First off, that's got to be one of the best band names ever, right? Seriously, how can a band called Flagitious Idiosyncrasy In The Dilapidation NOT be awesome? That's right. They can't. Not be awesome. So they are awesome. And, it gets better: they're four girls, playing grindcore, from Japan. Be still, our beating hearts! Not that by listening to this you could tell they're women, and they don't make a big deal of it image-wise, nor do they want to - in fact, at one point in their career they did have an American guy playing guitar for a while, and as he put it at the time: "If you just liked F.I.D. for being an all-female-Asian band, and don't like us now, then obviously the music comes second for you. So long, see ya, we'll keep on thrashing." Can't argue with that at all, good point, but people often have a way of liking stuff to come in neat conceptual little boxes, and those of us who have that failing will be pleased to know that F.I.D. are back to an all-girl, all-Japanese lineup, on this, only their 2nd full-length album even though they've been around for over ten years. And it's only about 24 minutes long, but of course this IS grind, so there's lots of tracks (17), each packed with brutal weird grinding insanity! From the lurching doomic atmospheres to galloping thrash bash, this runs the grind gamut, always infested with vicious vokills from singer Makiko, who constantly and very effectively trades off between a higher rasping wrraahahhhhh shriek and a low grunting grhwhoorrrrhhrggh growl. The band's music is a dizzying and dynamic match for Makiko's grunt-a-thon, replete with pummeling blasting, sudden stop/start shifts, and jagged chugging riffage galore. Pretty freaking awesome like we already said, and even if we found out they were actually all white guys like almost every other grind band we'd STILL like it. (But maybe not if they changed the name, that would be disappointing, not to mention dilapidating, flagitiously so.)
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Superior Viaduct does it again, bringing us much needed reissues of not only one but two classic LA underground records from 1981: The Flesh Eaters' amazing A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die, and The Gun Club's incredible debut, Fire of Love. We're gonna (gotta!) make 'em both Records Of The Week!
Death, drugs, sex, voodoo, evil blues, macabre horror and a sublimely detached southern gothic sensibility pervades the sound of these two bands who sat somewhere between the margins of the "death rock" and "cowpunk" or "gothabilly" genres in the LA punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties without fitting neatly into either.
Chris Desjardins, or Chris D., was the central force behind The Flesh Eaters as well as producer for The Gun Club, and other bands of the era such as Tex and The Horseheads (featuring his then girlfriend Texicala Jones) and his later band, The Divine Horsemen. Once a writer for the popular underground fanzine Slash, Chris D assembled The Flesh Eaters from many bands of the scene, such as The Blasters, Wall of Voodoo, Los Lobos, and X, and indeed no Flesh Eaters record had quite the same line-up. Their second release, A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die remains the band's most critically regarded effort and it's easy to see why. Featuring John Doe and DJ Bonebrake from X on bass and marimbas respectively, Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman from The Blasters on guitar and drums and Steve Berlin from Los Lobos on sax, the band's swampy but driving voodoo rhythms marked most notably by the unusual use of marimbas and saxophone and Chris D's horror-spun lyricism and guttural vocals put them in a similar scene as bands like 45 Grave and The Cramps, but with a fiercer edge and far less campy aesthetic. Instead, A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die is like a dark spaghetti western full of werewolf marauders, evil curses, night fevers, grave-digging and a rollicking hell-bent fury. Essential listening for fans of The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and any of the bands mentioned above.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Their debut album, Generic, is classic - a crushing, pounding, drug-addled nightmare of existential angst and torment. Lyrically hateful - yet hopeful - Flipper seems like a band at war with the audience and themselves. Their music is an utter trainwreck - it's often out of time and out of tune. You get the feeling that the band could really give a damn about playing well or recording quality. It's cynical, blase and yet utterly hypnotizing. It's also occasionally hilarious. From the opener "Ever," with its caustic lyrics (complemented by hand clapping!) to the seriously dark and murky "(I Saw You) Shine," to its ultimate peak with the optimistic "Life" ("Life is the only thing worth living for"), it's a glorious, fucked up listening experience.
Ending with the 8 minute long epic "Sex Bomb" - a punk "Louie Louie" if there ever was one - Flipper managed to create an album that epitomizes alienation and discomfort. It's pure poetry.
Reissue contains additional photos and obligatory liner notes by Nirvana's Krist Novoselic, who joined the band a few years ago.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Flipper's second album finds them better recorded, although it almost doesn't sound right - like an ill-fitting suit. And no suit can make this band sound any less dirty - Gone Fishin' is still full of lurching, menacing bass lines and repetitive, drug-fried riffs. And occasional piano. And horns. And xylophone. It almost sounds like a UK post-punk band at times, until the vocals kick in and it degenerates into a sloppy, group sing-a-long. It's a mess.
Best songs include the triumphant opener "The Light, The Sound," the chilling "Sacrifice" (since covered by the Melvins, yes, on Lysol), and the disorienting "Talk is Cheap."
The cover reproduces a scaled-down version of the original LP art, which is an interactive cut-out model of their tour van and band members. You could cut this one out, but it's not recommended.
Reissue contains additional photos and highly entertaining liner notes by Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, who rightfully gives thanks.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Live albums are often throw-aways, but this one is so NOT. On this masterful double CD compilation, Flipper demonstrates more than a casual flirtation with Public Image Ltd, at whom the band enacts revenge for allegedly stealing the "Generic" concept years prior. It's a sprawling, chaotic selection of some of Flipper's best songs, and many that don't appear on any other readily available release. Gloriously muddy, deranged swampfests of feedback, documenting the oft-touted rowdy live experience that their studio-recorded output may not have conveyed. This release definitely captures the best elements of Flipper - humor, depravity and a sloppy yet confident self-critique of what it means to be a band playing rock music.
Did we mention on-stage banter?
"Don't dance, I don't give a shit!"
"Is everybody on speed? I'm getting a contact high like a motherfucker!"
"Are you satisfied yet? Can we leave?"
The cover reproduces a scaled-down version of the original LP art, which was an interactive board game based on Flipper's touring life on the road. You could cut it out and construct it, but it's not really recommended.
Reissue contains additional photos and liner notes by writer Steven Blush, who still needs to explain why the movie made from his American Hardcore book chose Flipper as San Francisco's contribution to said 'American Hardcore', and not Crucifix, the Fuck Ups, Code of Honor, or even Fang.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Sex Bomb Baby! is a compilation of the band's singles, several of which were released before their seminal debut album Generic. Recorded in a trash can, their dirgey, feedbacky songs somehow transcend. Add cheap studio effects, the occasional arty sample or spoken monologue, and Flipper's trademark angst/sneer/fucked up genius definitely shows through. This album is a good companion to Generic but the uninitiated should start there first, not here. Aside from different versions of "Sex Bomb" and "Ever" from Generic, there's the insanely creepy "Ha Ha Ha," a live version of their most overtly political song "Sacrifice," and the bludgeoning "Earthworm." There are other nuggets here, but also quite a few jokey songs that were probably funnier to a teenaged-bong-smoking Flipper freek than the Flipper freek of today.
