[ aquarius records — Rock Pop Goth Industrial Darkwave ]

IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion): Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps OUT OF PRINT/UNAVAILABLE notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock — or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us — please email our mailorder department for availability status — or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.

Showing results 251 through 300 of 532.

Vampiric emo-no-wave-techno-metal. Listen to them. The Philadelphian children of the night. What beautiful music they make. ...Take the weirdest keyboard black metal (Arcturus/Septic Flesh), the prog-post-punk & male vocals of Dischord band Circus Lupus, occasional Cradle of Filth style female vocals, and gothic corpsepaint (really) and add a little Autechre & you've got Ink & Dagger, more or less.

Long, long awaited final release from this now sadly defunct Philadelphia band, who blazed their own musical trail combining emo punk rock, math-core, electronics, and no-wave...that unique formula, not to mention their kick-ass guitarist and of course their band-defining obsession with vampires, made Ink & Dagger a big AQ favorite. This self-titled album, released after many months delay, sees them incorporating more of a riffy '70s metal influence, while still retaining their moody, complex mix of weirdness. For fans of Circus Lupus, Ruin, Coalesce, Fugazi, and, let's face it, Led Zeppelin! In other words, recommended.

RealAudio clip: The Lines Of Lies
RealAudio clip: Part Time Prophet

Three remixes of this track from Interpol's most recent record, reworked by Ikonika, Banjo Or Freakout and Salem. Yep, Salem! Odds are while all three mixes are pretty cool, that's the one that will most likely seal the deal. Ikonika takes Paul Banks' original vox and drapes them over some swirling strings, and some skittery dubstep big beats, lacing the track with squiggly effects and bloopy synth melodies. Banjo Or Freakout leave some of the original track intact, but bookend those bits with some heady psychedelic swirl and dreamy looped mesmer. Salem basically obliterate any trace of the original track, barring some chopped and screwed snippets of Banks' vox and a tiny bit of guitar right at the end, leaving just a fantastically twisted wreckage of classic cough syrupy Salem trip out, the sounds all woozy and warped, total dreamy drag, the primitive drum programming, over thick crunchy swells of symphonic synth, effects swirling all over the places. Hell, if you didn't know it was a remix, you could easily believe this was yanked right off their King Night full length. Worth it for the Salem mix alone for sure, but even more worth it for all three!!

MPEG stream: Try it On (Salem Remix)

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

SORRY. Although this release is primarily credited to former Swan, Jarboe, it is actually just as much the work of Chris Rosenau and Jon Mueller (aka Telecognac). She wrote and recorded the song "Under" which would become the raw material for the tracks that make up "Over". The duo deconstructed the song, chopping both the vocals and instrumentation (mainly piano and postrock-ish guitar) to pieces, and adding their own percussion, synths and clarinet. Be forewarned the Jarboe's vocals have been so masticated that they're barely recognizable. Three tracks in all (the first and last are quite lengthy).

The ever quotable Stefan Jaworzyn, maybe most famous for his membership in Skullflower in the early days, has returned with his first batch of newly recorded material in almost twenty years. When Jaworzyn began the production process of reissuing those first three Skullflower records along with a fourth disc of singles, he rediscovered the joy of tinkering around with electronics. Digital, analog, virtual - our man Jaworzyn doesn't give a fuck, as long as it sounds good. His own words carry considerable gravitas, so we'll let Jaworzyn pick up the story from here: "Once I'd done a bit of recording I thought, 'This sounds pretty twisted, I might as well release it - what's the worst that could happen? People don't like it and say I'm a cunt? What else is new.'" Nope, we don't think that about you, Stefan; and we're actually quite fond of this twenty minute EP. "Make A Joyful Noise" is an aptly named track with its almost jaunty locomotive rhythms and relatively warm (dare we say inviting?) flares from the fizzing electronic melodies that still crack with considerable distortion, but in way that's more akin to the Tim Heckers of the world as opposed to the um, well, Skullflowers. Still twisted in that way that is still quite Jaworzynian. "Bilharzia" is a hot-wired chunk of cascading, modular synth squiggling that resembles the sharp plonk, plunk, and plink of fractured shards of ice spilling down from the inside of a collapsing Arctic cave. An automaton, steamrolling rhythm and blank-stare drone suspension puncture all of the frigid, percolating electronics. Altogether it comes off like some fucked-up hybrid of Bernard Parmegiani and the classic Broken Flag aesthetic. Limited? Yeah, probably.

MPEG stream: Bilharzia

Eaten Away By Shadows collects a bunch of archival material from Stefan Jaworzyn (once a member of Skullflower, Ascension and other industrial/noise outfits) produced from 1982-83 with some of this material making its way onto compilations and onto a single released by Fusetron sometime in the early '90s. In the equally delightful liner notes to this album, Jaworzyn gleefully extols the virtues of bashing microphones with pieces of metal, and at least on one instance, an axe! The results of these Neubauten-esque excursions are most obvious on the junk-yard clamor of the only untitled piece from this collection. Throughout the clang and bash, Jaworzyn set forth a marching drum machine and distorto-muffled bass riffs whose structured sonic latticework seemed to be standard scum-fuck procedure for early Skullflower, Throbbing Gristle, SPK, etc. A good chunk of the album follows this strategy, with some surprisingly graceful moments, especially on the spacious "M.O.R" which could be some Soft Moon demo track with its eerily spectral guitars hung upon primitive drum machine rhythms. But the latter half of the album gets nasty. Really nasty, through gnarled feedback demolition and unhinged free noise explosions. Such volatility, noted on the very Susan Lawly sounding "Second Orgasm" or the two "Guitar" tracks which made their way onto the above mentioned Fusetron single, all share a transcendent self-immolation with the likes of Merzbow and even Keiji Haino that's far more primordial than any of the stylized ultra-violence of Whitehouse or Sutcliffe Jugend. Fuck! And perhaps you're wondering why it's only on cd? And not vinyl? Well Jaworzyn has very strong feelings about cds and vinyl, as he does about most things, so in his own, creatively combative words, here's a recent missive he sent out about a 12" series he's planning, the recent Skullflower reissues, his intense feelings about vinyl, and more: "Almost every sales site/label/distro seems to be concentrating on vinyl. I don't get it. It's stupidly expensive to produce (and buy - especially considering international postage costs); there doesn't seem to be any way to break even on runs of 300 or less unless you sell most of 'em full price yourself; pressings are regularly horrible (coloured/gimmick vinyl etc is an abomination, 'super-heavy' vinyl a joke); 99% of vinyl is mastered from digital sources anyway so don't give me that drivel about 'analogue sound'... Oh, I could go on and on... So the 12" series is going to lose me quite a lot. But if I sell a relatively small number of CDs I'll break even much faster, can put out another release sooner and I don't feel like a spaz having spunked over a grand on a record no one wants...AND CDs SOUND BETTER. Yes, I said it. CDs sound better. Oh, so you've got a mono UK original Piper at the Gates of Dawn, have you? Sold your kids to Estonian sex-traffickers for it, eh? How droll. Well I have it on CD and IT SOUNDS BETTER THAN THE VINYL. I mean it, man. OK, here's another. Form Destroyer. The LP version is horrible. The cut was rubbish, the pressing was rubbish (the master tapes were fine). The new CD sounds better than any other version. No, your vinyl version is not much cooler, it's simply unlistenable. (Xaman sounds fine on vinyl as it was mastered from the � wait, what, no � DIGITAL MASTER!) What is this crap always polluting discogs: 'when's the vinyl coming out?' I'll tell you when the vinyl's coming out: 'Fuck right off time' is when the vinyl's coming out. But no, let's pay �20.00 for an LP, which probably doesn't include a download (mp3s are digital smegma), so where do you get your 'listening copy'? You pay ALMOST THE SAME PRICE AS A CD for some shitty flacs, or a quid less for the mpfucking3s. What, are we slobbering slack-jawed mongoloids? Why on bog's green earth would anyone pay around a tenner for flacs? So they can make their own CD? Duh. Oh, flacs are just dandy if you've got a 250GB shitpad that plays them. And they're so convenient to load onto your portable device, eh? Right, just kill me now." Oh yeah, and to end with a delightfully apt Jaworzyn quip, also from the liner notes: "we don't want to hear any moaning about the fact it's in a jewel case, not a repulsive digipak!" Amen, brother.

