Whether or not you find this album palatable will depend on your feelings towards the three principals in the group: terminally-mopey introvert Bill Callahan of Smog, Keith-Richards-in-an-alternate-universe Neil Michael Hagerty of Royal Trux, and
Oh yeah, other bandmembers include Tara Key of Antietam, Rian and Brendan Murphy, Mark Greenberg of the Coctails, Azita Youssefi of Scissor Girls, and of course the ubiquitous Jim O'Rourke.
Now available on cd!!
Previously only available as a limited lp via Chris Johanson's Awesome Vistas imprint, this is the debut full length from the strangely monikered Dragging an Ox Through Water, the solo project of Portland multi-instrumentalist Brian Mumford who conjures up a warped Americana of old-timey sounding ballads filtered through damaged electronics, field recordings and off-kilter use of horns, guitars, banjos and kazoos. Imagine the early pop-country side of Arthur Russell covering Neutral Milk Hotel's In an Aeroplane Over the Sea with just a broken guitar, a dented tuba, a child's steel drum and a busted radio shack electronics kit, and you come close to the feel of this oddly beautiful record. Weird and lovely!
Another limited Awesome Vistas release this week along with The Jackie-O Motherfucker lp (reviewed elsewhere on this list) is this debut full length from the strangely monikered Dragging an Ox Through Water. Dragging An Ox Through Water is the solo project of Portland multi-instrumentalist Brian Mumford who conjures up a warped Americana of old-timey sounding ballads filtered through damaged electronics, field recordings and off-kilter use of horns, guitars, banjos and kazoos. Imagine the early pop-country side of Arthur Russell covering Neutral Milk Hotel's In an Aeroplane Over the Sea with just a broken guitar, a dented tuba, a child's steel drum and a busted radio shack electronics kit, and you come close to the feel of this oddly beautiful record. Oh yeah, it's limited!!!! Cool hand screened covers too!
All you cd-r labels out there could learn a thing or two from Dragon, aka Dick Bladwin of Landing and Surface Of Eceyon. The first release on his Mystical Beast label, is packaged in a gorgeous hand sewn, embroidered pouch, a glorious multi-hued dragon spewing fire over the Dragon logo which is bisected by a broad sword, all on a black velvet background. Wow. According to Mr. Baldwin these each take THREE HOURS to make, which is probably why he only made 100 and why we could only get a handful of those. The music inside perfectly compliments the fantastical packaging, lilting hippy folk, with warbly reverbed vocals, over foresty fingerpicking and occasional indie jangle. Tales of dragons (duh), castles, burned villages and the like, punctuated by occasional squalls of fuzzed out psych guitars! So cool. Fans of Incredible String Band, Palace, Devandra, and of course dragons should definitely pick this up.
Wow. Imagine Captain & Tennille, Shuggie Otis, and Broadcast making a record together. Or even Gary Wilson and United States of America making some skewed electronic but totally weird and catchy seventies yacht rock (ok, we realize that may sound terrible to some folks, but it really works awesomely here!). The Dragon brothers, Doug and Dennis (of Surf Punks fame!), sometimes joined by their other brother Darryl (aka "The Captain" of Captain and Tennille!) and sister Carmen on harp, recorded BFI (short for Blue Forces Intelligence?!) in Malibu during the early seventies inspired by surfing and the explosive late sixties west coast music scene of The Doors, Byrds, CSN, etc. Unfortunately, all the connections they had as a popular musical family in Los Angeles (their father was a well known conductor and symphony arranger in Hollywood) gave them great studio access but didn't yield the recording contract they were looking for. Most of the labels they shopped it to liked the record but didn't see any single potential. So the masters were shelved and the brothers went their separate ways. It wasn't until DJ Food from Ninja Tune contacted Dennis Dragon to ask permission to use a Dragons' track ("Food For My Soul") from an obscure surf movie soundtrack for a mix tape he was making, that it was discovered that a whole Dragons album was recorded. Thankfully Ninja Tune resurrected BFI from the musical graveyard because it's fast becoming one of our favorite "buried treasures". Full of Moog grooves, break beats, jazz inflected piano, and high and low male voices, BFI is one of the most surprising and eccentrically sunny LA records we've heard in these parts in awhile that sounds completely timeless. Highly recommended! Oh, and if you loved the reissue by hippy surf psych band The Farm on EM Records, these are some of the same guys responsible for that album!
We may have unfairly pegged local guitarist Matt Baldwin. His records are big time faves around here, gorgeous mesmerizing guitarscapes, from raga infused psychedelic folk to Fripp / Rother style cosmic guitar explorations, we sell them like crazy, and they get played all the time in the store as well, so when it cam time to review a recent release on Baldwin's Psychic Arts label, we were all prepared for some blissed out guitarscapery, but instead, we got Cryptic Cross, a twisted lo-fi weirdo metal band from the East Bay, whose sound was murky and buzzy and psychedelic and sort of insane, and really about as far as you can get from Baldwin's solo records. So we were determined not to make the same mistake with this most recent Psychic Arts release, from the strangely named Dragontime, another group from Oakland, the cd featuring some cool psychedelic Rainbow Brite style paste on cover art, that definitely points to something a bit on the weird side.
And it's that artwork that maybe gives the biggest clue to what's going on here, cuz it's as far removed from the warped metal of Cryptic Cross as it is from Matt Baldwin's records. The opening track is all pulsing rhythms and synth swirls, kind of new agey, a little bit like video game music, a bit of swirly kosmische shimmer, quite cool actually, but definitely not what we were expecting, a sort of prismatic glistening rainbowscape. The second tracks adds ethereal female vox, and it's transformed into a soundtrack to some low budget fantasy film, a little 4AD, a little swoonsome shoegaze dreampop. After that the record continues to mutate and shift, from fuzzy, warbly organ minimalism, to an almost jazzy sounding lo-fi synth heavy tropical ballad, and from strange alien Asian video game folk music, all processed vox and dreamy melodies, to a murky, softly buzz shimmerscape, and from skeletal sun dappled folk pop, to droned out ominous cinematic synthscapery.
