[ aquarius records — Rock Pop Punk Hardcore ]

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

Showing results 901 through 950 of 1362.

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For the first release from the newly launched Black Tent Press, comes this legendary recording, all acoustic covers of Misfits songs by Dave Pajo, he of Slint, Papa M, Aerial M and loads more. Recorded on a crappy hand held tape recorder way back in 2004, these recordings have been circulating for years, passed around from band to band on tour, duped and dubbed over and over, until it acquired near mythical status. Well now, it's finally available, proper like, and this is no crappy dubbed cassette, nope, it's now a super fancy deluxe lp! As we mentioned above, Dave Pajo has been a part of so many records that we hold near and dear. First as a member of all-time AQ favorite's Slint and then guesting on records like The West by Matmos and a ton of solo records under his own name and as Papa M and Aerial M, as well as some serious arena rock action as a member of Zwan with Billy Corgan and Paz Lenchantin (who also has a rad limited edition LP on Black Tent, reviewed elsewhere on this list) and right now he's even a part of the touring band for the Yeah Yeah Yeah's. Phew! But finally we get to hear Pajo playing a handful of classic Misfits songs, in his own hushed and stripped down style. Both a testament to how great Misfits songs were and Pajo's soft delicate touch, these songs sound perfect all hushed and acoustic, like he recorded them right in your bedroom not even using a microphone, just sitting on the edge of your bed, singing right in your ear. It's pretty amazing to hear Pajo sing some of these lyrics, we're reminded how totally scandalous these Misfits lyrics were back in the day, and if you couldn't understand them then, you sure can now! A cool juxtaposition of delicate acoustic prettiness, and bloody gory nasty brutishness. Pajo is definitely not the first to give the Misfits an acoustic makeover, even the Lemonheads did a gorgeous stripped down cover of "Skulls", but somehow tackling this whole set of songs, it just works, and minus the lyrics, Scream With Me could almost sound like some lost Pajo record, or some unreleased demo. Incredible packaging, 130 gram vinyl, housed in a thick sleeve, with a 1 color spray painted serigraph on French paper, comes with a cd featuring all the music on the lp, and is LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES.

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

SORRY. This is probably the weirdest band on Howling Bull. Chaotic, off kilter hardcore, mixed with sloppy funk and all out Boredoms-ish weirdness.

We're actually surprised it's taken this long for Jello and Pansy Division to join forces, as they both have been some of the loudest, proudest and most subversive voices in rock n roll's underground for the last several decades. While of course Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys fame and head honcho of Alternative Tentacles has been around forever it made us feel a bit old to find out this release is in celebration of Pansy Division's 20th year of being a band. "Average Men" is the track with Biafra on vocals and it's a perfect match as the lyrics have the same kind of sarcastic and smart ass bite as so many of his classics. The song takes aim at those average dudes sitting at the counter of a bar or restaurant whose lives revolve around the junk food they eat, the bad beer they drink and the high class Hooters restaurant they salivate over. The 'b' side is without Jello and it finds Pansy Division covering an early track by their friends and former touring mates Green Day. Here's hoping Jello & Pansy Division crank out some more subversive pop together and continue to agitate those who need it for several more decades to come!

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

SORRY.

We had been hearing about this collaboration for a while now, definitely excited but not sure what to expect from a meeting of the warped musical minds between weirdo outsider noise jazz terrorists Talibam! and just plain weirdos Peeesseye, who would prevail, jazz or noise? Would it be unlistenable? Would it be unlistenable in a GOOD WAY? Would it rock? So while the answers are both, both, no, yes, yes, all you need to know is this is a serious chunk of psychedelic spaced out jazz flecked heaviness. It is on Invada after all, home to both the Heads and White Hills, so in that sense, this does sort of fit. The opening track is basically a super charged jazz kraut blow out, the guitars fuzzed out, the organ warbly and wild, everything wreathed in thick clouds of buzz and hiss, loads of effects, total post Hawkwind psych drone free jazz freakout, which shifts gears at some point and becomes even more of a krautrock jam, crunchy and distorted, with some weirdo vocals buried in the mix, eventually exploding into a frenzied freakout, before finishing off with a super distorted, in-the-red churning chugging space drone dirge finale. Phew. The next track offers some recovery time, a gorgeous raga like buzzscape, minimal percussion, weird production, some abstract twang, but the core sound a thick shimmering layered dreamlike drone. Ten minutes of pure cosmic bliss. But c'mon, that can't last long with these guys, "Everything for Everyone" is a crumbling, fractured noisefest, weirdly melodic, but chaotic and harsh, some slice and dice weirdness, fields of feedback, and more upper register drones, "A Grey Mountain of Shit" is full on freaked out psychedelic free jazz, with some incredible drumming, wild tangled guitaring, and a weirdo stumbling whatthefuck outro, all Tom Waits like growls, warped synths, and more wild unhinged drumming. The record closes with the 17+ minute "Year of the Moral Orgy / Grit of the Ghost", which begins life as a sprawling bit of psychedelic dronefolk, a distant buzz, little curlicues of high end melody, random percussion, a smoldering minimally tense dronescape, which grows more and more chaotic and intense, the drone threatening to swallow the song whole, never fully exploding, instead, stumbling to a confusional halt, complete with garbled vox and a slowly collapsing universe of sound.

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Fucked up far out sonic explorers Peeesseye (or PSI) return with a brand new disc that finds them sounding as weird and wacked as ever, and continuing to drift in the same direction as their last disc, Commuting Between The Surface & The Underworld. The first time we heard these guys, they were a much noisier proposition, spewing a caustic and fractured noise rock, that we liked quite a bit, but by record number two, they seemed to be exploring songs and melody more than noise and texture, their sound markedly prettier and folkier. On Mayhem In The Mansion, the band continue to drift through some strange folky forest, but being PSI, it's all glimpsed through some cracked funhouse mirror. A strummed acoustic guitar seems to root most of these songs, but that guitar is strewn upon skipping stuttering electronics, strangled yelps, random clatter and chaos, growled vocals, dense clouds of cymbal shimmer, stumbling tribal percussion, random bits of thump and rattle, distant moans and creaks, shimmering electric guitar melodies, furious squalls of static drenched psychnoise and lots and lots of effects. It's definitely pretty and folky, but so completely out there. The prettiest parts somehow manage to get all tangled up with the obtuse angular bits, folky strum is smothered in buzz or bleep or both, but it works, it becomes some impossible artpop weirdness. A lot of this sounds like Avarus or No Neck, but more than anything it sounds sort of like Animal Collective, but with most of the hooks removed. Or better yet, like Animal Collective's deformed mutant twin brother. The one they keep locked in the basement. With just a busted up acoustic guitar, some effects with dying batteries and a 4track. And shit, if that doesn't sound amazing, well, then we give up...

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'Tis the season for blown out and supercharged lo-fi burners and we can't say we mind one bit. Band after band, this eruption of buzzy stumbly hook filled garage-y pop is pretty impossible not to love. Pens are a great addition to the current crop of noise-poppers like Wavves, Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, etc. Luckily they defiantly have their own take on that sound, as the record opens with what sounds like thumb piano before erupting into a full on garage pop anthem. Pens are a London trio who infuse wonderfully swirling psychedelic moments into their Shaggs like crash and burn approach to way-in-the-red and dizzyingly fucked up pop. There is something so spirited and punk rock about their sound and approach, imagine your favorite riot grrrrl band on Woodsist! Bikini Kill mixed with Wavves? You get the idea, a hectic, urgent and way damn pleasing musical ruckus!

