Oh man, is this gorgeous! Eluvium's follow-up to 2007's somber soundscape Copia continues along a similar solemn path, but embraces some new elements into the fold - namely male vocals and understated percussion. They add a fresh dimension that works perfectly. Actually at times Similes draws comparisons to the desolate beauty of early Black Heart Procession. We like very much! The withered murmurs from mainman Matthew Cooper melt into the enveloping reverbed sea of velvety organ drones and creeping piano melodies. A shimmering and glimmering journey into the shadows of the most heavy hearted.
Ambient music can really suck. Yeah sure, -all- music can really suck, but ambient music has a not so stellar history. The likelihood of music being actively touted as 'ambient' actually being closer to 'new age' is greater than we'd like to believe. We here at AQ have been a bit spoiled, since our idea of ambient music includes most things drone, and lord knows there is no shortage of amazing drone music. So when a specifically 'ambient' record comes our way (especially one that vehemently defends itself against the perceived stigma of being labeled ambient) we are pretty skeptical. No need with Eluvium, who over the course of several albums have demonstrated (like a select few before them) time and time again that ambient music need not be wimpy or boring, and in fact can be dark and deep and emotionally charged. The music of Eluvium on Talk Amongst The Trees has as much in common with Philip Jeck or William Basinski as it does Brian Eno or Tangerine Dream. Maybe more so. Slow, fuzzy melodies, constructed from processed guitars and pianos and voices, are stretched into blurry soundscapes, lazily looped into slowly shifting snapshots of long forgotten pasts, brief glimpses of barely there memories, stories told in smears of tonal color, emotions expressed in rumbles and reverberations. Eluvium manage to create a strangely luminous center to each song, a pulsing heart, whose glow suffuses the thick sonic sprawl around it, making the hazy and murky depths of each song breathe with hope and glow with a subtle warmth. So nice. A perfect late night drifting off record. Fans of Stars Of The Lid, Jeck, Basinski, Labradford, Eno, and other ambient luminaries should now add Eluvium to that list. If you haven't already.
Here's a new four-song ep from Eluvium aka solo instrumental soundscapist Matthew Cooper. When I Live By The Garden And The Sea is a slow-building stormfront of hazy distortion washes, gradually materializing contemplative note sequences and an occasional dialogue sample. This cd might be only four tracks long but they're quite lengthy -- plenty long enough for you to stretch out and sink into.
More limited vinyl madness, this time in the form of the hotly anticipated vinyl only split between Justin Broadrick's Jesu, and US ambient drifter Eluvium. So the skinny is this, a split release between Temporary Residence Limited and Hydra Head, the copies we got are the TRL version. The TRL version is already out of print, but the folks at TRL let us have a big bunch (only about 50) and even cooler, a handful of them are the mailorder only colored vinyl version. So first 30 or so folks will get colored vinyl, the rest will get black, and please don't ask for colored vinyl, and don't order unless you'll be happy with black, it's first come, first served...
Three new songs from Jesu, and as if we didn't already see Broadrick and Co. heading in this direction, they've almost entirely jettisoned the heaviness, in favor of a blissy new wave-t drift. Really! No massive sludge, no blissed out crunch, in fact, most of this sounds like Jesu doing the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, all drift and croon and no crunch and pummel, but it's really nice, and pretty, and still suitably Jesu-like. Imagine Simple Minds or the Cure but raised on Slowdive and Chapterhouse and Swervedriver and My Bloody Valentine, doing the theme song for Sixteen Candles 2007 (which if our calculations are correct would be more like Thirty Nine Candles). The first song would be a massive hit, sort of melancholy and romantic, dark and dreamy, but still sort of catchy and hopeful, like sunbeams barely making it through grey storm clouds. The final track sounds like it could be from that last scene in Sixteen Candles 2007, the one where the boy and the girl finally make it to the dance after all of the crazy mishaps and misunderstandings and are finally sharing that slow dance... lugubrious and fuzzy, and soft focus and so great actually. It's weird, and a bit unexpected, but as much as we love the glacial crush of past Jesu discs, this new-wave-y drift really suits them..
The flip side features a side long three part epic from Eluvium, aka Matthew Cooper, whose usual stately dreamlike ambience, is here rendered even fuzzier and blurrier. The first part could be some long lost Tim Hecker or Basinski jam, all dense washes of keyboards and crumbling shimmer. The second and third parts feature Coopers doleful minor key piano, more recognizable than on the opener, but still takes those notes and smears them into glacial stretches of glistening murmur. The perfect sonic match up for Jesu's new, less heavy, more drift-y sound.
Rough, raw and shambolic pop from midwest art rock / garage popsters the Embarassment. This is the perfect companion to the almost-comprehensive 'Heyday' compilation released a few years back. Live tracks and demos of some of their best (and for some reason unreleased / unrecorded) stuff.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
There's 42 songs here, which we think is their entire recorded output, but one of you embo experts should come in and set us straight.
Wow! While Brazil gets most of the attention in terms of creating some of the best South American psychedelic music, we've recently been checking out the left coast of the continent, namely Chile, and have been digging some amazing stuff. Perhaps it's the epic geographical relationship of mountains and coast in close proximity that inspires such transcendent music or perhaps it's the constant political unrest of the period that cultivated a longing for the more earthy populace-empowered past. Smooth romantic harmonies, ancient flutes and dreamy textures of jungle and nature sounds are all key variables in the sound of great Chilean psych bands El Congreso, Congregacion (also reviewed on this list), Kissing Spell (featured on the Love Peace and Poetry Latin America comp), and their later incarnation, Embrujo. While Kissing Spell was more of a mellow psych-pop confection singing songs in English as was the trend of Latin groups seeking to become more commercially viable, the decision to become Embrujo stemmed from a revolutionary stance possibly inspired by the Brazilian Tropicalia movement both politically and sonically, to write songs almost entirely in Spanish and create a dynamic sound on their own terms upping the ante on their songwriting craft and musicianship. What they add to the equation is Gr-ooo-ve, driven along by fuzzy organ, simmering guitar and funky drumming, building on the traditional Chilean sound with fluid changes, solid rhythms, and like Os Mutantes, occasional wackiness. Tight hook-laden arrangements, lyrical breaks and progressive interludes are what make this sole 1972 album fetch astronomical prices amongst collectors of private press recordings. This is its first CD reissue and seriously, we haven't stopped playing it since it arrived in the store a few weeks ago. Finally we have enough to share this with the rest of you. Embrujo means "bewitched" in Spanish, and we are positive you too will be captured by its spell! Recommended!