Definitely far out, and seriously super cool too, a little like a female Fastest, conjuring up her own sort of 8-bit shoegaze soundworld, that we can't seem to stop listening to...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, hand numbered!
On this pro-duped, full color printed cd-r release Huffing Gas, one-man-home-studio-band George Draguns (a skilled skateboarder, noted wit, professional historic preservationist, and one of the many former fillers of the bass-playing position in Pennsylvania math rockers Don Caballero) has crafted a collection of instrumental tracks that are kinda post rock, even almost psych or krautrocky in spots... definitely all very moody and low-key and quite pleasurable. Not surprisingly, these were originally composed as soundtrack music for a friend's independent film project. But these need no visuals, this music is fine all by itself, although the cover art -- a strange painting entitled "Pumaseance" -- seems appropriate, somehow. The track titles, too, are jokey nonsequiturs ("Fake Drug Problem", "A New Hat", "Free Ironic Mustache Rides", "Addiction Overdose") that bear no evident relation to the sound of each piece. Some tracks have a droney groove that reminds us a bit of Circle's jazzier cousin Ektroverde, others are darker and mellower. It's hard to describe this, really. "31st Century Maximal Minimalism" is offered up by the science-fiction inspired liner notes, but that's no help is it? Whatever it is, we like it. George now has a band project happening (Thee New Zealand, a stoner rock outfit) but we hope he continues with his solo home-recorded experiments as well.
King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers does the drone-breakbeat-trance thing pretty well.
This is the first we've heard from these Irish heavies, who specialize in a face melting brand of pulverizing metallic crust, liberally dosed with heaping of good old noise rock, and Southern style sludge. The label cites Eyehategod and His Hero Is Gone, which is definitely pretty spot on, but there's plenty more happening here, for us the noise rock thing seems to dominate, a sort of Black Flag meets Unsane or something, but then just as soon as we're feeling that, the sound switches gears, and the band is pounding out a punkish blast, but then it's right back into the warped stuttery noise rock, which is maybe why we dig this stuff so much. They sort of take all our favorite things and jam them together. That same song we were just describing, well, there's some seriously sludge-y Eyehategodisms going on there too. But somehow, all of those disparate parts fit together pretty perfectly.
The guitars are crunchy, distorted, super noisy, droned out too, with riffs blurred and smeared and stretched way out into super tense high end sprawls, which only makes it that much more dramatic when the song collapses back into some roiling noisy convoluted churn.
There's plenty of melody going on too, but these guys definitely don't flaunt it, instead just occasionally slipping into a little drift before the next avalanche of downtuned crush or explosion of frenzied pound. But for all of their influences, these guys definitely have their own thing, they're masters of dynamics, and tension and release, with weirdly structured arrangements, and ever shifting tempos and parts, mixing in long stretches of processed noise, weirdly distorted FX, letting chords ring out and crumble, turning sludgey doom into something weirdly groovy, and taking punked out metal and making it almost proggy, a sort of super heavy math metal sludge, that as if you couldn't tell by now, RULES.
And So Our Troubles Began is actually a compilation, gathering up two out of print vinyl eps, but somehow it plays pretty well as a single album proper, although we're primed now to hear what they come up with for a proper full length.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one machine numbered.
In hopefully what will be the last attempt to squeeze blood from the Nick Drake stone, we get this CD of 28 early home recordings that showcase the raw beginning of Drake's brilliant songcraft and the previously unacknowledged influence Drake's family, particularly his mother and sister, had on his musical upbringing. It's a pretty interesting (but not entirely essential) collection of lo-fi recordings some of which were sketches for songs that would appear later on Pink Moon and Five Leaves Left, and there are one or two tracks that were originally released on the Time of No Reply anthology. The highlights include a duet with sister Gabrielle called "All My Trials" that we wish there was more of, and "They're Leaving Me Behind" which sounds like an early version of "Parasite" from Pink Moon with different lyrics. Occasional classical pieces by The Family Trio and a couple of old songs sung by his mother Molly are nice but act as little more than interludes rather than the indelible familial influences the compilers claim them to be. Like the pitfalls that befell the Nick Drake documentary, A Skin Too Few, the slimness of Drake's output and life is stretched so thin in order to supposedly reveal the minutest new insights into a mysterious figure, that we forget that the enigmatic mystery is the reason his work is so compelling in the first place. Revealing every tiny sketch of an artist's process and claiming them important only gives fodder to the backlash campaign that has started ever since "Pink Moon" was featured in a VW ad. Which is unfortunate for an artist who has never had any say or control over his own legacy, save for three brilliant records, which should be plenty enough for anyone.
This all time beloved AQ tresure, out of print for ages, finally gets reissued, in time to give as a gift, to ANYONE you know who might not have this, because everyone should own these records. Some of the most breathtakingly lovely folk music EVER. Now with new artwork, and with the addition of the recent Nick Drake documentary A Skin Too Few. To make room for the dvd, they bumped the odds and sods collection Time Of No Reply, but is not such a loss, as much of that stuff has surfaced in one form or another in the recent spate of collections gathering up anything and everything Drake ever recorded.
But here, in addition ot the movie, you get everything you need, all three classic albums: Pink Moon, Bryter Layter and Five Leaves Left. Breatless, intimate, heartfelt, tragic, lovely, dreamy, wistful, heart breaking, personal, intense and mysterious folk music that sounds as otherworldly as it does timeless.