Reissue contains additional photos and decently entertaining liner notes by Henry Rollins, who was responsible for the last reissue of this oft-reissued disc.
Wow, we kind of forgot what a weird and wonderful record this is. We've always had a place for the Flying Lizards in our hearts, but their blaze post-punk dub covers of fifties and sixties songs always seemed to outshine their other interesting qualities. Led by avant-composer David Cunningham, with the help of David Toop, Vivien Goldman, Steve Beresford and the flat vocal delivery of Deborah Evans, The Flying Lizards got their break when Virgin released their first single in 1979, a purposely skewed and dispassionate version of Eddie Cohran's "Summertime Blues" and it became a minor hit. But it was their second single and more enduring cover of Barret Strong's "Money" with its clanging prepared piano and trap percussion that got them on the charts and signed for a full album deal. That song gets a little overplayed these days, but the long version has one of the best extended dub breakdowns of the period that just doesn't get played enough. But besides the two covers and the channeling of Dagmar Krause (Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, The Art Bears) in the goofy cover of Kurt Weil's "Der Song Von Mandelay" that opens the record, lies a much stranger record. Sure there is the punk disco of "Her Story", "TV" and the danceable experimentation of "Russia". But there also is the triptych of minimalist dub experiments in the tracks "Flood" "Trouble" and "Events During Flood" that take the record to a much darker place. Culminating with Vivien Goldman's hushed and strange "The Window", proving that although the band was a one hit wonder, they were no one trick pony. This reissue doesn't contain the bonus tracks of previous reissues, but does include the single edit of "Money". Here's hoping Microwerks will reissue their other two records, Fourth Wall and Top Ten as well! Great stuff!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
More instro-avant-jazz-metal mayhem from recent Chicago-to-San Francisco transplant Weasel Walter & Co. Except, there's no Co. on this album, it's just the Wease. The concept here (we're told) is that the record is about "a horrible planetoid being [who] configures itself from atomic chaos". Cool. It's noisy, fusiony, and no-wavey. 45 minutes of this is either gonna be sheer punishment or pleasure, you probably already know where you stand on that. We're impressed, regardless. Especially by the 20 minute finale "Rise Of The Iridescent Behemoth"! Weasel works hard at this stuff and succeeds. Nerdy noisy prog rock for punks.
Available on lp (but very limited!!)
Wow. It's strange, after never having ever heard of this guy before like, 2 years ago, now I've practically got a whole shelf full of Henry Flynt cds -- all terrific stuff recorded at least two decades back, but only recently seeing the light of day. And they keep coming. This new one dates from way back in 1966, and is billed as a youthful Flynt's NYC art-punk garage rock band. That made us a little apprehensive (we've never really been Fugs fans, and that's what we thought it might sound like), but actually this turned out to be totally amazing! Most of the other Flynt recordings that have come out feature his violin playing, in a kind of '60s minimalism meets Appalachian folk style. But with The Insurrections (with Walter de Maria on drums, later famous for his Lightning Field scupture in the New Mexican desert) Flynt plays guitar instead of fiddle. It's weird country bluesy drone protest rock as only an academic hillbilly Fluxus artist could conceive. The Velvets meet a jug band at an acid test? Not quite, but close. No mere historical document, this is revelatory stuff, not sounding thirty years old but timeless instead. And the recording quality of this rehearsal tape is more than adequate. Somewhere betwixt hoedown and raga, these nine tracks represent a divergent strain of beat music not commonly associated with 1966 (though, that was the year of Black Monk Time, which this doesn't sound like, though you can imagine Flynt woulda liked that Monks LP, and for sure he shared their opinion of Uncle Sam). Again, a dusty tape from the vaults that puts today's crop of avant-blues-improv shitkickers to shame, whoever they are. Recommended.
Another bad ass chunk of pounding post punk math rock heaviness from Virginia. We raved about Tigershark a while back, some seriously chugging riffery, then The Catalyst more recently, who knocked us on our asses with their weird post hardcore stoner grunge screamo (we still have a few of those left, check elsewhere on the aQ site), not sure if Food are related, but they might as well be, they're heavy as fuck, and offer up a similarly supercharged post punk, but while The Catalyst and Tigershark both channeled AmRep (The Catalyst mixing in plenty of Sub Pop), Food take that sound even farther, with their super thick distorted fuzzed out guitars, pounding caveman drums and thick ropy bass, they weave a pretty thick, almost dirgey at times, post punky metallic garage rock stomp, but it's the vocals that seal the deal, a wild feral howl, falling right between Rick Froberg of Drive Like Jehu / Hot Snakes and Mudhoney's Mark Arm, plenty of vitriol and swagger, and a paint peeling yowl that perfectly compliments Food, chug and churn.
Dense loping grooves give way to stripped down tribal workouts, give way to complex mathy jams, which give way to seriously murky, dirge-y, almost Brainbombs-ish sludge, slathered with plenty of squealing Eyehategod style feedback, and all locked into pounding metallic repetition. Some seriously killer garage-y metallic post punk for sure.
Incredible packaging, eye popping cover art, all recycled materials, heavy printed insert, and pressed on INSANELY thick vinyl. And probably pretty limited too.
Now available on vinyl. Packaged in a super deluxe woodcut looking chip board sleeve!
This record is so Aquarius it almost feels like they made it just for us. And you of course! Taking all sorts of crazy stuff that we love and stuffing it all into a single band. Ostensibly, Forensics are a metal band, a really heavy, metal band. But their peculiar brand of metal includes, extended hypnotic bass-heavy post rock work outs, dreamy dark ambience, full on fuzzed out stoner rawk (think Boris' Heavy Rocks), crushing minimal sludge and mathy spazz rock. But somehow it all fits together perfectly. Like Neurosis, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Codeine, Bastro, Dazzling Killmen and Old Man Gloom all got together to jam, and this is what came out. Super dramatic and epic, lengthy super repetitive jams that give way to squalls of metallic fury that then give away to creeping minor key slowcore. Chaotic bursts of grinding spastic metal bookended by Slint-ish hypnorock. Huge blackened slabs of glacial riffage that decay into pulsing minimal krautrock. A massive, crushingly heavy, emotionally compelling cinematic soundscape. I swear if I was a film maker I would be getting bands like this to score my films for sure. Features members of Burning Airlines, Corn On Macabre, Pg.99, Trial By Fire, and Waiffle.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
""A fork is a cold shiny tool / To pierce, tear and ingest / Whoever has the fork in hand / Controls the meal of its choice." The opening lines for the Lard song, "Forkboy" which in turn gave the name for an Oulu-based quartet formed in 1993. Born out of love for AmRep noise, AC/DC, Dead Kennedys and driven by twenty-something angst, Forkboy recorded three demos and one previously unreleased session during their 6 year existence and it's all documented here on one disc. Furiously rocking songs packed with gritty guitars and feedback, rhythm section heavy as an elephant turd and as the band puts it, "lots of shouting". The original recordings have been carefully restored and remastered by Pentti Dassum and the sleeve features original artwork and photos by the band along with liner notes. If you were there during the late 90s noise rock craze or if you have only recently discovered its splendour or if you just have a boner for hidden gems of Finnish punk/noise/rock, this CD is for you!"
