Debut release from local lo-fi minimal bedroom synth poppers Exray's, and it comes in the form of one of the most lavishly packaged cassette tapes we've seen in AGES.
Born of now defunct SF twang-flecked classic rock / folk combo Ray's Vast Basement, the Exray's duo, craft short sharp slabs of synth soaked minimal pop, the keyboards wheezing and shimmering, the programmed rhythms sparse and skeletal, the vocals weary and laid back, the Sparklehorse vibe of RVB still in full effect, but here cast more in the form of the woozy, languid vocalizing, which perfectly balances the warm mechanical pop, which itself is rife with little bits of twang, and classic FM radio melodies, while the sound itself shifts from crisp and cool, to warm and wonderfully muted and murky, an ever shifting blend of classic pop/rock songsmithery and home brewed electronics, the sound dusty and worn, dreamy and sun dappled, an old timey vision of the future, modern music crafted through unmodern means, really really cool
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. The J-card full color, spray painted metallic silver on the outside, and elaborately lazer cut, leaving all sorts of geometric cut outs, revealing different colors and panels, includes a tiny triangle insert with the link to an mp3 download.
Latest from this local electronic pop combo, who construct their songs mad scientist style, wrapping lilting melodies in strange looped mechanical melodies, weaving buzzing synths into fields of glitch and static, the production simultaneously low fidelity, lush and layered. Pulsing and pulsating darkly electronic one minute, playful lo-fi electro pop the next, usually the two wound into one, a dark folkiness underpinning the modern sci-fi sounds, the result a strange hybrid of folky pop (not that far removed from mainman Jon Bernson's previous outfit Ray's Vast Basement), and modern electronic pop, the record seeming to follow a trajectory that starts out fully electronic, and gradually becomes more song based, but the best moments are definitely where the line between the two remains blurred, like on "Dark_Light", which is a low slung slow groover, that has a sort of sci-fi soul vibe, a loping rhythm wreathed in slithery melodies, and cool boy/girl harmonies, or the old school new wave electro pop of "Tresspassing", which again infuses the sound with a more standard folkiness which makes for a curious combo.
Comes packaged in a full color J-card, and includes a link to a download of the full album as well.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Take the brass of Eastern European group Fanfare Ciocarila, throw in a healthy dose of Test Dept. circa A Good Night Out, turn the punk rock knob up to ten and what do you get? Why San Francisco's very own inimitable Extra Action Marching Band. While we've been lucky enough to enjoy them here live for a few years now, a recording to share with our geographically challenged customers has been a long time coming. The twelve tracks on this disc were recorded live on the Motorship Stubnitz in July of 2004 while the band was on a European tour. A German ship built in 1964 and purchased by Swiss idealist Urs Blaser, the Stubnitz now serves as a floating cultural center and includes in its berth art studios, labs, workshops, two performance venues and a recording studio. Like any self respectin marching band, the Extra Action's core repertoire are arrangements of "popular" tunes for brass and drums, only the tunes they choose to cover are perhaps a little more esoteric than your average marching band. The theme to "Enter The Dragon", and "Lucky Seven" from Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke and (maybe not that obscure, but a fucking great arrangement none the less) Black Sabbath's "The Wizard". A definite must have for fans of those popular Poly High and Schoolhouse Funk comps!
The Extra Glenns is two musicians near and dear to Aquarius' heart: John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats and Franklin Bruno (Nothing Painted Blue and an esteemed solo artist). Together they've brought their li'l side project Extra Glenns to full fruition
Mountain Goats alert!! Mountain Goats alert!! Fans, you don't want to miss this wonderful new full length starring MG main man John Darnielle and his tuneful comrade Nothing Painted Blue's Franklin Bruno. They have decided to shed a couple of letters in the moniker of their collaborative project. They are no longer Extra Glenns, they are now Extra Lens. Not sure why, maybe they visited an optometrist recently?! But at any rate, their recording approach hasn't changed and the musical output of their combined forces still sounds terrific. Darnielle first writes and records his trademark speak-sing vocals and folksy guitar. Then, Bruno steps in to arrange and embellish his heart out - and he does it ever so tastily and tastefully, never obscuring the trademark wistful ache of Darnielle's voice which is always the focal point. In the ensuing years since their fine 2002 debut Martial Arts Weekend, Darnielle's own music has become much more fleshed out and considerably more elaborate than his barebones early works. So these days it actually more closely resembles that of Extra Lens. Definitely check out the hushed sock-you-in-the-heart "Cruiserweights" and "Programmed Cell Death". Sure to delight his legions of admirers!
For those not savvy with sports terminology, "undercard" refers to the preliminary rounds in series of matches leading up to the final main event. On the cover, there is a vacant boxing ring. We aren't certain if it is pre-match or post-match... or who was the victor. However, we think it's safe to say though that no punches were likely thrown between Bruno and Darnielle in the making of this album. Ha ha! Together they shine in each of its dozen flourishing folk pop numbers... and it is the listener who is ultimately the winner. Recommended!