In a super nice box, with a new 100 page book. Absolutely essential.
Here's an odd posthumous release that very well may only appeal to those hungering for *any* 'new' Nick Drake recordings. If you have Time Of No Reply, some of these songs might seem a little familiar. Many of that album's songs appear here in alternate versions that were either recently 'discovered' or have had one or all of the following applied to them: rerecorded, remixed, remastered. Released thirty years after Drake's passing, Made To Love Magic has a few moments that are indeed a bit sticky. Some artistic decisions were made that obviously Drake had no say in -- for instance, the addition of some very recently recorded orchestral arrangements to a couple of songs. This compilation closes with the one truly previously unreleased track "Tow The Line". For Drake completists only.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Long a treasured 'bootleg' amongst Drake fans, these are 18 rare home recordings that sit comfortably beside his 4 other essential albums. So lovely!
The first proper full length from Drcarlsonalbion, the alter-ego of Dylan Carlson, he of twang flecked dronelords Earth, who along with Earth drummer Adrienne Davies, has crafted this gorgeous bit of psychedelic drift, a soundtrack to a film called Gold, and really, fans of recent Earth records might think they've stumbled onto a new Earth record, although the music on Gold is much more spare and minimal, especially considering that mostly it's Carlson on guitar, with just a bit of percussive filigree from Davies. It's a sort of washed out and woozy, sun baked Appalachia, a definite desert blues vibe, most of the tracks here super short, many more like the film cues they are, than proper songs, with Carlson unfurling hazy, bluesy riffs, and letting them ring out, slowly decay, in clouds of reverb and delay, echoey shimmers ringing out like ripples in water, each track here some sort of dark folk ritual, some smoldering and cloaked in shadow, others bathed in sunlight, but most of the tracks here, just Carlson on some back porch, with an old broken bottle for a slide, and playing through a busted old combo, the notes wreathed in soft FX and let loose to drift on the afternoon breeze, or be carried skyward by soft swirls of black smoke, the campfire vibe is huge here too. It's hard to say what the movie Gold is all about, having not seen it, or even read anything about it, but we're imagining some sort of Cormac McCarthy style bleakness, vast expanses of dusty roads, and dilapidated farmhouses, dying crops and slope shouldered workers toiling in the fields. It has that sort of wasted, hopeless feel, endless days, and the brief respite of night. Gorgeous stuff for sure.
Packaged in an oversized heavy weight tip-on style sleeve, includes a download code as well.
The third installment, and the first full length recording, in a newly launched series of recordings from Dylan Carlson, he of the mighty Earth, once dirge-y sludgelords, now twangflecked dronefolk drifters, here performing as Drcarlsonalbion. Originally envisioned as a solo project, now expanded to a trio, which finds Carlson and Co. indulging their love/obsession with British music and occultic folklore, in the form of a sound not really that far removed from modern Earth in fact, the tracks here unfurling in hazy swaths of gauzy, dreamlike ambience, spidery guitar melodies, loose shimmery chords, spread out over a lush expanses of long layered tones, and blurred field recordings, sans vocals it sounds like a drumless Earth, it's easy to imagine these tracks tethered to a simple, spare, skeletal beat, but freed from any sort of rhythm, the sounds here billow and buzz, thick blackened clouds of rumbling, crumbling distortion, wash over delicate, crystalline arrangements of measured melancholy, over which vocalist Teresa Colamonaco delivers her haunting recitations, at least on the first track. But those spoken word vocals appear mostly on the first track, she's got a lovely powerful croon as well, and most of the tracks are either instrumental, or strident folk songs featuring Colamonaco's voice prominently, especially on tracks like "Reynardine", which pairs reverby chords with keening distant feedback, and heaving chordal swells, or the brief but swaggery "Wicked Annabella". All the tracks here but one are actually covers, or at least reintepretations of standards and old favorites, all culminating in a killer version of PJ Harvey's "Last Living Rose", which somehow manages to capture the feral energy of the original, while still managing to make it fit into Drcarlsonalbion's more tranquil and darkly psychedelic songsuite.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES (of both the cd and lp versions), both come in the immediately recognizable white on brown Latitudes sleeves, and include a full color printed insert, both with green metallic foil printing, the cd in the usual origami style packaging, the lp sleeve elaborately die cut, the vinyl pressed on green wax.
The first release from The Wormhole, a non tape offshoot of UK label the Tapeworm, comes in the form of this long in the works double 7" from Drcarlsonalbion, aka Dylan Carlson of doomtwang slowcore sludgelords Earth. We first heard from Carlson's alter ego on the now out of print Tapeworm tape Edward Kelley's Blues, which found Carlson beginning to musically explore his fascination with the occult and UK folklore, that record a mix of field recordings (of particularly occultic locations), Carlson's guitar, and some subtle vocals (sung in Enochian at one point) sounding not that far removed from Earth, albeit at their most bleary and softly psychedelic. The sound here finds Carlson creating dark, droning, buzz drenched sprawls of psychedelic guitar buzz, and twang flecked shimmer, and this time is even less removed from modern Earth, the music here a backdrop for spoken word by UK spoken word poet / activist Rosie Knight, the combination is pretty potent, Knight's lyrics mysterious, her voice nicely raspy, her accent thick, it definitely speaks to a sort of witchy seventies acid folk vibe, which we would imagine is precisely what Carlson was hoping to conjure. But for those of you (like some of us here), have issues with 'spoken word', fear not, the second 7" in this double set features instrumental versions of both tracks, and sans spoken word, they are essentially two new Earth cuts!