MPEG stream: M.O.R.
MPEG stream: Untitled
MPEG stream: Second Orgasm
MPEG stream: Guitars II

With the evidence clearly stated in Ka-Spel's solo projects, no one can doubt who wears the pants in the extended family of the Legendary Pink Dots. Edward Ka-Spel expands the downer psychedelic strum frosted with ample doom & gloom found on the "Hallway of the Gods" Pink Dots album into smoldering experimental if baroque arrangemnts maintaining his Syd Barrett vocal mimicry all the while.

We've dipped our toes in the extensive catalogue of The Legendary Pink Dots and Edward Ka-Spel from time to time; and here we have one of the true gems from both bodies of work in Ka-Spel's 1991 solo outing Tanith And The Lion Tree. The Pink Dots have long been a baroque ensemble of goth portent, psychedelic wooziness, Victorian theatricality and kosmische adventurousness. With Ka-Spel's lilting lisp picking up right where Syd Barrett left off, it's interesting to ponder where Pink Floyd might have gone under Barrett's direction instead. Nonetheless, the Ka-Spel / LPD aesthetic is always an eclectic patchwork of sound collage and oblique songwriting as the backdrop to Ka-Spel's lyrical invocations. The opening track "O From The Great Sea" is driven by a John Carpenter / Halloween set of horror-synth arppegiations and staccato piano lines that counterpoint the languid pleas from Ka-Spel, who leads into the black lullaby found in the title track which features a memorably melodic phrase that spotlights the allegorical imagery found in his enigmatic / mythological poetry. Droning loops, slumping organ chord passages, chemical playschools, and washes of musique concrete expressiveness tumble through much of the album, only to coalesce into a homunculus of a song here and there complete with structured tension, balladeering croon, lyrical obtusion, and mutant tales of love, death, and misery. Long out of print, it's very good to have this one available again!

MPEG stream: 'O' From The Great Sea
MPEG stream: Tanith And The Lion Tree
MPEG stream: Four Out Of Ten
MPEG stream: Prisoners Of War

We have mixed feelings about dvds and cds that come with bonus material that are primarily comprised of demos, alternate versions, etc... amounting to a mountain of stuff that was rejected for the album or movie proper in the first place. In one hand we have the "More is better, isn't it?" argument and in the other we have the "It wasn't intended to be heard by the public, was it?" debate. More often than not the extras and bonus material serve as nothing more than filler. Enter Killing Joke's new double disc compilation titled Inside Extremities: Mixes, Rehearsals And Live -- a standalone release which in its entirety is a bit of a convulsive listen, but an electrifying document of the band circa 1990-91. Simply stated, with a band like Killing Joke virtually everything is invaluable, nothing is extraneous. For fans and recording geeks (like us!), the first disc of rehearsal recordings is a fascinating peek behind the curtain of this mighty band's process in preparation for the recording of their 1990 album Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions. It features undeniably the band's finest, most potent lineup: Geordie Walker's massive guitars snake and roam, but are never ever aimless; Paul Raven's bass is a dirty molten boil; Martin Atkins' drums with a precise yet thunderous tribal pummel; and Jaz Coleman's bracing vocals slice through anything in its path. Even with the (we assume) one microphone room recordings on a lot of these tracks, Killing Joke's raw ideas and raw performances are riveting and filled with conviction. Oh yes, and let's not forget that there's a second disc too which is a recording of a 1991 live concert in France. The band's performance is blistering, a phenomenal rock maelstrom. Actually we were surprised that it wasn't made the central focus of the release. The disc of rehearsal recordings could easily have been made the bonus accompaniment to the live cd (or to the forthcoming reissue of the album proper for that matter). A strange decision, but nevertheless, as a whole this makes for perfect preparation for the imminent reissue of the Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions.

MPEG stream: Money Is Not Our God (rehearsal)
MPEG stream: Intravenous (live)

Not sure why we didn't review the recent full length from Killing Sound, a trio of producers which includes aQ fave Vessel, but this remix of the opening track from that record has us thinking we better right that wrong, although here, that track gets reworked as something way more fierce and fucked up and brutal. The more chilled out original, here recast as some dark, dark jungle, all droned out ambience, brooding sonic malevolence, laced with haunting vox, that devolves into some seriously grimy, dubbed out drum and bass, all oozing low end throb, echo drenched skitter, the whole thing laced with all manner of creepy sound FX, what sounds like a power drill, stretched out into a keening tone, plenty of crunch and crumble, a slow build to a seriously bombastic finale, rib cage rattling bass and pounding beats, all wreathed in a swirl of grim atmospheric ambience. Killer!

MPEG stream: $ixxx Harmonie$ Version

It's too bad sometimes that we don't get to really sit down with some records until right before it's time to review them for the list, cuz often, records that we were only able to hear once or twice in the shop, or briefly on the computer, reveal themselves as something super special, and in the case of this latest full length from the oddly and somewhat inappropriately monikered King Dude, a potential Record Of The Week! All the promise of past releases seems to be full realized here, in what is no longer really neo-folk, or post industrial, but is instead, some sort of alternate reality classic country music. Imagine some dark shadow version Johnny Cash, and that's King Dude, aka T.J Cowgill, a modern man in black, whose sound is equal parts classic country songsmithery, warped echo drenched rockabilly, and brooding sinister balladry. All reverbed twang, murky percussion, and Cowgill's impossibly deep croon. It's like some fantastically demonic Johnny Cash / Woven Hand / Der Blutharsch hybrid, the sound sinister, and haunting, emotionally heavy, dark and shadow, death ballads from beyond. The opener "Holy Land" is a roiling murky twang flecked dirge, a churning rhythmic backdrop, wreathed in washed out chords, the vocals a woozy croon, everything so doused in delay and echo, that the sounds blur into one single hazy sprawl of black country shimmer. But King Dude ain't no one trick pony, "Barbara Ann" ditches pretty much all the effects, leaving just acoustic guitar and vocals, Cowgills deep voice, made even more so (almost cartoonishly), but the effect is simply harrowing and haunting, it's on tracks like these, that the classic country comparisons are so apt, albeit with a slight twist making the sound just that little bit darker. "Im Cold" returns to the cavernous sonic underworld of the opener, with jagged twangy strumming, swaggery snarled vox, lots of percussion, again everything hazy and indistinct, the verses super dynamic, but the chorus is a druggy, drowsy sonic blur, the sound reminding us of Dirty Beaches, but a much more sinister, demonic version of them. It's a modern post industrial trip to the fabled crossroads, where the power of the blues was given to Cowgill, but stained black, with the blood all who came before. The songs here are so dark, and ominously powerful, whether it's the bluesy country dirge of "Jesus In The Courtyard" rife with muted industrial percussion, those deep growled vox, and a crooned chorus, or the soft focus twang-gaze dream drift of "My Mother Was The Moon", with fantastic female vox, over simple muted strum, everything gauzy and washed out and otherworldly, the woozy ooooooh vocal refrain utterly captivating and spellbinding, maybe the best track here, the post industrial black country analog to the Afghan Whigs' "My Curse". The rest of the record unfurls darkly and dreamily, the weird processed vocals on "Lorraine" leading into the classic fifties style country pop of "You Can Break My Heart", all dark torch song balladry, but sprinkled with soft swirls of celestial synth, the sounds weaving from speaker to speaker, wrapped in some extra grit and noise, and laced with ghostly female backup vocals, finally finishing with "Lord I'm Coming Home", which like the title suggests, the intro a dark, shadowy spiritual, all echo drenched chorale voices, and muted smears of soft focus feedback, before the song proper kicks in, that deep dramatic croon, over urgently strummed steel string guitar, all beneath a haze of chiming ethereal melodies, the vocals blurring into the background, taking on the form of some alternate reality spiritual, drifting dreamily on a bed of warm whirring organ, before finally fading out for good. So fantastic, and another one of those records that makes it hard to review anything else, since this is all we want to listen to. Consider this a could have / should have / would have been Record Of The Week, and thus consider it highly and extremely recommended!