The weird thing about this wonderfully weird collaboration, between NYC's premier avant free folk tribalists and legendary German progrock/krautrock combo Embryo, is that it doesn't sound all that different from what we might have expected a new NNCK record to sound like. Not sure what that says, either the two groups were absolutely perfectly in sync, or NNCK are masterful channellers of classic Krautrock jams, or NNCK stole everything they know from Embryo and their sonic brethren, or Embryo are the true masters, aligning themselves with the manic primal tribal sound of NNCK's percussive rituals. Hardly mattters, whichever way you slice it, this record is stunning. Dense and lush, and packed solid with strange and wonderfuls sounds, tribal rhythms, chimes, woodblocks, drum kit, hand drums, hand claps, all sorts of buzzing strings, what sounds like sitars and harpsichords and autoharps, woodwinds, flutes and recorders, and vocals, an impossible array of chanting and moaning, gargling, mumbling, humming, whistling and singing in tongues. Dreamy super melodic grooves give way to full on Wicker Man pagan insanity which further gives way to some clattery free jazz minimalism but always returning to that transcendental tribalism we just can't get enough of. If Embryo add anything to the mix, it's a warmth and melodicism that sometimes seems to be missing from a a lot of the more abstract NNNCK jams. Folks who dug NNCK's recent Qvaris will most certainly find this to their liking as it sounds like a much more dense, much more melodic, much more vibrant exploration and expansion of the songs on that record. And we LOVED that record, so that should tell you something! The more we listen to these songs, the more we think it might not be such a bad idea for this NNCK / Embryo hybrid to just BE the new NNCK, those No Neck guys ought to just ask those Embryo guys to join the band, what the hell, the more the merrier, and judging from this one time jam, the thought of these guys moving forward aas a single unit, and actively exploring the realms of inner and outer musical space, is almost too much for us to handle.
We reviewed an amazing album on the Dead-Cert label (the boutique subsidiary label of Finders Keepers and Demdike Stare) a while back by musical couple Kat Epple and Bob Stohl called Sanctu Spiritus, a proto-new age document of early recordings utilizing synthesizers and flute with tape-loops to be used in planetariums and space documentaries. That release is now sadly out of print, but that was just the beginning. Between 1978 and 1982, the couple would later form the group Emerald Web, a mixture of space and fantasy music with proggy new age leanings and release 5 recordings (1 lp and 4 cassettes) on their own imprint label Stargate from which the tracks here are compiled by the fine freaks at Finders Keepers/B-Music.
Hailing from Florida, the duo recorded their music at night utilizing the studio they used for their day jobs as synth-programmers, music consultants for computer technology labs and TV and film soundtrack work. Named after a laser show formation and combining elements of dungeons and dragons fantasy and cosmic ambience, the group released their vinyl debut, Dragon Wings And Wizard Tales in 1979, a heady post-prog synth epic of tripped out soundscapes and ethereal female vocals that was recently featured on the Record Store Day compilation Monster Skies. The subsequent tape releases were less proggy and more spacey, filled with field recordings, dueling flutes, and ambient electronics that have more of a minimal composition focus than your typical new age music does. The couple would go on to record music for Carl Sagan's Cosmos series and hopefully that will get released soon as well. So great!
There is an import lp version of this, but it's been very hard for us to track down, so for now we only have the cd.
Of the three Emeralds releases we've heard so far (Solar Bridge, What Happened, and now Allegory Of Allergies), Allegory has to be the most removed from the scene these guys seem most linked to. Whether the connection is geographic, or sonic, or social, Emeralds for better or for worse have been a part of Wolf Eyes' considerably noisy orbit, as well as a constant presence amidst the No Fun noisemakers. But even since that first disc, these guys definitely stood out, eschewing abject noise and rough raw grit, for something much more drifty and spacey and dare we say new age-y. Klaus Schulze is and has been an obvious reference, and Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, thus Emeralds belong more to a modern strain of kosmiche krautrock than any sort of noise or drone rock scene. Never moreso than on Allegory.
A sprawling double lp, the whole first side is filled with the billowy breathlessness of "Nereus (Spirits Over The Lake)", easily the groups, dreamiest offering to date, and the one that most taps into the sort of timeless new age drift we can't get enough of. Thick rounded tones, softly undulating, a gentle ebb and flow, melodies spread out over minutes, unfurling lazily, sun dappled, soft focus, we've already listened to side on 3 times in a row. So great,
The B side is split into three tracks, but they play out more like 3 linked movements, the sound here is a bit more ominous, minor key, slightly foreboding, but still darkly delicate, the multiple synths creating softly fluttering layers of sound, that by the second track build into something much thicker and fuzzier. Long tones, the various overtones creating buried rhythms and fragmented melodies, pulsing and throbbing thickly, before the final movement dials back the buzz, but cranks up the bottomless low end, offering a vast expanse of deep subterranean rumbles, both intense and heavy, warm and enveloping.
The other 2 sides are also side long epics, the first is about as corrosive as these guys get, layering sheets of buzz and fuzz and rumble into a heaving slab of washed out whir, that seems to breathe, growing thicker and thicker, the tones climbing gradually higher and higher in pitch, eventually locking into a soft focus Sunroof!-like divine ur-drone.
The final side returns to the spare tranquility of the first side, all barely there drift, hushed shimmer, deep softly swirling tones. Those tones are slowly subsumed by what sounds like crackle or glitch, or maybe even field recordings of rainfall, until eventually it's just that crack and glitch and buzz, the tones fading to near silence, before returning, in an altogether reimagined form, thick, viscous, aggressive, intense, a buzzing, softly corrosive rumble, that eventually thins out leaving just shadowy traces. So gorgeous.
Incredible packaging, super thick, full color gatefold sleeves, gold printed inner sleeves, pressed on nice heavy vinyl too! WAY RECOMMENDED!!
Remixed by Daphni (aka Dan Snaith -- better known as Caribou)
For some mistaken reason, we thought this was gonna be really noisy. Maybe 'cause it's on Hanson (home to such earhole excruciators as Wolf Eyes, Metalux, Smegma, and Hair Police just to name a few of the noisniks on the label). But we were wrong wrong wrong. Instead, this is totally calm and lovely electronic space music in the 'kosmiche' vein of '70s and '80s Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream and Ashra and the like. It won't harsh your mellow at all, quite the opposite! This is bliss-out droney stuff produced by a Midwestern trio using the equation: analog synthesizers x 2 + (electric guitar + effects). Something like that. Earlier in their career (this is the cd debut after lots of limited cassette and cd-r action) they used to use only TV sets as sound sources! Glad they gave that up, as Solar Bridge wouldn't be nearly so soothing if there were, like, breaks for commercials. You'd have to Tivo it.