Not sure how limited this is, but we're guessing VERY. You know what that means...
This is indeed some kind of dream unit! Thurston from Sonic Youth, free jazz legend Paul Flaherty, free drum wunderkind Chris Corsano, Heather who runs Volcanic Tongue and some mysterious bassist called Count Hejnowski.
Together these monsters of abstract free jazz avant noise whip up a slow burning frenzy of roiling instrumental fury.
But let's take a step back first and talk about the cover. Wow, is the artwork cool. The cover is a painting of some strange vampiric sideburned man with a bloody beaked raven on his shoulder clutching a bloody eyeball. On the back, a headless man, all bloody necked, clutching a skull. Inside, wolves with bloody mouths and owls with bloody talons. On the disc, bloody eyed nun attacked by birds. The theme is definitely blood, and that theme runs through the music as well.
A dark roiling maelstrom of burbling, minimal groove, that builds into a furious tangle of angular guitars and bloody drum splatter, horns bleat and squeak, lap steel slips and slides and gives everything a haunting unhinged vibe. Really quite beautiful in an overthetop, head shearing free music blowout kind of way.
Most of the tracks fall into that template, a sort of skittish circling, each player warily eyeing the other, feeling the situation out, offering up little salvos of sound, before eventually all launching into the fray and wildly tearing the throats out of the instruments in glorious musical bloodbath after glorious musical bloodbath. The brooding, murky, slow swirly passages are the most moving, but it's impossible to not stand transfixed, watching as they slowly twist and contort into something fearsome and fanged. The listener like one of the cover paintings, frozen like a deer in the headlights, or a helpless teenager before a mysterious monster, just waiting to be devoured.
This is the raging politi-punk / hardcore debut from Indianapolis' The Dream Is Dead. With their hoarse, full-tilt vocals and thick aggressive guitars, TDID are very much akin to bands like Born Against or Poison Idea. In fact, the ep's finale is a rad cover of P.I.'s "Just To Get Away". Features cover art by Shepard Fairey.
If you like to read about music as well as listen to it (we should assume you do, since you're reading our list), especially those of you who find yourselves missing the excellent-but-now-discontinued Broken Face 'zine, may we suggest the equally massive and indie-acid-folk-psych obsessed Dream Magazine from right here in California? The fifth issue is now upon us, 128 pages packed with tons of interviews and reviews (in eyeball straining tiny type). Artists featured include Ghost, Elf Power, Kemialliset Ystavat, Marissa Nadler, Tom Rapp, Sun City Girls (lots of good stuff in that interview!), John "Blind Man's Penis" Trubee, Donovan Quinn of Verdure/Skygreen Leopards, Robert Wyatt, Mushroom, Bipolaroid, Ed Hardy of Eclipse Records, and even Mats Gustafsson (not the saxophonist, but the former editor/publisher of the Broken Face!). And more. Whew. Plus, it comes with its own soundtrack: a cd compilation that's got unreleased tracks by Jack Rose, Piano Magic, Verdure, Volcano The Bear, and others...
One of the finest examples of California post-punk gets a well deserved vinyl reissue. The Dream Syndicate, long associated with the early eighties Paisley Underground scene with The Bangles, Three O'Clock, and Rain Parade amongst many other bands, had a much more dour Velvet Underground inspired sound than their contemporaries, marked by long feed-back riddled passages. "When You Smile" and "Tell Me When It's Over" are exceptionally perfect gloomy anthems. Released on Slash in 1982 and produced by Chris D. (The Flesh Eaters), the band features Kendra Smith (Opal) on bass and vocals. Essential!
Following the 2006 self-released debut 7" ("The One I Need / Dance Party") from these Bay Area honey pies, here's Dreamdate's slightly longer winded first full length. As the 'cut to the chase' title suggests, why wait? Dreamdate get right to their business of brightening our day with their short, snappy tunes. The overall sound of Dreamdate can readily be spoken of in the same breath as early '90s crushworthy indie pop a la Lois, cub and Tiger Trap. As the unaffected and uneffected electric guitars strum away happily and the drums keep things simple with an uncluttered beat, you might find yourself hummin' along with these gals' warm, smooth female vocals. Nice.
Two songs were recorded, mixed by the equally sweet pop minded Aaron Burnham of The Makes Nice who also mastered the album.
The proof's in the pudding... indie girl pop is alive and well! Evidence? Patience, the sophomore full length from those Bay Area sweeties known as Dreamdate. The follow up to 2007's Come On Now is as perky, peppy and pretty as its predecessor, but maybe a bit more self assured. Patience is packed with one dozen youthfully spirited, mid-fi tunes that'll put a skip in your step and a jingle-jangle charm in your heart! Most certainly for fans of cub, Tiger Trap, Heavenly, Lois and The Shams, as well as recent like-minded combos such as Summer Cats and Dum Dum Girls! And they even give a snuggly nod to the original cuddlecore queens Cub with their cover of the Vancouver trio's ditty "Go Fish". Ooooh la la! Oooh eeee cha cha!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Here's a short, sweet, little treat from new Bay Area band Dreamdate! Their pair of bright girly indie pop tunes comes perfectly pressed on thick bubblegum pink vinyl. Yummy to look at, yummy to hear!
Dreamend's new album brings to mind a countrified Mogwai or Godspeed You Black Emperor. Sleepy slide guitar twang cozies up to dynamic swell'n'crash waves. This contrast is perhaps best revealed in the seventh and eighth songs ("Slide Song" and The Old House & Its Occupants"). Indeed, one listen to As If By Ghosts may have you believing that Dreamend are part of the whole Montreal GYBE music collective, but they're not! Haunting and beautiful. Released on Graveface Records, home to some other fine bands we've been diggin of late -- namely Spires That In The Sunset Rise and Monster Movie.