Extradition were an obscure early seventies Australian psych-folk group very much influenced by the British Folk revival, in particular, Fairport Convention and Pentangle. Fronted by singer, Shayna Karlin, whose high timbre voice falls somewhere between Pentangle's Jaqui McShee and June Tabor, and multi-instrumentalist and sometimes singer Colin Campbell, who wrote most of the bands material. What sets them apart is how they shade their haunting and graceful compositions with an adventurous use of natural elements as instruments including leaves, branches, water, sticks and stones along with more exotic instrumentation of Chinese and Turkish gongs, harmonium, harpsichord, tablas and a Lebanese bell tree. This creates a more alchemical binding of music and nature that transports us to another place rather than grounding us in a traditional past. This cd contains the whole of their lone 1971 album plus six bonus live tracks including covers of Tom Paxton's "Hold On To Me, Babe" and Leroy Carr's "In the Evening" which was also covered by Karen Dalton. Beautiful!
More amazing voodoo groove.
1970 voodoo groove, amazing.
For a while there, Belgian label NOTHingness was one of our favorite sources for grim droning black ambience. Pretty much everything they released was fantastic. Well, NOTHingness sadly is no more, but in it's place, has risen Consouling Sounds, a new label focusing less on dark ambient and dronemusic and more on post rock, space rock and drone rock, with a distinct focus on up and coming unknown artists. The label is split into two distinct entities. They recently released the Bungled & The Botched cd from Nadja (now out of print, sorry) via the 'Soul' imprint, home for established acts, and this, the debut from Spanish metallic post rockers Exxasens is the first release in their 'Con ' series, limited cd-r releases of unknown bands, offering people an inexpensive chance to check out some new sounds.�
As mentioned above, these particular sounds come via Spain, and the weirdly named Exxasens, who while choosing a somewhat overpopulated style, do manage to do their own thing. Their sound while definitely rocking, is more on the math/post side of things than the metal, at their heaviest, they sound like a lighter Isis or maybe more like a slightly more metal Mogwai, and those heavy parts soar more than pummel, but they balance well with the more loping introspective bits. Regardless, math rockers and post rockers will definitely be in heaven, these guys certainly push all the right buttons, the drumming is intricate and mathy with some intense squalls of rapid fire double kick, the guitars ring out, chiming majestically, there also seems to be some sort of keyboard action, or perhaps that's just some extra guitars, either way, it adds all sorts of texture to the proceedings. There are some cool production tape speed tricks, a bunch of samples, but of course no vocals, this is all instrumental, every track rife with slow building elaborate arrangements, epic melodies, and some killer chops, as well as a flair for crafting some subtly catchy tunes.�
Explosions In The Sky, Pelican, Isis, Mogwai, Mono, Irepress, Souvenir's Young America, if that reads like your iTunes library, then, you probably will want to pick this up too...
Packaged in a cd sized dvd style plastic sleeve, with a full color insert. LIMITED TO 170 COPIES in two editions, both already sold out, so these are the very last copies.
This is the first we've heard from this Ohio psychedelic prog rock combo, whose sound the label compares to King Crimson and Pink Floyd, and which we're pleased to report is really not all that far off the mark, although the group take that classic prog sound and filter it through a much more modern sound, adding some serious guitar crunch, instrumental heft and some dense tripped out production. But that said, at its core, this stuff sounds pretty classic seventies prog, with soaring strings and epic synths, serious, properly sung vocals, dizzying solos, incredible harmonies, intricate arrangements, and of course loooooong songs.
Just check out the record opener, which takes up all of side A, a nearly twenty minute four part song suite called "Center Of The Sun", that channels Magma and ELP as much as it does Mugstar and White Hills. In fact the abundant progisms should definitely not keep all you space rock and psych rock freeks from digging into this stuff, cuz it most certainly IS both space-y and psychedelic, but instead of the usual endless jamming, these guys fuse killer jams, to actual songs, sprawling EPIC songs, "Center Of The Sun" being the best example, the band slipping easily from old school proto-metal sounding crunch, to dizzying mathy space-prog workouts, some cool classic rock bits, some shredding lead guitar, and some full on heart-of-the-sun space-psych freakouts, tempered with woozy washed out folk flecked drifts, and all somehow deftly woven into a seriously rad modern prog rock epic.
The three shorter tracks on the B side are equally heavy, and proggy, and intricate, killer riffing, busy drumming, weird arrangements, some soaring synths, lots of mathed out rhythms, gorgeous lush textures, and still more killer guitar jams, not to mention FX galore, definitely the sort of thing that should appeal to fans of the current crop of psychedelic space rock, and folks like us, who find little to love in modern prog. And while you don't have to love prog to dig these guys, it definitely doesn't hurt.
Includes a download code! LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered!