MPEG stream: Barbara Anne
MPEG stream: Jesus In The Courtyard
MPEG stream: My Mother Was The Moon
MPEG stream: Lord, I'm Coming Home
RealAudio clip: Holy Land

The Sleep Genius label who has brought us great releases by Chasms, Bad News, Tied To The Branches and Concrete Island is back and not only with a new cassette, but a cassingle!!!!!! Yes that's right, a cassette in a gorgeously blood red shrink-wrapped paper stock sleeve! King Woman is the first solo project of Kristina Esfandiari, the front woman of San Francisco local band Whirr, who we're not familiar with, but wondering now if we should be after hearing this. Backed by members of Tied to the Branches and Chasms, Esfandiari's deep resonant voice hovers over the minimal hazy treatments in these two slow shoegaze murder ballads. She reminds us of Hope Sandoval or Marissa Nadler but with a richer timbre to her vocal that is quite stunning. The backing music all hovering slow motion creep, quietly lifting these songs up to the beckoning gallows. Pretty fucking great!

Hey, we like surprises, especially pleasant ones like this. The return of longtime aQ faves Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, the project of Belgian musician Stef Heeren, is indeed a bit of a darkwave departure from his previous work, but still totally welcome, once we got our heads around it. Perhaps the purple-and-black cover graphics should have been a clue to something new, 'cause all earlier Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat covers were black-and-white. KTAOABC's previous four albums, while each varied to some degree (the introduction of drums, and heavier drones, on 2008's The Nebulous Dreams being a bold move back then), all hewed to the same basic sound/concept: foreboding experimental apocalyptic doom folk, that caused us to draw strong comparisons to the likes of Current 93 (especially Current 93!), Comus, Richard Youngs, Swans, and even Woven Hand. KTAOBAC's witchy rituals were dark and ghostly, a mix of sparse pagan folk and deathly industrial drone, with vocals intoned like David Tibet. But, with Weltuntergangsstimmung, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat has really taken a new tack. If we thought drums were a change, how about drum machines? The sinister old KTAOABC sound is present, but transformed. It sounds like Heeren has been listening to a lot of early '80s minimal new wave music (perhaps there's influence here from Belgium's own Snowy Red and The Neon Judgement?), and has now made a very song-based album with electronic instruments that, if it were an authentic release from the era, would fit in nicely on a reissue label like Dark Entries. Or indeed, we wouldn't have been surprised had this come out on Wierd, alongside the likes of Xeno & Oaklander. His vocals here are reminding us less of C93's Tibet, and more of another favorite folk shaman, Daniel Higgs. But imagine Daniel Higgs making a gothic coldwave record!! Clicking-ticking drum machine beats and electronic handclaps underpin reverb heavy electric guitar lines and washes of analog synth, over which Heeren croons his lyrics of sadness and surrender, baring his soul in a catchy new gloom-pop context. (There's also a bass player, and some female backing vox.) We're loving it, even though now KTAOBAC sounds more like Bauhaus or The Cure, than Comus. But, while quite different, this is rapidly becoming one of our favorite KTAOABC albums yet, we can't stop playing it. And, we all can be happy that Heeren at least didn't see any need to change the delightful name of his band. FYI, there's a vinyl version of this too, on OnderStroom Records, that we hope to get in sometime soon as well.

MPEG stream: My Word As Gospel
MPEG stream: The Shadows Are You
MPEG stream: Ruins

Kleistwahr is the lesser known project of Gary Mundy, probably better known for his long running industrial/noise/psych project Ramleh, and probably even better known for his occasional membership in Skullflower. Kleistwahr began life with a couple early tape release, and has been active sporadically over the last few decades, this however, is in fact new music from Mundy, and is a sonic stunner, much like past missives, a massive sprawl of psychedelic power electronics and dense distorted industrial-drone atmospheres, blown out and harrowingly heavy, the first few seconds are misleading in a way, a warm hazy melodic swirl that had us thinking Mundy might be going soft, but fear not, soon that hushed shimmer is swallowed whole by a blizzard of gristled guitar, distorted samples, disembodied voices, grinding textures, a dizzying assemblage of noise drenched sound that like much of this stuff, to the casual listener, might just sound like noise. And let's not kid ourselves, noise it is, but Mundy is surprisingly deft at sculpting these sheets of furious guitarnoise into something strangely lovely. A roiling blackbuzz howl on the surface, but beneath, all manner of murky melodies, and fractured chordal drift, even the bellowed, echo drenched vocals contribute to transforming white/grey/pink/black noise into something more. And it's not all speaker melting crush, this 39 minute songsuite, seven tracks fused into a single epic, moves through all sorts of sonic permutations, even returning to that opening shimmer, at about 11 minutes in, sounding like the Caretaker by way of Skullflower, a warm, undulating chordal thrum barraged by a cacophony of clatter and crunch. From there, the sound blossoms into prismatic flurries of crumbling distortion, before coalescing into a sort of burnished kosmische ur-drone, pulsing and pulsating, drifting atop a bed of gnarled buzzing blur, and pocked with strange rhythmic throbs, but again, it's all somehow prismatic and glistening and glimmering, even the final movement which finds everything slipping into keening sheets of high end and crooned distort-vox buried beneath, the sound is shimmery and mesmerizing, very reminiscent of the prettiest moments from Our Love Will Destroy The World, a bleary, smeared soft-noise that manages to be dense and completely crushing, while somehow washed out, ethereal and totally transcendent. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! In cool Broken Flag style packaging.

MPEG stream: I: Into The Black Light

There are a handful of purposeful mispellings of this project's moniker. For the sake of simplicity, we'll just go with the spelling on the cover. Konstruktivist was essentially the solo project of Glenn M. Wallis, who had been affiliated with Throbbing Gristle as something of a bouncer / heavy, given the rather suitable title in some texts as their "control agent." Would you really think that Genesis P-Orridge could take and/or throw a punch? No, Glenn Wallis did that for TG. After their mission was terminated in 1980, he began to explore the darker regions of electronic music and deconstructed minimal wave under those variously spelled Konstruktivist recordings, as well as maintaining an artistic relationship with Chris & Cosey and moonlighting as one of the revolving door members for Whitehouse on stage and on record. A languid synth melody introduces the record with a deathly pall resembling that of a Tibetan thighbone horn (whose eerie bleats graced Lustmord's Heresy album), that slides into a deliciously turgid piece of DIY garage-electronica for creeping drum machine and distorted basslines sounding like those great tracks by Cabaret Voltaire from way back when. A slippery piece of step sequenced synths on "Karnage" much more of a darkly kosmische vibe taking up the sci-fi electronica of Conrad Schniztler. The plodding "Karnal" follows the murky, abstractions that TG created with a distant, heavy drum machine, atonal guitar formations, and subliminally suggestive media collages. Wallis mostly fashioned his disenchanting rhythms and electronics to be instrumental, and when vocals did creep into the mix they tended toward a bleak monotone. The three bonus tracks on this cd seamlessly blend into the dour, DIY electronics of the original album; but sadly this cd reissue is also limited, to just 300 copies.