This long-awaited legit reissue of the lost classic by one man band the Dreamies will easily provide hours of crypto-analytic fun in response to the question "Who else besides the Beatles have the Olivia Tremor Control blatantly copied/paid homage to?" Kidding aside, we promise you could totally mistake this for an OTC record...a *great* OTC record! From 1973, it is an outstanding if bizarre psychedelic album with spartanly bleak arrangements for acoustic guitar and hauntingly Donovanesque vocal melodies, injected with trippy sonic squiggles and snippets from 70s newscasts to paint a disillusioned picture of the failure of 60s ideologies. Mesmerisingly beautiful and faithfully reissued from the original masters. Recommended!!
Hmm, it's 2005 and we've got the 2006 edition of a record that originally came out in 1973! And it's an album that we first encountered five years ago via a previous (and now out of print and obsolete) compact disc edition released in 2000. But much more important than all these dates and whatnot, is that this is such a great record that we at AQ have loved for a long time, and are super duper happy to have back in again in this improved, special edition!! As you may know, we're also long time fans of the band Olivia Tremor Control, and when we first heard the Dreamies we were struck by the similarities. Indeed, our original review of this made much of the seeming OTC/Dreamies connection. And we still promise that you could totally mistake this for an OTC record...a *great* OTC record! (And come to think of it, it also reminds us a bit of another AQ fave band, When). But it was recorded over three decades ago by a fellow from Delaware named Bill Holt, who, nearing 30 years of age in the early '70s, dropped out of his corporate job working for a Fortune 500 company to reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter, despite having little in the way of prior musical experience! Holt invested in an early Moog Sonic Six synthesizer and set up a recording studio in his basement, where he created this lost classic, an outstanding if bizarre psychedelic album with spartanly bleak arrangements for acoustic guitar and hauntingly Donovanesque vocal melodies, injected with trippy sonic squiggles and snippets from newscasts to paint a disillusioned picture of the failure of '60s ideologies. Mesmerisingly beautiful... and definitely dreamy. Never was a name so well-chosen!
Like the Olivias, Bill Holt is obviously a huge fan of the Beatles. That's pretty clear. Sgt. Peppers definitely. And, he must really have liked the White Album's notorious "Revolution Number 9"!! With two side-long songs called (hmm) "Program Ten" and "Program Eleven", the Dreamies album is a similar venture into psych-pop meets musique concrete territory, an elaborate tapestry of samples -- and this is from long before anyone called them samples, and before there was such a thing as samplers and sequencers, which means Holt used the old fashioned, labor intensive tape n' razor blade splicing method, working at home on his beloved TEAC Model 3340 reel-to-reel four-track recorder. Densely woven into his otherwise highly laid back and melodic mix, you'll hear clocks ticking, chattering machine guns in Vietnam combat, JFK speeches, crickets, frogs, NASA transmissions, and ominous but unidentifiable minimalist pulses of electronic/industrial white noise. Or even samples of the Beatles themselves! (Bits of "All You Need Is Love" and others are buried in Holt's sonic collage.) It's both unsettling and soothing at the same time, like surfing through shortwave transmissions from the late '60s psyche. And along with all the sound bites/effects, he also weaves together what must have originally been several different, distinct, enchanting songs he'd written for his voice and acoustic guitar. It's one man and his melodies alone amidst the chaos of the times. Unfortunately, the Dreamies album didn't end up leading to a career in music for Bill Holt, so sadly he was forced to return to the straight moneymaking world of 9-to-5 work. But his venture into the realm of hippy psychedelic rock music concrete lives on. And happily he's proud of his creation, leading to this "special edition", remastered by Holt himself from the original LP, claiming "better stereo sound" and "enhanced audio detail". It certainly sounds good to us. It also boasts liner notes, lyrics and photos in the cd booklet, while the cd itself for the first time divides the two original 26-minute LP tracks into thirteen more convenient parts, although really you should still listen to 'em all the way through in one sitting.
By the way, we for some reason we always used to think that this record was titled Auralgraphic Entertainment: An Incredible Mental Experience, but it seems that that was just descriptive front-cover copy, not the actual title. It is, however, a fairly accurate statement! We're so happy that this has come out again, giving us the chance to get reacquainted with an old fave. And recommended it to anyone who missed it before (or who wants to upgrade their old edition).
Now reissued on vinyl! An old, old fave here at aQ, this album originally from 1973, that wowed us when we first heard it 'cause, as you may know, we're also long time fans of the band Olivia Tremor Control, and we were struck by the similarities. You could totally mistake this for an OTC record... a *great* OTC record! But it was recorded over three decades ago by a fellow from Delaware named Bill Holt, who, nearing 30 years of age in the early '70s, dropped out of his corporate job working for a Fortune 500 company to reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter, despite having little in the way of prior musical experience! Holt invested in an early Moog Sonic Six synthesizer and set up a recording studio in his basement, where he created this lost classic, an outstanding if bizarre psychedelic album with Spartanly bleak arrangements for acoustic guitar and hauntingly Donovanesque vocal melodies, injected with trippy sonic squiggles and snippets from newscasts to paint a disillusioned picture of the failure of '60s ideologies. Mesmerisingly beautiful... and definitely dreamy. Never was a name so well-chosen!
