doom weirdos Grave Babies, find them in fine form, opening up with the succinctly titled "Fuck Off", which begins as a long sprawl of washed out almost new agey synth drift, but when the drums finally kick in, they throw another curveball, the song blossoming into some seriously hooky eighties pop, that sounds a bit like a more warped and distorted version of "I Melt With You", it's not hard to imagine this as the theme to some John Hughes VHS knockoff, in fact, the record is super raw and lo-fi and makes it sound almost like it was recorded straight off an old TV while said imaginary movie was playing. And that eighties poppiness continues throughout, with "Morning Heir" sounding like some lost Cure B-side, the vocals a dead ringer for Robert Smith, and the song's inherent Cure-iness, gets a little bit supercharged and turned into a blast of shoegaze gloompop that is crazy catchy and pretty gothdamn irresistible. The rest of the track titles may point to something much more noisy and grim: "Nightmare", "Bloodstains", "Wasting", but the rest of the record is crammed with more hook heavy eighties style gloomy new wave pop, that sounds like it came straight off some alternate universe high school mixtape. Which is most definitely a very very good thing. How we love these guys more and more with every release! Includes a download code as well!

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This is a MEAL! This punk ass band (and pals of ours) from the town of Watsonville, California are a bunch of snotty creeps with twisted visions of landlords on fire and yuppies being run through the wheat thresher! Their sound is part Public Image Limited (with dubbed out guitars, pounding percussion and general bad attitude) and part Big Black (angular, dark and more bad bad attitude). They hate rich people, they hate meansters, and they are annoying as fuck to see live. Happy Meal is fronted by twin brothers, known only as American Cream (guitar and vocals) and Harinjneesh Al Chone (bass and vocals). If you see them live, they will make fun of you!!! They also write amazing songs! The first track, after the rap station skit intro, is "Kathy". Has a catchier more riffradical song ever been written? You will have to buy this record to find out! The rest of the album is equally killer. Jagged but melodious guitar lines, throbbingly fucked up bass patterns and two little twerps screaming about making pipe bombs and selling weed to the cops. Watsonville's Most Wanted! Also, every cd is garnished with a hilarious comic street by bass-man Al Chone. Why? Happy Meal.

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Record number two from this hateful harsh suicidal black metal band turned dark gothy gloom wave outfit, and the band continue to shed the black vestiges of their past incarnation, moving ever toward a more purely darkwave pop sound, and like on their debut, Famine (Or Into The Bellies Of Worms), the sound here is all warm muted buzz, propulsive drum pound, low slung slithery basslines, all woven into a droned out darkly psychedelic chunk of sweet sonic miserablism, the vocals this time a bit more strident in places, and powerful, making this sound more like Killing Joke than anything. Although the deep dramatic croon from the first record remains, and seems to be again channeling Andrew Eldridge from Sisters Of Mercy. There are also long droned out tones, that sound like horns, but could be guitars or synths, the effect is the same, adding a sort of mournful funeral quality, which is balanced by the chiming melodies, and the almost Cure-like songcraft, although it's more like Cure filtered through Circle, as the tracks have a looped krautrock like mesmer to them, hypnotic and trancelike. Some of the tracks are peppered with weird squelchy synths and electronics, adding a weird spaciness to the proceedings, but for the most part, the sound here is a dark, driving minimal gloom pop, with the guitars occasionally slipping into an almost metallic chug, but tending more toward the angular crunch of echo drenched jangle, there are samples too, but really with music like this, it's all abut the bass and drums, that sort of Joy Division foundation that's in full effect here, and is dark and driving and dreamily depressive, mournful and melancholic, Hateful Abandon like the darker grittier version of Nuit Noire gloom pop offshoot Soror Dolorosa, and really anyone who dug that (did anyone not?) will love this too! Released on the always kick ass UK label Todestrieb.