MPEG stream: Karnage
MPEG stream: Beirut
MPEG stream: Karnal
MPEG stream: Physical Jerk

Not sure if you're a gore hound, horror movie obsessive or exploitation freek, but odds are, if you are, then like us, you spent a good chunk of your free time, 10 or 12 years ago trying to track down a copy of the film Nekromantik. The film itself wasn't all that great, the highlights being the female fucking a corpse with a condom covered screwdriver and the testicles in the fridge scenes. Eww. And at the time, we were so obsessed with the gross out factor and the blurred nudity that we barely even noticed the soundtrack. So here it is, over a decade later, and surprisingly enough, the soundtrack is really cool. And holds up quite well on its own. Super freaky instrumental squeals that ends with what can only be the sounds of a dead limb being hacked off, haunting almost atonal string quartet. like a slowed down, warped Balanescu Quartet, haunting Tom Waits-ish creepy clatter, with whining violing being transmitted through a crappy little transistor radio, with clanking slow motion rhythms, creepy underwater sound scapes of burbling and swooshing space sound effects, industrial buzz, with a distant mournful melody, all scratchy played over the top and even occasional full on synth heavy Goblin horrorscapes. Definitely cool stuff!

MPEG stream: The Loving Dead
MPEG stream: Poison
MPEG stream: Supper

The Austrian post-industrial provocateur Michael DeWitt attained notoriety in the mid-'80s for his project Zero Kama whose sole album was sourced entirely from human bones and skulls, with plenty of smoke and mirror production techniques to arrive at a Crowleyian sound parallel to the likes of early Current 93, Coil, and Psychic TV. Beyond the one album as Zero Kama, DeWitt released another obscure recording in 1982 under the moniker Korpses Katatonik. This cassette - sometimes referred to as Sensitive Liberated Autistiks, sometimes as Subklinikal Leukotomy Aphrenia Spasmophilik Lyssophobo Asphyxia Sinister Lethal Anorex - delved into parallel concerns of societal pathologies and death-obsessed transgressions through very dark electronics. It's very much in step with the classic industrial productions of SPK (when is anybody going to reissue those records again?) and the pre-Brighter Death Now project Lille Roger, with blackened squalls of grim noise belched through slow-grinding rhythms and an ominous proclamation that "we're all fucked." Such doomspeak from Industrial Culture was commonplace, but DeWitt's Korpses Katatonik said it with just as much brutalist force and conviction as SPK, TG, and Cabaret Voltaire at their most zombified. All of the tracks from that cassette and a compilation track make up the entire body of work for Korpses Katatonik, which have been remastered and repackaged for this anthology. The template for much of what Wolf Eyes did later is found here. Terrifyingly great.

MPEG stream: Nekom
MPEG stream: Kcock Transplant
MPEG stream: Chronozon

The art of Laibach can be found in their precise engineering of context, as they specialize in the cross-pollenization of musical archetypes and political rhetoric in an effort to undermine the totalitarian forces at work within consumer culture. The Laibach iconography emerges as a complex and purposefully contradictory concoction of Nazi-kunst, Wagnerian pomp, and Teutonic disco. When Laibach gets their hands on them, these forms become especially absurd, as they fuse such industrialized, miltaristic aesthetics to the songs of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Queen, Pink Floyd, Europe, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Yes, some of these Frankensteinian marches are a little clumsy; if you've heard their infamous reinterpretation of the Beatles' Let It Be, and particularly the comically fumbled version of "Get Back", then you know that Laibach's iron fist has the potential to crack a pretty bad joke from time to time. Anthems is the self-explanitory anthology of Laibach's most bombastic, and well, anthemic work. In many ways, Anthems is a "best of" compilation for Laibach, dating back to such classics as "Brat Moj" a turgid, solemn oath delivered with the sanguine baritone voice that has become a trademark for Laibach. But the bulk of Anthems feature the jackhammered, post-Wax Trax rhythms, incendiary guitar riffs, and claustrophobic electronics which Rammstein shamelessly stole on their way to MTV domination. Laibach probably didn't care, as they obviously did it much better and with a smug intelligence that Rammstein wholly lacks. Along with a great retrospective of this self-proclaimed retro-garde band, Anthems also features a second disc of remixes which apply a greater dancefloor sheen to Laibach's sound.

MPEG stream: Die Liebe
MPEG stream: Panorama
MPEG stream: Sympathy For The Devil
MPEG stream: Wirtschaft Is Tot

If one were to take the logic of appropriative artists like Warhol or Rauschenberg, to the extremities of absurdity and dehumanization through the procress of mechanical reproduction, you would have Laibach. Perhaps the most misunderstood post-modern project to infiltrate pop culture, Laibach has often been associated with the proliferation of totalitarianism and Nazi culture, simply because they used those higly charged symbols and images and projected them back into the mass culture. However, Laibach's intent is to reinvest not just those symbols, but any symbol of authority and power, with the question of why is this symbol important to our culture. In many ways, Laibach was continuing in the same paths of inquiry found in their British compatriots Throbbing Gristle and The Hafler Trio; however, Laibach never cracked a smile, an attitude exemplified in their triumphant reinterpretations of the Beatles "Let It Be" as a series of miliaristic dirges and patriotic medleys. "Rekapitulacija 1980 + 1984" was their first album, released as a double LP set with a beautiful series of reproduced woodcuts, offering portraits of the noble spirit from the agrarian worker married to the industrial landscapes, mirroring the same totalitarian artforms that had been thrust upon their native Slovenia during the Nazi occupation and later behind the Iron Curtain, when Yugoslavia was a Communist country. Despite this being their earliest set of recordings, Laibach's skill in the studio is tremendous, as heard in their epic piece 'Ti, Ki Izzivas' transforming Bernhard Hermann's soundtrack for "Psycho" into a punishing uber-motif coupled with a relentless drum machine pound and discordant organ blasts. Other tracks such as 'Brat Moj' or 'Smrt Za Smrt' are brooding no wave constructions, taking the best and most haunting elements of early Swans and early Cabaret Voltaire and fusing them into a skeletal anti-groove laced with growling vocals and commanding basslines. But Laibach themselves have said it best in their early masterpiece 'Perspektive' : "By darkening the consumers' mind, it drives them into a state of humble contrition and total obedience and self-sacrifice, by destroying every track of individuality, it melts the individuals into a mass and a mass into a humble collective body... Our basic inspiration (ideals which are not ideals through their form but the material of Laibach manipulation itself) remains an industrial production, the art of the third Reich, totalitarianism, taylorism, bruitism, disco... The disco rhythm as a regular repetition, is the purest / the most radical form of the militantly organized rhythmicity of technicist production, and as such the most appropriate means of media manipulation." To hear this recited in the style of a Russian propagandist over a ominous thud of drum machines and triumphant Wagnerian horns, one can't help but laugh at the absurdity of such a statement; however, the logic quickly sinks in that Laibach are 100% correct. A brilliant album. Perhaps the greatest and most challenging pieces of conceptual art disguised as a pop album. Truly awesome.

