The Skull Defekts are another one of those bands that seem to have gone from some unknown entity with just a cd-r and a tape, to a serious band, with an avalanche of releases, in the blink of an eye. So much so that it's been tough for us to keep up. This is the first of maybe three cds that have come out in the last little while, but the first we're actually getting around to reviewing.
In the review of the only other SD release we've listed and reviewed, a now out of print lp on Conspiracy Records, we said that "if there was any justice in the world, these guys would be battling Wolf Eyes for the hipster noise rock crown for sure," and this record, along with all the others we have yet to review, but will soon, only reaffirms that sentiment.
But whereas Wolf Eyes are lo-fi and murky, using piles of junk and damaged electronics and instruments that look (and sound) like they were sitting in a garage rusting for 20 years, The Skull Defekts seem to approach their noise with a bit more technical savvy, to the point of sounding mostly electronic, which they may very well be, but it's a testament to these guys and their sound that it's pretty difficult to tell what exactly is going on and what manner of soundmaking devices could produce this glorious racket. But who cares really, when it sounds this amazing, and mysterious, fucked up and so beautifully damaged.
The opening track here sounds like a Oval, but after being stored on decaying tape in William Basinski's attic for 20 years. A hypnotic looped soundscape of glitched electronics, haunting electronic melodies, crumbling distorted textures, alien beeps and bloops, all strung together into haunting melodies, and lurching barely perceptible rhythms, the song constantly crapping out, being swallowed up by distortion, as if it was being played back on a broken tape player, a skipping cd player and blown speakers simultaneously. A gorgeous chunk of decayed beauty. Of modern electronic corrosion. The second track is a slow growing drone, a warm electronic warble, a resonant thrum, drifting beneath shimmering metallic melodies, like Niblock covered by Wolf Eyes, a barely shifting series of sounds and layers, the various components becoming more and more distressed as the piece progresses, more distorted, less cohesive, but weirdly enough, more and more lovely.
The last half of the record is split into two parts, the first is a cloud of chaotic high end, a little bit Sunroof!, a little bit Vibracathedral Orchestra, but anchored by looped electronics and a relentless klaxon pulsing in the background, giving the track a strange sort of momentum, not at all unlike Avarus or Anaksimandros on Kompakt. The second part, and final track on the record, is a long dirge-y drone, of thick corrosive electronics and warm whirring low end, always on the verge of erupting into full on sludge, but instead, grinding glacially through a landscape of dark rumble and thick rib cage rattling throb...
Before Skullflower became a blissed out free drone, psychedelic raga outfit which would eventually morph into the ultra dreamy Sunroof!, they were trolling much darker, much harsher waters. When IIIrd Gatekeeper first came out way back in 1992, it fell right in alongside its sonic brethren, Swans, Godflesh, Pitchshifter, Terminal Cheesecake, Ramleh and all of those industrial dirge rockers. Originally released on Justin Broadrick's hEADdIRT label, IIIrd Gatekeeper is definitely one of Skullflower's finest moments (and quite possibly both Andee and Allan's favorite SF record EVER), a slow murky trudge through a blinding squall of psychedelic guitar freakout, dense swirls of which lurk behind a lurching slow motion bass dirge and pounding near industrial drumming. Each track picks a riff and pounds it into the ground, repeating and repeating until you can't help but be drawn in, while white hot streaks of guitar skree and low end rumble spin around the relentless plodding. SO much heavier and scarier than almost any other record. A bit like a heavy metal Whitehouse, or a more psychedelic Swans. A muddy, filthy, drug drenched metal club to the side of the head. So fucking awesome.
THIS WAS A WAREHOUSE FIND. THIS RECORD IS SOOOO OUT OF PRINT, BUT ONE OF OUR DISTRIBUTORS FOUND A BOX SO WE TOOK AS MANY AS THEY HAD. ONCE THESE ARE GONE IT'S BACK TO eBAY WITH YOU...
Skullflower's Exquisite Fucking Boredom, released last year on Andee's tUMULt label, welcomed back the seemingly retired Skullflower from a SEVEN YEAR hiatus. Skullflower mainman Matthew Bower was anything but MIA, keeping quite busy with his more blissed out Sunroof! project, as well as his equally blissed out but slightly noisier Hototogisu project. So after seven years, what was it that reanimated the slumbering corpse of Skullflower and sent the reawakened behemoth on a new path of sonic destruction. Well, it most definitely had something to do with THE RIFF. Exquisite Fucking Boredom was a throbbing pulsing ROCK record, a fucked up one for sure, but rock nonetheless. It was that relentless riffing eventually imploding on itself that convinced us that Skullflower was indeed back, to do unspeakable things with THE RIFF and offer up their own seriously skewed take on SPACE RAWK. So it seems now, with a new Skullflower record only a year later, we can rest assured that last year's return was for good.
All that talk of riffs, and a last record wholly centered around a single riff, and what does Bower do? Opens the new record with a dense splattery swirl of freaked out high end skree and throbbing drone, sounding not all that unlike his old group Total. There may be riffs in there somewhere, but you'd be hard pressed to find 'em. Sounds almost like he threw all of Hawkwind in the bathtub and then tossed in a plugged in hair dryer and recorded the results. Super freaked out spaced out free noise insanity! Fear not though, track two is where the riff returns, and once again we have to think Hawkwind, or maybe Circle, or even Can, that propulsive throbbing rhythm, that endless riffing, even some almost-leads, totally hypnotic and endlessly mesmerizing, a rock band rocking out until the end of the world as the earth opens up and the sky darkens with ash, although in this instance Bower takes that apocalyptic rock business and douses it in jagged sheets of white noise and huge slabs of acid fried feedback, swirling swells of amp buzz and chaotic guitar freakout, turning a rock song into a perilous journey through a sonic shitstorm. Makes sense that Crucial Blast has adorned this with a black metal styled Skullflower logo! And so it goes for the rest of the record. A musical tug of war, riffing is subsumed by squalls of white noise, massive waves of throbbing dissonance part allowing a riff to push its way through briefly, only to be eventually swallowed up again, eventually to resurface and push relentlessly forward into a looming musical darkness only toe be obliterated again into a beautiful cloud of swirling whirling noise. Not sure if this is the best rock record we've heard all year, or the best noise record. But it's damn sure one of 'em. Heck, it just might well be both!
Finally, we got enough of these to list, the darkly dreamy lp debut of Stefanie Franciotti's hazy and gauzy solo outfit, Sleep Over. A new light in the field of female-led synthesization, a la Laurel Halo and Maria Minerva, Sleep Over is a stunning mix of Grouper's washed out and oceanic distortion, Cocteau Twins-ish pop romanticism and uncanny gothic dream soundtrack. We've been fans of Franciotti since her days as singer in aQ faves, Silver Pines, but in Sleep Over she has found her true calling as an experimental sound composer, synthesizing voice and sound in chillingly bright sonic environments and ambient textures. Gorgeous!
We initially gave this a spin just 'cause of the cool band name, without knowing really what to expect. Turns out that this ep from Seattle's Sleepy Eyes Of Death is fantastically full of fuzzed out, synth-heavy shoegazing post rock. Six spacey, soaring, cinematic songs, seemingly inspired by the nexus of new wave and krautrock (or Trans Am and John Carpenter and Kinski and Klaus Schulze...).
Perhaps the briefest and best description we can come up with is: M83 meets Zombi. There, that ought to do it! Seriously, that's what this sounds like, and thus it's a quite recommended treat 'cause we love both those bands, and the combo is a natural one. Whooshes of distorted electronics, interlaced with airy melodies, mark these melancholic, majestic tracks, mostly instrumental but for a sparse few moments of processed, computery robo-vocals. Though the pulsating rhythms sometimes are purely electronic, deliberate drum beats on an actual drum kit are often also poundingly present, adding more of a muscular human factor to the proceedings.
Though we've never seen their live show, we're not surprised that someone is credited with "lights and fog" in the cd booklet. You could imagine that they had a role in the studio too, 'cause you can almost HEAR lights and fog on this recording, lights flashing with atmospheric radiance, sonic clouds of synth-fog billowing from speakers...
We managed to miss this one when it was released a while back in 2005, but we figured we weren't the only ones to let this import cd slip through the cracks. The Bedsit Tapes is the officially released collection of the early demos, escapades, and excursions from the megawatt new wave pop stars Soft Cell. These DIY recordings date back to 1978 when David Ball was attending Leeds Polytechnic, where he made full use of a makeshift recording studio consisting of a couple of reel-to-reel tape decks and a mixing board. Upon wiring up a Korg synth and primitive drum machine, Ball started to make "weird little tunes," one of which caught the ear of fellow student Marc Almond who asked if he could use one of those songs for his performance art shows. The two began refining those electronic blorps and bleeps into arty synth-pop numbers, snarling with contemporary punk energy and technological primitivism. Almond already had developed a charismatic persona, which he jubilantly expressed upon the wide vistas of grandiose theatricality, from the crooning balladeering of "L.O.V.E. Feeling" to the switchblade slashes on the uber-ironic "Bleak Is My Favorite Cliche" to the ominous bark of "Occupational Hazard" and onto the fucked-up delirium of their frenzied cover of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid." Yeah, you heard us right: Soft Cell covered Sabbath!