There's been lots of talk about heartbreak around these parts, and the best break up records, and that sort of thing. Windy thinks the new Built To Spill record is the perfect break up record, all bittersweet and caustic, but light and hopeful at the same time.
Who would have thought Fucked Up would turn out to be the IT band. They're basically a punk rock band. A killer punk rock band, but it still seemed a bit surprising that they blew up the way they did. For some of the reasons behind that, check out the review of Fucked Up's The Chemistry Of Common Life elsewhere on the aQ site, penned by aQ pal Forrest, for an in depth analysis of just what it is about Fucked Up that has everyone in a tizzy.
Before their debut album though, the band had released a whole mess of 7"s, all of them pretty bad ass. Fucked Up worked it like it was still the nineties, fuck MySpace, and downloads and all that shit, they were a 7" machine, pounding out winner after winner, understanding the magic of 7"s, a super inexpensive way for kids to hear your music, and thus, why wouldn't you put your best songs on those singles, well Fucked Up would and did.
Their move to Matador did nothing to stem the tide of Fucked Up 7"s, and this TWO DISC compilation collects a bunch of singles, from their debut in 2002 all the way up to now, they don't seem to be arranged in chronological order, and we've read a bunch about how Couple Tracks doesn't flow like an album and is stylistically all over the map, but fuck it, it's a SINGLES COMPILATION, it's not supposed to play like an album, it's more like a bad ass mixtape, with all songs by the same band. And bad ass this collection is, once again demonstrating that Fucked Up have a way of infusing seriously aggro punk rock, with some incredible pop hooks, and vice versa, taking what basically sounds like a heavy pop song, and adding loads of guitars and vocalist Pink Eyes' wailing bellow.
We could go through the record song by song, but by now you should know what Fucked Up sound like, if not, listen to the tracks below, needless to say, these guys rule, and this is heavy, hooky, catchy, aggressive, headbangable certainly if you're so inclined, definitely moshable too, but even if you're just sitting there with a pair of headphones strapped on, these sounds work that way too.
Includes photos of all the various singles sleeves, as well as some super funny, and super snarky notes on each song...
Full length number three from everybody's favorite progressive punx, and this Canadian sextet continues to polish and hone their ever unpunkening sound, with the band apparently openly fessing up to no longer being a punk band. Which really what was so special about these guys in the first place. Back in the early days, when they most definitely WERE a punk band, they seemed to have sonic aspirations beyond punk rock, and the fact that Fucked Up was populated by a bunch of well listened music nerds, most definitely informed their sound, a sound which as it stands now, is as much indie rock as punk rock if not more.
Just check out the opening of "Let Her Rest", sure it's an intro, but it's a dreamily jangly one, super melodic, a gauzy bit of distorted buzz over a sweetly tinkling guitar, and even when the second track kicks in, it's hardly punk, kinetic, caffeinated, super hooky jangle pop, which as far as we're concerned. The punkest part at this point is frontman Damian Abraham's raspy bellow (which is sometimes distracting as he's a dead ringer for the singer from The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, or maybe John Brannon of Negative Approach / Laughing Hyenas is a cooler comparison, or the dude from Scissorfight), but even those vocals have grown progressively more melodic, and the fact that there are some sweet female vox (via the woman from Cults reviewed elsewhere on this week's list) to balance them a bit, only presses the non punk point further home.
The multiple vocals are also part of the concept, as this is a rock opera of sorts, about a worker in a lightbulb factory, but unlike many 'rock operas' it definitely plays just fine removed from the concept as just a kick ass heavy indie pop record. Guitars crunch, drums pound, melodies soar, the sound as polished as ever, it's obvious these guys camped out in the studio and made that extra time count, there are hooks galore, the songs crazy catchy, those gruff vox keeping it from being pure pop, but just barely, a kick ass melding of modern indie rock, eighties post punk and Britpop into something that is most definitely Fucked Up.
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.
AQ pal Forrest has been championing Fucked Up literally for years now, and as we mentioned in the review of the Year Of The Pig review, we just weren't feeling it before, But Forrest hassled and hassled and finally we began to see the light. So when this new record finally dropped, we figure who better to gush and swoon than the person who got us to like the band in the first place. Take it away Forrest...
Fucked Up are not worried about orthodoxy or the retro purism that seems to periodically seize up the gears of the perpetually self-consuming punk revival. Based on their interviews, which are farragoes of obvious bullshit interwoven with a fair amount of surprisingly candid insight into their working methods, it's pretty apparent that Fucked Up is in a lot of ways better considered an art project than a band. They take not giving a shit
very seriously.
On the one hand, there's vocalist Pink Eyes's love of old-school Situationist shock tactics, which sits uneasily with his autodidact's preoccupation with esoterica and metaphysics, leading to lyrics that come across as Iggy Pop acting as Charles Baudelaire's puppet. On Fucked Up's debut album, Hidden World, the lyrical themes were as various as Henry Darger's phantasmagoric fantasy world of the Vivian Girls (look it up; no one-sentence summary can do it justice) and Blakean transfiguration; on Chemistry of the Common World the mixture is a little less indigestibly rarefied and maybe a little more quotidian, but not by much. It's still not really punk as we've come to know it, despite all of Pink Eyes's John Brannon-esque choked growling. It's still all over the place.
On the other, there's guitarist 10,000 Marbles's production and guitar work, an incredibly dense wall of overdubbed guitar, Pink Eyes's yowling, pounding drums, relatively straightforward bass playing, harmonized guest vocals (contributed, in an oddly recursive turn of events, by all-female Brooklyn chainsaw pop group Vivian Girls), flute, organ, bongos, whispered chants, horn drones, cheap analog synthesizers... you name it, it's in the mix somewhere. It's hard to say whether the songwriting is a product of influence or pastiche: "Royal Swan" owes a heavy, heavy debt to Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine" (they're even in the same key), "No Epiphany" pilfers both its melody and its sound from the Dandy Warhols, "Twice Born" comes across as a particularly easygoing Blood Brothers song, and "Black Albino Bones" is a hardcore take on Ride-style muscular shoegazer; "Lost of Days",
with its malevolent punkabilly riff stolen from East Bay Ray and then improbably fused with avant-garde horn drones (contributed by 10,000 Marbles's high school band teacher) is a self-contained masterpiece that reminds me of nothing so much as the recent Asbestoscape album, although in all likelihood Fucked Up got there first.
Fucked Up's sound is deceptive; their fondness for bright, major-key riffs laid over apocalyptically loud minor-key harmonic beds, slathered in truckloads of effects, obscures the underlying sinewy grace of the relatively complex songwriting, and the relentlessness of the sonic attack (this is some thick music) conceals the fact that the sound shares more in common with the post-Glenn Branca multi-tracked noise-guitar drone of bands like Helmet, Sonic Youth or (most closely, to these ears) Band of Susans than it does with, say Negative Approach or Black Flag, to whom Fucked Up are more frequently compared.