Like the Olivias, Bill Holt is obviously a huge fan of the Beatles. That's pretty clear. Sgt. Peppers definitely. And, he must really have liked the White Album's notorious "Revolution Number 9"!! With two side-long songs called (hmm) "Program Ten" and "Program Eleven", the Dreamies album is a similar venture into psych-pop meets musique concrete territory, an elaborate tapestry of samples - and this is from long before anyone called them samples, and before there was such a thing as samplers and sequencers, which means Holt used the old fashioned, labor intensive tape n' razor blade splicing method, working at home on his beloved TEAC Model 3340 reel-to-reel four-track recorder. Densely woven into his otherwise highly laid back and melodic mix, you'll hear clocks ticking, chattering machine guns in Vietnam combat, JFK speeches, crickets, frogs, NASA transmissions, and ominous but unidentifiable minimalist pulses of electronic/industrial white noise. Or even samples of the Beatles themselves! (Bits of "All You Need Is Love" and others are buried in Holt's sonic collage.) It's both unsettling and soothing at the same time, like surfing through shortwave transmissions from the late '60s psyche. And along with all the sound bites/effects, he also weaves together what must have originally been several different, distinct, enchanting songs he'd written for his voice and acoustic guitar. It's one man and his melodies alone amidst the chaos of the times. Unfortunately, the Dreamies album didn't end up leading to a career in music for Bill Holt, so sadly he was forced to return to the straight moneymaking world of 9-to-5 work. But his venture into the realm of hippy psychedelic rock music concrete lives on - now, again, on (remastered) vinyl!
Fantastic archival release from the always kick ass Kranky label, this one digging way back to the early nineties, collecting everything ever released (and then some) by this relatively unknown UK shoegaze outfit, whose sound most definitely predicted much of the music on Kranky's roster, a bleary, blurry sprawl of ethereal, washed out rainy day dreampop shimmer, songs slipping easily from hushed 4AD style drift to more driving jangle drenched bliss out.
At its most laid back, this is wistful soft focus indie pop, the sort of twee jangle and crunch that would have sounded right at home on Slumberland back in the day (heck even today), but Dreamscape add some seriously driving programmed drums, to give these tracks some density and texture, some sonic heft and some krautrock style motorik momentum. The more upbeat songs peppered with cool weirdly industrial percussion and cool tribal rhythms, some surprisingly deft drum programming, wreathing everything in a gauzy atmospheric haze, the vocals swaddled in soft billows of reverb, all draped over gloompop basslines and tangly spidery minor key melodies. Darkly dreamy shoegaze dreampop perfection that sounds like what most of the current crop or retro poppers wish they could pull off.
You know it's not just us recommending stuff to our customers here at aQ, it works the other way too, with our customers recommending stuff to us all the time. An example being one of our very favorite customers, David Katznelson, whom you may know as the mastermind behind several different, quality labels including country/blues/folk vinyl reissue specialists Sutro Park (and also WTF? specialists Birdman). David asked us to order this for him and then after he picked it up, immediately emailed excitedly about how fantastic it is, so we checked it out ourselves and then asked him to write it up for us to share with everybody else! Here's the great guest review Dave came up with:
I will not tell you how much money I have wasted on reissues of private press records from the '70s, bullied into buying them by well written descriptions namedropping other need-to-know ultra obscure artists, saluting their eBay sales price and touting their snot-nosed record collector desirability. It has gotten to a point that when I read, "ONLY 100 made back in 1972" - I figure I know why. To be honest, thank GOD for aQ's curation of the best, as well as big props to YouTube which lets me preview the other potential expensive crap-takes before I make a wrong decision and sacrifice money that could just as well be used at the local pot dispensary.
Thus, the discovery of a killer record from the outsider world is so sweet. Hell, the name of the label behind John Drendall & B.A. Thrower's lp is called OUT-SIDER RECORDS. The name of the game, plain and simple. Their record, "Papa Never Let's Me Sing The Blues" has all the markings of a brilliant mirage: a questionable title, a bizarre cover layout, and a slide guitar player named "Stiff-finger Eddie", but throw the needle down and BINGO, you realize that there is something more here. It starts with the early-'70s Stonesy-vibed "Cold Night In August", and flows into the very pushin' groover "Old Man Gibbs". The whole record is a groove...and to name drop sundry band names to stir the pot: there is definitely some late-late-period Byrds going on here...maybe a taste of Lucifer's blues abandon, the swagger of The Faces, or a smattering of the acoustic-side of Zeppelin. And there are meandering guitars that are the basis from many a great 60s downer (check out "I Feel" for example). The resultant sound for John Drendall & B.A. Thrower is bluesy brownish muffley warm outsider magic...the kind that you hope for!
Limited to 500 copies, 180 gram vinyl, thick sleeves. Includes liner notes by Patrick "Acid Archives" Lundborg.
Seems these Elephant 6 Collective members have shed their candy-coating for good. You'd almost believe that this is an altogether different band from the one who made the charmingly perky pop of 1999's Pink Hearts Yellow Moons or 2002's Sounds Go Round. While their last self-titled album did show some signs of change, Electrified is leaps and bounds away from the Dressy Bessy of 'old'. Now, to say that the skip in their step has been replaced by a stomp might be an overstatement, but the thought did cross our minds. Much darker, edgier, slightly dizzying, the tunes are propelled by an aggressive charge of big crunchy guitars and solid snappy drumming. The formerly pep squad-y vocals now come across a bit snarky and world weary with a maturity and composure that recalls Blondie, Throwing Muses or more recently the Canadian band Metric. Electrified, indeed!