Given the stripped down arrangements and trial-by-fire approach to the technology at hand, Soft Cell certainly benefited from Almond's larger than life persona. Such is what gave the 'pop' elements of Throbbing Gristle and Reproduction era Human League their iconic status, and it certainly set the stage for the anthemic '80s hits that Soft Cell would produce later on. While many ordinary Soft Cell fans might be put off by the roughness of these tracks, it's precisely that fucked atonality, that avant-punk electricity, that giddy nervousness, those warbled, sci-fi effects and those ominous drones which make us totally dig this collection. Anyone into the whole "Messthetics" scene, and/or the current revival of retro new wave electronica old and new, should also dig.
First appearance on the aQ list for Soft Kill, an offshoot of aQ gloom goth faves Blessure Grave, and as you might expect, SK's sound is not hugely removed from Blessure Grave, but it definitely displays a different direction, with a new, and more warped sound palette, check out "Seven Hundred", which opens with chiming Cure like goth guitar melodies, drifting dreamily over some thick, super distorted synth squelch, while way off in the distance, tribal drums pound and churn. Super hypnotic, and weirdly minimal, until the guitar grows more urgent, the drums following suit, the song finally breaking the tension, and blossoming into a proper song, and maybe surprisingly, a proper pop song. We were expecting it to get seriously heavy and dense (especially considering the fact that the group now features, for this release at least, the drummer from doom heavies Atriarch), but instead, it's warm and jangly, still dark, but more goth pop than death rock, the vocals a deep dramatic croon, eventually exploding into a passionate wail, all over the roiling gloominess below, reminding us of old school goth outfits like Kommunity FK or the Abecedarians.
The flipside "Circle Of Trees" wraps dark twang around skittery programmed beats and some chiming effected guitar melodies, which builds to a darkly propulsive doom-goth groove, and again harkens back to the heyday of early eighties LA goth rock, Soft Kill sounding like the sort of band you'd stumble across playing the Scream Club, it's a sound we've always loved, and one few bands can pull off convincingly, but both tracks here are kicking our asses, and most definitely has us hankering for the upcoming full length.
Pressed on SUPER thick clear red vinyl, housed in a heavy PVC plastic sleeve with a full color cardstock insert. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
In the year since its release the Soft Moon's debut full length has become a rare unanimous favorite here at aQuarius, and many other places too we would imagine. The songs were immediately gripping, but over time we came to the realization that the album is, dare we say, pretty dang perfect, and within the sea of similarly styled bands who would describe themselves as "dark" that record is one that will stand out as a classic. We often find ourselves wondering how something could be so goddamn amazing, managing to sound both familiar and unique to itself. Soft Moon mainman Luis Vasquez has taken things to the next logical step by assembling a full band to bring these songs to the live stage, and with the arrival of this brand new ep, Vasquez and company effortlessly show the world that there is more where that came from. The only issue we have here is Total Decay's short running time - but then it's an ep, so who are we to complain. Clocking in at under 15 minutes, we are already salivating for the next Soft Moon platter, but like the two singles that preceded the debut album, where we were given some months to digest the tunes and think about what might come next, Total Decay works in setting a mood while you hunger for what's around the corner. And yet, the ep also works well as a brief but wholly contained slab of music, beginning with "Repetition", where a murky post-punk bassline sets the flow over steady driving rhythms and frantically atmospheric synths that are as chillingly sexy as they are ominous. "Alive" would be a good place to start for someone who has never heard this band, displaying all the Joy Division / Wire / whatever influences they have merged into a sound that really belongs only to them at this point, with Vasquez's strange shouted whispers (or whispered shouts?) occasionally soaring into the disembodied falsetto that has become one of the band's trademarks. No doubt the standout here is the title track, which lurches forward midtempo with an industrial buzz and provides the perfect score to wandering alone through all the creepy abandoned parts of town. The heavily effected vocals feel like the voice of some sexless robo-narrator guiding you along and offering no guarantees that you won't get your ass kicked by whoever or whatever happens to be lurking around in the shadows as beautiful buried synths bring all kinds of strange melodies into the mix. The final track, "Visions", is a claustrophobic percussion workout with more creepy ambience that, again, has most of us desperately freaking out in advance for the next full length. Guess we'll just have to be patient, but until then Total Decay will be on constant repeat.
From the very first time we heard post punk / minimal wave / gloom pop one man band The Soft Moon (aka Luis Vasquez), we were totally smitten. The sound dark and menacing, distorted drum machines, buzzing low slung basslines, tangled melodies, all woven into a sort of lo-fi downer wave propulsion, that took the Cure, removed much of the overt poppiness, and instead recast it as some sort of home brewed post industrial goth wave, replete with breathy whispered vox, woozy minor key refrains and alien atmospheres, everything wreathed in a washed out eighties murk, noisy and rough around the edges, we couldn't get enough.
The Total Decay ep seemed to be an extension of the self titled debut, a perfect slab of similarly shadowy post punk nihilism, but if anything it was the bridge between that record and this one, where Vasquez' sound has blossomed into something even more perfect, a twisted dystopian future-wave, all thick, corrosive buzzing synths, and dubbed out machine funk, keening sine wave melodies, and woozy, echo drenched ambience. It's all about the sound. Really it always was, which is ironic since we often complain about bands getting the sound right, but not having the songs to back it up, but with The Soft Moon, while there are still songs lurking in the shadows, it's really all about the sound, and the sound is so impossibly perfect. All it takes is a few second of the opener, "It Ends", with it's dense blown out buzzing low end synth buzz, dubbed out hand clap rhythms, and frantic percussive skitter, not to mention the weirdly mournful keening melody over the top, it's like all the best parts of witch house, reimagined as some mutant strain of cold wave, we would have been perfectly happy if that sub two minute chunk of pulsing, buzzing witch-wave was stretched out to fill up the whole record, even if it just stayed locked in that witch loop. Sure it's an intro, but we've listened to it about 20 times in a row!
Thankfully, that alien electronic witch-wave oozes into the rest of the record, wrapping its inky tendrils around the more recognizable Soft Moon style of jagged rhythms, Factory style basslines, echo drenched guitar jangle, and hypno wave groove, cold and clinical, like the soundtrack to some alternate future, and as one grows accustomed to the sound, suddenly, as if by some slight of hand, the songs reveal themselves, a melody here, a vocal there, a hook hidden beneath a cascade of corrosive metallic crunch, a catchy chorus obscured by sheets of synth buzz and dubbed out robotic rhythms, repeated listens are definitely rewarded, the record acting almost as some sort of sonic portal, requiring a deep listening key, ultimately allowing the listener access to the inner workings of The Soft Moon's sentient musical machine.
Oh and stick around for the closer, a reverse bookend of that witch-wave opener, literally, as it's the opening track in reverse, which only makes it that much more psychedelic and fantastically fucked up.
We love when weird stuff just shows up in the mail, especially when that weird stuff turns out to be some grim, rhythmic, experimental blackened industrial avant-noise, like this, the first we've heard from Solitary Torture, whose sound is tough to describe beyond the above. Somehow super varied, but woven into a strange black sonic ritual, beginning with whipping winds, and some glitched out primitive rhythms, which is soon swallowed up by a blast of howling heaviness, before transforming into a swirling psychedelic blacknoise freakout, moaning vocals, and gristly electronics. At that point, we were sort of expecting this to be a straight up noise record, but instead, the second track unveils a melancholy, buzz drenched black metal riff, but instead of exploding into your standard blasting metal, in stretches way out, for the length of the track, spaced out and truancy and minimal and super hypnotic, the final minute or two erupting into some speaker shredding crush.
The rest of the record splits its time between, grinding black electronica, post industrial thrum, woozy abstract black ambience, blurred grim riffage, strange minimal noise collages and dense, blasting blacknoise blowouts. Killer stuff for sure. Surprised this isn't on Crucial Blast.
Needless to say, we only got a tiny handful of these, so not sure if/when we'll be able to get more. Comes housed in a DVD style case, with two xeroxed black and white inserts.
Record number two from this unlikely black metal offshoot. Which makes sense when you realize that the black metal band that Soror Dolorosa frontman Andy Julia calls home, as drummer, is none other than the twisted French 'faerical blasting punk' outfit Nuit Noire. But even that band's outsider barely black metal status couldn't have prepared us for Soror Dolorosa, which is only black in that it's the color of the clothes, and the black eyeliner these guys don, as they unfurl some fantastically retro gloom/goth/death rock, that as we mentioned in our review of their first album, sounds SO genuinely gothic, that we're guessing even some gothrock veterans could be fooled into thinking these guys were from back in the day. We mentioned groups like Christian Death, Specimen, The March Violets, the Virgin Prunes, we'd probably add the Abecedarians, and Kommunity FK, and heck why not Bauhaus and Joy Division and even Interpol. Cuz for all the retro eighties worship and gloom pop revivalism, NOBODY does it as good as these guys, right down to the bass tone, to the deep crooned dramatic vocals, the meandering spacious compositions, loping and low slung, spidery guitar melodies, simple propulsive drumming, lush reverby production, and gorgeous songs, not heavy, not weird, just dark and dreamy and dramatic, channeling classic cold wave and goth rock bands of the past, creating their own contemporary death rock sound that owes as much to the Cure as it does to the more subterranean goth rock of old.