We figure that since AQ pal Loren Chasse is so obsessed with Martyn Bates and Eyeless In Gaza, we figured we oughta just let him review this new one:
In the endless stream of comps, there's got to be something pretty special to get this listener to take notice.� For most listeners, when an anthology by a favorite band comes out there's the feverish question, "Are there any unreleased tracks� rarities�demos?!"�and� "What about the packaging -- any unseen art from some original pressing?" The new Eyeless in Gaza compilation Plague of Years: Songs and Instrumentals 1980-2006 released by Sub Rosa offers only token fulfillment of the first obsession by including a track from a yet unreleased Eyeless record, Summer Salt and Subway Sun (supposedly due out in 2006...guess not?).�The rest of the songs and instrumentals are all from full length records in the Eyeless catalog, but for three semi-rare songs from an old Sub Rosa Myths compilation from the early Eighties. So what's left for someone who's already 'in the know' about this legendary Cherry Red Records band? Not much but for a sensitively-mixed document of the musical prowess of Martyn Bates and Peter Becker, including some of their best songs -- "Fever Pitch" and "Bite" (is that a typo on this release, labeling it "Ever Pitch"...?), and "One by One" -- mixed among examples of their more mysterious and beautiful instrumental pieces. For a potential initiate to Eyeless In Gaza -- that is, someone who's perhaps all over the New Weird Now folk freakout and who might also have a soft spot for the drone and clang of such artists as Organum, Andrew Chalk or :zoviet*france: -- this comp would indeed be the perfect introduction. And if that potential initiate harbors a taste for beautifully fruity vocals (used only in adoration and reverence, Martyn!), then this could be a heavenly match, especially on those nights alone, rain pounding the window, black candles throwing moody shadows. If things worked out, of course, this comp might very well end up getting checked into the used bin on one's way to�consuming the entire Eyeless in Gaza catalog.�So� while offering little to the fan other than reassurance that Eyeless in Gaza is still awesome 26 years after its first record, Plague of Years succeeds as a flare for alerting new ears!
Eyeless In Gaza's troubadour songs could be of courtly loves or of the occultish mysticism found on the soundtrack to "The Wicker Man," and seeping with the dark rich production and theatrical vocals that wouldn't be out of place on any of This Mortal Coil's albums.
We kinda flipped for the debut 7" from these guys a while back, and while for whatever reason we never managed to get it reviewed, the killer A side from that single launches the group's new full length, and it remains a potential top pop jam of the year, total hazy, jangly Teenage Fanclub style shimmer pop, an impossibly dreamy melody, soft vocals and lovely harmonies, with shadowy minor key moments laced throughout the track's otherwise sunshiny jangle. It's another one of those records, that if you're anything like us, you might have to hit repeat 5 or 10 times before you can make it past the opener (sound sample below). But go ahead. We can wait.
The Eyelids are fronted by Chris Slusarenko (who's played with Boston Spaceships, Decemberists, Elliott Smith, Stephen Malkmus and more) and John Moen, and along with the rest of the 'Lids, they fuse unabashed NZ / Flying Nun worship with plenty of sonic nods to the aforementioned Teenage Fanclub, not to mention other pop faves from the past like Eugenius, BMX Bandits, as well as early R.E.M (and other Athens groups of the time), some of that LA Paisley Underground sound, and of course the Beatles loom large, how could they not? Every track here an impossible jangle pop gem, all chiming clean guitars, wistful melancholic melodies, sun dappled strum, the vocals all sixties and softly psychedelic, and hooks galore, with every song (once you get past the first) vying for best of the bunch. There's plenty of darkness and shadow too hidden amongst the sunshine, with some tracks slipping into haunting minor key melancholia, but even then, those moments are paired with some pure pop bliss. Ovens / Tony Molina fans would do well to check these guys out too, cuz if you couldn't tell, Molina is a serious Teenage Fanclub obsessive.
Definite contender for pop record of the year. And there's that single still available too, with two B sides that rival any of the songs from the record proper. Just ask if you want one of those too (you probably do)!
Reissue label Lion Productions is doing their job right, bringing us this collection of the obscure but oh so killer material from The Eyes. Tough '60s garage rockin' here, from these Ealing, England mods. The disc starts off with the one-two punch of their 1965 debut single, "When The Night Falls" b/w "Rowed Out". A really raw, proto-freakbeat smasher all right, A and B sides both. Stinging guitar, primal beats, and equally raw vox. Catchy too! And there's more, plenty more to like here. What made The Eyes sound so great? Well, maybe their songwriting talent, maybe their edginess. You can get an idea of these snotty young punks' attitude from the title of the b-side of their second single: "My Degeneration". Which helped get them banned by the BBC for their subversive lyrics! Not that anyone today would likely find 'em terribly offensive... 'Tis true, though, that the lyrics to "My Degeneration" were subtly suggestive, moreso when you learn that the the word "coffee", mentioned many times in the song, was a mod euphemism for having sex. And mods liked actual coffee too. The last straw, according to the extensive liner notes (thanks Lion!), was when BBC suits saw 'em perform a song entitled "I Can't Get No Resurrection" complete with a crucifix stage prop. So, though somehow they did get to play with the likes of The Kinks, The Move, and The Action, and got some pirate radio play too, they were a BBC no-no and thus failed to have a hit single. With record sales just not happening (making their releases today quite rare and collectable!) they were forced into doing a "tribute" record to the Rolling Stones, under the name The Pupils, just to make a lousy 180 pounds. Thus tracks 17-28 included here, all covers of Stones songs (or covers of songs the Stones themselves had covered!). In another world, maybe the Stones would have been covering The Eyes... well maybe not but there are definitely enough bad ass '60s beat rockers here to make this a recommended purchase for any fan of garagey goodness.