Like Hidden World, The Chemistry of Common Life is a coherent, carefully sequenced album with a beginning and ending that mirror each other. I've tried to not give away too many of its secrets - it's a complex, rewarding listen that is more than the sum of its parts, and it deserves a wide audience. People expecting an ordinary hardcore record are likely to be surprised. Very little about Fucked Up, and The Chemistry of Common Life, is ordinary. It may not be beautiful in a traditional sense, but it is very powerful, and at times - in the literal, oldest sense of the words - awesome and magical.
Includes bonus 7" flexi and download
The fifth in Fucked Up's ongoing series of Chinese Zodiac themed singles, this one obviously the Year Of The Tiger, and finds these punk rockers moving even further away from their punk rock roots, the only real punk thing about them is the members's handles, and vocalist Pink Eyes' howled bellow, otherwise the music continues to get more and more melodic, still heavy sure, but more sort of epic and jangly, this the A side of this one even has piano on it (courtesy of Austra) as well as guest vocals from director Jim Jarmusch (!) and someone called Annie-Claude Deschenes, and it's a good one, big bombastic, stadium indie rock, with soaring choruses, big jangly guitars, crunchy riffs, pounding drumming, and those vocals. The real surprise is the B side, which at 22 minutes long is apparently merely an excerpt of an even longer piece, and is a tripped out sidelong sprawl of experimental psychedelic Fucked Up-ness, starting with a symphony of backwards swoops, and blossoming into a blurred druggy wall of sound, that sounds a bit like multiple Fucked Up songs playing simultaneously, dizzying and carnivalesque in places, noisy and chaotic in others, the whole thing rife with cool backwards effects, which gives it a definite Teenage Filmstars vibe, and makes this out favorite Fucked Up jam in a while!
Includes a printed lyric sheet / insert and apparently, in the spirit of the theme, $1 from the sale of each record will go to the Save Tigers Now Foundation too.
Mysterious posthumous release of this irrepressible SF speed-punk-metal sect's entire recorded output. Led by the fearless SF scenester Matt Shapiro. Seriously in your (fuck)face. With a splatter of sampled dialogue. Mass unbridled thrashing and nudity abound. Watch the opposition cower in their boots.
Merzbow, Merzbow, Merzbow. We love the ultra-prolific king of Japanese noise as much as the next person - maybe even more, since several of us here own the 50-cd Merzbox! But, it's almost impossible to keep up - and also, when you've already got at least 50 cds of Merzbow's noise, do you really need any more? However, we do still get intrigued whenever Merzbow goes and collaborates with (or remixes) some other artist, like a rock or metal band. Maybe 'cause we like our Merzbow rhythmic, as in, with drumming. Also a little bit of, uh, music, in the mix tends to make the noise parts even MORE effective and interesting in our opinion. So this new release on Profound Lore caught our ears - East Coast metalcore band Full Of Hell teaming up with Masami "Merzbow" Akita for not one but two cd's worth of intense destructo mayhem. The blasting drum battery, filthy riffage and throat-shredded vokills are all par for the course with Full Of Hell, but the presence of Merzbow's mad noise skillz tips the scales further into the extreme and avantgarde! More "power electronics" feedback, more hellish drone and distortion, more abstract abjection. It sounds as if the pit is feasting upon itself, as FoH's fierce metal core breaks loose from its moorings and plunges into the abyss, accompanied by what sounds like 1,000 vacuum cleaners in a windtunnel, that sort of thing. Of the two discs, there's one that's presented as the "main course" with printed lyrics in the digipack, that one seems more like Full Of Hell doin' their usual thing, with a (powerful) side of Merzbow - and also, some free jazz style horns on a few of the tracks!! The other disc, entitled Sister Fawn, seems intended as a bonus, and finds FoH and Merzbow more fully enmeshed, blurring the lines a bit more, the noise to the fore with beats and demented vocals in the background. Noisefreaks can go straight to that one, the metalheads should start with the first disc...
How could we resist a band called Full Toilet? Especially when the cover features a crudely drawn 'full toilet', seemingly drawn on a piss stained piece of paper. And then when the label (Sub Pop!) describes the band with descriptors like "angry young man", and "short attention span", and "volatile and erratic", and "bad personal relations", and "turbulence and anger", and "channeling ultimate unhappiness" and finally "bursts of rage". All that and 13 songs crammed onto one 7". There's also some backstory about the Full Toilet guy being some impossible to deal with mentally deranged home recording loner, but we have it on good authority that Full Toilet is in fact one of The Fastbacks, in outsider lo-fi punk mode, and it suits him. And we can only assume one of the reasons we can't stop listening to this weirdo filth, is that there is something more musical lurking underneath, but it hardly matters, cuz this stuff KILLS, heavy and noisy and chaotic, the production totally twisted and lo-fi, the drums stumbling and confusional, the vocals barked and yelped, the guitars crusty and filthy and blown out, the whole sound off kilter and weirdly dubbed out, but in its own creepy damaged way totally catchy.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Managed to get a handful of these SUPER LIMITED lathe cut 7"s from New Zealand noise rockers the Futurians, and it's a doozy. Already they were a sludgey, garagey, noisy, a bit damaged, freaked out and arty, some mix of Chrome, the Stooges and the Brainbombs. If anything this 7"s pushes them even further out. Adding sheets of white noise distortion, some old school Butthole Surfers style vocal processing, and a production that barely surpasses tin can and twine through dictaphone, the band churn out a super repetitive hypnotic groove, the guitars not so much riffy as chunks of static, the drums a muffled barely there throb, the two elements that hold it all together, are the buzzing low end that pulses and throbs beneath the surface, seeming to fade out completely before exploding back into motion, a blackened rumble, and the vocals, a skipping, stuttering, hiccupping high end chirp, that almost sounds more like a malfunctioning synth than an actual human voice. The result is pretty fantastic though, a fucked up garage sludge noise rock wetdream, equal parts Buttholes, Siltbreeze, Brainbombs and shitgaze.
Hand painted sleeves, clear lathe, INSANELY LIMITED. Already out of print. We have 7 or 8. Don't blink...
The last we heard from NZ sludgy noise rock outfit the Futurians was a long out of print cd-r released on Jewelled Antler offshoot label Pink Skulls waaaay back in 2003. We were pretty into it, a sort of monotone garage rock trudge, simple plodding drums, blown out fuzz guitar, vocals way way way down in the mix, bits of synth squiggle, a sort of Stooges, Chrome, Fall, Brainbombs chunk of lo-fi noise rock dirge.
Well, here we are almost 4 years later, and the Futurians' primitive stomp sounds as good as ever. In fact, it sounds way better than we remember it.