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Finally reissued from 1977, Pere Ubu's debut full length. Essential stuff, and still sounds unbelievably great, vital, and groundbreaking 21 years later.

There's hype, and then there's HYPE. And we can't really remember a band as hyped as Perfect Pussy. Most folks had heard all about them, read all about them, knew way more than they had any right to before hearing a single lick of music. The risk with that sort of hype, is that the actual music could never ever live up to the expectation, and how PP stacks up is really pretty subjective. Assuming for one second, PP wasn't a ubiquitous news item on Pitchfork every day for the last year, hearing Say Yes To Love is kinda revelatory, the sort of record that could easily knock you on your ass. One thing we can say, is it's weird that a record this noisy and abrasive and UNcommercial is getting so much popular approval, but all we can say to that is hell yeah! So yeah, but what the hell does it sound like? Well imagine classic Riot Grrl, nineties noise rock, all wound up in wild squalls of psychedelic shoegaze, with frantic bleated vocals that are a dead ringer for Melt-Banana, and you'd be getting close. The opening one-two punch of "Driver" and "Bells" might as well be one song, four minutes of keening high end ferocity, and in fact high end is where PP spend much of their time, would be surprised to discover there was no bass player, cuz really, it's all sharp and jagged, slashing noiseguitar, crunchy jangle, it's not until the third track "Big Stars" that things slow down, but even then, it remains fierce and feral, a little more aligned with that classic nineties era, but wreathed in feedback and noise, and the end of the track tapering off into some tripped out psychedelic drift. But hold up, some bass pops up on the beginning of "Work", before being quickly swallowed whole by a cloud of swirling guitar skree, and then weirdly, midway through, are those synths, somehow, the song becomes all cosmic and celestial, just for a minute, before stumbling back into more jagged noise pop / noise punk pound. This is the sort of record, that squares will claim sounds like 'noise', and really they're not far off, this is some seriously noisy stuff, so much so, that on the shitty stereos this stuff was meant to be listened to on, it's really impossible to differentiate nuance, in the store it sounds almost like a Merzbow remix of Melt-Banana (not a bad thing mind you), but strap on some headphones, or blast it through a killer sound system at deafening volume, and PP's master sonic craft reveals itself for sure. Our favorite moment might be right at the end, with the two minute blast of "Advance Upon The Real", which fills up it's remaining 3+ minutes with a barely audible bit of strange industrial ambience, buried melodies, blurred shimmers, the perfect intro to the weirdo experimental closer "VII" which IS noise, vocals drifting through fields of grinding distorted crunch, blooping synth melodies hovering amidst sheets of caustic gristle, rhythmic and blown out, a weirdly beautiful bit of extreme noise punk, and the perfect way to finish things off. The cd comes in a cool glittery slipcase, with ultra minimal artwork, and while we did have the lp (back in soon, hopefully), it's not the oft remarked upon menstrual blood infused vinyl. Sorry.

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Our Record Of The Week from List #347, back in stock!! One genre in heavy music, that a whole bunch of aQ-ers consider critical to their musical development, is in fact WAY underrepresented on the aQ list, partially cuz much of the music that made up that genre happened well before the advent of the aQ new arrivals list, but also because so few contemporary bands can pull that sound off, at least convincingly. What the heck are we talking about? SCREAMO. Yep, wild, chaotic, short sharp post punk heaviness, some of our faves include Orchid, Mohinder, Swing Kids, Portraits Of Past, Heroin, Antioch Arrow... those live shows were legendary, heaving masses of sweaty flesh, the line between audience and band blurred or obliterated completely, sets as short as 10 minutes, still packed with 15 songs of furious hardcore frenzy, there were definitely politics going on too, but it was the sound that had us smitten, the energy, the passion, the emotion, that first wave of screamo was obviously heavily indebted to Rites Of Spring, Die Kreuzen and other early hardcore and post hardcore combos, but the screamo bands took that sound and cranked it up, supercharged it, shortened the songs and blew the living fuck out of it. Very few bands today can pull off that sound, or even try, there's Comadre, and Ampere, and a few others, and now you can add Pianos Become The Teeth, but the cool thing about PBTT, are that they take that classic screamo sound and meld it to a seemingly diametrically opposed sound, that sort of Godspeed You Black Emperor, slow build epic post rock majesty! And somehow it works. The energy and passion, the bursts of furious howling musical catharsis wedded to something more smoldering and patient, and the mix is pretty fucking fantastic, the group lurching from dense tangles of wild punkish crunch to soaring epic psychedelic blow outs, the songs super complex, constantly shifting mood and emotion, but keeping the tension ratcheted way up. "Quit Benefit" features insane squalls of wild octopoidal drumming, stuttering arrangements and dramatic pauses, haunting stretched out sheets of feedback, cool hard panned guitar jangle, the song a non stop frenzy of ever shifting rhythms, incredibly lush and melodic but all snarled up, but with a distinct melodic vibe running through the whole thing. "Pensive" finds the band locking into a churning slow build, with still more intense and relentless drumming, the guitars sharp and angular, the vocals howled and oozing with pathos, every song is a dizzying mile a minute post punk emo screamo epic, the band slipping so easily from indie jangle to rabid grinding punk and back again, but after nearly 30 minutes of that incredible and insanely cathartic level of sustained energy, the band offer up the final track, "Young Fire", a gorgeous post rock drift, all clean spidery guitars, simple skeletal rhythms, woozy twangy melodies, a slow build part way through to something more heavy, but never letting go, never exploding into a wild freak out, instead, letting the song unfurl lazily, the various sounds slowly slipping away, eventually leaving just a single reverbed guitar to play the record out. So lovely. And the whole record, so fucking heavy and epic and emo(tional), definitely a big new favorite around here, and for folks who have been missing the days of the Orchid and Mohinder and Gravity Records, this is as about as close as you're gonna get to making it back there, but as is obvious from the above, Old Pride is less about looking back, and more about taking that sound, and dragging it forward, into the NOW.

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We made last year's Old Pride, from post screamo heavies Pianos Become The Teeth our Record Of The Week when it came out, as it pushed all our buttons: the furious chaotic, post hardcore of screamo, the soaring epic emotion and about-to-crack vocal-ed intensity of emo, and the brooding slow build intensity of post rock. And on this most recent record, the band continue to hone this hybrid, pushing all of those elements further and further, crafting something this time around that dials back the chaotic punkish intensity just a bit, and focuses more on the expansive majestic side of their sound, pushing them in a direction more along the lines of Explosions In The Sky, the sort of sound, that sans vocals, would be the perfect music for some super moving moment in a film or a TV show, when everything comes crashing down, and the main character is walking dejectedly in the rain, head hung low, contemplating just what to do next, overwhelmed by life. This is the sort of 'punk rock' we grew up on, intense and emotional and moving, the sort of stuff you'd put on that cathartic crush / break up mixtape, and blast in your car, to either get the guts to talk to that crush, or to try desperately to forget about your broken heart. The power of punk rock here recast as something more lush and layered, the songs intricate and carefully crafted, but without losing that intense drama, or that extreme emotion, and while the screamo/punk elements may be dialed back, they're still present, and are exactly what gives this stuff it's power, the guitars chiming and ringing out one second, buzzing and grinding the next, the drums dense and wild and heavy hitting, the songs brooding and building into churning psychedelic squalls, the anguished super emotional vocals, just pushing it over the top. It sounds cliched, but they really don't make music like this anymore, or more specifically, they probably actually do, it's just nearly as amazing as this. Definitely a new favorite from an old favorite, and another one of those records that easily could have been another Record Of The Week, just like the first one.