Seriously, though, this is a droning delight. There's just two tracks here, but they are 'side-long' ones. The 12:34 "Magic" and the 14:14 "The Quaking Mess". It's almost New Age-y (as so much indie, experimental music is turning out to be, when you think about it) but not too too New Age-y. Though nicely mesmeric, it also has a quietly creepy edge to it, and a real grinding, full physicality at higher volumes. Emeralds create waves and layers of subtle, gently pulsating electronic gurble, but not in an overly wispy way. For instance, feedback whispers and glimmers through the cracks in the drone at the start of "The Quaking Mess", which then builds into more of a dense, fuzzy drone-sheen. The kind that radiates light, and that you want to wrap around yourself and your ears like a blanket. Definitely one of our faves from Hanson thus far, noisy or not!
In their brief career beginning in 2006, the Ohio based trio Emeralds has associated themselves with the grit and rust-stained noise that has erupted in the mid-western underground, often sharing the stage with Aaron Dilloway, C Spencer Yeh, and Hive Mind. Their two major releases have come by way of Dilloway's Hanson Records and No Fun Productions, which typically rank as releasing some of the most aggressive and brutal pieces of noise of the contemporary era. While live performances have reportedly embraced the noise community's full-force fury of maximum volume, Emeralds instead favors a sound that harkens back to the era of Cluster, Manuel Gottsching, Fripp & Eno, and Klaus Schulze.
Last year's Solar Bridge was a spectacular lazer blast of cosmic droning and inner-space meditation; but with that album clocking in less than 30 minutes, we were left wanting more. Fortunately, more is what Emeralds bring on What Happened. Collected from their seemingly non-stop sessions of improvisations for guitar, Moog, and Korg plus ample effects boxes, these 5 tracks spiral and snake around the same deep-space psychedelia found on Solar Bridge, pushing their sound beyond the two extended crescendos which populated that album. Monochord guitars pulse hypnotically against the overlapping tapestries of the sawtooth hum and modulating tones from the analogue synths. Throughout What Happened, Emeralds shift in mood from alien percolations of '60s sci-fi sound design to graceful swells of tonefloat majesty to purely physical vibrations which rip through the nervous system and strike numbly at the bone. There is beauty to be found here, but also a sublime unease that haunts these recordings. Yup, this one comes highly recommended!
Drifting backwards in time from the post-noise excursions into placid meditations for guitar and synth, Emeralds have become one of the favorites here at Aquarius; and for very good reason, everything they touch seems to turn to gold. Solar Bridge was a such a tease of an introduction for us, and probably was the same for many out there entering into the swirling concoctions of electronic drone; but it has been the two albums What Happened and Allegory of Allergies that really laid the foundation for their impending greatness. Not only do they have a strong grasp on the minimalist theatrics of the drone, but also Emeralds enjoys a selective memory of what made progressive electronics and progressive rock in the late '70s and early '80s great. The pastoral colorfields of Cluster, the alienated ethos of Heldon, and the insistent arpeggiations of Achim Reichel and Ash Ra Tempel all figure heavily into Emeralds sound.
This vinyl-only, eponymous record seems to percolate and bubble with electronics, at times veering into the same Omni Magazine territory that Oneothrix Point Never has been mustering for the past year. It may not be a surprise that OPN and Emerald's guitarist Mark McGuire have collaborated in a project called Skyramps, which is as good as you might imagine. The three tracks on the first side wrangle squiggling rhythms, bleepity squelches, and bending sustained tones generated by Emeralds' two synth jockeys John Elliott and Steve Hauschildt, while McGuire dishes out his best Manuel Gottsching impression. The second side is one of the epochal, long form constructs that slows everything on the first side down to an elegant pace with watery field recordings laced throughout. Pretty fucking awesome. And no doubt somewhat limited...
Perhaps you've already come across the cover of this album, it's one of those classic kitschy covers, two innocent looking teens, in cheesy white jumpsuits, unzipped in the front, with huge collars, one of the guys wielding a guitar, both looking pretty earnest and heartfelt. The record's called Dreamin' Wild, which is printed in bubbly red letters. We had seen this pop up on best/worst album covers lists forever, and like most everyone else, we had a chuckle and forgot all about it. But then we started hearing about this song called "Baby", most notably covered by weirdo outsider pop nerd Ariel Pink (the 12" of which we just got in today!), originally recorded by a couple kids named Donnie & Joe Emerson, and holy shit, we suddenly made the connection. We assumed the original version of "Baby" must suck, and Ariel Pink just took a crappy cheesy old song and weirded it up and made it warped and catchy, but instead, it turns out, the original just might be THEE coolest jam we'd heard in ages. Then we learned that Light In The Attic was gonna give this lost gem a proper reissue and we were pretty excited, even before we learned about the record's crazy backstory.
Apparently Donnie and Joe were raised in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Washington state, lived and worked on a farm, when their dad, after making them promise to focus on writing and recording original material, took a second mortgage out on the farm and built his sons a recording studio filled with amazing equipment, spending more than $100K! But that's not all, he also built them a THREE HUNDRED SEAT venue, complete with stage, ticket booth AND snack bar. As you might imagine, those 300 seats were never filled, and while the boys toiled diligently on their original music, even being featured in a local news special, all culminating in their dad paying to release the original version of this record, a selfless act that ended up causing the family to lose a significant amount of their farm when the record failed to sell. And thus, very little was heard from these boys, until now.
And while these days pretty much any old unknown record can be dug up and presented as some sort of lost treasure, very few deserve the accolades bestowed upon them, and even fewer fulfill the promise of crazy album covers and over the top backstories like Dreamin' Wild.