Simple and stripped down, Each track an endless looping riff, swathed in grungy guitar grrrr and tons of reverb, synths in there too it sounds like, but if anything, their sound got more blown out, more primitive, more skeletal, and somehow more filthy and fuzzy. And who can argue with that?
Like a caveman Dead C, these noiseniks, pound out a relentless slow motion krautrock groove, a simple riff ground forcibly into your skull, drums that don't so much swing as thud, over the top drift shards of damaged electronics, swooping alien synths, extra guitar noise. The vocals are usually lost in the skree and buzz, but occasionally, the vocals take center stage with frontwoman Beth Duckling howling and crooning, her voice drenched in effects, the vocals another layer in the Futurians dense barrage.
In addition to Beth, the Futurians also features a who's who of NZ underground rockers, Clayton Noone (Armpit, CJA), Stefan Neville (Pumice) and Antony Milton (PseudoArcana head honcho)
Limited to 300 copies, each hand numbered, packaged in a cool black and silver screened cardstock sleeve, with a color photo affixed to the inside...
At first blush, the debut full length from local trio Fuzz, sounds a lot like a Ty Segall record, as it should, since Fuzz is actually Segall's new band, which was originally described to us as sounding like Ty Segall crossed with Black Sabbath. Needless to say we were pretty skeptical at first, but their preceding 7"s proved the point, and now that the highly anticipated full-length is here, goddamn if this isn't some seriously heavy garage-psych proto-metal retro-rock radness! In fact, you'd most certainly be forgiven for thinking this was in fact some genuine lost proto metal artifact, the songs, the sound, the guitar tone, all harken back to the classics, that sound we here at aQ obsess over, in fact, if we were trying to describe Fuzz with some succinct rock band math, we might replace Sabbath above with groups like Power Of Zeus, or Dust, or the Groundhogs, cuz it definitely has that old school hard rocking vibe BIG TIME.
The interesting thing about Fuzz, is that while Segall is still singing, he's now behind the kit, and is actually a seriously kick ass drummer, very much in the style of say Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell, busy and loose, slipping from wild octopoidal freakouts to locked in hard rocking grooves and back again, while guitarist Charlie Moothart (who also plays in Segall's band, as well as the Moonhearts) proves himself to be a serious shredder, who should be getting the same sort of love that dudes like Isaiah Mitchell does, in fact fans of Earthless will find much of the jamming here right up their alley, with Moothart unfurling, crumbling, blown out heavy rock riffs, alongside wild blasts of mega shred psychedelic freakout. And while most of the songs her are loose and jammy, with much of the record sounding like different parts of the same mega-jam, rife with lots of space, and stop/starts, stretches of amp hum, lurching abstract almost doomy breakdowns, even some almost-drum solo bits, a few pop gems surface here and there, like "What's In My Head", which would have sounded right at home on any of the Segall record proper, so catchy, with a hook to die for, but still somehow fitting into Fuzz's retro fuzz-rock soundworld. That sound in full effect on "Loose Sutures" which is about as loose as these guys get, the midsong breakdown total heavy seventies psych-prog radness, complete with fuzzed out bass solo, killer drumming, and when the main riff comes back in, SO HEAVY. The record finishes of with three more blasts of blown out riff heavy psych rock that kills, lurching from fuzzy lope, to full on near metallic crunch, to total classic old school heavy psych, and as much as we love pretty much everything Segall has done, this Fuzz record is fast becoming our favorite.
Killer psychedelic space dragon cover art, the lp includes a download code as well!
Ok, hopefully all of you into dooooooooooooooooom have heeded our recommendations in the past ("best band EVER" we may have said, in a moment of infatuation) and are already well acquainted with this cult Japanese band who exude a magnificently miserable mixture of slow, atmospheric doominess and crusty black metal thrashing, inspired by the likes of Celtic Frost/Hellhammer (natch), Amebix, and Corrupted. This is their 2nd full-length studio album, following 2004's Gloomy Lights debut and last year's The Dawn Of Gallhammer demos n' live cd+dvd collection. That's the one where we busted out the Simpsons Comic Book Guy impersonation in our review, but it's this album that really seals the deal, when it comes to Gallhammer's position in the pantheon of most depressive doom bands ever, anyway. They're up there, no doubt about it, as is proved by this collection of ten tracks, each one of 'em often (but not always) a slow-motion trudge through the depths of emotional bleakness in the form of monotonously massive low-end guitar riffage, wretched cookie monster screams, and simple, gloomy melodies. Several of the song titles are quite indicative of their sound: "Long Scary Dream", "SLOG", "Ripper In The Gloom"... Many of these varied tracks feature a dynamic combination of knock-you-over-with-a-feather soft n' sad prettiness setting you up for some smash-you-with-a-hammer heaviness, or even manage both at the same time. It's the former element, this band's almost post-rock instrumental mesmeric moodiness, for which we think Gallhammer should be best noted. Not that it has any of post-rock's usual complexity, this is raw and primal and ritualistic, perfectly encapsulated by the way the stark, repetitive slowcore acoustic guitar part at the start of "Ripper In The Gloom" suddenly, shockingly gives way to a full-on punk rock assault.
It also seems possible that Gallhammer, along with their interest in underground '80s doom-crust, also shares some of the Velvet Underground fixation displayed by their contemporaries from the Japanese psych-rock scene, like LSD-march and Doodles. Heck, track one, the nearly eight minute "At The Onset Of The Age Of Despair" seems to have echoes of VU's "Venus In Furs"... If one of Gallhammer's songs wound up on a PSF Tokyo Flashback comp someday we'd be surprised, yes, but only a little. Though it sure wouldn't be a track like "Killed By The Queen" or "Blind My Eyes", two of the punked out, filthy metal blitzes on here, the latter of which throws in some uncharacteristic Melt-Banana style yelping, dogwhistle vocals along with the usual guttural grunting and growling.
Hey, we made it all the way to the end of this review without mentioning Gallhammer's major non-musical selling point... we said they're a "cult" band above, but were tempted to say "cute", as this trio just happen to all be attractive young Japanese ladies, their looks further enhanced by the tasteful application of gothy corpsepaint makeup. No this fact doesn't make Gallhammer's music sound any better (or worse) but it's, um, interesting. Happily, though, Peaceville isn't using Gallhammer's sex appeal to sell this album, there's not even any pictures of the band at all included in the classy-lookin' white-and-silver digipack. Recommended nonetheless!
The roots of Gang of Four can be traced back to 1976, but from opposite ends of the globe. In their native England during that year, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash dropped the bomb that was punk whose shockwaves can still be felt to this day through music, literature, art, politics, fashion, etc. In China also in 1976, a renegade faction of communists staged a leadership coup after the death of Mao Zedong, holding out for 10 days and calling themselves the Gang of Four. Back in England a year later, a punk band began as four art students from Leeds appropriated not only the name but also the insistance upon bold ideological stances from those Maoist revolutionaries. After achieving considerable success with their debut Damaged Goods EP on the remarkably prescient Fast Productions (who also signed The Mekons early on as well), Gang of Four landed a deal with EMI which resulted in Entertainment. This album -- like Joy Divisions' Unknown Pleasures and the first three Wire albums -- transformed punk with its ingenious marriage of intelligence, angst, politics, and aesthetics, and has not been improved upon since, despite the best efforts from the current crowd of post-punk revivalists (i.e. The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, etc.).