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The first release from this twisted avant shoegaze, black-doom, new wave, industrial psych pop duo, Deathconsciousness, was a sprawling double disc, complete with a huge book filled with lyrics and obscure text, strange illustrations, sonically and conceptually it was utterly stunning, we had been getting emails about that band and record for months before we got our hands on copies, and in our review of that record, we proclaimed that it really SHOULD have been a Record Of The Week, but the band decided to stop making copies, and we had the last copies ever. We were so obsessed with the record that at one point it was even slated to be reissued on Andee's tUMULt label too, but sadly, that never came to fruition either, and we hadn't heard much from Have A Nice Life since, a tape, a cd-r of outtakes, a few live performances, we began fearing the worst, that Deathconsciousness was the first and final proper record we'd hear from these guys. But now, six years later, local label The Flenser continues their shift from black metal to twisted dark pop and avant heaviness, and reveal a brand new Have A Nice Life record, and we get to right that old wrong, and finally make Have A Nice Life our Record Of The Week, cuz the new record is really damn near as good as the first. And sonically a good fit for The Flenser too, their new even less metal sound settling somewhere right between outfits like Aussie black-jangle noise poppers Loss Of Self and math-doom electro-sludge goth rockers Wreck And Reference. And yeah, HANL were really never metal, and now, they seem to have settled into a sound that's equal part gloomy death rock, noisy jangle pop and nineties style shoegaze, with a weird lo-fi production, almost entirely clean vocals, lots of angular guitars, reverb heavy goth rock drumming, and huge thick swirls of crumbling distortion and psychedelic freakout guitars. The record opens with "Guggenheim Wax Museum", a heady blast of fuzzy, super distorted dirge pop, blown out and shoegazey, with deep, dramatic vocals, and wild squalls of swirling psychedelic noise, like a slo-mo Godspeed fused to a blackened My Bloody Valentine, which bleeds right into "Defenestration Song" a super melodic, gloomy, goth pop gem, all thick fuzzy bass, a little Joy Division, molded into a sort of post industrial doom-gaze death rock with some super dramatic, almost emo vox. "Burial Society" sets moody pianos amidst a slowly skittering drum machine, beneath crooned hushed vocals, buzzing guitars, sounding almost like a darker, meaner, more underground Deftones (which is a VERY good thing by the way), the same sort of goth informed, dramatic metallic pop, but filtered through a much more fractured and fucked up sonic filter, laced with some surprising vocal oooh's and aaah's that add even more poppiness. "Music Will Untune The Sky" unfurls as a creepy raga like drone, keening, wailing vox, heaving low end swells, lush and layered, slowly blossoming into something darkly melodic and prismatic, before slipping into the confusionally chaotic opening to "Cropsey", a tangle of overlapping samples, buried muted rhythms, chiming barely there melodies, before the song finally explodes in a frenzy of tribal drumming, swirling strings, and more strident death rock vox. "Unholy Life" is some serious, total eighties style goth pop, a little bit new wavey, echo drenched drums, minor key melodies, but with some cool angular metallic guitars, and a wild noisy, psychedelic shoegaze second half, which gets gloriously blown out and blissed out. "Dan And Tim" cranks up the mathy post punk, sinewy and slithery, before transforming into more hazy gloom pop shimmer, the mathiness of the opener continually churning away beneath ethereal swaths of fuzzy guitar and heavily reverbed vocals, blurry and bleary. And finally, closer "Emptiness Will Eat The Witch" is all hushed and dreamlike, buried melodies and muted shimmer, all beneath a hypnotic drone, that shifts subtly, changing timbre and tone, vocals surfacing, the sound coalescing into some dour pop dreaminess, but still darkly droney, it's not until 5 minutes in that the song truly takes off, but instead of exploding into something heavy, the vocals soar and swirl, thick clouds of dreamy, droney vocal harmonies, pulsing and pulsating, peppered with strange abstract percussion, before settling into one final drift, haunting, and hypnotic, and darkly and dreamily mysterious. So goddamn great, and while it was totally worth the six year wait, let's hope we don't have to wait that long for more...

MPEG stream: Guggenhein Wax Museum
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As one of the many indie-rock bands resurrecting the theatricality of the New Wave, Heart of Snow has almost perfected their mimicry of Siouxsie and The Banshees, down to the bombastic vocal delivery of Cynthia Mansourian to the phased 'n' flanged