Really, just check out "Baby", somewhere between the sweet soulful shimmer of Shuggie Otis and the dreamy reverby pop of Roy Orbison, it's lush and lovely, the sort of mix tape killer that had we heard it before would definitely have featured prominently in past courtships. And while we're tempted to say, that it's worth the price of admission for that track alone, there's so much more to dig here, the wah guitar disco funk groove of "Feels Like The Sun", the classic rocking bass heavy buzz of "Good Time", the old school soulful smolder of "Give Me The Chance", the psychedelic yacht rock balladry of "My Heart" which manages to sound fantastically droney and druggy and dreamy, and makes it obvious just what had Ariel Pink so smitten. The record is rife with reverbed psychedelic guitars, lush vocal harmonies, ingenious arrangements, and some KILLER tunes, all cooked up by two teens in a basement studio on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So awesome!
Includes a massive booklet with extensive liner notes and tons of pix. And check out this mini-documentary on Donnie and Joe: http://vimeo.com/39424998#at=0
FYI vinyl lovers, this is on lp too, we've got a few but not enough to list, our supplier just happened to be out this week, but we should get some more soon!
Everyone here fell in love with Dreamin' Wild, a rediscovered pop gem from 1979, we made a Record Of The Week a couple years ago. The story of two teenage farm boys from rural Washington dreaming of making it big and the family who believed in them so much that they took out a second mortgage on their farm so their sons could build a studio and release records was as compelling as their music. The fact that their goals for success ultimately eluded them, only gives their music with its heartfelt earnestness, a deeper weight. But now their past efforts have finally gained the Emerson brothers some attention and with that, a discovery of more recordings made after the recording of Dreamin' Wild. All in all the brothers recorded over 70 tracks in that home studio, mainly led by Donnie's ambitions not to give up on his dreams of becoming a successful musician even after their sole record failed, while Joe turned more of his attentions to taking over the farm his family started and nearly lost.
Still Dreamin' Wild is less cohesive in form than its predecessor, mainly because the tracks jump various genres from power pop and new wave to synth balladry and soft rock. While there are some great jams like the opener, "Don't Fight" with its pulsating beat and haunting harmonies that we could see bands like Ariel Pink or Once and Future Band taking on, as well as the closer, "Don't Disguise The Way You Feel" which hearkens back to the sincerity of the first record, there are a few tracks that sound like music from any number of teenage movies of the eighties. Good thing? Bad thing? You be the judge! Definitely a deep cuts record that will appeal to fans of the duo and era in which they were made. Not as essential as its predecessor, but still a curious and entertaining artifact.
We always seem to go on and on about loads of rare prog. We love that stuff. Lost Italian prog, rare South American prog psych. But let's not give short shrift to American and British progressive groups, especially the more popular mainstream acts. No prog lover worth his salt would dare deny the brilliance of Yes, or Jethro Tull or E.L.P. Especially E.L.P. In fact if you asked Andee who his favorite band was, not just prog band, but band period, he just might answer E.L.P. Why? Because they are the ultimate prog band. Excessive in everything they did, instruments, outfits, song choices, song lengths, solos, EVERYTHING. Plus all three members of E.L.P. were unbelievable players. When rock kids were worshipping at the altar of Neil Peart, some of us were bowing before the godlike drumming of Carl Palmer. This double DVD is jam packed with so much classic E.L.P. footage it's unbelievable. There's a bit of pre-E.L.P. stuff: the video for "Fire" by the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, which features a masked Carl Palmer on drums, King Crimson live in Hyde Park in 1969, the Nice on German TV show Beat Club in 1968, all amazing. Even just the DVD menu footage features lots of classic E.L.P. images, the band in their silk kimonos getting on stage in Japan, the infamous semi trailers, each printed with one band member's name on top, billboards, fireworks and pyrotechnics. Then there's just loads and loads of amazing live footage from Europe, the UK, Japan, including their debut performance at the Isle Of Wright festival with Carl Palmer disrobing during his drum solo and Keith Emerson playing his keyboard from the wrong side, pounding it, jumping over it, then launching cannons from either side of the stage. Holy fuck! They definitely don't make bands like that any more. There's lots of videos too, from European TV, including an amazing Carl Palmer drum solo filmed live on a TV show called Aquarius, where he plays chimes, timpanis, four bass drums and even rings a bell with his mouth! Disc two features E.L.P.'s whole California Jam set as well. Bonus footage includes an unseen rehearsal film from 1973, interviews with Bob Moog about his relationship with E.L.P., analysis of the album covers, videos and more. But even without the extras, heck, even without disc two, there is just so many amazing sights and sounds and performances here. This stuff is so absurd and so brilliant, and the songs are so classic, and the playing is so goddamn good, it just makes me feel like an old man for lamenting the state of modern music. Anyone out there who wants to start an E.L.P. for the new millennium get in touch with Andee via the store!
This is going to be short and sweet. At the risk of some of you losing faith in my (Andee's) reviews, Emerson Lake and Palmer are the greatest rock band ever.
Period.
Everything you like about every one of your favorite bands, ELP do better. Heavy, bombastic instrumental virtuosity, gorgeous mellow pop chops, everything. A greatest hits record can't really do justice to a band who almost never wrote a bad song (at least until 1977), and if you were actually interested, you'd be better served buying one of their actual albums. Or all of them. But for the timid or the not so daring, this is not a bad place to start.
Thirteen tracks by of the most successful, most reviled, act in prog-rock history!
Oh, how we still love Alec Empire. We just can't help it. We loved (and heck, still love) DHR so much. Atari Teenage Riot, Shizuo, Fever, EC8OR, Patric Catani, Bomb 20, for a while we were downright obsessed with all that stuff. Like all things new and exciting though, Empire and his crew sort of lost their relevance, their silly sloganeering, rehashed metal riffs, pummelling drum beats and screecheed vocals became more tired and boring than thrilling. Some stuff Like Empire's Destoyer stood the test of time a little better, but as music got more extreme, that whole DHR thing just didn't seem so badass. So the return of Alec Empire, could've been a sad rehash, but guess what, he's managed to knock us for a loop again. Your fist hint is Empire on the sleeve toting a guitar case, but Futurist is all ROCK. And heavy too. A super aggressive pounding metallic garage punk stomp. At times it sounds a but like Ministry or what we WISH Nine Inch Nails sounded like, which is hard to avoid when you're talking pounding beats and metal guitars, but it also sounds like the Hives or the Refused, super charged and slightly DHR-ed (some of the drum fills become that instantly recognizable DHR digital drill) A few tracks do slow down into chugging punk rock dirges and sound like some fucked up take on Fear or Fang or Flipper. But for the most part this is wild and sweaty, kick ass metallic garage stomp future rock. And we LOVE it.