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Book Burner is the first record in 5 years from these grindcore gods. Their last full length was 2007's Phantom Limb, and as we mentioned in that review, as much as we dig these guys, we sort of dig PD frontman Scott Hull's -other- grind band even more, the twisted, warped, drum machine driven Agoraphobic Nosebleed, perhaps in part due to the fact that the music is not at all restrained by the limits of human drumming, which means that a lot of AnB stuff is ridiculously, and inhumanly fast, not to mention dizzyingly convoluted. But let's not sell PD drummer Adam Jarvis (who also plays in Misery Index) short, he comes about as close as any other human we can think of to insane hyperspeed drum damage, and the rest of the band follow suit, unfurling some seriously shredding, grinding heaviness, that in the world of grind really has no equal. We bitched about the more punky parts of the last record, and for the most part, that stuff has been jettisoned, in favor of lots of crushing slow and midtempo parts, that KILL, as well as crazy chunks of wild progged out math metal, which sound sooooo good, especially when paired up with bursts of lightning speed grinding blasts, the switch to churning chugging riffage only makes it sound that much heavier. And if anything, the sound of Pig Destroyer has continued to inch ever closer to that of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, more dense and complex, more furiously frenzied and fucked up. It's still somehow surprising the sort of hype this record's been getting, these guys popping up on the covers of all the metal mags, and no doubt filling up year end lists, but we have to say, as skeptical as we were, the more we listen to this, the more we're digging it, repeated listens yield a deeper appreciation of how fucking epic and relentlessly masterful this stuff really is, strap on some headphones and get lost in the wild squalls of grind, and the classic metal flecked churn and chug, a furious face melting modern grind metal powerhouse that jams 19 songs into 32 minutes, and sets the grind bar pretty goddamn high. As always, creepy artwork, demented lyrics, and a clutch of sick guest vocal spots from occasional PD/AnB vocalist (and full time Salome frontwoman) Kat Katz.

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Who would have thought a band with name like Pig Destroyer, and heck, a band that -sounded- like Pig Destroyer, would be super popular, but just check out the sticker on the front of the new Pig Destroyer record Phantom Limb: "For fans of Slayer, Mastodon, Lamb Of God, Melvins, Black Dahlia Murder, Cephallic Carnage." Huh? Cephallic Carnage makes sense but the rest? It seems like maybe they're just saying, "If you like heavy music, this is heavy too, so you'll probably like it." Which is certainly true, but Pig Destroyer are way heavier and weirder and more extreme than most of those bands, but then again who are we to complain if the Alternative Press youth of today are digging shit like Pig Destroyer along with their Slipknot, way better than A.F.I. of Aiden. But as much as we dig PD, we're still surprised at how popular they've become. They're definitely great, but not -that- great. Maybe if you have a limited exposure to grind, we can see how they might blow your mind. But personally we tend toward Pig Destroyer's drum machine drive alter ego Agoraphobic Nosebleed, who take the metallic grind of PD, and speed it up, twist it all around, and chop it into short sharp blasts of furious impossibly technical fury. But fuck it, we're nitpicking, sure we like AnB more, but this is some seriously heavy and brutal metalgrind insanity. These guys totally destroy, and totally shred, super convoluted arrangements, confusional mathiness and superhuman tempos, all wrapped in super downtuned chug and blown out distortion, howled vocals and buzzing bass, lots of the tracks slip into a more straight ahead thrashing punk which we're not so into, but the blasting parts are face meltingly intense and so awesome, and PD do kick out some damaged sea sick doomy jams here and there that are pretty kick ass. And hell there are plenty of super catchy killer riffs dotting Pig Destroyers hyperspeed grindscapes. So yeah, maybe we love Agoraphobic Nosebleed a bit more than PD, and this is definitely not our favorite Pig Destroyer disc (that would probably be the Painter Of Dead Girls comp, or maybe their debut full length Explosions In Ward 6), but fuck it, this is still severed heads and hacked-off shoulders above most grind, and definitely heavy enough to please most metalheads and grindfreaks alike�

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Latest slab of pummeling, punishing industrial power violence from this local one man band, who also just so happens to be 1/2 of another band we love, Iron Lung, but unlike Iron Lung, BHT, aka Jon Kortland, creates twisted blurts of caustic noise, grinding, distorted power electronics, and brutal metallic churn. This latest is split into 28 tracks, each 44 seconds long, each a sonic stunner, from skull cleaving blown out crush to sculpted static over stuttering jack hammer rhythms, it's a hard sound to swallow, difficult listening for sure, and it's likely most metalheads might find this a bit too brutal, and too abrasive, and probably not metal enough, which is saying a lot, but for folks into twisted avant noise, industrial and power electronics, outfits like Ramleh and Skullflower, Whitehouse and Swans, Brighter Death Now and Bastard Noise, PHT definitely fits somewhere amongst all their equally sonically twisted brethren! Some tracks are strangely atmospheric, others purely rhythmic, the sounds themselves blown out and in-the-red, plenty of sonic gristle, crumbling feedback, hiss and hum and skree and squalls of feedback, metallic clang and clatter, with sounds often exploding into wild gouts of white noise, but just as often evolving into murky pulsations. Heady, heavy and hypnotic, the vocals a wild bellow, the only really link to the group's punk/metal roots, otherwise, the sounds is more experimental, and avant, and even with the vocals, the vibe is more like some lost industrial outfit from the eighties or nineties. There are plenty of surprise too though, moments of unlikely melody and beauty ("1970"), gorgeous bits of grey ambient drift ("Scum"), and a bunch of tracks that almost play out more like some warped variant of minimal techno, all skeletal crunch, and stuttery throb, and yet, it all somehow works together as this bizarre, noise drenched hydra-headed, 28 part psychedelic, power electronic noise-crust epic. And it KILLS. Awesome orange and black minimal cover art too.

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Folks went nuts for the PHT full length we reviewed a few weeks back, so here we have two new slabs of murky, muddy, downtuned sludge drenched power violence. Both tracks are gloriously crusty and filthy and so so so heavy, and would have fit perfectly on the full length. One side features a massive lurching riff over machinelike drumming and howled vokills, pounding and relentless but strangely hypnotic almost like a sludgier Geronimo. The flip side is even doomier and more spaced out, with crushing low end, squiggly streaks of feedback, all wound into a lumbering grinding slow motion behemoth, with glass gargling vocals all beneath a thick layer of buzzy grit. The weird part about this 7" is that both tracks, each side, features essentially an entirely different lineup! There's only one guy who plays on both sides and on one he plays drums, while on the other he plays bass. We knew they were a sort of collective and this seems to prove it. Especially considering that both sides definitely and distinctly reek of that filthy blackness that could only be Pig Heart Transplant. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES. Packaged in hand stamped plain red sleeves with a printed red bottom obi.