Unlike their first record, which seemed to retain much of the urgency and raw energy of the black metal scene that birthed them, this latest album is simultaneously more polished and more restrained, less crunch, and buzz, and more shimmer and jangle, the verses unwinding and meandery, the choruses epic and majestic, but still restrained and minimal. And the songs too might be even catchier, but subtly so. There's no overt immediate hit like "Beau Suicide" from the first record, but instead, ALL of the tracks here blossom on repeated listens into the sort of songs that get played to death, and make it on to that break up mix tape, dour and dark, and miserably blissed out.
The song "Soror Dolorosa" almost cribs the exact bass line from the Abecedarians' biggest hit, but here, the band instead stretch it out, and pile on layer after layer, keening guitar melodies, a dark melancholy croon, clouds of cymbal shimmer, until the song slips into a woozy bit of softly tribal drift, all warm guitar whirl, before launching into a darkly propulsive gloom rock churn. Our favorite track though might be closer "Broken Wings", which almost sounds like the best Katatonia song ever, but slowed way down, with all the distortion stripped away, the dramatic vocals so powerful and moving, the guitars thick and textural, all the while a thick driving bass line pulsing beneath the surface, a dark, doomy goth pop dirge that plays out like some miserablist slowdance moperock, cinematic in it's own way, evoking wandering in the pouring rain, watching the city lights blink off one at a time, of heartbreak, of loss and even death, a gorgeously lush yet emotionally bleak ballad, that is the perfect finish for this modern gloompop/gothrock classic.
Soror Dolorosa is a band that will confound many of those trolling the internet for any number of '80s deathrock / darkwave obscurities. You could easily slip Soror Dolorosa - with its Goth name, its monochromatic artwork, the theatrical vocals, the rhythmic savagery - next to the likes of Christian Death, Specimen, The March Violets, and The Virgin Prunes, and none would be the wiser. Of all the '80s references to make, Clair Obscure (while very well, obscure) is probably the closest, if that French band had been much better in grafting songs to match the ritualistic deathrock throb.
The biggest surprise here might not in fact be that this is new and not some archival eighties lost gem, but that it is in fact the project of Nuit Noire drummer Andy Julia, who has also played in Peste Noire, Mutiilation and other grim black combos. None of which would at all prepare you for the glorious cold wave miserablism found here, Julia has such a distinctive croon, and the band conjure up such an amazing batcave new wave gloom, it sounds like it has to be from the eighties.
The guitars shimmer and chime, the bass is thick and throbbing, the drums are simple and propulsive, the sounds is spacious, lots of reverb and delay, but it's all about the vocals, a mournful dramatic croon, somewhere between Ian Curtis and Andrew Eldritch. In fact, this totally channels the spirit of the Sisters Of Mercy, as well as the Virgin Prunes, the Fields Of The Nephilim, the Cure all that awesomely epic gothic darkness we grew up on.
But as we know, it's easy to just emulate a sound, any band can sound like their favorite band of old, that phenomenon is responsible for at least several scenes and sounds. But that music, that classic sound, is as much about songs as it is about sounds. We often lament, that songwriting seems to have been supplanted by the mere act of being in a band, of making the right noises.
And it's in that way that Soror Dolorosa stand out from all the other cold wave wannabes, they write amazing songs, filled with incredible melodies, hooks galore, the basslines as memorable as the vocal lines, dramatic, intense, personal, emotional, the vocals oozing with pathos, the songs themselves rife with parts and pieces that are incredibly catchy, when the vocals drop out, you're still hearing them in your head, you find yourself humming along to the bass, or slipping away from the vocals and getting lost in the shimmering reverbed riffage.
The whole record is fantastic, but opener "Beau Suicide" is maybe one of our favorite cold wave jams ever, past or present, so dark and driving, with a main riff to die for (the sort of riff Interpol has spent their whole career trying to come up with), a cool jagged angular guitar freakout midway through, an incredible and impossibly melodic bassline, and one of the coolest, most intense, and unforgettable vocal lines, so good. Just this track gets played so much in the store it's beginning to feel like the aQ theme song. Then there's the nearly 12 minute closing track "American Chronicle", a lilting, super dramatic gloom pop epic, with long stretches of dour drift, the guitar unfurling gorgeous echoey melodies, the vocals more emotional and anguished than anywhere on the record, which is strange, since the music is perhaps the prettiest and most melodic.
Needless to say, absolutely required listening for folks who like their pop gloomy, their eighties revivalists depressive and dark, and who count any of the above mentioned bands in their personal pantheon. And while we love the current revival of lo-fi new wave goth garage pop, Cold Cave, Blank Dogs, Gary War, Zola Jesus, etc... Soror Dolorosa has supplanted them all and now seems to be the record we can NOT stop listening to.
The story goes that The Sound *should* have been huge - as big as any number of successful post-punk outfits like The Cure or The Fall or Echo & The Bunnymen - but for reasons seem to baffle most everybody, they didn't find that success. Frontman Adrian Borland cut his teeth in the 1976 punk frenzy in a project called the Outsiders; but grew dissatisfied with the amphetamine trad-rock that punk was becoming. The Sound formed around Borland's increasingly complicated songwriting, following a similar art-punk route that Howard DeVoto took after leaving The Buzzcocks to start the equally adventurous Magazine.
From The Lions Mouth was The Sound's second album, released originally in 1981; and it displays a big leap toward a more theatrical atmosphere and away from the jittery two-step punk-pop of their debut. By this record, frontman Adrian Borland developed a voice that falls somewhere between a couple of Ians - Ian McCulloch's Scott Walker croon in Echo & The Bunnymen and Ian Astbury's snakebit yelp then of Southern Death Cult. From The Lions Mouth also benefits from the lush, layered production of Hugh Jones. The Sound maps out much longer, tracks that soar, billow, and collapse with more aplomb than The Chameleons, Comsat Angels, or Cripsy Ambulance, exemplified by the album's final number "New Dark Age." It makes for an epic, sprawling album that does raise a lot of questions as to why The Sound didn't propel themselves onto MTV and beyond like so many of their contemporaries.
The story goes that The Sound *should* have been huge - as big as any number of successful post-punk outfits like The Cure or The Fall or Echo & The Bunnymen - but for reasons seem to baffle most everybody, they didn't find that success. Frontman Adrian Borland cut his teeth in the 1976 punk frenzy in a project called the Outsiders; but grew dissatisfied with the amphetamine trad-rock that punk was becoming. The Sound formed around Borland's increasingly complicated songwriting, following a similar art-punk route that Howard DeVoto took after leaving The Buzzcocks to start the equally adventurous Magazine. Jeopardy was the first album for The Sound, whose complex pop-punk was built around Borland's nervously chiming guitars and engaging hooks that paralleled those from The Cure's mod-pop debut Three Imaginary Boys, the theatrical bellowings of Juilan Cope's The Teardrop Explodes, and of course Magazine. This album was recorded roughly, supposedly for less than 800 British pounds; and the urgency (or panic) of getting everything to tape quickly works well with these songs. The Sound embellish a number of their new wave / punk tunes with glammy synthesizer melodies that harken back to Roxy Music and an occasional sax blurt for good measure; but it's Borland who passionately drives this band, one that should have been heard back then... and right now.
Hmm. There's no point in really "reviewing" Spacemen 3 records at this point. They're surely one of the top 10 greatest bands to ever exist and even with their influence touching so many bands everywhere, no one - NO ONE - sounds like Spacemen 3. They just got it in ways other bands couldn't. Simple as that. It sure is great to have the band's Glass Records output, their first three full lengths, available on vinyl (some nice 180 gram vinyl to boot) for the first time in God knows how long. They look amazing in their heavy duty sleeves, and after years of absorbing every molecule of the shitty looking Taang Records cd versions, seeing these records as they were initially presented puts things into perspective even more. They just look so classic, so timeless, and so many years later, it makes perfect sense why we felt like we uncovered some secret portal when we discovered this band. Any song they ever did is the perfect soundtrack to any moment of any or every day.
Performance was released to fulfill contractual obligations with Glass, sort of an easy solution before moving on to bigger things. Still, it comes completely recommended, as it captures Spacemen 3 in a live setting on the Perfect Prescription tour, and there's no reason to complain about that. Apparently they weren't exactly pleased with this particular set, and the drums are surprisingly low in the mix, but they tear things up just as you would expect, with the molten guitars taking over everything everywhere. Recorded in 1988 in a setting one could imagine the band being quite comfortable in - Amsterdam - Performance is a fiery run through some early classics, and it will no doubt give you further insight into Spacemen 3's revolutionary approach. Goddamn, there sure aren't any bands like this these days.
An exhausting, exhilarating compendium from '90s British noise-rock outfit Splintered, Turned Inside Out collects many of the singles, B-sides, demos and unreleased tracks on an expansive double disc anthology. Splintered was often lumped alongside Skullflower, Ramleh, Godflesh, JFK, Terminal Cheesecake, and other malcontent proponents of industrial-noise-crust damage due to similarities in the revolving door policies for each of those projects, the appetites for taking drugs to make music to take drugs to, and of course, the self-immolating noise-rock girded to massively pummeling drum assaults. Richo Johnson was the man at the center of Splintered, whose ideas on post-punk culture, trashy films, Ballard / Burroughs / Beat poets, and the like were drawn out via his Grim Humour fanzine through which he made a considerable amount of contacts in England, Europe, and beyond. A heavy, monolithic rhythm section was formative to Splintered's sound, upon which Johnson and company would lay scalding, black-hole riffs of unholy psychedelic guitar noise, controlled feedback bursts, tape collages of murmuring newsreel / talking heads discussing the horrors of a graphic crime right next to gardening tips, and Johnson's best impression of Gibby Haynes barking through a megaphone.