With the demise of Atari Teenage Riot due to Carl Crack's untimely death, Digital Hardcore's mainman Alec Empire continues to preach / sing / scream to the hordes of disaffected electro-punk youth. On the first disc of this set, Empire's tactics remain consistent with the ATR output, as heavy duty punk explosions signified by the relentless samples of gated, grindcore riffs are punctuated by huge 909 throbbing drum kicks and stabs of searing white noise. Not surprisingly, "Intelligence And Sacrifice" finds Empire aligning himself more with the industrial / metal crossovers of Ministry and the guitar crunch attacks from the mid-'90s Wax Trax! clones. The second disc lands more in a disjointed acid breakbeat / micro-glitch realm, that is as good as anything Mille Plateaux / Ritornell has been releasing during the past few months. Quite effective, but neither of the two aesthetic sides of Alec Empire can be purported as entirely groundbreaking.
Most people probably remember Alec Empire best as the head of Digital Hardcore Recordings, or as the front man of Atari Teenage Riot, or for his various solo records, but here at aQ he's probably best know for the LOUDEST instore ever. It was pretty insane, not sure how we even got away with it. Folks were coming down from stores 4 or 5 doors down to see what the heck was going on. There was as big a crowd of lookie-loos as there was people to see the show. He was DJing with Merzbow albums or something.
But it's been years, and Empire has gone through a bit of a transformation since then, he's not so much into the super distorted jungle anymore, his more recent records have been more industrial, sounding like Nine Inch Nails or Ministry, but actually good. We dug his last, The Futurist, a slab of metal riffs and drum machine beats, of howled vocals and stomping garage rock. A weird mix, but one that definitely suited him. But this most recent disc is different all over again. First there's the glamour shot in the booklet, all bleached bangs and aviator shades, and the legend underneath the disc that says "This is an indie rock noise record...", and it is, sort of. But we'd also say it's a sort of industrial synth pop new wave record, borrowing HEAVILY from prime era Gary Numan, and a little from Suicide too. It may be derivative, but it's still awesome. The opener is worth the price of admission alone. A killer hook, total new wave goth-industrial dream pop, equal parts Interpol and Gary Numan (the synth line is criminally Numan), the vocals a bit robotic, a weird atonal bridge, but the whole song so fierce and catchy, and the sort of thing that would destroy a dancefloor filled with silver booted, multi-scarved glam pirates for sure.
There is some weird shit here too, robotic proto-funk, angular electro, murky ballads, groovy garagey buzz, it's all good, we're also reminded of the Mark E. Smith + Mouse On Mars project Von Sudenfed at times too. But the best parts are definitely rife with thick fuzzy synths, and killer beats, all wound up into groovy late night, strobe lit, stilleto heeled, funky, sexy blasts of buzzing new wave. Way cool.
Such a lullaby of an album! Ultra barebones... this British duo often craft their songs of just the same two or three notes plucked over and over ever so gently on a guitar while the sweetest, softest female vocals whisper-sing dreamily and a hushed organ-y drone drifts in and out. Lovely, fragile and haunting.
Completely stunning, delicate and crystalline, slow motion dream rock. A bit like Movietone in mood, but Empress replace the murk, with a glowing diffused warmth and clarity, the musical equivalent of those little glowing orbs on the lens of a camera when it's pointed at the sun. Super nice. Definitely for fans of Low, Movietone, and the like. On the Pastels' Geographic label.
New SF band Empty Rooms made quite an impressive first impression when we pressed play on this, their self-titled debut five-song EP. The band oozes with composure as they unfurl their solemnly brooding, verging on goth style of rock. They'll undoubtably draw plenty comparisons to the moody likes of Interpol and their forefathers Joy Division and Bauhaus. One song that particularly stands out is the second to last, "Form Has Two Faces" features additional female vocals from Carly Schneider which offer an effective counterpart to lead singer Andy Beyers' deep dour delivery. Hopefully she'll surface again (and more frequently) on their next release. Another highlight is the final song "Black Sugar", a super catchy smoldering pop song.
Lion Productions' extremely welcome krautrock reissue campaign continues! This reish is another from one of scenemaker Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's labels, Pilz (after one by Guru Guru originally on his OHR label and Sergius Golowin's album on Kosmic Kuriere), and is appropriately trippy. Indeed, it's a minor masterpiece of cosmic-folk that no less an authority than Dag Erik Asbjornsen's encyclopedic krautrock tome Cosmic Dreams At Play calls "absolutely essential".
Emtidi were a hippy duo, Maik Hirschfeldt from Germany and Dolly Holmes from Canada, supposedly brought together by their participation in the Berlin production of Hair (not the first time we've heard such a story about artists from that era!). Emtidi made just two albums in their brief career, a self-titled, not-so-cosmic acoustic folk debut in 1971 (which has also recently been reissued by the way) and then THIS one.
1972's Saat is so special in part because they labored over it in the studio with well-known producer Dieter Dierks, creating a multi-tracked, synth-floating, electronically treated environment to support Dolly's airy and delicate vocals. Her sweet singing reminds us of UK folksters like Sallyangie and Pentangle, while the spaced out music is far freakier (generally placid, but including some acid rock guitar eruptions).
Maik plays vibraphone, synthesizer, bass, flute, guitar, percussion, and also contributes rougher, accented vocals, dueting with Dolly on several of the tracks, taking lead himself on the German-language closer "Die Reise". Dolly, as well as singing so beautifully, plays keyboards, Mellotron, organ and piano. And Dierks also performs on several instruments as well, including more Mellotron.
The album's centerpiece is the blissed out shimmer of the nearly 12 minute "Touch The Sun" but the cosmic journey actually begins with a walk in the park, on opening track "Walkin' In The Park". The combination of mellow, effected guitars/keys and the gentle vocals of Dolly (joined by Maik partway along) belies the stoned humor of the lyrics, something to the effect of: "There's a sign here... keep off... don't sit on the grass, it's too cold for your ass"! Though they do sound quite earnest about it.
As with all Lion reissues, this one boasts a thick cd booklet, with original album graphics, extensive liner notes, and a discography of the Pilz label.