Dressy Bessy have always been known for perky lo-fi indie pop that rides the fence between sweet and twee. As with pretty much all of their Elephant 6 Collective cohorts (Of Montreal, Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, etc), Tammy Ealom (formerly of The Minders), John Hill (also of Apples In Stereo) are seldom at a loss in the candy-coated pop hook department. That said, many of the tunes on their fourth album, the suitably titled Holler And Stomp, jump out with far more crunch and punch than the band has ever mustered before. Maybe we should've taken the hint from their chosen cover art - an illustration of a trash and graffiti strewn alleyway with a street sign that says "Dressy Bessy Way", a butterfly smoking a cigarette flitters by. Hmmm, a Dressy Bessy makeover (or make-under)? The pumped up sassy, edgy attitude led to immediate comparisons with contemporary gal-fronted bands such as Metric and Teegan & Sara!
The Elephant 6 collective keeps on truckin', and here's one particular E6 troop's compilation of sugar pop singles - just in case you missed them the first time around! Lots and lots of harmonious sweetie-pie gal vocals over fuzzy-crunch guitars. Immediately hum-along-able, sunshiny indie pop blossoms just in time for spring.
Straight from the candy counter of the Elephant 6 soda shoppe comes the gumdrop pop of Dressy Bessy.
Dressy Bessy have unfurled their full length follow-up to their '99 debut "Pink Hearts Yellow Moons"! Still flying their honey-pie Elephant 6 kite high in the bright blue sky and not being stingy with their bountiful battalion of pastel-hued lucky charms, these
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John Hill of Apples in Stereo and that's what it sounds like! Limited release from U.K., only 500 copies in embossed fabric packaging. Buy now or cry later.
"Holy smokes," you might exclaim (as we did), "a double disc of Dressy Bessy?! We always knew those Elephant 6 Collective folks were prolific, but... geez!" Okay, okay, hold your horses, folks! The second disc is actually a dvd - a bonus treat including live performances at this year's South By Southwest festival and CBGB, in-studio footage, and slideshow style videos! The music disc contains eleven incredibly sunshine-y sugar pop songs that harken back to a time of wide-eyed innocence and trippy mod pop styles. Tammy Ealom sings her earnest heart out while John Hill and Ealom's guitars jangle and crunch, Darren Albert's drums snap and crack, and Rob Greene's bass keeps a steady perky thump. It's so infectious that this week almost without exception after just a few bars of a song, customers have asked what it is and bought it. Poof! Just like that... really! Dressy Bessy just might have you bouncing around like a marshmallow fight!
Sure to please fans of Broken Social Scene!! How are we so certain of this? Well, this is the solo album from one of the band's co-founders Mr. Kevin Drew, and it also features a lot of his BSS bandmates (Feist, Emily Haines of Metric and Stars' Amy Millan) as well as Pavement's Scott Kannberg (on "Lucky Ones") and J. Mascis of all people (on the very Dinosaur Jr. college rocking "Back Out On The..."). It doesn't sound a whole lot different from the less electronic side of BSS! The album opens with a Flaming Lips-y grand scale orchestral pop swell, then the first few tunes settle down and get all ultra mellow and breezy -- a gentle guitar strum, a soft steady tap on a snare drum and hushed male vocals. Drew keeps things calmingly pleasant, but does kick it up a notch for the abovementioned song featuring Mascis.
As you well know, we're really into that special Scandinavian subgenre of electronica known as skweee. In part, 'cause we were already into a lot of the sounds that inspired skweee, such as '80s electro, video game music, and funky old school hiphop. So, we were excited to see this disc recently repressed/reissued, Detroit electro act Drexciya's first full-length compact disc, originally released by German label Tresor in 1999. Also excited, 'cause we completely missed out on listing it back then, somehow! The rather idiosyncratic Drexciya can definitely be considered as precursors to the skweee phenomenon (skweee-cursors?). And indeed also as important, if eccentric, artists in the Detroit techno pantheon.
There's 21 tracks on this basically instrumental disc, most of 'em bearing some bizarre title that relates somehow to Drexciya's strange, sub-aquatic sci-fi concepts (the comic bookish artwork features squid shaped spaceships, and spacemen (spacefish?) that look a lot like Lovecraft's Deep Ones, or the Creature From The Black Lagoon, but in spacesuits. Sonically, these tracks range from the droning chant and mysterious voices heard in the introductory incantation "Temple Of Dos De Agua" to moody 4/4 techno atmospheres to synthesized future funk ("Funk Release Valve") to textural rhythmscapes to body-jerking fusion grooves ("Jazzy Fluids")... there's melodic keyboard soloing over jittery beats... squelching bass and lush synths... And dig the Kraftwerkian echoes on "Polymono Plexusgel" (and elsewhere). Pre-skweee or whatever, it's all awesome. This Drexciya disc is a bit of a classic, as far as catchy cosmic electro with fishy sci-fi fantasy elements, Detroit style, goes. And the connection with fellow Detroit space-travellers Dopplereffekt should be obvious. Check it!
A new somber rock trio has emerged from the Bay Area's shadowy fog featuring three SF metal vets! Though their other musical endeavors are decidedly metal leaning, Old Grandad's Max Barnett and Erik Moggridge along with Chewy Marzolo of Hammers Of Misfortune take Drift Of A Curse in a post rock direction on their debut album. Throughout the album's eight songs, the band smoothly weaves in and out of ominous overcast atmospheres and more fervent tempos. The Wrong Witness commences with "Blink" a number that creeps along at a brooding funereal pace, and things proceed along as such. Very heavy in tone and mood, but by the fourth song "Straits And Narrows" they get far more propulsive - almost poppy even! - with cool multi-part vocals and high sinewy guitars. This comparatively 'up' mood doesn't linger too long though. The very next song is the album's title track and with its subtle spacey effects and gentle gruff vocals it draws everything back down into a forbodingly solemn contemplation. If you dug the dark weathered beauty of Erik's other side project Aerial Ruin, definitely check this out!