MPEG stream: Brat Moj
MPEG stream: Slovenska Zena
MPEG stream: Ti, Ki Izzivas

What with the sad recent history of the former Yugoslovia -- conflicting ethnicities and religions, horrible atrocities, wars upon wars -- Laibach's perspectives on politics and culture appear as ghastly premonitions, which unfortunately have come true. Since the early '80s Laibach has located their Slovenia at the crossroads of the many forces (e.g. Nazi fascism, Communism, Western consumerism, fundamentalist religions, etc.) which all attempt to exact their wills upon the people of their nation, who in turn have had to adapt culturally, politically, or otherwise to such forces. In turn, Laibach and their larger organization NSK has embraced this behavior for adaptation and appropriation as a means of both celebrating the Slovenian spirit and criticizing the invasive forces. At times, the Laibach ethos spoke through grim industrial mantras (e.g. "Rekapitulacija" and "Nova Akropola"); yet others, Laibach's message came through the pastiche of their bizarrely comical cover album of the Beatles "Let It Be." So strong are their convictions about their own concepts, politics, and aesthetics that Laibach runs dangerously close to self-parody. Of course, Laibach has plenty of rhetoric to defend their conceptual agenda; but it's hard for them to hide behind tautologies in defense of "Wat," a strange album that jack hammers 909 rhythms, Wagnerian samples, Chain Reactive synth pads, and growling vocals into a slick production not unlike a guitarless Rammstein, who in turn are the most egregious of Laibach copyists. That said, Laibach unwaveringly believes that "Wat" is a relevant pop album disguising their interrogative practices. The bombast of these ideals is what makes Laibach so effective, but at the same time Laibach can stumble over their own tongues.

MPEG stream: B Mashina
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Le Travo were a quick flash across the Belgian griddle of minimal wave, post-punk, and whatnot, releasing a short lp (or long ep, depending on how you want to look at it) and a split 12" between 1984 and 1985 only to disappear entirely. The principle songwriter for the project was Patrick Bollen who recruited Luc Van Acker (later of Revolting Cocks infamy) to produce the tracks on that split 12" along with a handful of other musicians sitting in on this track or that. But beyond the 10 tracks that Dark Entries has compiled onto this lp, Bollen never did anything else. For the most part, Bollen keeps his influences local, finding comradery in the lugubrious angst-pop of fellow Belgians Siglo XX, but there are more than a few hints of Modern English (who did write some memorable goth-pop anthems aside from the one that would immediately come to mind) and Colin Newman's re-engineering of The Virgin Prunes. It all speaks of decadence and despair with the midtempo drum machines dialing in a casual strut behind the disco-punk basslines, gloomy synths, and spidery guitar jitter. Whether or not the result of Van Acker's guiding hand, Bollen is at his best on the three tracks produced by that Revolting Cock, including the urgently marching plainsong of "Chiaroscuro" and the Xmal-ish drone melodies on the "Glow Of Gnome". Another gem from Dark Entries.

MPEG stream: Chiaroscuro
MPEG stream: Something New
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Belgium 1982 or Brooklyn 2009? Dust On Common is one of those albums that could herald from either time and space with its dark-eyed synth-pop aesthetic complete with a wardrobe of black jackets and skinny ties. Yes, Led Er Est are New Yorkers of today, reclaiming the forgotten future with considerable aplomb and fitting in very nicely next to Cold Cave and fellow Wierd recording artists Xeno & Oaklander. The Led Er Est trio are quite deft at the synth melody, building terse and catchy, if minor key, tunes out of repetition & difference, and grafting those melodies onto uptempo mechanoid rhythm tracks. Guitars, bass, and vocals also make themselves known throughout the album, but the synths are the dominant machines at hand, marching along with icy detachment, primitive sparkplug buzzing, and occasional bursts of cinematic grandeur. Fad Gadget, Xymox, early Skinny Puppy (i.e. Bites), Dark Day, Chris & Cosey, and Cabaret Voltaire are all within the sonic vocabulary of Led Er Est. Another excellent release from Wierd. Vinyl only!

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We can't blame Cold Cave for everything, but someone has to take the blame (or credit!) for the seemingly endless supply of cold wave / new wave / minimal wave that seem to be pouring out of the woodwork. Where were these bands a couple years ago, did they not exist? Or did they just exist in some radically different form? Thankfully, at least a handful of these bands, are doing more than aping their predecessors, and are taking the elements of those 'waves and turning them into something, if not wholly original, at least dark and catchy and kick ass. The latest additions to the NU-new wave onslaught are this trio from NY called Led Er Est, we have their full length record reviewed elsewhere on this list as well, and it too is killer, but this is definitely the sort of band who sound perfect on a 7"s, two short hook filled gloom pop gems, 45 rpm, the sort of songs you play over and over and over, skittery clipped drum machines, swoonsome minor key guitars, throbbing joy division synthesized basslines, looped synth melodies, subtle guitars, a killer main riff, echoey vox, it's pretty irresistible. The flipside is more spacey and psychedelic, with chiming guitars, crooned vocals and a woozy off kilter rhythm, like some lost eighties new wave gloom pop ballad. Led Er Est are balanced right between old school eighties new wave, and the current wave of Captured Tracks revivalists: Blank Dogs, Gary War, Girls At War, Silk Flowers, Mayfair Set, etc� which is not a bad place to be as far as we're concerned.

The Legendary Pink Dots venture further into 70s Germanic trance / space rock (Neu!, Gunter Schickert) with hypno-motorik bass thudding and repetitive rhythms becoming the prime elements for the LPD songwriting ---this mainly due to the increased presence and influence of the astoundingly talented Ryan Moore (aka Twilight Circus Dub Sound System). The album flows with wonderful transitions from rich drones to Niels Van Hoornblower's complex sax arrangements. In spite of the title "A Perfect Mystery", Edward Ka-Spel's lyrics here are less cryptic (and perhaps a little pedestrian) on a couple of tracks. However, as most LPD records are full of indiscretions (notably bad Fellini-esque carnival tunes), this is a minor infraction to an otherwise great record by an ever-evolving group of musicians. LPD's crushed velvet and black nail polish romanticism is retained in a baroque sheen that coats the album, but they have long ventured forth from their goth beginnings. And if their recent SF performance ---a beautifully enveloping evening that enthralled all present at the sold-out Slim's--- is any indication this album is destined to reach perhaps LPD's widest audience yet, and deservingly so.

The initial listen to each unheard Legendary Pink Dots album is a frustrating experience as one waits for that one utterly crappy piece of carnivalesque junk to ruin an otherwise decent album of gothic psychedelia. Fortunately for Nemesis Online, that one song is missing... Making this quite an enjoyable LPD record of unnerving lullabies and noirish beats not too disimilar to Portishead.

The Legendary Pink Dots is an unusual crypto-pop collective whose expressive sonic adventures blur the well-demarcated subcultures of '60s psychedelia and '80s doom 'n' gloom. Stained Glass Soma Fountain, a collection of LPD rarities from the early '80s. Primitive keyboards and drum machines playfully march through baroque fusions of New Wave and psychedelia, hinting perhaps at the underappreciated pop of Brian Eno.