A stellar follow-up to 2010's The Absent Coast on Root Strata, Already Gone from this local San Francisco drone duo, Maxwell Croy and James Devane, aka EN, finds theses two with an even more focused and nuanced dynamic sensibility. Of course that sensibility centers around Croy's classically trained koto playing, which plays a large part in EN's overall sound, but here that element is really given ample room to stretch out and breathe. Instead of being merely one component in a layering process of cascading shifting dronescapes, the high relief sound of the texture of strings, the slow growing lyrical motifs and the solemn resonant pauses between phrases set up the pieces as they bloom into delicate shimmers and then oceanic swells of drifting unsettled moods. Pushing the momentum along on the first track, "Lodi" is the loping bass pulse of Trevor Montgomery (The Drift, Date Palms, Tarantel), that has us surfing waves of sound before settling into a swirling miasma of crystalline tones and airy phases. Taking us to the final track, "Elysia", the longest track at 20 minutes is set up by a long introduction of gorgeous and breathtakingly spacious koto playing that like falling leaves in gusts of winds unfurl into bellows of sky high cloud drones, gathering and darkening in fields of rich pulsating grey thunderous tones and then watercolor washes of blissful ambiance, the storm cleared and fading away, set to awaken in some far-off place. Beautiful!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This limited one-sided collaboration between artist Chris Johanson and local SF literary punks The Enablers is the second release on Johanson's record label, Awesome Vistas. Starting as a request to write a song that he could illustrate, Johanson and The Enablers instead came up with a more open idea for a piece where both parties would riff off of each other's work as it happened. Reading the lyric sheet for "The Achievement", the colorfully damaged South of Market characters seem directly inspired by Johanson's drawings of San Francisco streets, while the cover art by Johanson is more bruised, urgent and damaged, with all the process of mistakes and ideas vibrantly displayed Fitting right in line with the Enablers distorted amp squalls and Slint like sludge.
End Of Your Garden was a minimal-wave / post-punk quartet from Denmark, whose "Celebration" single from 1981 has just been reissued (on a split lp with Da Ma Vaere Belgiere) via Dark Entries. And this disc features those four tracks, plus four bonus tracks (two in the studio and two live recordings). Their skeletal arrangements for cheap electronics, drum machines, violin, guitar, bass, and vocals that all come together like Siglo XX trying to work out Young Marble Giants covers. The vocals alternate between monotone male vocals from Benny Woitowitz and Jan Laursen with a guest spot on female vocals by the breathy Angie White on the downbeat and slinky tune "Don't Walk Away In Silence." The other tracks, especially the anthemic "Celebration" and the messthetical "The Autumn" are considerably more up-tempo and urgent in their delivery. "Test" is one of the bonus tracks, and had appeared as another single from EOYG's Replik Muzick, with a two-note arrangement for guitar and synth plopped upon a noisy drum machine groove that Cold Cave might have very well lifted for their Cremations album. Agitated guitar noise gives more of a This Heat impression towards of the end of this track, and makes us wonder why nothing else was released from EOYG or anything from any of the members of the band, who all seemed to disappear around 1982. The other studio track and the live material also offer a lot of intriguing art-punk electronics, that certainly would lend themselves to a long career throughout the '80s. But alas, this is all there ever was.
More post-punk / minimal-wave obscurities by way of Dark Entries. Both of these bands were Danish outfits dating back to the early '80s, and don't seem to share much beyond their Danish good looks and the fact that both of these recordings had been released by the small Replik Muzick imprint. End Of Your Garden is more in keeping with the minimal wave vibe that Dark Entries has been promoting, through a skeletal arrangements for cheap electronics, drum machines, violin, guitar, bass, and vocals that all come together like Siglo XX trying to work out Young Marble Giants covers. The vocals alternate between monotone male vocals from Benny Woitowitz and Jan Laursen with a guest spot on female vocals by the breathy Angie White on the downbeat yet slinky "Don't Walk Away In Silence." The other tracks are considerably more up-tempo and urgent in their delivery.
The first cut from Da Ma Vaere Belgiere is a deadringer for what Interpol had been producing at the beginning of their career with this impassioned, darkly tainted post-punk with death disco rhythms, galloping basslines, and spiky guitars. Again, Siglo XX (alongside Crispy Ambulance) pops up as a reference through the monotone vocals and the downcast mood set throughout the rest of the tracks, and a less obscure citation is made on their final track which lifts Robert Smith's riff from "M" of Seventeen Seconds. Not a bad thing at all!
All of the material had been released as 7" singles back in the early '80s and now has been lovingly remastered and repackaged by Dark Entries. Recommended as with everything on the label!
Pre-Tucky Buzzard Swinging '60s psych-pop band, pretty great!
Brand new vinyl only, ultra heavy match up between NY's low end doom metal titans Unearthly trance, and Canadian powerviolence grind duo The Endless Blockade. Unearthly Trance go first, and fill up a whole side at 33 rpm, of their roiling doomic dirgery, thick downtuned riffage, bellowed howls, the sound epic and majestic and blackened, like a crustier version of Mastodon or Neurosis, that same sort of mighty bludgeon, but here sprawled into something way more abstract, with the track drifting fro, churning crush to loose doomy drift, with creepy tangled minor key melodies, a gorgeous and haunting, repeating motif, ominously intoned vocals, it sounds like the track will eventually erupt into more heaviness, but instead it goes the opposite direction, or at least explores a different kind of heaviness, breaking down into a long stretch of ambient dronemusic, a shadow of that original riff/motif remains, ghostlike, the track shimmering and slithering and evolving into a sort of ultra doom dirge, spacious and spare, a spaced out plod, that gradually grows more and more abstract before dissipating completely.
On the flip, Endless Blockade temper their usually furious flurries with some lumbering riffage and almost doomy drift, beginning with a dense cloud of glitched out electronics and feedback drenched shrieked vocals, before exploding into a face melting wall of blasting powerviolence crush. Flurries of frenzied drumblast, insane insectoid riffage, dueling grunted/howled vox, a furious grind wrapped in thick swaths of swirling noise, occasionally slipping into something a bit more dirgey or doomy, but eventually erupting back into some seriously aggro pummel. Their side finishes off with a dense and intense abstract noise squall, all grinding and crumbling in-the-red buzz and skree, tangled vocal freakouts, and then finally a strangely pretty field recorded ambient outro.
Killer power violence tag team, in one corner, newbies The Endless Blockade, who more than almost any current band embody the sound and spirit of classic power violence, and in the other, the grandfathers, and direct descendants of the genre's namesake, Bastard Noise, who have returned to the sound of their Man Is The Bastard antecedents, while still incorporating plenty of twisted Bastard noise noise.