Even though Splintered was known for recording "singles," these were expansive, nine-minute long tracks pushing the boundary of what could physically fit on a seven inch. The compilation is set up chronologically, with disc one featuring two such gaping cuts that originally graced their single for Stefan Jaworzyn's Shock Records label. The second disc continues through this path of obstinant, noise-rock pummel akin to early Swans or Missing Foundation, highlighted on the awesome, apocalyptic hypno-rock track "Smokescreen "(which actually was one of Splintered's singles, though this version was a cassette comp track instead of the single version for some reason or another... they probably lost the master tapes, is our guess). But by the end of 1996 when Johnson called it quits for Splintered (and continued on under the different project name Theme), the guitars, noises, and vocals were acquiring a heavy doom-drone quality with the drums thudding at a slower, more meditative pace, almost prescient of what Nadja would be doing a decade or so later. Pretty fucking brutal we gotta say.
Over 30 years, Steven Stapleton has worked with countless musicians, miscreants, and madmen in the brilliantly surreal Nurse With Wound, and occasionally he's stepped beyond Nurse to engage in fully collaborative projects. His long-standing friendship with Current 93's David Tibet brings the most prolific non-Nurse collaborations (both with Current 93 and as Stapleton / Tibet pairings); but in 1992, a curious one-off project between Stapleton and Tony Wakeford (Sol Invictus, ex-Death In June) was released. The Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish is certainly not a Nurse With Wound record, but it's also not a Sol Invictus record. The album finds itself in one of those unique locations that really exists on its own, but also manages to perfectly hybridize the aesthetics of both artists.
It's unfortunate that we've not posted much on Tony Wakeford, and for those not aware of his work, here's the brief synopsis. After working with Douglas Pearce in the anarcho-punk trio Crisis and later forming Death In June, Tony Wakeford's personal aesthetic took up a very dark, occultish take on British folk, even darker and more malcontent than those apocalyptic recombinations of Current 93. His vocal style was never terribly polished, with his mumbling delivery and blue-collar brogue probably serving the punk snarl of Crisis better than the stoically minimal arrangements of Sol Invictus. While some of the Sol Invictus records could be pretty painful to listen to, a few are downright classics, Trees In Winter and Against The Modern World being the two strongest.
We seem to recall Stapleton quipping somewhere that he felt Tony Wakeford's music was too po-faced and that his collaborative project was his own way of subverting Wakeford's agenda. The two genuinely seemed to enjoy each other's company, as the liner notes from both artists can attest; but one has to wonder if the flipside was true as well that Wakeford felt Stapleton's collages were too silly from time to time.
The atmosphere of the album is somber from the onset, with slashing drones not dissimilar to the Nurse album Soliloquy For Lilith, but situated into a gentle melody surrounded by gasping noises and eventually giving way to melancholy piano chords bounce off of oscillating drones. These collages of semi-melodic drones continue until a frenzied noise burst gives way to a quick interlude of Perez Prado inspired mambo shimmy. This leads to the albums centerpiece: a song-based diptych of "Lucifer Before Sunrise" and "Walk The White Ghost" (a haunting remix of the former), both of which center upon an archetypal Wakeford song of grim folk tunes that Stapleton twists to their profound benefit. The album concludes with an dubbed collage of spectral noises juxtaposed with more of that mambo grooviness that could only come from Stapleton.
For the reissue of the Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish, there's a bonus disc with material unused from the original album, plus a series of remixes from irr. app. (ext.), Andrew Liles, and Brian Conniffe.
Very nice to have this record in stock again!
Latest from this long running neo-folk outfit, a fantastic collection of traditional folk standards, performed with a reverence that displays Stone Breath's obvious sonic debt to groups like Pentangle, The Incredible String Band, Comus as well as their modern descendants like Sol Invictus and Death In June. The sound is simple and spare, all acoustic, the instrumentation appropriately old timey: lute-guitar, dumbek, harp, bodhran, tamboura-lyre, ramyaj, etc. and multiple vocalists. Delicate steel string guitars drift dreamily beneath deep dramatic male vox and angelic female vocals, gorgeous harmonies, the sound stirring and timeless, a few tracks slip into almost bluegrass, drawing from classic Appalachia, but most have a sort of renaissance vibe to them, slipping easily from broody and balladic, to hushed and crystalline, soaring majestically, but then settling right back into something much more haunting and spiritual.
Pressed on thick vinyl, and housed in heavy jackets, and yeah, you guessed it, LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!
Another fine collection of DIY electronic pop from another minimal wave band we're getting introduced to by Dark Entries! The history of Stress began in 1981 as a musical collaboration between the editors of two fanzines -- Adventures In Reality and Damn Latin - both of which covered the darker aspects of post-punk and new wave, with interviews and features on Bauhaus, SPK, Attrition, etc. Stress kept their songs girded to the taut electronics of sequencers and drum machines with vocal melodies that expand beyond the typical monotone delivery, falling not too far from Soft Cell's earlier tapes and Attrition's less baroque leanings. They released a couple of tapes by 1982, with contributions to numerous compilations to follow, leading up to their proper album The Big Wheel in 1984, which sported the witchy chart-topping single "Elisabeth Selwyn." The band split by 1985, with a few reunion gigs popping over the next couple of decades. Conspiracy Theory compiles tracks from those two early cassettes, remastered expertly as with all of the Dark Entries recordings. Comes with a fanzine, adopting a classic punk / new wave aesthetic with all sorts of appropriated texts about Stress and a cheeky spread on all of the gear that the band used. Nice.
Submissions was first described to us as "Bobb Bruno's Godflesh project", which while now having heard it is maybe not entirely accurate it was definitely enough to get us to order a bunch. And the truth of what it sounds like is in fact even better. For those who don't know, Bobb Bruno is probably best known at this point for playing guitar in fuzzy retro pop superstars Best Coast, but he was also responsible for the ultra heavy Goliath Bird Eater, and also played in nineties indie rock outfit Polar Goldie Cats, and we recently listed his first solo record Mellowdramas. Submissions is in fact a duo, Bruno, and his partner in industrial heaviness Paul Kneejie (The Pope, Bipolar Bear), and the two do conjure up some serious sonic Godflesh, with primitive programmed rhythms, churning murky riffage, and weird processed vox that sound more Buttholes Surfers processed garble than Godflesh bellow, which is most definitely not a bad thing. Besides the nineties industrial vibe, the songs also have a sort of gloomy goth feel to them too, like if you swapped in real drums and deep crooned vox, you'd have some sort of old school deathrock, but as it is, Godflesh, or Pitchshifter, are probably the closest comparisons. But unlike the relentless pound of the 'Flesh, Submissions do let the guitars fade out sometimes, leaving long stretches of droning guitars, they also add all sorts of strange electronics, and the slower tracks get downright atmospheric, thick swirls of low end rumble and moaning monk-like vox drifting above blurred dirges and robotic plods, with some of the more propulsive jams sounding downright gothrock. Closer "A Face" might be our favorite, a super atmospheric dirge, about as balladic as this stuff can get, the guitars dialed way back, the drums skeletal, all rumbling and droning and spaced out, no vocals this time, instead a strange sample drifting above the murky machinelike minimalism, doomy and bleakly atmospheric, reminiscent of nineties noise rock too, it's a lumbering, utterly mesmerizing doomic dirge that manages to be the most ominously heavy jam on the record.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
An album that arrived too late. Sadly the Subtonix are no more. Recently disbanded, they were a wild skronky art punk combo of four women. All raven-haired and smudged black eyeliner, they channelled the ghosts of James Chance & The Contortions (although they also made me think of We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It). The inclusion of sax in their instrumentation set them apart from the rest of the bay area punk scene. Raw punk/new wave sounds with old synths, saxophone, primitive drumming and slightly sneering swooping vocals. Known for their stage costumery (bloody nurses and dishevelled prom queens immediately comes to mind) they were high on punk rock haphazard dramatics. This album is short and sweet at just under a half hour, and it follows two even briefer releases a self-titled 7" and a split single with Glass Candy & The Shattered Theater. Note: Sax player Jessie Trashed now sings for The Vanishing.
Here is the split release from the dark, sexy Portland, OR group Glass Candy and the now dead, but equally sexy SF band Subtonix (R.I.P.). Art-punk-no-wave for the gothy 70's punk resurgence fans. In the vein of X-Ray Spex, Suicide, James Chance and the
After a few years as a drum-machine backed two-piece, Andy Zevallos and Cynthia Mansourian have joined forces with Jim Andersen (former drummer of The Pattern & Year Future) to make an extraordinary EP of dark post-rock.
Possibly the best song on the record is the haunting "Siren Song" which shows off Andy's talents on the bass and Cynthia's rich vocals to their fullest. Backed by just a tambourine, the bass sounds like Three Mile Pilot's Zac at his finger-picking best.