A new release on Profound Lore, featuring members of Wolvhammer, Nachtmystium and Mourner. Now it's just a question of what stripe of metal it might be. Grim black, warped death, filthy crust? You'd be wrong on all counts, cuz Liar In Wait, while boasting a serious metal pedigree, is not metal at all. It's still dark, and gloomy, and maybe a little grim, but it's actually death rock, or gloom pop, or some hybrid of the two. And really, it's not surprising considering most metalheads have a soft spot for gloomy old pop and goth rock, whether it be Depeche Mode or Christian Death, Fields Of The Nephillim or Sisters Of Mercy. And really if you like any of those, then this just might hit the spot. Four songs, of brooding bass driven gloom rock miserablism, Joy Division-y basslines under chiming minor key guitars, deep crooned vox, softly psychedelic, heavy at times, but much more atmospheric and gothic. While not as great as say Soror Dolorosa, it's still pretty good, and death rockers, gloomy metalheads and depressed goths should all be able to get into this. The perfect soundtrack for depressed wanders through a dark and decaying city, or just a night home laying in the dark.

MPEG stream: Faithless
MPEG stream: Conversations In Violet

Latest from Swedish blackened doom pop weirdos Lifelover, which we have been trying to get for a while, and it's a doozy, melding the twisted demented depressive black metal strangeness of their early records, with the more streamlined, lush heaviness of their most recent recordings, resulting in what might be their most full realized release yet. Featuring members of Ondskapt, Hypothermia, Dimhymn and IXXI, one could be forgiven for expecting something much more grim and black, hateful and harrowing, but instead, the band have been moving more toward a sound much more akin to groups like Katatonia, epic, lush, depressive doom pop, the guitars and drums massive, the melodies melancholy and mournful, but with the unhinged maniacal vocals that defined the first few records. Live videos display the group's incredible (and incredibly bloody) stage presence, with the vocalist, wearing a white long sleeve dress shirt, and doing some strange herky jerky dances, but within a few songs, things get decidedly darker, that white shirt soaked through with blood, the band locked into a frenzied fierce assault, but STILL, the music manages to be lush and sprawling and epic and weirdly impossibly poppy. Not sure why it works, or even how, but Lifelover are not only master showmen, but masters of crafting off kilter blackened pop. And Dekadens is most definitely testament to that. Not nearly as weird or experimental as past records, the first four tracks are a practically flawless explosion of the sound these guys have seemed to master, the production loud and lush, the riffing incredible, the drums not blasting, but pounding, the vocals a shrieking caterwaul, all wound into some incredible heavy pop music, still with hints of blackness, some double kick drumming, chugging guitars, those vocals, but however much of that there is, this still is ultimately pop music. The second half of the record, things get a bit weirder; "Androider" almost sounds like some sort of alien modern rock, if it weren't for those unhinged vocals, it's not hard to imagine a song like this ending up on MTV, with some woozy clean guitar breaks, a soaring chorus, and some clean crooning vox, eventually slipping into a gorgeous minor key lament. "Visomdsord" is all clean guitar and skeletal drumming, soaring melancholy melodies, weirdly processed spoken vocals, gloomy Joy Divisiony basslines, and a second half that gets more and more dreamy and abstract. And then finally "Destination: Ingenstans" has possibly the poppiest main riff of the bunch, total sugary sweet, still distorted and crunchy, but majestic and major key, before a brief hushed drifty interlude, and then a burst of mathy proggy blackened heaviness, maybe the heaviest thing on the record, before the song chills out again, returning to something much more meditative, clean guitars, jangly and shimmery, the only vestige of blackened weirdness, a still tortured hellish howl, creating something at once dreamlike and melodic, haunting and harrowing. So goddamn good. Lifelover are probably one of the most original 'black metal' bands around. And one of our favorites, and it's hard for us to imagine anyone listening to Dekadens not agreeing wholeheartedly...

MPEG stream: Luguber Framtid
MPEG stream: Myspys
MPEG stream: Androider
MPEG stream: Destination: Ingenstans

One of the rare contemporary bands to be released on the ever exceptional Dark Entries label, typically known for reissues of classic and / or obscure minimal wave and post-punk electronics from the late '70s to mid '80s. But this is an album that's firmly grafted to the aesthetic that Dark Entries has honed through their fine curatorial ear; so much so that if we were told that Linea Aspera were some rare Sheffield band from 1981 featuring an undiscovered Anne Clark on vocals, we wouldn't be surprised one bit. The sequenced electronics, drum machines, and minimalist melodies are ice cold in their production thanks to the engineering prowess of Ryan Ambridge, who taps into the darker synth wrangling of Chris & Cosey, Psyche, Soft Cell, Human League, and even the Eurythmics in an experimental mood. That Eurythmics reference is furthered along by the full-throated vocals of Allison Lewis, whose poetics of despair and sexual miserablism are couched in the industrialist appropriation of neuroscience and various medical pathologies. There's a considerable amount of dark tension between the cold electronics and Lewis' vocals that really makes this record quite special and worthy of being included in the hallowed Dark Entries pantheon. To be completely honest, this is really what Xeno & Oaklander *want* to sound like if either of those Anglophiles could really rise above their well crafted electronic starkness. Kudos, once again to Dark Entries for introducing us to another great minimal wave find!

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We were pretty much sold before we'd even heard a single note from the bizarrely name Lou Champagne System, which is indeed the work of Mr. Lou Champagne, and that 'System' is actually a thing, not just a cool band name appellation, it's some sort of "guitar and hookup" invented by Lou himself which "allows him to play guitar and sound like a whole band with no tapes!" There's a picture of him on the cover too, skinny mustache, and skinny Cylon style new wave shades. Plus it's on Medical Records, who were responsible for another recent Record Of The Week, Novels For The Moons by Axxess. And if you thought that one was weird, this one is gonna blow your mind. "The Lou Champagne System is a real time guitar synth solo act" the original liner notes go on to explain, who with the help of that aforementioned system, whipped up some of the coolest, weirdest post punk / new wave we've heard in ages. A rare private press lp from Canada, originally released in 1983 on Champagne's own label, this unearthed gem, on first listen, elicited a whole range of reactions, ranging from "this is freaking amazing?!" to "what the fuck is this?!", and in most cases it was a little bit of both, cuz while this stuff is pretty weird and a little bit goofy, it's also totally kick ass. And the fact that he played this stuff live using a whole array of pedals and switches and that system. Just check out the opener "Don't Say I'm Here", which takes crunchy almost metallic guitars, swirling analog synths, and primitive skeletal drum machines, and crams it all into some dense, claustrophobic punk wave weirdness. Ranting vocals, hysterical laughter, a bizarre back and forth dialogue between someone called "Fred" and a "Narrator", there's also some rad shredding psychedelic leads. It's the sort of retro weirdness that the current crop of outsider synth wave revivalists are channeling, but nothing compares to the sheer madness/brilliance of the original. "Broken Hearts" is a bit more poppy, the same sonic layout as "Don't Say I'm Here", but for a brief minute it sounds way more commercial like it could have been some obscure eighties hit, but then BAM, the synths get all squiggly, the vocals get even more unhinged, a woozy weirdly psychedelic synth punk freakout that is so fucked and bizarrely brilliant, there's another wild squall of guitar leads, this time sounding like some tangle of malfunctioning electronics. The other jam here we're obsessing on is the awesomely titled "Propaganda Frustration", with its smoldering slow build synth intro, that explodes into a droned out sprawl of skeletal drum skitter and pulsing synths, and when the song proper kicks in, it's all dark and heavy and propulsive, a sort of Goblin / Carpenter sound transformed into something much more electro-pop, the vocal heavily effected and buried in the mix, a driving late night future groove that sound like those sunglasses on the cover. Then there's "Another Dimension", with a sort of faux synth horn intro, that gives way to some chugging metallic guitars, that almost sounds like Motorhead or something, until those primitive programmed drums come in, then it becomes this weirdly metallic driving synth punk, the vocals over the top and dramatic, you can almost imagine the sort of low budget cable access video that would have accompanied this jam. Oh and did we mention the insane chorus, where the drums go all wobbly and chaotic and sound like they're totally malfunctioning beneath the howled vox? So fucking nuts! From there on out it doesn't get any less weird, in fact, if anything it continues on its warped trajectory, squiggly synths, skittery stuttery drums, strange synth melodies, the vocals unhinged and maniacal, the songs heavy and punky and fuzzy and synth and totally catchy and baffling bizarre, but we definitely have to mention the awesomely brooding closer, which is quickly becoming our favorite, sounding like some outsider synth dirge version of Blue Oyster Cult's "Veteran Of The Psychic Wars" from the Heavy Metal soundtrack, with it's haunting creep and weird field recorded honking horns and crickets, all beneath super psychedelic swirls of synth and some seriously tripped out gorgeously multi-tracked harmonized vocals, including the way too appropriate lyric "I'm like a man in a fantasy, maybe I should just get stoned..." Totally and utterly amazing, and baffling, and so obviously absolutely recommended. Total fractured genius outsider post-punk synth wave weirdness that is threatening to become the only thing we want to listen to! Pressed on white vinyl, LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Includes a 12" x 12" insert with liner notes / lyrics.