There's lots of ways we find out about cool new bands. We finally listen to a promo that came in the mail, or a customer raves about them, or we read about 'em in a fanzine or on the internet, etc. etc. One of the best ways though, is to randomly see a band playing live that you've never heard of before, and be impressed. That's the deal with how we discovered local SF heavies Pigs. I (Allan) just moved into a new apartment here in the Mission, that's not too far from the Potrero del Sol skatepark. On one of the days I was moving stuff, I could hear live music coming from the direction of the park, where they do sometimes have outdoor shows. Sounded like yr basic punk rock, but then a band started playing that - as best I could tell from several blocks away - sounded much more metallic and interesting, with shredding guitar leads and chunky riffage and everything. And obviously very loud. So, needing a break from my moving tasks, I wandered over to the park posthaste to check out what was going on. When I got there, the band I'd heard was still playing, and they were GREAT. Super heavy, fairly hairy power trio (boy drummer, girl bassist, bearded dude guitarist / sometime vocalist) kicking out the jams big time, sorta like a scrappier, scuzzier Melvins, in their earliest, fastest, punkiest incarnation. Like, with some more Motorhead mixed in. I had a blast watching the rest of their set, totally into it, already wondering if they had any recordings I could get my hands on for Aquarius. Also wondering, just who the heck they were. Well both questions were soon answered when the drummer held up a garish purple, very DIY looking handscreened LP emblazoned with the name Pigs, saying they'd just put this record out. Better yet, moments later a friend of mine appeared, who it turned out was friends with band as well, and told me that he'd just been telling Pigs before they played that they should bring their album down to Aquarius. And so they did, a week or so later, not just the limited vinyl but also a cd version too. Just like their live set, the album is a blast (of distortion, among other things). Sometimes slow and sludgy, equally often full of frenzied jamming, Illuminati House Party is pure metal-punk underground awesome, with more than a few nods to classic rock catchiness. Pigs traffic in Black Sabbathy riffs (most definitely in "Lurch"), their songs furthermore having plenty of rollicking swing to 'em a la both Sabbath and Sleep. The guitarist constantly peels off tangly, widdly leads like they're coming back into style. All the tracks here (11 of 'em) rule, from the sick-o smartassery of "Hard Lovin' Van", a song with gnarly Ginnish licks and hoarse, strangled vox that could almost be an old Tad tune (some of the lyrics: "let's go the lake, and feed the ducks...get in the van, take the candy"), to the even more punk "Population Control", to the wasted doom of "Hessian's Revenge" and sheer shred of "Surf's Up". And then there's the epic instrumental 3-part rifftastic "Taser Trilogy" wherein Pigs show off their Champsy chops, not to mention stoner sense of humor (and not for the first time on this record). Yeah, great stuff! Is it possible to imagine an unholy hybrid of, um, Electric Wizard, Breadwinner, and, er, Pissed Jeans?? Pigs might be it. Soooo glad I was within earshot of the skatepark that day!

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Right on! Reissued on vinyl... Gotta love the Pink Fairies. A seminal British freak-rock act, part of the scene alongside Hawkwind and Edgar Broughton Band and The Deviants and Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, their albums still hold up as kick ass psychedelic, proto-punk early '70s rock sets. A British Stooges they're not, but a sillier, even more anarchistic, hippified MC5 isn't too far off. What A Bunch Of Sweeties was the Fairies second album, from 1972, still featuring founding guitarist Paul Rudolph but without original Fairy Twink, who split to Morocco after the first album. Fortunately, although Twink played drums, they already had a second drummer, Russell Hunter, in the band, so slimming down to a trio wasn't too difficult. They certainly kept their "deviant" sense of humor, even getting the guy who did the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comix to pen lyrics to one song, "Pigs Of Uranus". Amidst the silliness, though, the Fairies might actually have managed more straight-up acid rock on this album than their debut, with one of its highlights being their nine-minute long, heavily distorted cover of surf classic "Walk Don't Run". Like the MC5, the Pink Fairies obviously felt that the Revolution was Rock n' Roll and Rock n' Roll was Revolution, evident from the album's lead off good times rocker with the countercultural, political message of "Right On, Fight On" to the last track, their cover of the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There". With their whiskey-soaked vocals, psychedelic excursions, pop hooks, and freak-flag attitude, the Fairies were too eclectic and scattered and messed up to have much of a "career" (you could never really imagine 'em ending up as a metal or punk or even Hawkwind style spacerock band). But their three albums, this one among 'em, bring back a vibe long-gone today, and so it's way cool to have this back in stock on vinyl.

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Oh my God, yes! Finally the collected recordings of San Francisco's punk sweethearts Pink Section have been released to broader appreciation. Named after the San Francisco Chronicle's pink entertainment guide, the quartet of drummer Carol Detweiler, singer Judy Gittlesohn (both of Inflatable Boy Clams and Longshoremen), singer/guitarist Matt Heckert (Survival Research Laboratories) and bassist /keyboardist Stephen Wymore existed on the margins even in San Francisco's 1979 underground scene. Forming at the San Francisco Art Institute and haunting venues like The Deaf Club on Valencia Street and Mabuhay Gardens in North Beach, gigging with bands like Tuxedo Moon and The Units, their self-taught musicianship and songs playing up the dark side of domesticity and consumerism into an infectious and oft-kilter new wave artiness. Angular rhythms and infectious hooks, and alternating male and female vocals put them directly on a par with bands like Suburban Lawns, Devo and The B-52s, even if they were barely known outside of San Francisco. While they never released a full length, this compilation collects their 7" single, their 12" ep, unreleased demos and live material, even a Yoko Ono cover of "Midsummer New York". So great!!!! Download card included.

MPEG stream: Francine's List
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The latest single from local label Valley King comes via Pins Of Light, a local outfit featuring members of Dead And Gone, Triclops and Hightower, who deliver a seriously dense slab of progged out metallic gloom punk that winds sinewy riffage, around super frantic intricate drumming and some wild soaring vocals, the A side sounds a bit like Voivod via Pink Floyd, the arrangement dense and constantly shifting, with a killer main riff, and some surprisingly poppy moments, dense and tense, there's even a little stonery groove to the proceedings, definitely psychedelic, but a sort of gothy mathy metallic psychedelia that kills. The flipside begins with a sky full of swirling psych guitars, before they're joined by some busy drumming and a proggy bassline, eventually erupting into some full on prog metal crush, but once the vocals come in, the song is transformed into a sort of part two of the A side, catchy, weirdly subversively poppy, but still heavy and proggy and metallic, the outro gets seriously blown out and psychedelic, the band locked into some serious space metal churn, before the vocals come in again, and the sound becomes some sort of twisted Voivod / Judas Priest / Hawkwind hybrid, which is most definitely a good thing. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Killer spaceman skull cover art by Alan Forbes, each one signed and numbered, includes a printed insert, and a sticker too!