You may not be aware of Andee's psychic precognitive abilities. He predicted that Eyesinweasel (which is fronted by Guided By Voices' Tobin Sprout) would sound like GBV but is not as good. Behold, Eyesinweasel sounds exactly as Andee said it would! Look out Uri Geller, there's a new kid on the telepathic circuit.
Lord knows we love us a one man band. Whether it's some shrouded figure who crafts grim black metal in a dim corner of a blackened cave or a goofy old man with a bass drum on his back and cymbals between his knees. Well, local one man band Ezeetiger falls somewhere right in the middle. Sort of. Clad in a big ol' furry bear suit and clutching a bear in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Ezeetiger aka Anthony, spews out a bit ol' thorny squall of splattery prog synths, cheesy wedding organs, squiggly spaced out melodies and surprisingly hooky pop, all buried in a murky sweaty musical knee to the crotch, and buffeted from all sides by ultra distorted garage rock scuzz, wildly careening overblown drums, and occasional bursts of buzzy, howled death metal crunch. Once in a while, the weirdness gets reined in and the clouds part, revealing, gentle, lilting vocals over gently strummed guitars or stretches of head nodding, fuzzed out Krautrock, but it's never long before gnarled drone-psych claws reach up from the abyss and haul the squirming struggling song back under!
We've totally fallen under this Australian group's sonic spell, an intoxicating concoction of hazy, beautifully dirgy, psychedelic synths. The dreamy, disintegrating songs on Hide Before Dinner wash over the listener, inducing a gloriously drugged out hypnotic state from the beginning to the very end of this wonderful record.
One of our customers thought F INGERS sounded like the perfect combination of two of our favorite labels: Not Not Fun and Fonal. And we totally agree! Equal parts Paavoharju and Pocahaunted, La Vampires and Islaja. There's a ghostly quality to these songs, which seem to hover and shimmer with a woozy and darkly tinted gracefulness. It's almost like Nico crooning from beyond the grave, her detached but sexy voice filtered through a bank of FX pedals operated by Noveller and Andy Stott. We could definitely imagine F INGERS touring with fellow Australians Fabulous Diamonds, whose sound is like a more driving and rhythmic version of F INGERS' melted music aesthetic. Totally gorgeous!
F-Space is the brainchild of Scot Jenerik and Ethan Port, two veterans of the West Coast noise / punk community. In many ways, Jenerik fully embodies the Burning Man ethos (or at least the way Burning Man presented itself about a decade ago), still proclaiming that the apocalypse is coming and when it does, he'll be out in the desert celebrating the destruction of society along with a bunch of other Mad Max renegades with their recycled art cars and homebuilt flamethrowers. His solo performances and installations find Jenerik in a literal circle of fire while hammering out post-Neubauten jack-hammer rhythms on abused pieces of metal. This visual appeal for immolation infiltrates the stage presence of F-Space, while the musical side shows much greater ties to his creative roots harkening back to his days in Savage Republic and Death Ride 69. Sprawling blasts of dueling monochord guitars drive the F-Space sound which marches through pounding tribal drums (compliments of Aleph Kali of Chrome) and slow-burning gritty walls of guitar sound which situate themselves somewhere between the early Skullflower albums and a slightly less psychedelic Acid Mother's Temple. On occasion, the Arabic motifs which haunted the later Savage Republic recordings emerge on F-Space as well. If DIY destruction is your bag, then boy do we have a record for you!
F/i have been somewhat of a buried treasure since the early eighties, spewing a rich brew of buzzy psychedelia, sludgy stoner doom, and extended space jams over the course of numerous lps and cassettes, but never really reaching out beyond the space rock underground. That's a shame as there has been a recent plenitude of reissues, making available again some of F/i's most seminal recordings, on cd for the first time, reminding us what a psych/space rock powerhouse these guys were. And still are! These guys never really stopped kicking out the jams. A Question For The Somnambulist finds the band back to its original lineup with the return of founding member Richard Franecki, and while one might hope this would mean a fiery, triumphant comeback of amp melting, spine crushing intensity, you also have to consider that it's been 20+ years since the launch of F/i, and these guys are getting older, and wiser, and mellower. So while there are moments where the whole thing threatens to combust and leave your stereo a charred husk, most of AQFTS is more on the dreamy, hypnotic, Krautrock side, reminding us quite a bit of Finnish drone rockers Circle or local psych rock tribe Subarachnoid Space, with warm fuzzy riffs, swirls of squiggly Moogs, propulsive infinitive rhythms, and the occasional squall of freakout guitar.