Gang of Four were Andy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and Hugo Burnham; well at least for Entertainment and the two follow up records. Entertainment's politics have been at the center of most of the reviews you'll find praising this record, but those politics wouldn't have been heard had Gang of Four not been a fucking tight band, with Gill's rapid fire guitar arppeggios, Allen's agitated funk-punk basslines, and Burnham's explosive post-disco rhythms. Every thing that has been written about Gang of Four in the past is true, especially from those kind people at Pitchfork who sneered at the end of their review of Entertainment that "anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag." Truer words have not been spoken.
There's no real clear answer to why this album was recorded or even released. It's not that it's bad; actually these recently recorded versions of a bunch of Gang of Four classics are pretty darn good. "Damaged Goods," "Anthrax," "To Hell With Poverty," and "At Home He's A Tourist" are just as aggressive, punchy, and groovy as the originals. Especially since Gang of Four just reissued their masterpiece Entertainment, there's not much justification for the album. But if you need to hear Entertainment and a whole bunch of the later singles redone with the benefit of a pristine digital recording, look no further!
Not remotely new (the catalog number for this is PSF-17, it was released some years ago) but something that we thought we'd get a few of and list 'cause we were doing an order with the PSF label in Tokyo and hadn't ever reviewed this cult classic before. Anyone into the speedfreak psychedelic acid punk of flagship PSF band High Rise (or Mainliner, or Musica Transonic, etc.) ought to check out Gaseneta, a Japanese combo from the late '70s who helped pioneer that sound (and were later covered by High Rise). This disc contains archival recordings mostly from 1978, all of 'em ultra distorted, in-the-red recordings of a band simply destroying, sonically wrecking the place. We mean, if you thought Boris kicked out the noisy jams on Pink... well this is a whole 'nother kettle of raw fish of course, way punker than Pink, but of potential interest to Boris fans wanting to check out their antecedents. There's eleven energetic tracks on Sooner Or Later, bursting with skronky guitar solos (Black Flag style) and the spittle of guttural vox, backed by urgent bashing rhythms. Four of 'em are live recordings, which are especially lo-fi but since you should be playing this LOUD anyway that just adds to the effect. Way cool.
Some of us at aQ have been going through a little bit of a Japanese crust phase, listening to lots of Lip Cream, Gloom, Confuse, GISM and of course Gauze, when what should show up but this lp reissue of both of Gauze's first two records, their 1984 debut 12" ep Fuckheads, and the 1986 follow up Equalizing Distort. Both brimming with furious chaotic metallic crust punk fury, grinding buzzing guitars, strange flanged riffage, all sorts of sound effects, seriously fucked up almost experimental production, wild tribal drumming, yelped vox, thick super distorted bass, weird squiggly atonal leads, all wound into churning, pounding blasts of frantic hardcore mayhem, with shouted almost sing along choruses ("THRASH THRASH THRASH") and some downright poppiness popping up here and there. But for the most part, this is some fierce as fuck frenzied Japanese hardcore crust punk genius, that sounds just as good now as it did nearly three decades ago!!
Includes a two sided 12" x 12" insert, photos on one side, a lyric sheer, in both English and Japanese on the other.
We first heard the awesomely monikered Gay Witch Abortion on a killer 4 way split we reviewed recently called A Butcher's Waltz, which teamed up this duo with some other aQ faves including Skoal Kodiak, Seawhores and Power Take Off. But for as much as we dug those other outfits, Gay Witch Abortion definitely stole the show, more than living up to the hype, which was a relief as we'd been hearing how great they were for ages.
So here now is the debut full length from these guys, hot on the heels of their collaboration with AmRep head honcho Tom Hazelmeyer, which should come as no surprise cuz GWA definitely sound like they'd be right at home on AmRep, channelling a little Lightning Bolt, reminding us a bit of recent aQ faves Wizard Rifle too, these guys take that bass (guitar?) / drum duo thing and make it their own, their sound more a sort of blown out fuzz drenched heavy rock stoner prog thing, wild chaotic drumming under dense buzzing riffage, the guitar weirdly processed so it almost sounds electronic, their might be keyboards too, but it sounds more like the guitar/bass is run through some seriously fucked up FX, the sound constantly peppered with bits of buzz and hum, little glitches, swirls of hiss and crackle, the songs locking into dense looped mesmer, before slipping into songs proper, the vocals clean and crooned, when there are vocals, but more often these two are like a cobra and a mongoose, a wild squirming sonic tangle, a gnarled, writhing metallic noise rock that flits from droned out dirge to frantic hyperspeed punkprog and back again in the blink of an eye, all that and the group never shies away from weirdness either, peppering these blasts of acrobatic noise rockery with bits of twangy dirgery rife with whistled melodies, or stretches of Torche like fuzz pop, tripped out super distorted psychedelic drones, and even some cool experimental electronic noisiness.
Super intense sweat soaked math metal spazz punk stoner prog heaviness that will definitely hit the spot for anyone who digs Lightning Bolt and other like minded outfits, or really anyone into heavy, dense, noise rock aktion!!
The cd version comes with a Learning Curve beer cozy!!
It's generally a pretty bad idea to have a pun as a band name. Once in a while, if the band is pretty good, and you put some effort into it, eventually you can get used to it and forget it's a pun (Jucifer), sometimes you don't even realize it's a pun until you finally say it out loud (Vulture Club), sometimes it never gets any easier to say or type (Cream Abdul Babar), and once in a while, VERY rarely, it's actually a pun that makes sense, and suits the music, and thus is actually a perfect name for the band. That just so happens to be the case with Genghis Tron, who combine a punishing super complex grinding downtuned metallic onslaught (like a musical Genghis Khan) and tons of synths and video game sounds, and electronics and glitchery (like the video game Tron?), which is a chocolate-and-peanut-butter combo that is tough to beat.
We've always dug Genghis Tron, but something seems to have happened since the last record. The way we remember it, the old Genghis Tron wielded a non stop torrent of super spazzy buzzy synthgrind, we even described their sound as "synthcorespazzmetalfusion", but Board Up The House, while retaining plenty of spazz and buzz and grind, is a much more mysterious beast, much darker and dronier, with the gnarled blasts of hypergrind, peppered with awesome fuzzy synthy Gary Numan style new wave, all dour and moody, with crooned robotic vocals, tangled swaths of minor key synthdrone, Autechre like skitter, super spare minimal old school electro, some gorgeous washed out dreamy drift, and while some of those sounds end up tangled up with jagged shards of downtuned chug, or churning Neurosis-y sludge, or chaotic screamo freakouts, much of the time the band lets those sounds sprawl, creating gorgeous darkened soundscapes, very cinematic and epic, intense and majestic. It's like John Carpenter jamming with Pig Destroyer sometimes. Very few of the heavy songs make it to their ends without being awesomely complicated by the band's weirdo electronic proclivities, but somehow, instead of sounding like pointless genre hopping, or some infuriating ADD drive aggro rock band, the diverse parts are fused seamlessly, to the point where some soft synth shimmer couldn't sound more perfect than sandwiched between a wall of stumbling grind and a blast of hyperspeed Iron Maiden style guitar harmonies. And actually, the ratio of electronic weirdness and dark droned out synthscapes to full on mathgrind leans WAY more heavily toward the former this time around. And it definitely suits them.