MPEG stream: The New Sun
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Oh man. Seeing that immediately recognizable Sub Pop single logo/design bring us right back to the glory days. That black strip across the top, with the Sub Pop logo in the upper right hand corner. The white text, the songs split up by the 'b/w'. We totally remember collecting singles by Mudhoney and Tad and Love Battery and Nirvana. Joining the singles club and anxiously awaiting the next single to show up in the mail. Checking the mailbox every day. Seeing the little upcoming releases announcement panel in the single you just got telling you about all of the killer singles you would spend the next 6 months anxiously awaiting. Man, those were the days. That Sub Pop singles club was pretty fucking excellent. Sure there were a few lame entries, but even those were at least weird. And some of the best songs of the last twenty years were first heard via those 7"s. Not sure if the club is still an ongoing concern, or if it's just a sporadic sort of thing, but how awesome is it to get a Sub Pop Pissed Jeans 7"!!! It just seems to fit. Pissed Jeans are like OUR Black Flag. Sort of. But c'mon, snotty and punk and super rocking. Perfect for a Sub Pop single. And it almost sounds like they purposefully made their sound MORE Sub Poppy for this release. The A side is a creepy dirge with moaning bass and keening high end feedback, with super tortured vocals, a feral crooned howl, the whole thing sexy and slithery and dangerous. It almost sounds like a bluesier, punkier Green River! The B side is a short blast of pounding sludgy garage rock scuzz, with buried vocals, simple punk rock drums, and a wildly grinding crunchy guitar sound that just kills!

Batten down the hatches, lock up your daughters, run for the hills, and/or break out the beers, 'cause Pennsylvania OG punk paragons Pissed Jeans are at it again, erupting with their 4th full-length of scuzzy ugly pounding filthy punk rawk action. Opening cut "Bathroom Laughter" starts things off all uptempo, a hardcore blast that's almost jaunty even as the singer froths at the mouth all over your ears. Taking a different tack, the second cut, "Chainworker", delves into the depths of sludgey dirgepunk heaviness a la Flipper. The record then seesaws seasick betwixt these two extremes, always dishing out the raw riffs, choppy rhythms, and vocal vitriol. Flashes of Black Flag at times, as per usual, Jesus Lizard too, and some of the catchy bits here reminding us a little bit of Rocket From The Crypt, oddly enough. Oh yeah, and certain tracks, like "You're Different (In Person)" have a grunginess to 'em that makes us think of another (former) Sub Pop act, Tad. In other words, another highly enjoyable Pissed Jeans platter, for those who like their rock noisy and their noise rockin'.

MPEG stream: Bathroom Laughter
MPEG stream: Chain Worker
MPEG stream: You're Different (In Person)
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This Pennsylvania punk band's debut Shallow was a surprise, sleeper hit 'round here, scuzzy and trashed and oh-so-catchy, the likes of which we hadn't heard since the '80s, it was that good. Sub Pop obviously thought the same, and picked up Pissed Jeans for a single and also their sophomore album effort, now upon us, Hope For Men (what is that title, taken from some spam email subject line?). So, do they deliver? Yes... and no... and yes. Yes this is MORE damaged and distorted and deviant than the debut. No, it's not quite as catchy, not immediately. But the level of artful anguished ugliness that they achieve here takes some doing and when you're in the mood, this album is gonna be your best friend, your friend who's been there, crawling in the gutter, screaming his guts out, the only friend who can understand how wrecked you are, how fucked up your life is, how shit sucks and you both need another drink. When you're thinking, where the fuck's Black Flag? How come they're not around for me anymore? Pissed Jeans is there for you, man. This is no good-time rock and roll, it's filthy puking punk dirge that you'll want to play LOUD. Parts of this even remind us of the mighty Oxbow, who are a lot more bluesy and avant-garde than Pissed Jeans but also are pretty much THE yardstick by which seriously fucked angst-ridden cathartic rock should be measured (along with, perhaps, Brainbombs), so that's no small compliment I'm sure you'll agree. All their self-loathing and fear of sex and yuppie-hating and general misanthropy, though, is channelled into some seriously primal sonics that may or may not be theraputic but sure as hell rock in the noisiest sense of the term, with some almost--ambient but still abrasive interludes amongst the more brutal tunage (the semi-spoken vocals on the former being the least-successful, trying-too-hard part of this album for us, however, even though it's also what pushes the Oxbow angle). And, they still have a sense of (black) humor, how could they go on without it??

MPEG stream: Secret Admirer
MPEG stream: I've Still Got You (Ice Cream)

King Of Jeans? Not sure what that title is about exactly. Now, King Of PISSED would make a lot more sense! What with all the scuzz and scowl found on this loud, noisy record. Though the Pissed Jeans aren't always pissed, sometimes just more, like, bummed. As on the album's final cut, "Goodbye (Hair)", a song about going bald. By the way, just thought of this, is there some sort of pun going on the band's name, could it be read Pissed Genes as well? Dunno. Anyway, this album, the PA punk troupe's third (2nd for Sub Pop, where they definitely belong, in the tradition of shitkickers like Green River), is another good 'un. On it, they bring back more of the catchiness that caught our ears on their debut Shallow, while not sacrificing any of the ugliness and avant-rock anguish heard on Hope For Men. Nope, this new slab of heavy punk pounding is chock full of all the feedback guitar skree and vokill rants that Pissed Jeans always bring to the party, sounding partway between Tad and the Jesus Lizard. Of course Black Flag is also another obvious comparison! And like we said, a lot of this is catchy as fuck, that is if you can call choruses consisting of barely-human "bleeeargh!" catchy. Or all the spastic lurching n' doomed lumbering. We also like the spacey FX that pervade "She Is Science Fiction". Most songs are in the 2-3 minute range, though there's exceptions, like the seven and a half minute "Spent", a Melvins-y, My War style dirge. For fans of the Flag and other '80s punk past, contemporary scuzzers Vee Dee, some of the more extreme of the current "shitgaze" crowd, and of course Pissed Jeans' previous output. Duh.

MPEG stream: False Jesii Part 2
MPEG stream: Half Idiot
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Now on vinyl!! A punk record for people who haven't bought a punk record in a while. It's not a retro exercise, but still something about this young Pennsylvania band brings back memories of '80s hardcore, Black Flag or Flipper back in the day, nasty punk scuzz with lots of badass guitar distortion and feedback, shambolic rock n' roll with rabid bite. The lyrics are sadsack smartass dumb, yowled over the band's noisy, catchy trashcan stomp, the vocalist really letting it all (down-and-)out on such songs as "I'm Sick," "Boring Girls", "Ashamed Of My Cum", and "I Broke My Own Heart." Can you feel sorry for someone who's wallowing in it? Doesn't matter, just enjoy the careening chaotic entertainment that results. The packaging features cool cartoon graphics of surburan banality.