The minimal pounding of the last track, "Thin and Gold", uses space and delay just as effectively as the opening track "You Were Down" uses relentless and almost breathless pounding. In addition to the bass, drums and heavily effected guitar, there's all these weird little shimmers and buzzes floating around in the backgrounds of the songs, like gothic insects. Recommended.
NOW REISSUED ON VINYL!!!
While everyone here loves the Swans, we all have our favorite era. Pretty much all of us are WAY into the harsh, metal bashing pummel of the early years, on albums like Filth, Cop, Greed, but at the same time, we all also seem to love the group's later, more epic brooding folk flecked sound, one that hinted at Swans frontman Michael Gira's post Swans outfit Angels Of Light. That sound was first foreshadowed on the group's 1987 album Children Of God, which while still heavy and industrial, began to flirt with a much less harsh musical palette, one that was fully explored on the following year's The Burning World, their sixth album, and their only major label release, now finally reissued after many years.
At the time, the shift may have seemed more organic, but years later, it definitely like a crazy dramatic sonic shift, the band having shed pretty much all vestiges of their industrial past, and instead, embracing a dark swoonsome string laden psychedelic folk, the songs a mix of dark classic balladry, seventies UK acid folk, and low slung gothic gloom pop, a sound that fans of groups like King Dude, Hexvessel, Der Blutharsch, Cult Of Youth, Comus, Woven Hand and the like, will find surprisingly familiar, and we would imagine much to their liking.
Their continued post-industrial sonic trajectory definitely suited them, the abject metallic pummel and industrial crush of those early records replaced by a lush songsuite that seems to have more in common with Scott Walker, and Nick Cave, and other dark pop troubadours, the songs bleak and almost folky, often driven by an Eastern sounding percussion, giving some of the tracks an almost Muslimgauze vibe (due in no small part we'd imagine to input from producer Bill Laswell). Gira's croon ominous and dramatic, Jarboe's dreamy angelic background vocals the perfect foil, the backdrop a lush expanse of simple spare rhythms, lush, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, layered drones and lovingly layered soundscapes, fiddles and strings nestled alongside darkly pointillist pianos, the sound slipping from doomfolk creep to seasick waltz, to strange old time gypsy folk to strange almost angular pop, with some tracks that even bear hints of new wave, indie rock and post punk, but the band deftly weave these sounds into a haunting dark folk gem, that sounds as good now as it ever did.
And we had completely forgotten about Swans' version of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home", with Jarboe on lead vocals, the original transformed into a timeless darkfolk lament, that manages to sound harrowing and otherworldly, but hushed and dreamily lovely.
And of course there's the immediately recognizable Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo...
An aptly named album for a time and a place and a band. Swans' first full album came out in 1983 from the gritty underbelly of New York City, before Guiliani has kicked out all the freaks, criminals, and artists. The sound of Swans engorged the primal violence and psychological dread that had been first broadcast under the banner of No Wave a few years earlier. Led by the tyrannical Michael Gira, who probably only learned how to crack a smile some 15 years after the inception of Swans, barked and grunted lyrics which might be easier read as agitprop slogans, decrying the perceived imbalances of power through sex, money, depravity, and (later) religion. He controlled and commanded his band to perform pummeling excesses of rhythmic brutality with lurching basslines and atonal splashes of guitar shards forming the barest sense of what could pass for a melody. At the time of Filth, Gira had two thugs - Roli Mosimann and Jonathan Kane - behind drum kits, augmenting their panzer-korps marches with bloodyknuckled sheets of metal and pipe fights tossed into that engine at unpredictable moments and angles. For all of the furious muscularity and self-inflicted violence of Filth, Swans could color their claustrophobic slabs of sound with empathizing spells of existential misery. "Power For Power" is probably the best example of this, with guitarist Normal Westberg (the longest standing member of Swans aside from Gira) chopping the melody that could very be knocking on the door of The Stooges' raga-dirge "We Will Fall". It should also be noted that John Gossard swiped the title "Weakling" for his cult black metal band, and like Gira, used the term not to self-identify but as a damning epithet. The song itself is a depressive trudge of basslines alternating with dissonant guitars and shoved along by a strangely spry rhythm from one of the drummers, while Gira (taking on the role of the weakling) insists that all of the shit around him isn't real.
Filth still stands as one of the great achievements of an already highly acclaimed band. It's never been an easy listen, and never will be. Newly remastered and comes with a poster!
This double cd is a documentation of the very earliest abject thud-rock from the Swans. Along with the first full studio album, "Filth," this features a whole slew of early live material, with their bleak tape squeals accompanying their trademarked atavistic pummel. It should be noted that this is the third time "Filth" has been issued, and the second for "Body To Body," with 24 minutes of unreleased live material not found anywhere else.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Slow, militant explosions of huge percussive blasts, guitars, and bass rhythmically collide with the vocal bark of Michael Gira. An awesome document of the pure power of their live performances from 1986 that shows how far Gira has gone from this period ('Holy Money' / 'Greed') to the recent Angels of Light album. Finally out on CD.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Scary stuff from the Swans' final tours.
While everyone here loves the Swans, we all have our favorite era. Pretty much all of us are WAY into the harsh, metal bashing pummel of the early years, on albums like Filth, Cop, Greed, but at the same time, we all also seem to love the group's later, more epic brooding folk flecked sound, one that hinted at Swans frontman Michael Gira's post Swans outfit Angels Of Light. That sound was first foreshadowed on the group's 1987 album Children Of God, which while still heavy and industrial, began to flirt with a much less harsh musical palette, one that was fully explored on the following year's The Burning World, their sixth album, and their only major label release, now finally reissued after many years.
At the time, the shift may have seemed more organic, but years later, it definitely like a crazy dramatic sonic shift, the band having shed pretty much all vestiges of their industrial past, and instead, embracing a dark swoonsome string laden psychedelic folk, the songs a mix of dark classic balladry, seventies UK acid folk, and low slung gothic gloom pop, a sound that fans of groups like King Dude, Hexvessel, Der Blutharsch, Cult Of Youth, Comus, Woven Hand and the like, will find surprisingly familiar, and we would imagine much to their liking.
Their continued post-industrial sonic trajectory definitely suited them, the abject metallic pummel and industrial crush of those early records replaced by a lush songsuite that seems to have more in common with Scott Walker, and Nick Cave, and other dark pop troubadours, the songs bleak and almost folky, often driven by an Eastern sounding percussion, giving some of the tracks an almost Muslimgauze vibe (due in no small part we'd imagine to input from producer Bill Laswell). Gira's croon ominous and dramatic, Jarboe's dreamy angelic background vocals the perfect foil, the backdrop a lush expanse of simple spare rhythms, lush, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, layered drones and lovingly layered soundscapes, fiddles and strings nestled alongside darkly pointilist pianos, the sound slipping from doomfolk creep to seasick waltz, to strange old time gypsy folk to strange almost angular pop, with some tracks that even bear hints of new wave, indie rock and post punk, but the band deftly weave these sounds into a haunting dark folk gem, that sounds as good now as it ever did.
And we had completely forgotten about Swans' version of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home", with Jarboe on lead vocals, the original transformed into a timeless darkfolk lament, that manages to sound harrowing and otherworldly, but hushed and dreamily lovely.
And of course there's the immediately recognizable Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo...
My co-worker Byram once asked the rhetorical question of Morton Feldman, "what self-respecting composer doesn't have their ouevre divided into three periods?" Maybe this is a reasonable question (albeit a bit silly), yet the same division of aesthetics ceratinly applies to Swans. Their first period centered around the butality of the "Cop" and "Filth" albums and had been described as "a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography" with aggressively barked vocals from Michael Gira directing a muscular thud of clinically precise assaults, neither punk nor metal, but an abject creature of its own making. "Children of God" and the World of Skin side project marked the middle period with Swans, shedding some of their purposeful ugliness in favor of expansive dirges that matched a more complex mythological content, with a sublime and throroughly ashen beauty. "The Great Annihilator" from 1995 stands at the pinnacle of that final period for the Swans. The militant goose step rhythms remain as punishing as ever, but have been subjected to the all-encompassing swarm of buzz-saw guitar, bass, and keyboard drones. Yet amidst these dense orchestrations, the interlocking vocals of Gira (with his commanding baritone) and Jarboe (with her lilting theatricality) adeptly counter the jagged fury of the multiple guitar arsenals. A handful of bands from black metal circles (especially Katatonia and Beyond Dawn) have drawn heavily from this period of Swans, with considerable success; but the original is quite a masterful work. Finally reissued, with a bonus live cut.
The latest masterpiece from these aQ-beloved musical misanthropes has moved well beyond the already boundary stretching sound of their previous album The Seer, and continues in a similar direction, shedding elements of song, and moving closer and closer to pure sound, with most of the tracks here unwinding like free form / free rock explorations, with only the barest hint of structure to keep them from drifting into utter shapelessness, but even then, whatever sonic constraints that are put in place, seem to be disregarded most of the time, the resulting records is hardly a rock record at all, but a gorgeous collection of brooding soundscapes, allowed to sprawl and ooze and drift and build, almost like an even more ephemeral / abstract Godspeed, and yet somehow, the tracks here are infused with an intensity, and sonic dread, that marks this as pure Swans.