Local San Francisco favorites, The Drift, return three years after their stunning Memory Drawings album with a beautiful memorial to their fallen bandmate, trumpeter Jeff Jacobs who succumbed to cancer early this year. Jacobs had given a plaintive exploratory charge to that last album that greatly attributed to its majesty, and Blue Hour shows the band taking a moment to regroup and reflect on the band's core strengths than to venture into strange new territory. Alternating between large rhythm heavy instrumental post-rock explorations and quieter blissed out but melancholic interludes, Blue Hour features all that we love about this group, intricate intertwining melodic passages, a delicate weaving of soft textures and forceful rhythms and that wonderful dynamic sense of floating and being propelled forward by hidden but benign forces. Quite Beautiful!
This 6 track collection from Tarentel co-founder Danny Grodinski's side band, The Drift, culls together four tracks and two remixes (by Four Tet and Sybarite) from various vinyl only releases recorded between 2004-2007. While similar Chicago-style post-rock influences have been present in both bands, The Drift trades on tightness and jazz-inflected precision (due mainly to Rich Douthit's frenetic drumming) that is reminiscent of The Necks, Can, and This Heat. Like their previous full length, Noumena, six tracks cover a lot of time, nearly an hour in length, that never drags but soars swiftly through atmospheres of propulsive kineticism. Wonderful!
On their second full length outing, Memory Drawings, The Drift engage in an even larger oceanic expanse of sound than before. Incorporating blurry hints of dub, Afrobeat, and free-jazz without straying too far from their post-rock dynamic roots, the songs slowly pulsate and bleed, building subtle layers of guitar and piano patterns, kinetic drumming and majestic horn-playing that soars high like a bird over choppy waters. Like The Necks or Circle's more organic recordings (Miljard or Tower), Memory Drawings is best experienced as a whole rather than a collection of individual pieces. In this sense the title is appropriate. Artist Colter Jacobsen who did the cover art, draws pictures from photographs then re-draws the same drawing from memory, letting subtle deviations through mental assumptions to occur and perpetually alter the drawing process. The Drift approach their process similarly, starting with a base musical template that subtly shifts and alters in dynamics as the pieces progress, sounding similar on the surface but never quite the same. Lovely.
This SF quartet gets things rolling on their first album Noumena, introducing themselves with some moody, brassy horn abstractions that settle into a more straight-forward Chicago-style post-rock affair. While as we mentioned this is the band's debut full length release, the bandmembers are certainly not newcomers and their experience definitely shows in these dynamic compositions. Drummer Rich Douthit plays in Halifax Pier and guitar and keyboard player Danny Grody is also a member of Tarentel. In fact this band started out as a side project for him and his Tarentel bandmate Trevor Montgomery who then pursued his solo endeavors as Lazarus. Rounding out the line-up are bassist Safa Shoukrai and trumpeteer Jeff Jacobs. Speaking of which, bask leisurely in the warming glow of his trumpet and flugelhorn which take centerstage on the first track "Gardening, Not Architecture". Next up, Shoukrai's cyclical stand-up bass sets the pace for the more groovin' "Invisible Cities". Guitars soon join in, while the horn blasts and some hazy electronic elements add texture and atmosphere. The Drift keep their jazz-inflected sounds varied and movin' right through to the final track. Oh and keep in mind that although there's 'only' six tracks, they sprawl out over the course of 55 minutes.
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Like the rest of the FMN roster, noise and punk have their place in the music of Drill Man, but it's really much more of a pop thing at heart with this band.
This came out a while ago, and for some reason we never reviewed it, but we were listening to it recently, and realized how fucking kick ass these guys were, and figured there were probably some other folks out there who would dig this as well.
SF heavies kicking out some serious skull crushing jams, falling somewhere between the punkish metal bombast of Northwestern groups like Karp and the Melvins, godheadSilo, and any of the heavier hitters from the classic Amphetamine Reptile stable, so you know what that means, relentlessly rocking churning chugging noise rock / punk metal blowouts, huge downtuned riffage, bad ass drumming, howled vox, the band locking into full on burly grooves, about as fierce and furious as it gets, not sure why these guys didn't blow up, never saw them live, but it sounds like they must have slayed, this stuff is dense and dark, loud and intense, frenzied but also right as fuck, with plenty of melodies, and lots of hooks hidden amidst the pound and pummel, fans of any of the above mentioned bands should grab these while they last, got a handful left, and as the band is dead and gone, we might not be able to get more.
As much as we dig White Fence, this might be our favorite recording yet by that band's Tim Presley, as he teams up here with an unknown-to-us Welsh musician named Cate Le Bon. The result of their collaboration is sheer post-punk perfection.
Taking turns on vocals, the interplay between Tim and Cate through these minimal and infectious songs works so well. There is not a wasted note or wasted second on this record. Think of the best parts of Young Marble Giants and Deerhoof coming together, and you might start to get a sense of the vibrant sounds that Drinks create. Angular, punchy, and stripped down sounds that ring with an immediacy that is so damn refreshing.
We're also reminded of a long and super underrated record that came out a decade ago, that was the only recording by a band named Klang who featured an ex-member of Elastica. If you ever heard that record, No Sound Is Heard, you know the greatness it contained and we were so stoked to finally hear a brand new record that taps into that same sound, and likewise channels early Rough Trade output in all its brilliant post-punk glory. Recommended, though maybe we don't even need to tell you that, as these Drinks have been flying out the door...
Up until now, young Olympia, WA pop pup Dennis Driscoll has released only a couple of 7"s, drawing a bunch of indie Oly acclaim, but finally a full length has emerged of his boyish Daniel Johnston / Jad Fair super-lo-fi, fragile, quirky pop. Shy boy odes to