Since the beginning of the eighties, the strangely monickered F/i have been turning their amps up to 11, firing up the bongs, filling their space ship with all manner of effects and illicit mind altering substances and setting the controls for the heart of the sun. Here we are more than two decades later and F/i are still drifting in a dreamy and drug addled Hawkwind meets Loop meets Acid Mothers Temple meets Spacemen 3 meets way too many drugs sonic stupor and it still sounds so good. Music to take drugs to make music to take drugs by for sure! Huge streaks of reverb drenched distorted guitar, swirls of synthesizer swoop and sizzle, electronic beeps and bloops and burbles, throbbing, rumbling basslines, Hendrixian psych guitar freakouts and simple krautrock rhythms keeping the whole thing from floating off into the atmosphere. From full on Stooges-y psych stomp, to blissed out shimmering space trance, to smeary echoey ambience to almost Stereolab / Neu! style synth heavy krautrock, F/i manage to take whatever sonic course they're laid and make sure it also involves flying way too close to a black hole and thus being doused by white hot radioactive guitars or dense clouds of thick fuzzy synths or being bombarded by blown out cymbal sizzle, and burning up in a gloriously dreamy and druggy white hot space rock ball of flame!
Final blast from the past in this F/i reissue blitz of late and it's a doozy. The first half is a reissue of the Blue Star lp, three lengthy tracks of spaced out fucked up Hawkwind meets Gore meets Acid Mothers Temple outer-space-psych. Sludgy riffs are pounded into oblivion, splintering into shards of psychedelic swoosh and druggy shimmer. Endlessly and gorgeously hypnotic. The second half is the F/i half of their split with Vocokesh, and is way more electronic. Same vibe and feel as the first half, but with the riffs becoming weird modulated tones, and the propulsive drumming turning into mechanical throbs and pulses. Imagine a krautrock Wolf Eyes or Factrix covering Sabbath. This is some awesome shit. As recommended as the rest of the recent F/i reissues!
Maybe the most anxiously awaited release in Lexicon Devil's comprehensive series of F/i reissues. Paradise Out Here, originally released in 1989, might just be the heaviest, most freaked out, most spaced out of all the F/i records. All it takes is about one minute of opener "From Poppy With Love", an acid fried, ultra freaked out, swirling psychrock blowout to understand why. A chugging scuzzy garage rock riff scratches out a relentless spacey stomp beneath a massive roiling cloud of FX that make Acid Mothers Temple's arsenal look like a broken down collection of Casio distortion boxes and Fisher-Price keyboards. So heavy and so spacey. Monster Magnet, Hawkwind, AMT, Colour Haze, UFOmammut, White Hills, Comets On Fire, the Heads, the Telescopes, Atomic Bitchwax, Loop. If those are the kind of bands that get your blood boiling and your bong bubbling then this record is definitely for you. Extended excursions into the outer reaches of deep deep deep space, where the stars blink and twinkle in dizzyingly psychedelic colors, everywhere you look guitars are all twisted and distorted, thick slabs of rumbling bass plow through reverbed swirls of shimmer, melodies explode and splinter into jagged bits in gloriously incendiary bursts, everything is blurry and swathed in a thick drug rock haze, and everywhere you look huge slabs of blown out wah guitar drift past, like fluffy prismatic clouds, underneath it all, drums pound a never ending rhythm, while being endlessly pelted with synth squiggles and a veritable hail storm of bleeps and bloops and beeps. Woah. This record is so relentless and about as tripped out and psychedelic as a record can get without completely collapsing in on itself.
If there was ever a record that made us want to get super high, turn off all the lights, rock the fuck out and drift WAY WAY WAY OUT.... it's this one.
The Australian label Lexicon Devil has certainly picked an unusual scene to ressurrect from the mires of terminal obscurity, as they've been reissuing a handful of records from the mid-'80s psych-electronic-noise rock scene of Milwaukee. It's probably a stretch to qualify this as a 'scene,' since the bands in question had only a handful of rotating members in a couple of guises, specifically F/i, Boy Dirt Car, and Vocokesh. F/i began as a trio with Richard Franecki, Greg Kurczewski, and Brian Wensing, although Franecki parted ways in 1990 to form Vocokesh and record solo albums, leaving Wensing in charge of F/i, which theoretically is still operational. Despite its subtitle as being rare and unreleased, "The Past Darkly / The Future Lightly" was originally issued as a 3LP set on RRRecords with a tiny pressing of 300 copies in 1989, and makes for a pretty good overview of F/i's diverse history that runs from gritty electronic passages to dusted psych rock explosions. The earlier electronic pieces are clearly the best work in F/i's catalogue coming across as droning fields of sound not unlike Conrad Schnitzler or MB. The move to distorted and wah-wah heavy hypno-space-rock never quite rises above bearing a passing resemblance to Hawkwind, Blue Cheer, or the early Skullflower rock explosions. Pretty great stuff though.