MPEG stream: Boring Girls
MPEG stream: Closet Marine

Sub Pop has just reissued these abject punks' debut album from 2005, originally released on the Parts Unknown label. Pissed Jeans kicked our asses back then when we first heard 'em - and have continued to do so throughout their career after they signed to Sub Pop. It's great to have this back, especially since Sup Pop has packaged this with extra tracks, the two songs "Throbbing Organ" and "Night Minutes" from an even earlier, long out of print 7" single. The vinyl version provides those on a separate 45, while the new cd version just provides a download code for 'em (the lp comes with a download of the whole thing too, by the way). So, here's what we said 'bout Shallow when we listed it the first time around: A punk record for people who haven't bought a punk record in a while. It's not a retro exercise, but still something about this young Pennsylvania band brings back memories of '80s hardcore, Black Flag or Flipper back in the day, nasty punk scuzz with lots of badass guitar distortion and feedback, shambolic rock n' roll with rabid bite. The lyrics are sadsack smartass dumb, yowled over the band's noisy, catchy trashcan stomp, the vocalist really letting it all (down-and-)out on such songs as "I'm Sick," "Boring Girls", "Ashamed Of My Cum", and "I Broke My Own Heart." Can you feel sorry for someone who's wallowing in it? Doesn't matter, just enjoy the careening chaotic entertainment that results. The packaging features cool cartoon graphics of suburban banality.

MPEG stream: Boring Girls
MPEG stream: Closet Marine

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

SORRY.

For a lot of folks, the Plasmatics were a band that was more seen than actually heard. With Wendy O. Williams and her mohawk and duct tape covered nipples, nearly seven foot tall guitarist Richie Stotts, often clad in a mask and a French maid's outfit, the whole band was a motley crew of subversive imagery, punk, metal, bondage, sex and violence. When this record came out in 1983, a lot of us were just getting into metal, and the Plasmatics just seemed too PUNK. Sure, the young boys among us couldn't get enough of the near nude Williams destroying guitars with a chainsaw, or amps with a sledgehammer or even cars and buildings. But we just figured we wouldn't dig the music. When we finally did hear the band, this record specifically, we were blown away and kicking ourselves BIG TIME. This was indeed METAL. Sure it was punky in a lot of ways, but more than anything the Plasmatics were whipping up some serious heavy metal. Described as "One part Grand Guignol, one part minimalist / kamikaze conceptual art and one part Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the Plasmatics also managed to be one part AC/DC, one part Motorhead, and one part New Wave Of American Heavy Metal (NWOAHM?). It was easy to forget that the Plasmatics were actually a band. A good one. Live shows were orgies of destruction, blowing up cars, smashing televisions, destroying instruments, in magazines and interviews, that's all anyone wanted to talk about. That and the nipples, but fuck if this isn't an absolutely killer metal record. Huge riffs, classic eighties metal hooks, and Williams' throaty growl/howl. Catchy and complex, head banging and fists in the air, like a female fronted AC/DC-Motorhead hybrid, with strange little bits of glistening pop here and there, where Williams would really sing, delicate and lovely, before launching back into a vitriolic face smashing metallic pummel. Awesome! Totally remastered, with extensive liner notes, tons of photos, and FOUR bonus tracks: two demos, a work-in-progress recording and a hilarious radio ad! This is the first release we've reviewed from a new line of eighties hard rock and metal reissues on the Rock Candy label. Other releases include records by Armored Saint, Icon, Ted Nugent, Billy Squier, Coney Hatch, Ram Jam, Helix, Riot and more!!!

MPEG stream: Put Your Love In Me
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Latest slab of grinding destruction from these bay area thrashers. Wicked and heavy, pummelling fastcore. Complex and amazing. With Max from Spazz/What Happens Next on the skins. Awesome.

Several Poison Idea cd reissues recently hit the racks, and we rate this one the best (although they're all pretty darn good!). Poison Idea is one of the few bands that comes immediately to mind when you think about what a good hardcore band was really all about. Manic pace, adept "sausage-finger" guitar playing, a tight rhythm section and a singer wailing over the top with lyrics so poetic and fucking deep it's actually worth reading the lyric sheet! Poison Idea was that band -- Portland's finest -- and on top of it all, you had two serious behemoth madmen drinking and bleeding and rocking in a hellbent frenzy. With this 1987 release, War All the Time (yes, it's named after Bukowski, duh) the self-proclaimed "Kings of Punk" added extra power-pummel to the mix with the addition of Thee Slayer Hippy on drums and Vegetable Olsen on second guitar. This record still proves to be a timeless classic today as far as early hardcore/thrash/crossover goes. Lots of stop-and-start on a dime riffage, a million little cymbal splashes filling in the holes, Pig Champion moving those little chubby stubs up and down the fretboard at the speed of light (or maybe as fast as the malt liquor would allow on any given night!) and on top of it all Jerry A. mumbling / howling / screaming some seriously stoic shit in that immediately recognizable caterwaul, but you wouldn't know how serious unless you were reading along... You're definitely not a real punk without this in your collection!

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Every once in a while, there's a record that is so good and makes me so happy, I find it virtually impossible to write a review of it. There's all this pressure to somehow convey in the space of a hundred or so words how goddamn good a record is. To convince YOU that this record will move you as much as it did me. So I hem and haw and write all my other reviews around it until I have no choice but to face my fear and go for it. So here it is. The new record by Florida's Poison The Well. Up until now, I've been a fan, and definitely enjoyed their records. But 'Tear From The Red' is such a colossal leap from their last record. Ostensibly a 'metalcore' record, it manages to encompass so much more: rock, emo, hardcore, death metal, even pop. The heavy parts, even when the vocals are howled, are somehow as catchy and heart wrenching as any Get Up Kids weeper, if not more so. And then when PtW -do- go for it, and break it down and get all mellow and sweet and emotional it's just devastating. And the playing on this record is so phenomenal. The riffs are so thick and huge they just smack you upside the head, but you just kind of bob along, oblivious, banging your head and spitting out teeth and letting this wave of furious emotion watch over you. The songs shift from crunching near-death metal, to wild free-metal, to stuttering stop-start rhythms, to spacy almost Voi Vod-ish melodies, and dreamy shoegazey bliss out parts. Halfway through the record they break out with just vocals and acoustic guitar, but the melody is so odd, and the voice is so impassioned and the chord progression is so unexpected that it ends up being just as intense as any of the heavy stuff, and not cheesy at all. And track three! What can I say? If you could wear out a track from playing a cd too much, I would definitely need a new one by now. Track three has the absolutely most punishing part of almost any song I have ever heard, where the kick drums, guitars, and bass all stutter then stop, over and over. Huge and unbelievably heavy. I was listening to it in my housemate's truck, and when that part came on I had to turn up the stereo so loud that I could SEE the beat making little waves in the rear view mirror. We have been getting a little worn out on this whole metalcore explosion, but Poison The Well have stepped up to the plate with not only one of the best metalcore records ever, not just one of the best emo records ever, but one of the best records I have heard in a long time. Period.

RealAudio clip: Turn Down Elliot
RealAudio clip: Botchla
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RealAudio clip: Horns And Tails
RealAudio clip: Moments Over Exaggerate

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MPEG stream: Who Doesn't Love A Good Dismemberment?
MPEG stream: Without You And One Other I Am Nothing

We Are Time is a collection of odds and ends from The Pop Group, first issued on Rough Trade in 1980. All of the material was recorded around the same time as their seminal album Y from 1979, though nothing except for the title track and "Thief Of Fire" had appeared on their two albums from that time period. With the exception of those two tracks and an obscure B-sides (all of which appear here in live, demo, or alternate forms by the way), everything else is unique to the compilation. The recording sources are all different, making the entire album a bit uneven in terms of sound quality; but that criticism is pretty fucking minor, when it comes to a reissue of this fairly obscure album from this incredible Pop Group. Always an adventurous proposition, The Pop Group took the feral energy of punk to dub production techniques and a self-immolating funk sending limbs and legs in too many directions at once. We Are Time - with its much more raw sessions - tends towards the dislocating rhythmic aspect of The Pop Group's sound and less of the dub-punk delirium. Frontman Mark Stewart is a much of a madman as he's ever been, very much on par with his contemporaries of Nick Cave then of The Birthday Party and James Chance. His yelps and barks punctuated the jittery guitar spangles and that rhythm section that seems always on the verge of coming unhinged. Very nice to have this work in print!