That said, the opener "Screen Shot" might be the most curious of all the tracks here, as it's centered around a baseline, and drum part that are without a doubt, bordering on 'funky', so much so that before we even heard the record, people we posting online that the new Swans sounded like Primus. Which weirdly enough just made us want to hear it more. And when we finally did, well, we could definitely see that, but only Primus slowed down and stretched out and infused with a terrifying malevolence, and really, that funkiness become something else in a matter of minutes, some mutant strain of grim grooving bunkurfunk, that sounds more to us like Skull Defekts, and Michael Gira's vocals a dead ringer from the shamanistic conjuring of Defekts collaborator Daniel Higgs, but before you know it, the song blossoms into something even more tripped out and psychedelic, a swirling piano loop, jagged shards of guitar, eventually exploding into a wild cacophony that could go on forever, but instead burns bright and quickly fades out. An intense, invigorating start to what just might be the best of the modern Swans records.
There's not a track here that's less than 5 minutes, with the bulk closer to 15, and one clocking in at a stunning 34, and as mentioned above, they've done away with traditional compositional concerns, and have instead endeavored to craft their own modern minimalism, and it's truly stunning, from the slow core creep of "Just A Little Boy", that sounds a bit like the Necks via Woven Hand, but stretched out into one extended slow motion balladic dirge, laced with some truly terrifying vocals, to the atonal lope of "A Little God In My Hands", which sounds like multiple New Orleans jazz bands playing at once, before settling into a gorgeously creepy march, all glimmering electronics and swirling melodies, and some twisted call and response vocals.
Then there's the record's centerpiece, the 34+ minute "Bring The Sun / Toussaint L' Ouverture", which lurches right out of the gate as maybe the most rocking song here, a lumbering drum heavy riff, that instead of turning into a song, just locks into an endless hypno-rock cycle, that you never want to end, and for a while, it seems like it never will, before eventually setting into another apocalyptic swampy creep (and again reminding us of Woven Hand), before beginning and epic, majestic slow build, a vocal chorale draped atop a dark cacophonous roar, that gets almost metallic before dissipating into a free rock sprawl, all long tones, and drones, moaned vocals, and warm electric piano shimmer, as well as some FX heavy percussion, and finally a wild freaked out psychedelic squall. Disc one ends with a hushed horror ballad, all moaning distant horns, and sinister vox, and atonal melodies swirling throughout. And most bands would hang it up there, but this is the Swans after all, so we're only halfway there.
The second disc begins with a twisted bit of malformed Tom Waitsian weirdness, all groovy percussion, swirling junkyard ambience, and some strange vocals refrains, before erupting into some swampy garage rock swagger, slithery and sinister, distorted and psychedelic, the sound layered and dense and seriously fierce. From there on out, To Be Kind seems to open up into some sort of alternate universe rock opera, brooding ballad gives way to horn flecked death march dirge, wild kraut-funk groovery grows more and more atonal, pocked with elephant bleat blasts, and feral vocal bellows, long stretches of kosmische drift, and jazzy piano shimmer slowly evolve into another bout of swampy swagger, "Nathalie Neal", a piece that's drum driven and intense (and named for an aQ pal!), before finally finishing off with the title track, a haunting, subdued finale, all dramatic croons and whispery chordal drift, that bursts into a full on freakout, blistering arcs of distorted guitars wreathed around pounding drum damage, and billowing swirls of psychedelic noise, the rare piece of music that is as exhausting and exhilarating to hear, as it presumably is to play.
Totally transcendent, dizzyingly ambitious, stunningly executed, and thus utterly and totally recommended. Creepy baby face cover art too! And, while they last, we've got the Deluxe Edition, which comes with a live dvd, featuring performances of several songs from this album along with renditions of "Coward" and "The Seer". That's if you get the double cd, your other option is the swank triple vinyl, but no dvd with that, but it does have a download.
Swans are one of the few bands whose live recordings should be paid attention to; and in their lengthy career, a smattering of semi-authorized bootlegs and Gira-sanctioned live recordings trickled in and out of print, including the epic Feel Good Now 2lp documenting their Eastern European tour for Children Of God, the Swans Are Dead recordings from the final tour with Jarboe on board, and the charmingly titled album Public Castration Is A Good Idea. After the Swans Are Dead album was released, Michael Gira called it quits for a while; but his thirst for heavy pummelling percussion and discordant slabs of guitar noise proved greater than his desire to write beautifully plaintive country numbers. Swans reformed in 2011 with a magnificent fury evidenced on the album My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky; and Gira issued the marching orders shortly thereafter for Swans to head out on the road, a crew that included his original guitarist Normal Westberg. The tour was as relentless as Swans' music, with Gira and company crossing the globe in support of the album.
To support the record to follow My Father Will Guide Me, Gira issued a limited edition set of live recordings from that tour exclusively through the Young God Records website. That edition sold out so quickly that he issued a second pressing in a handsome double digipack with a much greater distribution. While the recording quality is exceptional, what's truly impressive is the brutal precision that Gira directs his band to pursue through the entire Swans catalogue. On this recording, there's also a great distribution of older material alongside most all of the cuts from My Father Will Guide Me. The highlights include the surging drone-rock groove of "Apostate" with Gira barking above his natural baritone and the Nietzchean commands that Gira bellows during the doom-thud of "Sex God Sex." The prettiest and most restrained number is "Your Property" originally written back in 1984 for the seminal album Cop, which would never be mistaken for being pretty or restrained. The difference in listening to Gira now as opposed to Gira some 15 years ago is that he had a huge chip on his shoulder needing to prove to the world that he was worth something. Now, he's fully confident in his abilities and in the choices he's made for his artistic career. He knows that Swans are awe-inspiring and terrifyingly great. So should you.
Another obscure reissue from Dark Entries! How obscure might you ask? Well, System Liliputt was a one-man band of the Norwegian Geir Vassang, who released only one cassette in 1984 in an edition of 150 copies. There were some blogs which got a hold of crappy rips of the cassette in recent years; but for the most part, this is a project that nobody has really heard. The Norwegian new wave tunes that Vassang produced oscillated between motorik, disco arrangements and standard verse-chorus pop arrangements on his polyphonic synths, drum machines, guitar, and an occasional bass. Some of the sequencing that Vassang gets has a hollowed plasticity heard in some of the tracks by Cabaret Voltaire or Casssandra Complex with a brittle jangliness to his guitar playing cribbed from The Cure's Seventeen Seconds. The pop-song side of Vassang's production can be quite fragile in its construction, which lend itself to the subjects of loneliness and death through these bittersweet tunes alternately sung in English and Norwegian.
We mentioned The Cure earlier, and we got to say this really does hit the magic mark of our favorite era of The Cure. So many of the songs on here are leaving a lasting impression with us, especially "Gatelangs" which should be put on every mix tape this winter. One of those records so perfect for the onslaught of rain we've had the last few days. You just want to sit locked in your bedroom while flipping this over and over and sulking in such great sounding misery!
We found ourselves immediately intrigued by this group of Philly black metal / blacknoise / industrial merchants, whose M.O. consisted of site specific rituals, and what essentially amounted to field recorded black metal. A space would be chosen, as much for its acoustic properties as it's historical/emotional significance, an old abandoned mental hospital, supposedly haunted buildings, various ruins and locations of past tragedies. Seemingly in a bid to channel that energy through sound, and we have to say, to our ears it worked. Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy aka T.O.M.B. have created a sound that is black only in mood and vibe, that sonically has more in common with outfits like Gnaw Their Tongues, Demonologists and even NRIII, whose new record is reviewed elsewhere on this list. Whether it was intentional, or just the result of the locations and the recording process, the sound of T.O.M.B. tends toward the cavernous, lots of echo and reverb, sounds careen from speaker to speaker, some sort of infernal black dub in places, the vibe way more industrial noise than black metal, but somehow, ultimately it feels more like an unholy union of the two. Lots of rhythmic percussion, processed sounds that rumble ominously one second, explode in shards of white noise the next, there seem to be voices, but those too are transformed into just more blurred psychedelic noise.
The most 'serene' moments might be the most sonically malevolent, churning looped pulses, some sort of deep hellish thrum, gradually drawing ever nearer, the percussion like some sort of demonic death march, the sound locked into long stretches of rhythmic mesmer, the sound at it's MOST rhythmic, reminding us of Aluk Todolo or German Oak, albeit much more blown out and blackened, at its blackest, like the sickest, grimmest, most raw and primitive low fidelity black metal, and at its noisiest, rivaling the most corrosive Japanoise, yet all somehow strung together into some sort of black hymnal, an abject collection of abstract, mysterious, soul stirring sonic malice.