We made the last record from this Australian drum and organ duo Record Of The Week back in 2010, a glorious concoction equal parts simple stripped down krautrock rhythms, swirling psychedelic organ mantras and ethereal vocal incantations. That Fabulous Diamonds album was a bit like some psychedelic zoner pop melted down into something much more primal and abstract, a sound at once alien and mysterious, but that somehow retained ghostly vestiges of the pop songs that somehow spawned it, the sound slipping woozily from looped lunar hypnorock to mesmerizingly motorik minimalism and back again.
This new record takes the same sound, and reimagines it as something even MORE abstract, even MORE psychedelic and sprawling, each song a single idea, looped and layered and strung into a dizzying stretch of tranced out rhythmic mesmer, the vocals this time around seemingly more of an afterthought, with several songs foregoing vocals entirely. The first half of the record seems to inhabit a sonic orbit slightly closer to conventional pop, but only slightly. Opener "Inverted Vamp" unfurls a warm, murky rhythmic churn, as if it were simply the intro to some dark retro psych pop jam, but instead, the sound loops, cyclical and repetitive, in fact, for the first two minutes, the band lock tight into a tranced out slo-mo groove that as far as we're concerned could have continued that way for the entirety of the record, and it STILL would have been Record Of The Week. Instead, the vocals drift in, all dreamy and hazy, a plink plonk melody drifts beneath the undulating layers of buzz and whir, the whole thing sounding like a Stereolab or Broadcast record produced by King Tubby, and perhaps also spinning at the wrong speed. Woozy and washed out and so gloriously blissed out and hypnotic.
"John Song" is another drum driven chunk of dirgey murk-pop, that again, sans vox, sounds like some sort of slowcore This Heat, but it's the vocals that transform the sound into something much more distinctive, in this case drifting in and out, alongside some strange dubbed out synths, in fact, the dub vibe looms large throughout. Where Peaking Lights take dub and make it all dreamy and sunshiney, Fabulous Diamonds, drag dub into the dark, wrap it in shadows, and douse it in soft focus noise, letting it careen lazily in a field of warm swirling thrum.
About midway through, the record begins to remind us of African Head Charge, or even Muslimgauze, that same sort of rhythmic tranceout, still heavily dubby, but dark and drifty and spacey and all about the texture, and atmosphere, and of course the rhythms. "Lothario" becomes a total AHC style groover as the track coalesces into something darkly driving, and laced with warm whirring ominously minor key synths, it's probably our second favorite track here.
After a few more shorter tracks, again heavier on the vocals, the sound drifts back toward that mysterious murky pop that defined the first few tracks, but even at its poppiest, the sound constantly shifts and transforms, slipping easily into something distinctly unpop, looped and layered, pulsing and pulsating. The sound laced with Reich/Riley like organ arrangements, swirls of fragmented melodies, those divine vocals, and of course the unwavering rhythms.
Closer "Downhill" though is definitely our favorite, and it feels like the whole record was working up to this nearly 11 minute slow burner, beginning with a super spare skeletal tribal beat, beneath pulsing synth squelch, it's nearly 4 minutes (4 gloriously mesmerizing minutes!) before the sound shifts noticeably, a second organ part gradually surfacing, the sound growing more and more dense, then a third, laying down a sinister bassline, and finally, the sound slips into a creepy cinematic swirl, worthy of Carpenter or Goblin for sure, and fans of all that retro synth soundtrackery, this track will knock you on your ass, somehow growing more and more melodic, and more and more intense, a sprawling swirling psychedelic kosmische blissout of the highest order. So great! (Vinyl version upcoming, by the way.)
Much has been made about the Dual 7"+ cd set that Fabulous Diamonds released a few years back through Nervous Jerk, a small Australian imprint which had the good fortune of also releasing an Animal Collective single. Dual did make an appearance here at Aquarius, although it arrived rather mysteriously (perhaps from the band, perhaps not) and vanished after just a single play of the disc on a busy Saturday afternoon. Yes, that's always a good sign when we don't have to ballyhoo the merits of a record, and the strength of the tunes speak for themselves. Woozy hypnosis from organ, sax, drums, monotone female vocals, and lots of delay patterning is what we can remember from back in 2007. The arrival of Fabulous Diamonds' II (whoops, somehow we missed their self-titled Siltbreeze LP in '08) jogged that memory to the forefront of our collective mind, and we're happy that at least we got hear those early tracks at least once. BUT, damn if Fabulous Diamonds haven't made a stellar album here with II.