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MPEG stream: Colour Blind
MPEG stream: Sense Of Purpose

"Hardcore is a place where upper-middle-class white kids take all the good pan handling spots away from the bums who really need them". So said the irreverent punk rock sage that is Joe Pop-O-Pie in his classic "The Words of Jamal -- The Rainbow Bridge Version". Along with the Butthole Surfers, the Pop-O-Pies were the perfect antidote for punks who were tiring of a stale, formulaic genre and a scene that took itself way too seriously. Started in 1981, the Pop-O-Pies were the brain child of New Jersey raised, 'Frisco' transplant Joe Callahan (A.K.A. Joe Pop-O-Pie). And for those who weren't there for the legendary first two years of its existence, the rumor is true, the Pop-O-Pies really did play only one song: "Truckin'". According to Joe the reason was because the band's lineup changed so often, there really wasn't much time to learn anything more. The end result however, was a band tailor made to piss off punks and hippies (or pseudo-radical youth culture) alike. Joe eventually found a competent, and consistent backing band in the form of none other than Faith No More and recorded the now out of print (and master tapes lost forever, sigh) "White EP" on 415 Records. But that, due to its nonexistent nature, is not the subject of this anthology. The bulk of the material here are the complete Joe's Second (also featuring Faith No More) and Joe's Third Records released in 1984 and 1986 on Subterranean Records -- at the height of punk rock's uber-hip, uber-tough, uber-serious "hardcore" era. If there's one thing that self righteous punks needed at that time, it was a good satirical slap in the face and Joe Pop-O-Pie was there to administer it. And administer he did, replete with well played, overindulgent Hendrix-esque guitar parts market tested to irritate the minimalist punk rock purists. To be fair (to the punks and Joe), that isn't all that the Pop-O-Pies satirize. Joe takes on the music industry ("Industrial Rap"), New York City ("I Love New York"), the Beatles ("I Am the Walrus"), bummed out guys ("Bummed-Out-Guy"), morons ("World-O-Morons"), the Grateful Dead ("Truckin' Slow Version" and "Sugar Magnolia") and much more and all throughout peppered with the unique punk rock salt-of-the-earth wisdom of Joe Pop-O-Pie. Not only does this anthology contain the Second and Third Records in their entirety, but also includes four additional tracks: two from Joe's 1993 comeback "The In Frisco Single" released on Amarillo and two previously unreleased tracks from the same recording session (featuring Mr. Bungle alumni Trey Spruance, Danny Heifetz and Dieselhed bassist Atom Ellis). Included with the disc is a three panel fold out featuring historical notes on the Pop-O-Pies, photos new and old and a brief account of an actual conversation overheard by Robert Mailer Anderson. And what's best is that, buying this, you don't have to worry about the artist getting screwed. Yes, that's right, Joe has come out of hiding himself to put this collection together in 100% true D.I.Y. fashion. So every dollar goes to Joe and not some A&R clown in some office building somewhere.

MPEG stream: Truckin' - Slow Version
MPEG stream: The Words of Jamal

Been dying to review this slab of bleak brutal blackened doom drenched power violence for a while now. We were first exposed to these guys when they shared a split lp with the equally downtuned and devastating Burmese. Very few bands are up to the task of sharing a record with the mighty Burmese, but these Macedonian (not Russian as we mistakenly thought) slow motion grindcrushers definitely held their own, enough that we were super psyched to discover there was indeed a full length. Channels takes up right where those split tracks left off. Heaving, massive, lurching, doomy, crusty crush, but this isn't ultra doom, or even classic power violence, Potop fall right in between, the tempos are slow to midtempo, the guitars crunch and buzz, but just as often ring out, there's tons of space, long stretches dotted with spaced out chords, left hanging, slowly decaying, wrapped in Eyehategod-like sheets of feedback. The vocals are tortured and anguished, a feral yowl, way down in the mix and doused in reverb, those two elements, all tangled up and sprawling, create these epic drifting slabs of angular buzz and monstrous pound, weirdly melodic, and dramatic, sometimes mathy, other times seemingly structureless, but the best moments are when the band lock into a woozy groove, crushing and punishing and massive and so weirdly catchy. The record finishes off with a 40 second blast of twisted pummeling ultraviolence, a blurred blowout of howling grinding pounding fury. And then it's over. And if you're like us, you go right back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing again...

MPEG stream: S.S. Eksplozija
MPEG stream: II

Hi-Tech Boom is the debut from SF synth punks Pow!, and it's a doozy. Fuzzy, poppy, synth, new wave-y, not that far removed from a lot of the Castle Face stable, but with some retro-futuristic synthiness that positions it somewhere between classic Gary Numan, vintage Suicide and newer outfits like the Mind Spiders. The synths slither and buzz, even the poppiest jangliest numbers are underpinned by thick buzzing layers of synth, and peppered with wild squalls of glitched out synthy psychedelia, but for the most part, the tracks are minimal, stripped down and tranced out, the vibe sort of druggy and laid back, the vocals snotty and snarly, but laid back and sorta wasted, and while some tracks get kinda rocking, the record seems to tend toward sorta midtempo groovers and swaggery stomps, often bordering on zoner dirgery, everything doused in echo and reverb, some total freaked out electro-garage weirdness ("Sugi Walks"), some eighties post punk wrapped in distorto sci-fi synths ("Switchboard Scientist"), and hooky synth flecked garage pop ("66") in equal measure. Castle Face obsessives will no doubt flip for this stuff, and we're suckers for synthed out garage punk anyway, especially when it's all sorta druggy and hypnotic, and thus, this comes highly recommended!!

MPEG stream: Hope Dealers
MPEG stream: Vertical Slum
MPEG stream: Sugi Walks
MPEG stream: Switchboard Scientist

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

SORRY.