MPEG stream: Don't Say I'm Here
MPEG stream: Broken Hearts
MPEG stream: Propaganda Frustration
MPEG stream: Silent Walking

Took us a while to get these to list, but, now we have a few, at last... Ah, Lovesliescrushing! What a beautiful noise you make! Ghost Colored Halo finds the shoegaze duo returning to Projekt Records, where they released their first album nearly 20 years ago. Little has changed in terms of the group's sound during those two decades, as Scott Cortez stills weaves thick, amorphous clouds of blissed-out guitar noise around the siren-song vocalizations of Melissa Arpin-Duimstra. With just voice and guitar at their disposal, Lovesliescrushing elegantly deconstructs the pop-song into an oceanic wash of sound, all without the use of any rhythm section whatsoever. Much of the work that has been released over the past decade was stitched together from old tapes of guitar drones and vocal tracks reworked many years afterwards. Both the Shiny Tiny Stars album on Handmade Birds and the Girl Echo Suns Veils boxset on Projekt were examples of Cortez reworking archival material and with Arpin-Duimstra dubbing vocals later. These albums further atomized the overblown shoegaze wash of sound into beautiful blurs of reverberation and echo, with the song all but entirely eradicated in the lush soundscaping. On Ghost Colored Halo, the two actually got together in the same room to record for the first time in well over a decade. Here, the song begins to appear once again, and the in-studio chemistry results in a more focused set of compositions as nebulous as they may be. The opening number "Blemished Sunspot" blossoms with all of the majesty of one of Tim Hecker's constructions as radiant glistenings of soft-focused guitar noise gradually lift off and soar into the upper regions of the stratosphere. A more plaintive guitar strum along with Arpin-Duimstra's voice grounds tracks like "The Tiger Hunts Alone" and "The Wounds That Won't Heal," the latter almost sounding like it could have been a track from the early Tarentel records (an interesting reference to hear, especially since Tarentel's Jefre Cantu-Ledesma actually penned an homage to Lovesliescrushing on his solo record Love Is A Stream). And to throw a monkeywrench into everything we had thought about Lovesliescrushing, the duo toss a steady heartbeat pulse into rapturous, pop-ambient waltz "Ghost Colored." It's all gorgeous stuff, and we're head over heels to hear Lovesliescrushing once again, especially working with comparitively more structured material!

MPEG stream: Whitening Glos
MPEG stream: The Wounds That Won't Heal
MPEG stream: Ghost Colored

No introductions necessary for Lydia Lunch and Roland S. Howard. These two had collaborated sporadically throughout the '80s, with an alliance between Lunch and The Birthday Party that resulted in an infernal split, live LP recorded in 1981, a near perfect single for 4AD of those two covering "Some Velvet Morning" in a round of comic-book horror / love-story genius, and the Honeymoon In Red album which is pretty much the best thing that Lydia Lunch has done outside the No Wave days. In 1991, they trekked from their respective dens of iniquity to Memphis, Tennessee with JG Thirlwell in tow to produce Shotgun Wedding. This album came after a number of years of spoken word performances and recordings for Lunch and right before Howard returned to the studio with These Immortal Souls to pen the masterful I'm Never Gonna Die Again album. With Howard recently dying of complications from a lifetime of heroin abuse, a flood of reissues seem to be in order. We can hope that Mute will do a proper reissue campaign for those two These Immortal Souls albums, as those were two of the forgotten gems in the wake of The Birthday Party's demise. Nonetheless we have here Shotgun Wedding - a swampy, lugubrious album of druggy, shambolic blues rock with Lunch's caterwauling vocals dialing down the shrill assault and trying with degrees of success to sing along with Howard's world-weary guitar leads that are still the blueprint for a bleak, cowpunk transgression. There are a handful of covers on Shotgun Wedding, including Led Zeppelin's "In My Time Of Dying", the obscure (and unremarkable) "Burning Skulls" penned by Jeremy Gluck, and the one that really shines - a diabolically sassy cover of Alice Cooper's "Black Juju." Throughout the rest of the album, Howard's tunes are front and center, slinking and slithering through his guitar leads and Lunch spouting her sordid love songs mired more in sex and death than love. It has to be said that the album stumbles a bit from the first couple of tracks; but after that, Shotgun Wedding broods and sulks with the best of them. 1972 has also seen to including the aforementioned "Some Velvet Morning" cover at the end of the album immediately following the Alice Cooper one. Horror. Humor. Horror. Humor.

MPEG stream: Endless Fall
MPEG stream: Incubator
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Latest from this Euro synthwave/gloom pop combo, a three song 12", the new track "Chasing The Light", contains everything we loved about the last LFY full length, a buzzy, murky artpunk new wave creep, all pulsing synths and crooned, almost yowled vox, robotic beats fashioned into some sort of Eurodisco glooom/goth synth pop, swirling and psychedelic, a darkly droning electro-pop dirge. That track gets a reworking on the A side, which transforms the song into something a bit more murky and Skinny Puppy sounding, loads of echo and delay, the whole song seemingly being transmitted though a pillow, the beat more industrial, tranced out, droney and super hypnotic. The flipside is a sidelong sprawl of gloomy, gothy electro, clubbed up just a bit, a more house-y beat driving the proceedings, but the whole thing still muddy and washed out, the various sounds buried beneath all manned of deathrock sonic grime, a gristle soaked electronic doomscape, that definitely reminds us of some of Dominick Fernow's projects, like Christian Cosmos or Vatican Shadow, which is most definitely NOT a bad thing!