Combining the wonders of cEvin Key (of Skinny Puppy and Download to name but two of his many projects), Edward Ka-spel (of Legendary Pink Dots), Ryan Moore (aka Twilight Circus) and their cast of like-minded co-horts, it's Tear Garden. Rich, velvety, and hypnotic. Check out track 3 "In Search Of My Rose". If you like the more dub-tinged moments of the Pink Dots' album A Perfect Mystery (undoubtedly due to the bass and percussion presence of Mr. Moore), this earlier album is definitely for you. Gorgeous!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"Some things have to be endured, and that makes the pleasures so much sweeter!" So spoke the villainous Frank Cotton in Clive Barker's first Hellraiser movie. It is interesting to think back, and realize that Coil had their proposed soundtrack to that same movie rejected with some citing that Coil's themes were 'too frightening' or (more likely) 'not commercial enough' for a major studio motion picture. Anyone with ears who has listened to Coil's unreleased themes to Hellraiser will not find anything frightening or scary at all. In fact, Coil was quite reverential to somebody like David Shire, especially with his minimalist and maudlin score for The Conversation, with Coil composing everything on the Fairlight synthesizer, which itself had a distinct sound but one that didn't fall in line with the Goblin / Carpenter axis. Had Coil turned in to the film studio something like what they produced on their grand statement to the apocalypse in Horse Rotovator, it might have sounded close to where Theologian ended up on this death-synth industrial opus.
Here, Theologian - the project of a cold-hearted character simply given the name Leech - has employed the talents of a host of female vocalists from the darkwave and noise underground. The conceit has a similar feel to Lustmord's recent album The Word As Power; and thankfully, both albums transcend any notion of female tokenism. Furthermore, both albums do not suck. Far from it for Theologian; as this album triumphantly extends the M83-produces-Swans analogy that we posited regarding the 2012 epic The Chasms Of My Heart album. After a garbled, witchy cackle that introduces the album's first track "Black Cavern Myopia," Leech uncorks a dark-minded, power techno rhythm, crunched through distortion, echo and sinister atmospheres featuring the deep-in-the-catacomb vocalizations of Hecate's Rachael Kozak. A more familiar militantly bashed rhythm keeps with a Swans-styled corporal beatdown on "The Conjoined Deviant Procession" with the monotone chanting delivered by Kristen from Sewer Election. The vocals never really come to the foreground throughout the album, instead they swirl and commingle amidst the metalgaze hiss, powerdrone murk, and audio sickness from Leech's decomposing productions. Even when he employs the talents of opera singer Melissa Kelly (the only vocalist not hailing from noise culture), her voice is cacooned in billowing reverb as it flutters throughout the ghastly synth melodies and blackened industrially crushed doom plod on "Ectothermism." Aside from Sewer Election and Hecate, we've not encountered any of the other vocalists, but their legion is Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), and Shari Vari (Void Vision). Leech has crafted monstrous, ghastly album of lurching rhythms and totally downer melodies - think the Cure's Pornography remixed by Vatican Shadow. So good!
The second of two releases this year from black ambient alchemist Theologian, the other, Finding Comfort In Overwhelming Negativity, released on Handmade Birds and reviewed here recently, and now this one, The Chasms Of My Heart, released on Crucial Blast. Like Finding Comfort (and The Further I Get before that), Chasms is another stunning collection of grim, industrial wastescapes, all bleak drones and industrial percussive crunch, although Chasms does start out on a remarkably 'musical' note, opener "Abandon All Hope" weds actual singing to tense layered keening tones, and churning machinelike rhythms, the vocals mantra like, wreathed in static and crackle, drift atop a dense droned out thrum, driven by that relentless rhythm, eventually the vocals and drums drop out, leaving some seriously serene sonic shimmer and softly sweeping cinematic ambience.
The second track makes up for the melody in the first, unleashing a heaving onslaught of power electronics and blacknoise skree, which eventually blurs, and is melted down into a thick morass of crumbling low end that gradually becomes a hushed blackened drift.
But it does seem that melody will be a recurring theme on Chasms, as "My Body Is Made Of Ash, I Live As Ash" begins as a series of thick thick distorted synth swells, which rapidly blossom into something much more melodic, soaring and cinematic, like M83 via the Swans, but even slower and meaner, and then the beats come in, and you can add Muslimgauze to the mix. Weird combo, but it works, hypnotic and tranced out, until the hammer falls, and the song explodes into full on face melting noise, but if you listen close, within that caustic cloud of noise, the rhythm continues to churn, vocals wail, and melodies drift and shimmer, it's the sort of hard noise, that softens a bit the more you listen, and seems to transform before your ears into something weirdly, and impossibly catchy. The rest of the record reveals more of Theologian's bleeding black sonic heart, the stuttering, almost 'danceable' "We Can't All Be Victims", the processed vocal driven blackened power electronics skitter of "I Don't Exist", the blown out noisebliss of "Bed Of Maggots, the almost house music-y pulsating noisescape title track, and finally, the sprawling 13 minute, haunting, grinding cinematic ambient noisescape closer.
Comes packaged in a super striking, full color, oversized dvd style, six panel digipak.
This release includes the debut album "Magenta Skycode" remastered and repackaged, with a bonus CD called "Magenta Lost" of studio outtakes, demos and other rare and previously unreleased material recorded in 1994/1996.
Thoabath is the solo project of Sutekh Hexen's A.C. Way - the barrel-chested vocalist and black magic specialist for Sutekh Hexen. His tranced-out incantations of heavily processed incantations work against the grain of black metal vocals, coming across like a highly chemically altered take on La Monte Young's extended vocal techniques. The method-acting trance-induction is no fucking joke for Way, who actively pursues those moments of out-of-body experience during performance. These vocals do work their way into the mix of his output as Thoabath, but with those pushed behind a series of drum machine explorations into industrial demolition and occult ritual hypnosis. The tinny replication of the electronic rhythm on the opening "On Her Smokey Chariot" builds from a micro-robot jig tapped on a shopping cart into a pounding march in the tradition of TG's "Discipline" all the while swarmed with diabolus in musica drones and insectoid electrical mayhem. The slinking breakbeat of the short programmed "T.'.T.'" has the overdriven torpor of some of those Clipping productions joined by some microphone swallowed vocals instead of tongue-twisted lyricism. Clocking in a hair under 30 minutes, Through Smoke and Feathers could be filed next to Dissecting Table, Contagious Orgasm, and Master/Slave Relationship for some sicktone references to chew on. Limited to 100 copies.
Where does Dark Entries find all this stuff? Sure, Dark Day was certainly a known quantity; but before the label reissued the Eleven Pond LP, had any one really heard "Watching Trees?" Ditto for the Second Decay album? Those Attractive Magnets were a band that the world forgot, except for the discerning ears over at Dark Entries, who compiled this album from a handful of tapes produced in the late '70s and early '80s. And yes, it's another great piece of archival synth-wave! This primitive synth driven / new wave outfit was from small village of Tamworth, located in the English midlands, but their heart seemed to be directed north to Sheffield where the likes of the Human League, The Future, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire were blossoming at the same time. Those Attractive Magnets revolved around the charismatic frontman Rikk Quay, who had been inspired by the punk class of 1977 but wanted to channel that spirit through electronics. Joined by a couple of like-minded musical partners from Tamworth, Quay propels his urgent tunes along surprisingly catchy minimalist synth melodies, whose darkened atmospheres were amplified in futurist bleeps and alien bloops; but it's Quay's voice that is really key to making the band work, as he does what he can to emulate an early Phillip Oakley (of the Human League) without sounding too smug or contrived as Oakley was want to do. Recommended for any and all keen on the resurgence of the minimal wave aesthetic!
Like all Dark Entries releases this is limited to a pressing of 500 and comes with an 11x17 poster of artwork, lyrics and liner notes.
The cover for Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is a marvelous piece of subversive design. The four members of Throbbing Gristle look quite dapper, Genesis dolled up in a tailored white suit jacket, Cosey smiling happily in her pert miniskirt, and Chris & Sleazy both wearing rather conservative sweaters, but they had situated themselves on the cliffs of Beachy Head (a notorious suicide spot on the south coast of England) with a rented Range Rover in the distance and in a variation of this scene, a nude male body lies at their feet in the grass, presumably dead. This design (executed by Sleazy through his day job at Hipgnosis Design) was a sneering act of contempt for British society that failed to see the horrors and injustice which boiled just under the surfaces of congeniality and civility.
Both Second Annual Report and D.o.A. were ostensibly compilations of recontextualized material both from the studio and extracts from live recordings, but 20 Jazz Funk Greats - the third proper album from Throbbing Gristle - feels like a conceived album from beginning to end, even with all of its dead-ends and contradictions. The album opens with the title track, where a slow-motion drum machine and synthesized bass tones strut with a mechanical swagger with Cosey's discordant cornet blurts in the distance and predatorily whispered vocal extracts of what could be some smooth jazz DJ trying to set the mood - with that mood being a sickening, menacing threat. Such is also the case, with the lugubrious "Tanith" whose atonal rolling basslines churn against strange electronic blorp and tinkling chimes, which leads into "Convincing People" - whose metronomic synth sequencing became the signature for nearly every 'industrial' band that claimed TG as an influence. The detuned and distorted guitar from Cosey smears the mechanical edges while Genesis wailed through the lyrical repetitiveness which articulated to the effect that if you say it enough, people will start believing you. A hammer might help too. The minimalist club hit "Hot On The Heels Of Love" is one of the most memorable TG songs, and for very good reason as TG offered a much-imitated disco frugality through their insistent drum machine, squiggling sequencing, and Cosey's whispered vocals. Immediately following this is a nightmarish narration of the aftermath of a night of partying too much in "Persuasion", as disembodied female yelps of sexualized horror sporadically punctuate a slithering Genesis donning the role of a low-rent pornographer. "What A Day" is another 'industrial' template with a corrosive loop of cybernetic thumps forming the only backdrop to Genesis barking as loud as he can in a diabolical take on a footballer's chant. The finale "Six Six Sixties" finds Cosey's monochord guitar awfully prescient of Sonic Youth and Bailter Space in the drone intensity through distortion and rhythm, with Genesis reciting a suitably bleak monologue above, rounding out what is arguably the best of the Throbbing Gristle albums.