The clincher is the 11 minute closer, "Relief", which is a gorgeous, post rocky dirge, all clean vocals and languorous riffing, the track builds to some serious chugging crescendos, and even offers up a few breathless skittery ambient interludes, but when the band lock into THE RIFF, the one they pound away at for the last 6 minutes, it's total drone-doom-kraut-groove nirvana, a loping seasick drum part, underpinning a slithery minor key riff, thick and relentless, glistening with harmonies, the various melodies slipping in and out of the churning groove, vocals and synths soaring in the background, another one of those parts we wish would go on for another 40 minutes, so much so that we've been driving everyone crazy by playing this track over and over and over.
Like we said above, we always dug this band, but even so we definitely weren't expecting a record this dense and epic and melodically mature. Fans of heavier stuff, of groups like Pelican, Conifer, Isis, Tides, Ice Bound Majesty, as well as dronerock combos like Pharaoh Overlord, Circle, Cave, might get WAY into this record, assuming they can dig some of the more manic freaked out stuff. And this just might be the disc to get Genghis Tron out of the synthspazzgrind ghetto. That is if they even want out.
WAY RECOMMENDED!!
Genghis Tron might have a joke name, but their music comes across as serious business. Not played for laughs, anyway. They blenderize genres like electro pop, grindcore, techno, screamo, and heavy metal into a delicious smoothie packed with blasting "boosts" and nutritious noise. Their name is still silly, but also fairly descriptive. The power and might of metal meets the computer age of music making! It's 100mph headspinning mayhem and sorta new wavey '80s synth pop sensibilities in collision, one or both of 'em subverting the other, it's not clear. Those of us here into The Locust and An Albatross and Horse The Band and the like were all thumbs up for GT's hyperkinetic debut ep Cloak Of Love and are equally stoked on Dead Mountain Mouth, which spreads their love all over ten tracks, a whole half-hour plus of gonzoid synthcorespazzmetalfusion. Very cool.
Note too, they have a few tracks on one of our recent Records Of The Week, the Drummachinegun compilation!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
More of what we've come to expect from Australia's shockingly badass Homeless label (The Night Terrors and their anomalously motorik theremin kraut jams aside) - total noisy nasty scuzzrock gutter dwelling punk action! The seven trax here are just one feedback-damaged, mean-spirited, primal rawk blast after another. Yum! As some 'zine or blog called Tape Piss blurbs on the cover sticker, "Rabid vocal presence over sick fuck guitar hate". And, yeah, this 12" did start life as a DIY cassette tape before Homeless vinyl-ized it.
For fans of another Homeless act, Cuntz, and also the likes of Aussie reprobates Cosmic Psychos, King Snake Roost, Slug Guts, et. al., as well as other like minded miscreants from elsewhere in the world such as Pissed Jeans and Baxter Stockman.
Limited to 300 copies. 45rpm. Comes with download code so you can filth up your mp3 player along with your turntable.
Music For Sick Queers is very strange album from the bowels of the San Francisco synth-punk scene during the early '80s. The band was founded by Stephen Scheatzle and Sandy Stark in 1981, who concocted lumbering, atonal synth blorping and stumbling drum machines that served a very loose backdrop to the flat, cynically delivered lyrics that mocked the paradigms of control - politics, morality, and religion, complete with the requisite Jim Jones appropriation that was commonplace for the proponents of Industrial Culture. Their first single from 1981 featured a song entitled "Booty Jones" which told the true crime story of child molester who kidnapped a young boy and then raised him as his son for many years. The infamy of that song devolved into the suicide of Sandy Stark who in 1984 was awaiting trial on trumped up charges of child molestation. The band continued on with Mark Hutchinson replacing Stark, well sort of... as Stark and Hutchinson were in fact the same person, and the Sandy Stark suicide was all just a publicity stunt to support the 1984 album Music For Sick Queers. Woah!
The album is an exercise in deliberate confusion, with the songs being loose, visceral collages of sicktone electronics lurching around broken rhythms and megaphone vocal distortions that at their best take on the guttural aspects of Factrix or what Debbie Jaffe would later manifest as Master/Slave Relationship (might any of her stuff get reissued?). On more than a few tracks, German Shepherds push the vocals forward in the mix and their lunatic ranting embraces an unrefined, performance art ethos with an affected, flat intonation of sarcastic mockery.
This was one of those records that you would see around San Francisco pretty much everywhere back in the '90s; but obviously they slowly got snatched up, making this a pretty intriguing reissue for those outside of the Bay Area interested in the more out there proponents of DIY post-punk electronics. The Superior Viaduct reish comes wth a bonus 7" of unreleased material, and the LP has a single-only cut not found on the original vinyl. Yup, there is a download code.
It was sort of inevitable that this disc would end up being an aQ record of the week. But before we tell you the strange tale of how we got to this point, how we discovered this band and this disc, let's offer up a quick, succinct, three word description that might render the rest of this rambling review moot:
CAVEMAN THIS HEAT.
Sold? We would be. Imagine Man Is The Bastard transported back to the early seventies and let loose in This Heat's Cold Storage recording studio, or take the black hypno kraut noise of former aQ record of the week, Aluk Todolo and strip it down to its bare essence, a sound based almost entirely on rhythm. A pounding, Neanderthal groove, pelted with squelches, and laced with a strangled inhuman mewling, huge chunks of grinding minimalism and long swaths of dreamy shimmering bliss, an ultra intense slab of kraut-doom power violence for sure.
The weird thing is, the first time we hear Geronimo was several years ago, when Circle came to play some shows on the West Coast, and so I (Andee) was happily drafted to drive them around, roadie for them, all that stuff. So one of the shows was at Arthurfest in LA Circle were playing with SUNNO))), in a way-too-small seated theater, based on how many angry folks were turned away (as in HUNDREDS!). I spent the whole time, running back and forth, up and down the stairs, trying to sneak as many people into the show as possible, through the emergency exit, the backstage door, every time I went back out I would run into someone who wanted me to get them inside. While this was all going on, a band started playing, and they were AMAZING. A bunch of cholo looking dudes, handkerchief headbands, all sort of just standing there, behind huge racks of busted looking equipment, making the most unholy racket, a gorgeously destructive rib cage rattling pummel, eventually I had to stop running back and forth, cuz this band was totally sucking me in, and so I just sat down on the floor and let the band's vibrations wash over me, the floor literally shaking violently with every note.