This Melbourne duo - Nisa Venerosa (drums, voice) and Jarrod Zlatic (organ, effects) - channels a quasi-mystical hybrid of post-Terry Riley time-lag accumulation and the proto-electronica riffs of the Silver Apples through deliriously simple means. Venerosa lays down a slinky percussive groove without much in the way of variation what so ever, much like finest of motorik krautrock drummers (e.g. Jaki Liebezeit, Zappi Diermaier, etc.), and pairs it with Zlatic's spellbinding layers of interwoven phases, loops and moire patterns snatched from his arpeggiating mantras on organ and synthesizer. Venerosa's stoned lullabies are well suited in their simplicity and echoplex ooze to the Diamonds' hypnotic arrangements. On this album, three short tracks about three and half minutes each are bracketed by two lengthy hypno-zoner jams. Those untitled shorts are great on their own, with curiously catchy phrases of repetitive pop minimalism, but Fabulous Diamonds are clearly at their best when sprawling their rhythms and sounds over longer durations, when Zlatic's organs, electronics, and loops have plenty of time for a lunar trajectory around the dark side and back. Anyone with a passing fancy for the likes of Stereolab, Can, Pocahaunted, Aavikko, Shogun Kunitoki, and of course The Silver Apples would be well served with these Fabulous Diamonds. Excellent!
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Brand new batch of twisted noise pop malfunction from Steve Peffer, the mastermind behind fucked up noisemakers Homostupids. Fans of the 'Stupids stumbling lo-fi Neanderthal crush will find much to love here, but Factorymen takes the demented buzz and crunch of Homostupids, and fashions it into something a bit poppier, and weirdly enough, more electronic, creating some sort of knuckle dragging buzz drenched electro-pop, that takes the warped pop of folks like Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, and adds some Stooges-y swagger and some dirge rock guitar buzz, not to mention the whole thing sounds like it was recorded on a cassette that's been sitting the dashboard of a car for the last decade, all hiss and warble and plenty of Faxed Head like sonic drop outs, but all that only adds to the deliriously demented sound.
Tape speeds shift, the fidelity slips from muffled and murky to brittle and blown out, the songs are all over the map from garage-y pound to blurred hypnotic thump, to total eighties style FM radio cheese, to blurred blissy strangely sunshiney Breakfast Club pop, to rhythmic Butthole Surfers like mesmer, to downtuned synth laced space doom dirge, al woven into a druggy and lo-fi, synthy, outsider, electronic, psychedelic warped pop that almost sounds like a drug addled Stephin Merritt record on Not Not Fun or Olde English Spelling Bee, but with just enough crunch to keep the sound at least tangentially noise rocky. Bizarre and sorta brilliant, should most definitely appeal to fans of James Ferraro, Ariel Pink, Rusted Shut, Rangers, Pink Noise and other similarly twisted pop deconstructionists.
Includes a download of the whole record, as well as the previous Factorymen record, 25 tracks in all! The first FM record another batch of even more murky minimalist drug pop...
After months of digging, we were finally able to track some of these down. For those of you not in the know, Factrix just happen to be AQ faves Wolf Eyes favorite band, so much so that not only do they try to sound like them, but to this day they continue to send their industrial-doom heroes letters of gratitutde and worship! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 20+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Reseach Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and -- Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on trangressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records. In their short lifespan from 1978 - 1982, Factrix developed a language that clearly rivalled that of their European comrades; but in many ways, Factrix owed their sound to their San Francisco roots, as they inverted the paisley pretenses of psychedelia into a grim seance of sound in which free love became sexual taboos, universal peace became soul-crushing dread, and transcendence became morbidity. This inversion of psychedelia used many of the same tools of Haight-Ashbury in composing through non-structured improvisations as well as through a steady diet of psilocybin mushrooms; but the sound came out all wrong. Factrix devolved '70s pop banalities into dissonant slabs of noise with squiggling guitar feedback and all-encompassing dirges from over-distorted basslines, with a continuous, tinny pulse from an abused drum machine. The process of free association carried over in the vocal duties, which were typically shared amongst the chief protagonists Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph Jacobs, although industrial culture celeb Monte Cazzaza was also known to offer his demented lisp to Factrix.
While not presented as a 'best-of' collection, "Artifact" features the best material that Factrix had produced, including all of the tracks from their seminal "Schentot" LP on Adolescent Records and a ton of live material, which has been digitally salvaged so as to sound great. "Artifact" is an essential artifact, in fact and a great surprise!
About ten years ago, we championed the San Francisco industrial prodigies Factrix via their Artifact 2cd anthology released on Storm, in fact, we made it a Record Of The Week. That went out of print quickly; so we are now quite grateful to Superior Viaduct for at last reissuing two of this band's seminal recordings! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 30+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Research Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and - Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on transgressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records. In their short lifespan from 1978 - 1982, Factrix developed a language that clearly rivalled that of their European comrades; but in many ways, Factrix owed their sound to their San Francisco roots, as they inverted the paisley pretenses of psychedelia into a grim seance of sound in which free love became sexual taboos, universal peace became soul-crushing dread, and transcendence became morbidity. This inversion of psychedelia used many of the same tools of Haight-Ashbury in composing through non-structured improvisations as well as through a steady diet of psilocybin mushrooms; but the sound came out all wrong. Factrix devolved '70s pop banalities into dissonant slabs of noise with squiggling guitar feedback and all-encompassing dirges from over-distorted basslines, with a continuous, tinny pulse from an abused drum machine. The process of free association carried over in the vocal duties, which were typically shared amongst the chief protagonists Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph Jacobs.