We haven't heard Bastard Noise sound this fierce and heavy in years, throbbing low slung bass, pounding caveman drums, howled feral vox, wild screeches, tangled riffs, all woven into tightly wound tarpit grind jams, lurching and stuttering, stop start, freaked out blasts of furious thrash bookended by lumbering doomy crush, all shot through with streaks of electronic skree, clouds of glitched out FX, in fact, if anything this sounds like the perfect mix of classic Man Is The Bastard and another aQ fave MITB offshoot, Geronimo: rhythmic, hypnotic, cyclical. There are some moments of droned out Bastard Noise electronics, but those moments usually end up exploding into shards of hyper rhythmic pound and chug. So awesome. This would be worth it alone for the Bastard Noise side, but we haven't even gotten to the best part of this split...
Which is "Advanced Directive", an Endless Blockade remix by legendary academic electronic pioneer Noah Creshevsky (we had a killer retrospective of his work on Japanese label EM!), that is a total skittery, stuttery, psychedelic plunderphonic freakout. Riffs and vocals chopped and looped and pitch shifted and reassembled into a weirdly hiccupping experimental power violence mash up, reminds us a little bit of the recent Record Of The Week by Whourkr, with its impossibly complex and head spinning heaviness. Wow. The fourteen minute track that precedes it is a killer too, pummeling, pounding doomic heaviness, that slips into a strange electronic flecked trip out breakdown, and then a super in-the-red grinding buzz drenched feedback slathered noise freakout, before lurching back into some riffy crunch to finish things off.
There is one more track, a remix by noisemaker The Rita, but that one is for the TRUE noise lovers only, 15 minutes of crumbling, blown out, earshredding Merzbowian digicrunch.
Kinda too bad this didn't make it onto our list last week with the other Endlessess (Dismal Moan, Blizzard) found therein, woulda been funny, but this is a whole different thing anyhow as you can tell from the second half of their name. Endless Boogie (now that's a handle that will make 'em or break 'em!) are a NYC band featuring two dudes who work at Matador records (we think). Real famous record collector types or so we're told. Now doing their own brand of dumbo psych rock blurt, indeed boogying (they wasn't kiddin'!) and probably all too endlessly for some, in the spirit of their evident sixties/seventies heroes. They got de mojo too, it seems, rubbin' off all those elpees they been collectin'. Cool enuff stuff (though they ain't no Vermonster).
"Smoking Figs In The Yard", the first track, starts off with a spoken "get down have a real good time" intro done in a hokey, jokey (we hope) Beefheart/Billy Gibbons/Edgar Broughton sorta grunt. Ouch. Then they git to rockin'. It's sorta Monster Magnet, sorta Rolling Stones (well, the vocals are kinda Jagger). Meh. But then track two's hypnotic throb, and beerbellycrawlingkingsnake scat singing moves, make it more akin to a redneck version of Circle, or Pharaoh Overlord. Starting to like this better... Endless Boogie coming on like a wanky hybrid of somethin' Circular, with the likes of Drunk Horse or maybe Howlin' Rain.
When track 4, "Executive Focus" rolls around, it's guitar solo wah wah time (moreso even than earlier), stuff that any Comets On Fire, Wooden Shjips or Julian Cope fan can flash on and dig... Acid Mothers too. By the time this song was over, eleven heavy and a half minutes later, we'd been swayed. Endless Boogie is all right with us. And we think we've got the idea. Yep, soon enough, sure enough, track six "Steak Rock" is another repetitive throbber with weird caveman mumblin' Tourette's babble o'er top. Circle's Mika Ratto could speak in tongues with this guy, and they'd understand one another we're certain.
A little later, the album's eighth cut "Jammin' With Top Dollar" sounds like "Mississippi Queen" Mountain with more of that tweaked out-of-the-side-of-the-mouth bugeyed blues holler...
That's followed by the over sixteen glorious guitar-centric minutes of "Low Lifes", a moody, mesmerizing epic of stretched out six string psych action. And then, they rock out the 2:38 duration of the disc's final number "Move Back!". As for the tracks we didn't touch on, "Bad River", "Gimme The Awesome", "Coming Down The Stairs", you can more or less guess at descriptions from the above.
So, the verdict - this gets better n' better as it goes along, though we still find it tough to tolerate the vocals, which are a tongue in cheek tribute to ZZ Top we guess. Struth, if we didn't think the Endless Boogie guys were NYC hipsters taking the piss, we might cut 'em more slack on that. Like, if they were Finnish... but that's hardly fair. Still, the guitars are way cool (if'n you like geeetar), but vocals sorta sound like it's a joke. Yr mileage may vary. You do pretty much get what you'd expect from a band called Endless Boogie! Fans of Wooden Shjips, Itavayla, and of course ZZ Top should check it out.
Here's the second album for No Quarter from Brooklyn's Endless Boogie, and boy howdy do they live up to their name, there's a couple songs here upwards of eight minutes long, also tracks that clock in at 9:36, 10:49, and even 22:36! That one, entitled "A Life Worth Leaving", is the album's finale, recorded live on cassette for maximum sweat and grit and grunt. Though the whole album isn't much different. With extreme repetitive blues rock grooves, Beefheartian holler, and loads of wild electric geetar wail, it's hypnotic shitkickin' psychedelia like Wooden Shjips and ZZ Top and Circle and the Rolling Stones all jammin' together for ever and ever.
If you liked EB's previous album Focus Level, you'll like Full House Head too. And like we said about that record, the one thing that sometimes doesn't work for us is the vocals, they're a bit too "authentic" to really be authentic, if you know what we mean. But we could be wrong, maybe the singer (whom we assume is also playing guitar or something) really is a grizzled old white blues hippie dude with a long beard, wearing a floppy leather hat, and spitting tobacco juice out the side of his mouth when not pouring the whiskey in. 'Cause that's what he sounds like, or sounds like he's trying to sound like. But anyway he certainly shuts up and plays his guitar plenty so we're not really complaining. And actually, when he is on the mic, we like him at his most gruff, psychotic and strangled, like the ranting of "Top Dollar Speaks His Mind", not so much the more intelligible singing/speaking of "Slow Creep", which is one of the album's mellower moments, if you can call a nearly 11 minute long track a moment.
But mellow this mostly isn't. Mesmeric, though, yes. At their best, Endless Boogie's psychedelic choogle gets positively savage, and we start thinking, it's like Blue Cheer's Randy Holden crankin' it out backed by the Plastic Ono Band rhythm section, or something equally fantastical. Not sure if it really sounds like that, but that we'd even think it for a second is a good thing. So, yeah, while we once had our doubts about this band, again we've been convinced. The real deal, or what passes for in this day and age. Go unto it and get into it, brothers and sisters! Unless the name Endless Boogie totally turns you off. In which case, 'tis truth in advertising, thus this ain't for you.