Well, we later discovered they were called Geronimo, but no one knew anything about them, and the folks waiting for Circle and SUNNO))) didn't seem to get it or be that into it at all. We never got to talk to them in the chaos of getting Circle sorted. And eventually it sort of just slipped my mind.
So flash forward two years to the end of 2007, when we highlighted that No Skull Left Unturned comp a list or two back, collecting the various offshoots of Power Violence pioneers Man Is The Bastard. And we were particularly taken with the band Sleestak, a doomy math rock variant on MITB's bassy grind, and their sound reminded us of THAT band, the one that opened for Circle back in 2005. Then we sort of randomly stumbled across this here disc, and suddenly everything clicked, THIS was the band we saw and loved so much, and whaddayaknow, Geronimo just so happens to feature folks from both Man Is The Bastard and Sleestak. And it sounds even better than I remember, heavier, groovier, way more fucked up and WAY more freaked out. So here's a song by song breakdown of this devastating chunk of brutal beauty and monstrous minimalism:
The opener, the 18 minute "Firewater", is perfectly placed to test the listener's mettle, an endless epic stretch of looped high end klaxons and choked cymbal crashes, like a metal intro stretched into an entire song. All around this constant crunch and whine, whip flurries of electronic glitch and crunch, swaths of grinding crumbling analog buzz, while beneath it all a rumbling minimal bass line lopes lazily, until about half way through, when the track suddenly switches gears, and turns super abstract, minimal smears of drone and muted feedback, LOTS of space, and huge percussive crashes spread WAY out. It's like a super minimal abstract doom. But with bits of atonal keyboard and strangled vocals. Like the rhythm section of Khanate scoring a Dario Argento movie. That soaring high end from the beginning of the track returns, along with some speaker destroying analog buzz, still spaced out around long stretches of silence, finishing off with a brief burst of intense fury, distorted vocals, thick wall of crumbling distortion, If you survive the first track, then track two, "Headdress", is your reward, a short sharp shock of rhythmic groove, it's all about the drums, a simple, killer rhythm, the drums slightly distorted, locked into a relentless loop, while all around it, malfunctioning synths and skittering shards of glitch and skree soar and swoop, until it too shifts suddenly, into a mathy breakdown, another mesmerizingly minimal and hypnotic looped drum fill, pounding its way through a sky filled with creaks and groans and whirs and garbled grinding lo-fi squelch, finishing off with another furious blast, this time a spray of super distorted bass riffing, howled ultra effected vocals, and total drum destruction.
"Spiritwalker" offers up another side of Geronimo, the strange homemade electronics muted and smeared into much softer shapes, allowed to drift and shimmer, the drums a muffled pulse, lots of low end rumble and whir, darkly droning and cinematic, thick swells of minor key melodies, over a wasteland of glitch and buzz, slow motion tribal percussion, everything wrapped in a gauze-y haze of psychedelic textures, low end murk, and abstract FX, a gorgeous soundscape, of slow black krautrock ambience. "Medicine Man" is another brief chunk of abstract doom. A simple plodding rhythm, a thick grinding rumbling low end synth, huge blasts of effects-drenched crunch, and ominous spoken vocals and shrieked demonic howls,
And then there's "Facepeeler", which begins with a propulsive drum part, a serious metallic jam, huge bass riffs, shrieked maniacal vocals, and speaker shredding, super stereo panned effects, until suddenly the song slows down into a lurching doomic plod, the drums blown out and in the red, locked into another super simple, but completely intense and relentless slow motion rhythm, again, the sky full of FX, squealing and grinding and buzzing and screeching, but now sprawled over Geronimo's angular what-the-fuck minimal math doom, are some of the most fucked up and intense vocals ever, alternately growling, roaring, howling, whispering and mewling, it sounds a bit like an industrialized Wolf Eyes-ian Oxbow, until you realize that the vocals in question belong to one David Yow, of Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid (if only Qui sounded this bad ass). The suddenly it begins to sound like some Jesus Lizard outtake, slowed down, pulled apart and run through a bank of rusted and duct taped effects. One of those songs that easily could have been stretched out to the length of a whole record. Abrasive and brutal and hateful and super intense and heavy as fuck, but somehow weirdly hooky, and impossibly catchy, it's almost like having your pain and pleasure centers swapped, so having that anvil dropped repeatedly on your head ends up feeling so so divine. Definitely the song we keep coming back to, and playing over and over and over and over...
Finally, the band finish things off with the uncharacteristically mellow "Prints Tie", wrapped around a fluid almost jazzy bassline, drifting keyboard melodies, and shuffling abstract percussion, the Neanderthal electronics are still present, but used much more sparingly, gorgeous and glimmering, a soft smeared minimal workout that almost sounds like a more lo-fi Necks. Super dreamy and darkly shimmery, and just pretty enough to almost make you forget the 47 minutes of glorious sonic punishment you just endured. Almost.
So so so recommended. The minute we threw this one, we knew, THIS WAS THE ONE. Definite contender for record of the year (and actually, since I got it in December, it WAS my record of the year for 2007, even having only had it less than a month!) Folks who dug the Aluk Todolo will for sure dig this too. Likewise if the idea of, say, Mammal doing This Heat songs sounds cool to you too. Basically anyone into brutal rhythms and abstract minimal heaviness NEEDS this...
As much as some of us love grind, we definitely don't get enough grind on the list. This split cd, released we think to coincide with a Japanese tour, features unknown to us until now Japanese grinders Gesewa, and SF grindlords Utter Bastard, who since have broken up, but who happen to feature aQ pal Roberto behind the kit.
Gesewa definitely hit the spot, the songs mostly clocking in at less than 30 seconds, aren't so much blazing fast, although there are bursts of extreme grind, instead, Gesewa are of the weirdo, pounding metallic what-the-fuck school of grind, sharing more in common with say Bathtub Shitter than Unholy Grave. Lurching start stop arrangements, plenty of D-beat pound, wild hysterical dueling vocals, one grunty and low, the other shrieky and high, the guitars downtuned and chuggy, plenty of buzz and chaotic noise drenched thrashing, pretty awesome stuff.
Utter Bastard are much more technical and heavy than their twisted and bizarre Japanese compatriots, and tend toward a more classical grind sound, pounding and relentless, the guitars frenzied and furious, the drums pounding and blasting, with mathy complex arrangements, but UB too offer up some bizarre dueling vocals, only here and there, but for the most part, they chug and churn, spewing out some seriously crusty classic American grind. Rad stuff for sure. Too bad they're no more.
Beautifully designed cd as well, super striking layout, with liner notes and lyrics inside.
A snotty young crew of Providence Rhode Island roughnecks, both male and female, kicking up a seriously intense racket. Aggro, over the top, grinding, post punk / punk rock. Angular guitars, furious drumming, like some long lost Amrep band brought back to life and given a serious hit of screamo, and dosed with a little metallic sludge.
Limited to 500 copies, on cotton candy pink vinyl, in cool hand cut sleeves.