We'd been hearing about this band for a while now, the new project featuring Kevin Sharp of Brutal Truth and Bill Kelliher of Mastodon and a few other dudes, playing what? Grind of course, what else? But not really grind like you might be imagining it, Primate offer up a pretty fresh take on classic grind, merging the churn and pound and punkish ferocity with something WAY more melodic, a sound one could posit as the perfect mix of Brutal Truth and Mastodon, which is not such bad math when you think about it, and listening to Primate it definitely works. Pretty much all the tracks here thrash and grind to varying degrees, the drums heavy and complex, the guitars downtuned and chugging, the songs slipping from midtempo punk rock thrash to dense blackhole blast, Sharp's vocals as fierce as ever, but without fail, even the heaviest and most brutal of the bunch, are laced with some sort of serious melodic component, subtle in places, but totally overt in others, with tracks like "Global Division" getting CRAZY poppy, with some rad shredding guitar leads, and classic old school metalisms, or the punk metal pound of "Hellbound", which channels the same classic metal into a much more frenzied near-grind gallop. Or the harmonized metal guitars on "March Of The Curmudgeon, they even cover Black Flag's "Drinking And Driving" too, staying pretty true to the original. And of course, throughout, the group never hesitate to erupt into straight up full on grind, which of course kills, but it's all tangled up into songs that are surprisingly hooky while remaining super heavy. It helps too that the production is massive too, super polished, everything sounds loud, the mix is perfect, which is another thing that keeps this from sounding like standard grind. Instead, Draw Back A Stump is like some weird, sorta poppy modern grind metal record, one that could most definitely be a gateway for all those Mastodon fans out there to sounds much more fast and frantic, furious and fucked up.

MPEG stream: Global Division
MPEG stream: Hellbound
MPEG stream: March Of The Curmudgeon

During the fall of 2004, I (Jim) had the privledge of travelling to Australia for a month or so. Well, I guess that technically makes it *spring* of 2004; anyway, I met a lot of great people who had some amazing record collections, including a bunch of Australian post-punk and new wave stuff that probably never made it outside of Melbourne or Sydney. Of everything that I heard, there were a few bands that stuck in my memory: the Laughing Clowns, Microfilm (which happened to be the first band of Lisa Gerrard who later went on to found Dead Can Dance), and then there was the Primitive Calculators which was by far the best thing I heard. After asking around about those recordings, it became clear that I was probably going to be out of luck or out of a ton of money. So, I simply filed those band names away in hopes of coming across them somewhere, sometime, somehow. You could imagine my surprise when I discovered a compilation from the Primitive Calculators in a box from one our distributors. It's sort of like Christmas when you get that cool gift that you forgot you asked for, instead of the ugly sweater or pair of wool socks from Grandma. Anyway, The Primitive Calculators were Melbourne's answer to the Screamers, although I'd be hard pressed to believe that they actually heard that legendary techno-punk ensemble. It was more likely that The Primitive Calculators came to their sound through Suicide and the No New York compilation, in particular DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Their intense, throbbing post-punk songs centered around the raw electricity of twin synthesizers and drum machines hammering out noxious arppegiations whilst the lead singer / guitarist Stuart Grant screamed, grunted, and scraped up and down his guitar in short, sharp blasts of epileptic energy. This CD documents their one and only LP, which was a live recording in which the audience appears to dwindle despite the fact that their set gets more and more intense, culminating in a ridiculous cover of Lloyd Williams' soul standard "Shout." Fortunately a bunch of their studio recordings round out the CD, giving their exceptional songs a much fuller sound. Even without the serendipitous experience of re-discovery, I'd still love this record!

MPEG stream: Do The Icepick
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Folks outside of San Francisco are probably unaware of the bitchin' underground rock scene going on here, and we're not talking about the experimental / drone / cd-r scene, that scene is happening too but those folks get way more press. We're talking about the bands, the rock bands, that play basements, play at Thrillhouse Records, a killer performance space / shop in the Mission, who release cd-r's too, but whose sound is more metal and sludge and rock than drone and drift and shimmer. Wildildlife when they were here were part of that scene. So are Ovens, THE best pop band in the city (with a record coming out on tUMULt any day now), then there's Robocop III, who we've yet to hear, but like based entirely on their name. And then there's Prizehog, who have probably played with all those bands, but whose sound is all their own. Their cd-r is 5 long songs, each one a slow building, brooding chunk of slow motion heaviness. It's metallic, but not really metal, heavy and sludgey and dark, but with weird bits of epicness and majesty mixed in. There's definitely a Harvey Milk thing going on, and we'd be WAY surprised if fans of that band didn't dig these guys as well. Not so say they're aping HM, more like they're sort of orbiting the same sonic black hole. Plus Prizehog have a lot more spaciness going on, lots of swirl and shimmer, long drawn out stretches of dark drift, rumbling low end and ominous dronescapes, often sprawling into moody abstract slowcore drifts, peppered with synths, skeletal rhythms and blooping bleeping effects, that slowcore sometimes sounding almost like a blackened doom metal, before returning to their glacial downtuned pound, impossibly slow crawls through near static metal riffage, and squalls of drum splatter, and a howled guttural voice that sounds like it's gargling glass and spitting blood, the whole band a lumbering beast, lurching from chord to chord, note to note, occasionally pausing to rest beneath the glimmering starlight, before rising again to continue on its path of utter destruction. Heavy, fucked up, freaked out, distorted and brutal, space-y and sometimes sorta pretty, bet these guys destroy live, but for now this chunk of filthy heaviness and sludgey crush will do just fine.

MPEG stream: Ramsong
MPEG stream: Sleuth

On a European tour about ten years ago, a curious 7" was unearthed in a used record store. It had an amazing black and white cover, a painting of Golgotha, with the cross lost in a cloudy haze and surrounded by watercolored trees. The band was called Professor, their logo in splattery hand drawn Olde English. And the record was called The Academizer ep. One of the tracks was "Into The Auditorium". Suddenly thoughts of an evil black metal band made up entirely of doctoral scholars leapt to mind. Sort of the whole Carcass medical student thing, but with academia. This was just getting better and better. The record sat unplayed until returning to the States, where it finally made it onto the turntable. And holy shit! It was as good as the cover suggested it could be. A sloppy noisy blackened slab of Carcass worship. Blast beats and grinding guitars, howled gutteral vocals, and crushing heaviness. Over the course of the next decade, several more copies were discovered and hoarded like the treasure they were. Until a random series of circumstances led to tUMULt discovering the man behind Professor and the quest to make that amazing, out of print 7" available to a wider, turntable-less audience. What happened, was that an unsolicited package was sent to tUMULt HQ, with some new music for the tUMULt overlord to check out, but the sender also included a cdr of his old bands. A cursory listen was blasted to an immediate halt, when the hauntingly familiar strains of Professor came screeching from the speakers. Oh shit. Is it possible? Could it be? And what do you know? The sender was none other than a real live living member of Professor. After much convincing and cajoling, he agreed to let tUMULt re-release the Academizer ep. And even now, a decade later, this shit is so good. Fierce and furious, stumbling and blasting drunkenly like a grinding blackened metallic juggernaut. Four tracks of crushing grind, pummelling crush and grinding pummel. Heavy and noisy and fucking great! Rumour was, that Professor was maybe a joke. But if that's true, this is some sick joke. Fans of Carcass, Drop Dead, grindcore, black metal, and all things heavy owe it to themselves to enter the auditorium, and bow before the Professor!! In the form of a 3" cd packaged in a mini jewel case.

MPEG stream: Professor
MPEG stream: Immatriculation

Certainly the best band on Fat Wreck Chords (unless of course you're in a fraternity, or you're a snowboarder, or a skater, or a high school student). It may be pop punk, but it manages to transcend what has become a frightfully dull and amazingly asinine genre. Propagandhi craft super complex songs that stop and start and are heavy and are arranged so bizarrely it's amazing that they can sing along at all. And then there's the lyrics (queer positive, animal rights, anti-moron), funny and insightful, scathing and clever and so right on. Really cool.