Endless Boogie continue to do what they do best, endlessly boogie-ing, on this their third album for No Quarter. If you've heard their other two records (we hope), if you're a fan of their other two (we are), then you have a not-so-rough idea of what the heck the haps are here, and oughta dig Long Island big time. Boasting a scary/spooky cover painting that looks more like it's meant for a black metal album, Long Island is all asprawl - over four vinyl sides or one literally jam-packed (nearly 80 minutes long) compact disc side - with EB's trademark by now Stones meets Beefheart meets ZZ Top meets Wooden Shjips style of old school sixties record collectin' bluesy choogle 'til ya droogle extreme jammage damage. For those of you not familiar with these NYC (by way of the fabled crossroads, perhaps) jammers, please do go read our reviews of Focus Level and Full House Head - in fact we were just reading 'em over ourselves the other day and thinkin', hey wow good job on those reviews, we should relist those records just so folks will scope them again. But anyway, they'll give you a decent idea what's Long Island is all about, too. But, if you want a review of this IN this review, here's the rundown�
Vocalist "Top Dollar" (his vox a potential dealbreaker for some, as we've previously noted, depending on whether you believe or care if his maniacal gritty drawl is authentic or parodic or not) does his old blues coot holler over the guitar blurt and rhythmic churn of these eight tracks, none of 'em short, all (except "Taking Out the Trash") with fairly cryptic/esoteric titles. They range from moody numbers wherein Endless Boogie "bring it down" and Top Dollar reigns it in, to put forth a semi-spoken Nick Cave-y sorta vibe, to power rockin' bangers aswirl with plentiful 'lectric geetar psych soloing, a preponderance of the tracks leaning to the latter cantankerous category, or at least in the murky middle ground of mesmeric instrumental groovin', so get ready for the rumble.
Just imagine a world in which there's only one kind of music: the blues. As the basis for ALL other types of music. (Ok, maybe this is almost true, but take the idea to an extreme). So there's no rock, just blues rock. No electronica, only, uh, blues electronica. No black metal, only blues black metal. No reggaeton, only blues reggaeton. And no tranced out throbbing krautrock except, well, ENDLESS BOOGIE. Makes sense they'd be on the same label what's put out records by Circle, Pharoah Overlord, and The Psychic Paramount.
Vinyl version is a gatefold, with download, fyi.
To a certain degree, Endless Humiliation sound pretty much exactly what a band called Endless Humiliation -should- sound like. The review we read described EH as a mix of Ildjarn and Hijokaidan, which was enough for us to track some of these down. And heck, that's not all that far off the mark.
A total face melting wall of blacknoise, a continuous blastbeat beneath a churning, ever shifting sea of harsh hissing buzz, blown out circuit blowing distortion, crumbling clouds of processed vocal chaos, thick sheets of feedback, this is definitely NOISE, but that damn drum beat, and we seem to hear riffs, whether they're there or not, this is the sort of thing that puts all those other noisy black metal bands to shame. For Endless Humiliation, noise is an instrument, with which they craft some virulent and abject black fury.
Blasting crusty D-beat style drumming, pounding away beneath a cloud of Merzbowian freakout, shrieking vox, guitars? Maybe, but if so, they've been melted down and poured over the speakers, the sound shifts dramatically and fantastically throughout, from gritty and lo-fi, to brittle and tinny, to thick and corrosive to muted and washed out to sharp and jagged, and those drums just keep pounding away, the whole record throbbing and churning and heaving, we hear Dead C, Prurient, Akitsa, Bone Awl, Malveillance, Hijokaidan, Incapacitants, lots and lots of blasting pounding rrrrrrooooooaaaaaaar. But amidst all this noisiness and brutality and mayhem, there are some seriously sublime moments, like halfway through side two, when the sounds all lock tight into this high end drone, the drums an insanely repetitive metronomic plod, the guitars or synths or whatever the fuck is making that racket coalesce into a near static sheet of high end buzz, the whole thing managing to somehow sound more than noisy, tense, intense and dramatic. Oh and noisy. Totally killer. Noisefreaks will need this for SURE. Metalheads who like their blasting and thrashing just dripping with blown out buzz, and spewing white hot gouts of in-the-red NOISE, well then this is for you too.
Wicked packaging, hand silkscreened on thick cardstock, super striking, inside and out, comes with one photocopied insert, and one full color insert. And pretty sure it's crazy limited too...
Very impressive. Much less randomly aurally assaultive than her previous works. Atari Teenage Riot's Ms Endo has steadied her aim, and carefully selected her angles of attack. Not a constant barrage of pummelling abrasiveness, but instead more of a
Finally managed to get our hands on a few copies of the 2014 debut from this Japanese
'Catastrophic Noise Metal' band, newly reissued on domestic vinyl by our pals at Hydra Head, and holy shit, this is some crazy, noisy, confusional, brilliant stuff. And as always, a Japanese band takes a sound and transforms it into something completely next level and bafflingly over the top. Although in this case, it's like Endon took the music of ten different bands, and mashed it all together into one swirling chaotic metal mess. And it's glorious. It's like Boris crossed with Melt Banana crossed with Unholy Grave then run through a battery of damaged stomp boxes, adding all manner of industrial crunch and crumble, tripped out backwards FX, echo drenched vocals, the sound seems to be anchored by some unholy grindcore/black metal hybrid, furious blasting beats and frenzied riffing, but depending on the song, it can sound grim and black, or totally nutzoid and super psychedelic. The sound also can collapse into a sprawl of end-of-song noise, but sculpted into dense swirls of drones, freaked out blasts of feral hardcore can suddenly splinter into abstract electronics, demented ambience drifts through fields of chaotic noise-jazz-splatter, death metal vokills, doomy decay riffage, again all blended up into a dizzyingly WTF? sonic concoction. It's exhausting, but utterly exhilarating, and for anyone who grew up listening to the Boredoms, and Hanatarash, and the Ruins, and Space Streakings, and Boris obviously (Atsuo from Boris produced this record btw), this seems like a (il)logical metallic, sonic extension of all that wild and wooly weirdness.
We got VERY few copies of this, and while we should be able to get more, probably best to grab one quick, or be prepared to wait patiently as we try to restock.