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We raved about Ruthless Sperm, last year's full length from Italian gloom garage noise pop new wave outfit His Electro Blue Voice, who we originally discovered on a split 7" with another aQ fave 'faerical blasting punks' Nuit Noire. As much as we loved that single and whatever other tracks we could dig up from HEBV, Ruthless Sperm was a revelation, noisy and poppy, chaotic and catchy, anyone who's been digging Iceage or the Holograms or Beastmilk or the Grave Babies, His Electro Blue Voice were kind of a meaner, more feral version of all those bands, which is most definitely a good thing. So after listening to Ruthless Sperm pretty much constantly, we were thrilled to discover this 12" we had somehow missed, releases on Clay Ruby's (of Burial Hex) Brave Mysteries label, and needless to say, it's a good one. A three song blast of murky, gloomy noise pop, equal parts garage rock crunch, new wave slither, goth rock swagger, the guitars fuzzy and crunchy and angular, the basslines sinewy and Joy Divisiony, the vocals yelped and howled, and most importantly, the songs are catchy as hell, opener "Dead Mice" could have been plucked right off of Ruthless Sperm, with its fuzzed out bass, and furious punk rock energy, all droney and spacey, with a weird psychedelic breakdown midway through, the song collapsing into a weird free noise drift, all skipping records and looped voices, before transforming into a weird bit of psychedelic goth folk, right down to what sounds like a recorder solo(!), eventually working its way back up to something more rocking, but still blissed out and weirdly woozy. Definitely worth the price of admission for the first track alone, but follow up "Eat Sons" is cool too, a serious Interpol vibe, albeit WAY noisier, a crunch, murky main riff, pounding drums, total leather jacket, sunglasses, anthemic gloom punk radness. The song here we end up playing on repeat. The whole of the flipside is taken up by "Zum", a sprawling brooder, all laid back and washed out, fuzzy garage gloom murk, noisy and droned out, but muted and minimal, a sort of swaggery garage goth ballad, that like the opener, has a strange breakdown midway through, from which emerges a completely different song, wildly mathy for a minute, before locking into something much more rocking and swaggery, some fierce fuzz punk pound with some really weird falsetto vocal wails and wild squalls of spaced out psychedelic FX, all of which KILLS. This band is so great. Seems like only a matter of time before the rest of the world discovers these guys, and they end up getting the same love as all the above bands (Holograms, Iceage, etc.). Here's hoping... LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!

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We first heard this Italian outfit on a split 7" with aQ faves Nuit Noire, whose weirdo 'faerical blasting punk' sounded pretty much perfect alongside the goth-stomp noise rock of His Electro Blue Voice. So much so that we found ourselves trying to track down everything we could. We were then thrilled to discover a His Electro Blue Voice track on this year's Sub Pop 1000 Record Store Day sampler, a track we described as "a gloriously twisted chunk of noisy, synthy, distorted garagey new wave weirdness that might be worth the price of admission alone" and which sadly is not included here, but that sound is in full effect, gnarly, gritty, crusty, swaggery, it's actually a LOT more aggressive and blackened than we remember, at least on opener "Death Climb", which adds some grim black buzz to their brooding, nightmarish punk wave gloom garage pound, but soon enough the band settle into something a bit more tranced out, check out the new wave krautrock of "Spit Dirt", a sprawling 8 minute motorik groove, that wraps spidery chiming guitars and thick low slung bass chug around a seriously hypnotic ultra propulsive rhythm, before exploding into the aggro noise rock new wave murk and howl of "Sea Bug", that reminds us of Iceage or the Holograms, but even more rough and ragged and supercharged, and infused with the sort of hookiness most proper pop bands would kill for. After that, the band dip into some churning, thud rock pigfuck noisiness on "Tumor" (shades of Aussie thugs Lubricated Goat, as well as late great SF knuckle draggers Steel Pole Bathtub), with some super cool tripped out psychedelic weirdness part way through, then some super pop punkiness via P.I.L. on "The Path", with yet another psychedelic breakdown, this one all synthy and shimmery, but still driving and hypnorocky. "Born/Tired" might be the prettiest of the bunch, the chiming intro is a dead ringer for some classic indie rock song we can't quite put our finger on, but then the howled vox and gristly guitars swoop in, managing to rough things up without taking way any of the poppiness, and then ditching the buzz and crunch and slipping into some laid back space rockiness, totally mellow and mesmerizing. Finally, things finish off with "Red Earth", which begins as a softly glimmering drift, all washed out thrum and psychedelic spaciness, which is soon joined by some simple tribal drumming, hushed vox, eventually swirls of chiming guitars add a woozy minor key feel, as do processed synths, the song drifting into more of a dark jangle pop, before eventually fading out, leaving just a dark shadowy swirl of ominous synth thrum and some seriously sinister vokills, which also fade out before you can even figure out what's going on. So cool! Killer 'ruthless sperm' cover art too!