The cd version contains a bonus disc with live material extracted from the numerous live cassettes (and some of these versions apparently appear on the 24cd boxset of live TG material, although we've not cross referenced these facts yet). The two versions of "Discipline" (which were released as a 12" on Fetish Records in 1981) suitably conclude this disc, as that was the track that TG also performed at the end of their sets, with the heavy drum machines whipping the crowd into a frenzy and Genesis barking hysterically for some order. Such were the wonderful contradictions of Throbbing Gristle. About as a high a recommendation as we can give.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Neither the third nor the final album from Throbbing Gristle, D.o.A. marked the decided progression of a band that earlier produced the cauldron of sinister noise found on Second Annual Report and would lead to the subversive disco of "Hot On The Heels Of Love" on 20 Jazz Funk Greats. TG frames this album almost entirely upon the William S. Burroughs strategy of the cut-up, with found sounds being the inspiration for, counterpoint, or inclusion in the musical program. For both Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge, the chance operation of overlapping seemingly unconnected elements offered the possibility of hidden, unconscious meanings in those 'texts' which could be pushed further through aesthetic means. What P-Orridge and the rest of Throbbing Gristle found in their aleatory combinations was a foreboding, societal malevolence, to which their sounds could be read as both response and antagonist.
The sounds which introduce the first track - "I.B.M" - might have been familiar to anyone with an early '70s era computer that used tapes for data storage, especially if that data-cassette found its way into an audio tape player. The blurting, flanged lurches of electronic noises speak a de-humanized language of the machine, one which TG augments with their own synthesized noise and atonal fragments as a seance attempting to make contact with the ghosts that may or may not live in those machines. The most infamous appropriated text found on D.o.A. is "Hamburger Lady" - a thoroughly creepy piece based on a letter written to the band about a woman who was suffering under the extreme pain from half of her skin being burnt off of her body. TG grinds a low-frequency VCO pulse upon a very slow throb, whilst an unsettled melody blurts through a fence of tremolo patterns, with P-Orridge reciting the text of that letter in the distance. Sickening doesn't even begin to describe how effective this track is even three decades after the fact. The track "Dead on Arrival" parallels what Conrad Schnitzler was producing at the same time on his darkened electronic album Ballet Statique with its mid-tempo drum machine, unsettled percolations, and angular jabs of dissonance. But the bulk of D.o.A. is filled with found-sound excepts including the self-evident found tape of "Death Threats" and the recording of mumbling children on "Hometime."
The cd version of this remastered reissue contains a bonus disc, mostly of live material ending with a single. Here, the live tracks cover much of what's found on the Live Volume 2 compilation, and the single in question is "Five Knuckle Shuffle / We Have You (Little Girls)", the former of which reprises the mechanical sequencing from "Dead on Arrival" with much vicious bass and guitar noise slashing throughout, and the latter being a screaming exorcism of vocals and electronics that must have planted the seed in William Bennett to make a whole career out of screaming at his audience above a painful squalor of noise.
For reasons unknown to us all, 1975's "First Annual Report" from Throbbing Gristle was deliberately held back by the band, thus positioning "Second Annual Report" as the first documentation from the legendary parents of Industrial Culture. This record has
Throbbing Gristle could hardly be confused for a hit-making machine; but in their repertoire of ghastly noise cohabitating with mechanoid rhythms, there are certainly some tracks which stand out more than others. Subtitled "Entertainment Through Pain," Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits delivers everything that it sets out to, and it also compiled some of the singles which had never appeared on one of TG's proper records. The most obvious 'hit' would be the minimalist yet sultry disco number "Hot On The Heels Of Love," with all of the other tracks being much more obvious in their subversion of the song through transgressive lyrics, subliminal horrors, corrosive electronics, and / or aleatoric appropriation. The sickening, psychoacoustic track "Hamburger Lady" opens this album of hits, with the lumbering electronic oscillations setting the stage for a gross-out spoken text from a letter about a woman languishing in a hospital burn unit. Of the singles featured on Greatest Hits, you'll find the blood-curdling scream of a track in "Subhuman" and the angular perkiness of the Kraftwerkish tracks "United" and "Adrenalin." But everything else comes from the earlier records, including the stellar churned cybernetics on "Six Six Sixties" and "What A Day," the woozy blurt of "20 Jazz Funk Greats" as well as a 'backwards' rendition of one the many recordings of "Slug Bait" recast as "Tiab Guls."
The bonus disc of Greatest Hits doesn't follow suit with the other four cd reissues; as the program does not include live material, but a continuing program of 'greatest hits,' including the B side stunning synth burble on "Distant Dreams (Part Two)" which is one of the high-points for the Chris Carter facade from TG's production. There's also a studio version of "The Old Man Smiled" found on Heathen Earth - a track that uses the same arrangement from "Six Six Sixties" with different lyrics, and an alternate mix of the revved-up step sequencing on "AB/7A." But aside from those, the other 'greatest hits' include "Persuasion," "Five Knuckle Shuffle," "Dead On Arrival," and a few more.
And like the other TG reissues, the lp does not include the bonus disc, and is limited to 1000 copies.
Finally, the long rumored Gristleism soundbox from Throbbing Gristle is here, and it's just about as cool as we hoped. Regardless of your feelings on Throbbing Gristle as a band, Gristleism is another must have for music obsessives and weird gadget freaks, like FM3's Buddha Machine, Gristleism is a small compact battery powered soundbox that plays loops, it has a volume and a pitch control, and a button to switch between loops, but UNlike the Buddha Machine, which until recently came in the generic Asian packaging that all similar machines came packaged in (originally these boxes contained prayers and were used for mediation), and finally got a minimal but stylish upgrade, the Gristleism box is all about the packaging, in fact, we balked at the price before we saw these, but now that we've seen one and held one, WOW. Totally worth it.
The outside sleeve is gorgeously printed shiny on matte on one side, elaborately diecut on the other, that immediately recognizable TG pattern, the bottom is printed in metallic silver ink. But that's just the outer slipcover. Once that is removed, the inside cover is revealed, again, shiny ink on matte paper, some of the details in shiny metallic silver, the credits, the tracklisting, then inside that is a small printed insert, on thick reflective paper, and then finally the soundbox itself, which even has the Throbbing Gristle logo pressed into the plastic. As an object, this thing is breathtaking, totally striking and even if you never listened to it, would look smashing on your shelf. But you WILL want to listen to it.
Thirteen TG loops, the bulk of which seem to harken from the classic late '70s period of Throbbing Gristle, before the project split into Psychic TV, Chris & Cosey, and Coil.
The low synthetic dirge of "Persuasion" (from 20 Jazz Funk Greats) is the first loop on the box, complete with those unsettling female vocalisations which may be screams of fear, ecstacy, horror, or somewhere in between. The seasick distorted swells and atonal melodica trilled with tremolo come next, culled from the TG classic "Hamburger Lady" (from D.o.A. The Third and Final Report), all that's needed is for you to fill in Genesis' vocals about encountering a charred human body still alive in a hospital ward. Similarly effective is the alien slow-motion grooviess of the title track from 20 Jazz Funk Greats, with Cosey's bleating trumpet hanging in the distance. The windswept eeriness and foghorn blurts on "Thank You Brian" seem to be a loop that's unique to the box, or at least we're not sure where it might have come from. But the proto-acid squiggliness and disembodied vocals of "Maggot Death" reprise a particularly great snippet from TG's Second Annual Report. The "Wimpy Bar" loop doesn't seem to come from one of TG's records either but is one that sounds really familiar with Cosey's knife-on-the-guitar-strings scraping and squiggled electronics, perhaps from one of the many live cassettes? The tenth loop reprises the darkly hallucinatory echoes and atonal blurts from "Heathen Earth". The shepherd tone crustiness of the "Industrial Intro" could have been an experiment that Chris and Sleazey worked out for Second Annual Report. Everything actually sounds pretty awesomely crappy through the little speaker, apparently the band worked quite hard to enhance the sound of these little boxes, according to their website, Gristleism has almost twice the frequency range of the original Buddha Machines, but it's definitely a pretty perfect encapsulation of the TG aesthetic. Low brow high art. We would have liked to have seen a chunk from United or the rhythm from Discipline added into the box, but hey save those for the next one. Please?
The one bummer is that there's no output / headphone jack, so there's really no way to hook this up to an amp or your stereo. Unless... you go to the band's website, where they provide specs for certain mods, insert a jack, do a little circuit bending, so you can add your own twist to TG's Gristleism box.
Needless to say, odds are you're probably gonna want one of these. Or two. If you loved the Buddha Machine, or the recent Black Box variation, then this one's gonna blow your mind. Available in black, red, and chrome (although, as of this moment, the chrome version is not available yet, it should be in a couple weeks). And be warned, these are super limited, we have a bunch, but we may not be able to get more, or if we can, it might not be all that many...