We went a little crazy for the last Lust For Youth full length, Growing Seeds, having only just discovered the group via some random witch house mix, and while as we mentioned in that review, LFY are most certainly no witch house, they definitely share some of the sonic traits, swirling and psychedelic, murky and electronic, but LFY has a definite Euro EDM vibe, a post industrial new wave feel, that when fused to LFY's more witchy, moody atmospheric inclinations, the sound is transformed into something super cool, and weirdly warped. Check out opener "I Found Love", which begins with clouds of cricket chirp electronics, woozy synth melodies, sweeping chordal swells in the background, weird skittery rhythms surface, as does a weirdly reverbed loop of a woman laughing (sobbing? hard to tell), but as that loop is repeated, and a pounding pulsing beat swoops in, the swirls dark and minor key, the vocals proper a sort of shouted sloganeering, that weird sample becomes a bit more intense, the whole song brooding and mesmerizing. Rhythmic and groovy, swirled in shimmery psychedelic colorations, minimal and abstract, but darkly intense and a little bit sonically harrowing. And while the rest of the record isn't nearly so dark, that shadowy something seems to run through the whole record. "It's You" sounds like it's gonna be some Depeche Mode style electro pop, and it sort of is, a thick warm main melody, soft billows of analog shimmer, a super hooky main melody, but then those vocals come in, mush mouthed and lazy, doused in reverb and effects, sucking the energy out and transforming this electro pop, into something creepier and darker and more menacing, the vocals sounding like they were plucked from an Iceage song and dropped into LFY's woozy electro swirl. And that's definitely the vibe of the whole record, a cool. twisted juxtaposition between synthy electronic pop, pulsing rhythmic dance music, and crumbling distorted synths, those sneery washed out vocals, pulsing beats draped with billowy synth swirl, the sound just on the edge of distortion, everything blown out and in the red, also giving the record a more sonically intense vibe. Like DHR produced Depeche Mode maybe, but it's those vocals that really give the music it's sort of wasted nihilistic vibe, made even more pronounced when they're paired with super melodic synths, or almost groovy rhythms. Whatever it is, we dig it a lot, a gloomy, dystopian synth-kraut gloom pop darkwave that somehow fuses the abject future funk of Suicide to the blissed out sci-fi synth pop of M83 and comes up with THIS! Awesome!

MPEG stream: I Found Love
MPEG stream: Breaking Silence
MPEG stream: Another Day

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

SORRY. Believe it or not, Lustmord's Heresy was the first cd I (Allan) ever bought, back in 1990 when it was first released. (Not my first tape or LP, but my first cd -- the second, if I recollect correctly, was either Nirvana's Bleach or Lights...Camera...Revolution by the Suicidal Tendencies...someday I'm gonna do a 'zine on the subject of 'first records purchased', but I digress). I think I'd read about it in some magazine, and was intrigued that it was apparently recorded deep underground in some cave or crypt. These subterranean origins are certainly believable when you listen -- it's dark and deep indeed, an ambient well of sound echoing with what sounds like the cries of buried, ghostly whales, a fog-shrouded hour of droning unease. Haunting, beautiful, something enjoyably scary to listen to alone at night. As the first-ever cd in my collection, of course it's near and dear to my heart, but it's the music that prompts me to tell you it's a great album. We're glad that it's finally now been reissued (in a spiffy digipack, still sporting the fantastic, apocalyptic cover piece "The Great Day Of His Wrath" by English Romantic painter John Martin), all tracks remastered by Brian Lustmord in 2004. Highly recommended. If you're at all into dark/ambient/drone musics, you ought to have one or two or more Lustmord discs in your collection, and I'd say Heresy should be one of them.

MPEG stream: Heresy Part I
MPEG stream: Heresy Part IV

Perhaps beginning with the soundtracks that Throbbing Gristle supplied to Derek Jarman films and Coil's rejected score to "Hellraiser," industrial culture has slowly been creeping into more and more mainstream venues through its affiliation with film. Brian "Lustmord" Williams' work is certainly no exception as he began his musical career during SPK's most devistating period back In the mid '90s, Williams followed the lead of SPK's Graeme Revell by working on the sound design for big Hollywood movies. Revell, in fact, is credited with scoring the "Tombraider" soundtrack (amongst 30+ others)... Quite a long way from the autopsy imagery of SPK's "Information Overload Unit!!!" Anyway, "Metavoid" marks the first proper Lustmord album in almost seven years, and the time that Wiliams has spent toiling for Hollywood has undoubtably affected his own work as Lustmord. While the slashing drills and unnerving screeches blast from his gaping drones, Lustmord has laced these already threatening pieces with unneccessarily theatrical synthetic strings and mystical flutes that seem better suited for "Xena" than a Lustmord album. A disappointing return.

Lustmord's nightmare aesthetic continues to map out aural manifestations of subconscious terror. "The Monstrous Soul" was originally released through World Serpant in 1990. While the earlier Lustmord records had been acoutic in nature, this time, the digital prowess of Adi Newton (Clock DVA, T.A.G.C.) was enlisted to add a digital clarity to the psychoacoustic malevolence. "The Monstrous Soul" is a series of dark ambient environments sounding like some Lovecraftian haunted forest ready to send its trees tumbling on top of any trespassers. Ominous tectonic plods, loops of Crowley's incantations, and samples pronouncing the intention of demonic possession are interspersed between the dark ambient passages rich in deep reverberations. A perfect bridge between the avant black-metal of Skepticism and the dadaist dirges of early Current 93.

It has to be said this is not the Lycia record that we would have picked get reissued on vinyl; but it is very interesting that the highly acclaimed label Handmade Birds has dug into the back catalogue of the dour doom-goth-pop outfit Lycia to publish their first ever vinyl release. Lycia was probably the best known band on the US goth label Projekt, originally a one-man project from Mike VanPortfleet which expanded to a trio with the addition of Tara Vanflower and David Galas by the mid-'90s. But the vision for Lycia was always that of VanPortfleet, through his funereally paced dirges draped with suffocating amounts of reverb, whispered vocals, and his signature, effect-laden guitar work. Cold was the band's fourth studio album dating to 1996, but was the only proper album that found that trio working in the studio together. The albums before didn't feature Vanflower, and the albums after didn't feature Galas. The chemistry between the three does make for a very consistent record, and that was something lacking even from Lycia's strongest album A Day In The Stark Corner which came out a few years earlier. The tracks uniformly float at a ghostly pace, occasionally swooning in step to a forgotten Victorian waltz, with Vanflower's ethereal vocals countering the whispered baritone of VanPortfleet. As is the case for all of Lycia's albums, they managed to craft a strongly recognizable sound that nonetheless draws heavily from the somber atmospheres of New Order's first album, the claustrophobia of The Cure's Pornography, and the black-trenchcoat theatricality of Fields Of The Nephilim.

MPEG stream: Frozen
MPEG stream: Bare
MPEG stream: Snowdrop
MPEG stream: December

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

SORRY.

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

SORRY. While Maeror Tri ceased activities and 2/3 of the band continued on with Troum last year, archival recordings of this very prolific outfit have finally resurfaced. With more than a dozen albums, Maeror Tri released countless limited edition�collects the best work from those tapes. Maeror Tri (as well as Troum) excel at the dynamics of the repetitive drone, from slow steady darkness to dense crashing guitar noise. One of Jim's all-time favourite bands... and this certainly does not disappoint!

The self-titled debut release from Malditos is a minimal and dark synthesizer driven ep filled peppered with some unlikely but super awesome electric tablas! Because most of the songs are sung in French you might be tempted to think this is a slab of obscure European '80s gothic vinyl reissued by Dark Entries; but no, this Oakland, CA band is comprised of current or former members of Swann Danger, The Phantom Limbs, and Black Ice. The aforementioned tablas and Eastern scales recall more than a few of the moodier aspects of Dead Can Dance, but there's also echoes of Rowland S. Howard's angular phased guitar work. The record is quite heavy, the two synths proving a driving and repetitive low end while occasionally swirling around the upper registers. As previously mentioned, three out of the four vocal tracks are in French. Pretty much the only French word you need to know, however, is "Noir". When listening to lyrics in a foreign (to this reviewer) language, what is said is less important than how it's sung and Cyn M. does an excellent job of setting a brooding and dark mood with her powerful vibrato. The last track is an almost industrialized cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Requiem Por Un C..." (sung in French, of course). Limited to 259 hand numbered copies, this record is sure to go fast.

MPEG stream: La Nuit Noir
MPEG stream: Burning Eyes
MPEG stream: Requiem Por Un C...