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Record number two from these gloom punk Swedes, and like their self titled debut, which we described as sounding a bit like Interpol via Iceage via the Undertones, Forever is another batch of crazy catchy pop jams in goth rock clothing. Right from the get go, Forever manages to be somehow even poppier than the debut. Opener "A Sacred State" is all dramatically crooned vox, pounding distorted drumming, fuzzed out guitars, and when the chorus hits, holy shit, chiming eighties style guitar shimmer, and a hook any band would kill for. It's the kind of jam that would/could/should have found its way into some arthouse version of a John Hughes coming of age pic. Total teenage moody pathos and mix tape melancholia. And it never really lets up, every song here is super epic, ultra catchy and totally rocking. the production this time around even better than on the first record, managing to be noisy and reverby and psychedelically echoey, but still lush and layered, letting the hooks shine through, and as mentioned before, there are hooks galore, even the noisiest jams here deliver the sort of choruses that sound simultaneously casually tossed off and meticulously crafted. Synths swirl over barrages of tribal drumming, guitars crunch and shimmer, and the vocals, way up in the mix, but right where they should be, dramatic and powerful, a gorgeous gothy croon, that we can only imagine has fans all a swoon. All of that wound up into some of the best songs we've heard in ages, and a record that gets spun in the store all the time, and one that has us constantly dashing up to the front of the store to see what's playing, convinced we know what it is, that it's some old favorite, only to be (pleasantly) surprised to find out it's the new Holograms!

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After a string of 7"s and eps which commenced back in 2003, The Holy Kiss come swaggering up to the bar with their first full length. Shot Love On The Back Line finds the SF band sounding at once far looser, fuller and tighter than ever. It's a volatile gathering of cheap red wine, vampire novellas and Birthday Party records... maybe a few by The Scientists and Pleasure Forever for good measure. No, The Holy Kiss aren't in pursuit of originality, but they do what they do increasingly well with each subsequent release. Matty Rue Morgue, Nick Ott and new members Alli Pheteplace and Panther MacDonald break the intoxicated tension halfway through the album with their rendition of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies: III. Lent". Afterwards, they then slip right back into their blood red, bluesy funeral procession.

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MPEG stream: A Dancehall Goodbye

Horrid Red can hardly be qualified as a side-project anymore, but pretty much everything born from the twisted vision of Glenn Donaldson is in a constant transformation from one aesthetic strain and/or band to another. Horrid Red emerged out of the creative overload of Teenage Panzerkorps through the talents of Donaldson (here cloaked in the guise of Edmund Xavier) and the Teutonic punk vocalist Bunker Wolf. Where Der TPK blasted outward as a furiously darkened drone-punk, Horrid Red sought more of an elegant take on the post-punk agenda with Factory inspired synths and Death In June's urgent acoustic guitars; but those megaphone vocals from Bunker Wolf on all of the Horrid Red and Der TPK recordings make the projects somewhat interchangable and just goddamn great! Celestial Joy is the second record in about twelve months for Horrid Red, following Der TPK's impressive German Reggae and a 'singles' collection; and this album finds Burial Hex's Clay Ruby joining the fray. Some of the songs on Celestial Joy seek a minimal-wave brightness such as on the skittering groove of "Marble Staircase, III" complete with electric piano lines and Bunker Wolf crooning the vocals instead of barking them through a megaphone. "Nothing In My Heart" cops a few choice guitar licks from The Cure's "In Between Days." But other tracks sport the bass-driven punk propulsive favored by Der TPK, such as "Men And Sand" and the death-disco vibes on the title track. The Holiday Records vinyl version of Celestial Joy is limited to 400 copies and comes with a much nicer print-job on the artwork than the domestic version, hence the higher price.

Another blast of post-apocalyptic cold-wave inspired dark goth-pop from Horrid Red. Comprised of members of Teenage Panzerkorps, including the ever prolific and talented Glenn Donaldson (Art Museums, Skygreen Leopards, Jewelled Antler, etc.) as well as a rotating cast of band members including some AQ alumni. "Silent Party" is perhaps the most infectious song Horrid Red have crafted yet. Sounding like some lost gem of gloomy dark wave pop that one might hear on some awesome reissue by Dark Entries. But just as we played that song over and over several times and finally allowed ourselves to hear the next track "The Horror & The Cruelty" we had to seriously rethink if this track now takes the cake for their best blast of sneering motorik Fad Gaget inspired darkness. The two tracks on the B side "Marble Staircase" and "Parts I & II" are less immediate but showcase their ability to create a downer atmosphere with such success. At a time when we've been getting lots of 7"s with just one killer song, we appreciate that there are four totally strong tracks on this 7" making it well worth the price.

It's a bleak world for HTRK, as tragedy and death has surrounded this outfit which has only been around for a couple of years. In 2010, the band's bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide and the producer of their haunted album Marry Me Tonight, Rowland S. Howard died of cancer a year earlier. All of these elements make a connection to The Birthday Party almost inevitable, especially given their historical mirroring in relocation from Melbourne to Berlin and the manifestation of the id through a very raw sound. But where The Birthday Party was an expression of violence, HTRK are in constant search of desire, occasionally finding it only to have it frustratingly fizzle out before anything ecstatic can be achieved. As a result, HTRK's sensual bleariness is in an emotional feedback loop that never can spiral beyond the longing for sex, love, a relationship, etc, without anything ever attained. HTRK's existential portraits of being trapped by one's own desires are in direct opposition to the hedonism found in most electronica. Here on Work (Work, Work), the band parallels some of the horror-affected reverberation of the flash-in-the-pan Witch House crowd; but instead of drawing on unremembered memories of the forgotten '80s, HTRK has profound pain to draw upon... and they want their audience to feel that too. The band had been shifting their sound even before Stewart's death, with a greater reliance on electronics and subharmonic tones girding the spindly guitar work from Nigel Yang and the self-composed breathiness of Jonnine Standish. They were moving away from the rock trio and towards a miasma of voice, guitar, bass, and electronics with boundaries between these sounds far more permeable. The closest references to HTRK's sound would be Ike Yard and Dome, although HTRK are much more interested in building tension with their teasing melodicism through their droning electronics. The first track on the album features a weird collage that Stewart had made of late nite TV sex ads in Berlin amidst slow-motion sighs caught in a half-melodic drone and crawling drum machine pulse. "Eat Yr Heart" ramps a quarter-speed Giorgio Moroder sequence above heroin paced rhythm with Jonnine crooning a sultry melody counterpointed by breathy exhalations. Sexually charged yes, but more of a downward spiral into dejection rather than release. "Poison" is more in keeping with the bass and guitar structures found on Marry Me Tonight, with Sean Stewart's bass clearly present next to the twilight flickering drone-riffs from Yang. "Body Double" overhauls Suicide's classic sound of metallic synth / drum interplay with undulating melodies that stretch into a magnificent coda of cascading melancholy for what amounts to a masterful album. Highly recommended.

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Folks who flipped over the recent copies of Techno Animal's Ghosts we dug up and listed a while back, are probably gonna flip over this too, a long lost remix ep from the group Ice, that like Techno Animal, featured both Kevin Martin of The Bug and Justin Broadrick of Godflesh, Jesu and lots and lots of other stuff. There was plenty of overlap between Techno Animal and Ice, both being sort of avant industrial hip hop /dub groups, the big difference was that Ice included sax (played here by both Martin and 16-17's Alex Buess!!), which gave it a sort of free jazz vibe, although that was balanced by Ice's overall lurching, lumbering industrial crunch. On Code:Quarantine, two tracks from Ice's Under The Skin record get reworked, as does one from that awesome long out of print Isolationism compilations. "Juggernaut Kiss (Deaf, Dumb Blind)" is all nineties industrial thump and skitter, the beats dubbed WAY out, all tangled up in squiggles of distorted guitars, swinging wildly from speaker to speaker, thick low slung bass rumbles and thrums, sax squeals and skronks, the vocals are spoken or mumbled, the whole thing is a constant barrage of dizzying beats, twisted production, and staggering deconstructed beats, like some sort of Godflesh / 16-17 mash up, pulled apart and reassembled as something much more spaced out and skeletal. "The Dredger (Titanic)" is mostly beatless, long stretches of moaning horn and reverbed string buzz, loads of echo and delay, plenty of reverb, streaks of feedback, when the beats to come in, they're pretty abstract, shuffly and skittery, more about texture that rhythm, building to a skronky psychedelic freakout, before locking back into a more stripped down groove, as it slithers through billowing clouds of twisted FX and whirling fragmented melody. Finally, "Implosion (Flying Machine)" gets WAY dubbed out, thick syrupy basslines under horns and vox and drums, that get slathered in effects and sent spinning, a looped tripped out cracked looking glass bit of free jazz industrial dubbiness, with some seriously killer long stretches of stripped down minimal skitter that makes up almost the whole second half of the song, various beats all space echo-ed and Lee Perry-ed, the motorik rhythm pounding and shuffling its way through occasional fields of crumbling distortion, insectoid buzz, and swirling psychedelic chaos. WAY OUT OF PRINT. We got a small handful of these direct from the label, who discovered a small stash, so odds are these will be gone before you know it, so buy one now cheap, or pay way too much later for it on eBay...

MPEG stream: Juggernaut Kiss (Deaf, Dumb, Blind)
MPEG stream: The Dredger (Titanic)

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.