Scheintot was the only studio album from Factrix, originally released on Adolescent Records in 1981. Its dark lysergic murk and obsessive decomposition crawls through scabrous guitars, clanking metal, distorted electronics, shadow-cast vocals and atmospheric doom, certainly paralleling the death-factory churn of TG's Second Annual Report and SPK's Leichenshrei. It must be stated that all of the tracks here (including the cd's two bonus tracks!) were present on the aforementioned Artifact 2cd; but with that long out of print, this becomes a recommended purchase!
About ten years ago, we championed the San Francisco industrial prodigies Factrix via their Artifact 2cd anthology released on Storm, in fact, we made it a Record Of The Week. That went out of print quickly; so we are now quite grateful to Superior Viaduct for at last reissuing two of this band's seminal recordings! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 30+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Research Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and - Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on transgressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records, even as Factrix teamed up with fellow San Franciscan provocateur Monte Cazazza for this Spartan yet very caustic live recording. California Babylon was originally released by Subterranean Records back in 1982. There are songs lurking throughout the scalding guitar noise, announced through repetitive, lurching basslines that sound like Flipper tunes played at super slow-motion. Growling slabs of toxic noise, grim electronic murk, tape collages (including some rather diabolical rants from somebody who sounds a lot like Jim Jones), and plenty of guttural No Wave deconstruction spew out from underneath those bass throbs, with Monte Cazazza occasionally spitting his own transgressive venom with his unmistakable, devilish lisp. There's even an appearance from Z'ev on a couple tracks clanking on found metal objects!
The bonus tracks on California Babylon are pretty amazing, we have to say; and all of these were in fact featured on that aforementioned Artifact compilation. On these tracks, the trio was certainly honing their songwriting craft, but they had not eschewed the noise, the murk, nor the bad vibes. "Silver River" is an awesome slab of downer, drone-rock orchestration that could very easily be mistaken for some New Zealand / Expressway gem by Gate or Alastair Galbraith, where "No Trees" reprises Factrix' searing guitar noise with staccato punk vocals and deconstructed post-punk basslines.
The accompanying dvd (which comes only with the cd edition, not the vinyl) features "Night Of The Succubus", the video that was shot at the same California Babylon live recordings. Like Scheintot, California Babylon is an essential document of San Francisco's industrial culture!
After a record on Siltbreeze, one on Sacred Bones, one on Kill Shaman, and a whole mess of singles, none of which we managed to list somehow, comes this latest full length from Seattle's Factums, a soundtrack (or faux soundtrack perhaps), that takes their gloomy gothic post punk new wave sound and gets it all tangled up with much more soundtracky elements, and it's a pretty killer combo.
So yeah, that sort of post Joy Division, depressive modern retro new wave thing these guys do so well is fully intact, but on A Primitive Future, that sound is surrounded on all sides by experimental interludes, ambient mood music, drones and driftscapes, all appropriately haunting and mysterious and cinematic.
When the band rocks, it's fierce and feral, barked distorted vocals, creepy keyboards, buzzing angular guitars, chaotic drumming, krauty motorik rhythms, darkly new wave-y and dreamily doomy and depressive, but here the band spend much more time sprawling sonically, creating sounds to accompany sights (or so we're meant to believe): shimmering expanses of soft focus hiss over field recordings, haunting stretches of gauzy druggy drift, lo-fi rumbles beneath layers of shifting grit and grime, swirls of malfunctioning music box chimes, deep muted ambient whir, murky sci-fi psychedelic swirl, clouds of abstract deconstructed reverb and detuned guitar and on and on.
Not just another dose of cold wave post punk gloom (although there are moments, instead, a spaced out abstract creepy chunk of brooding, sci-fi, new wave, cinematic ambient doom drift.
Weirdo Seattle gloompunk artrock experimentalists Factums have always been tough to describe, and somehow it seems with each new record, they push their sound even further into indescribable sonic realms. Which bring us to this, a sprawling double lp called Gilding The Lilies, which seems to be a much expanded version of the 2010 tape of the same name on Night People. And like past records, it sometimes feels like you're listening to a compilation, 'cause the songs are so totally varied, and even within songs the sound is constantly shifting, from gloomy creep, to organ driven dirge, from gothy lo-fi electro, to gorgeous Eastern style buzz drenched ragas... it's fantastic, yet also fantastically confusing. But once immersed in Factums' twisted soundworld, the songs seem to make a sort of sense, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces are different shapes, but that can be assembled in any order to create an unlimited series of final images, if that makes any sense, and even if it doesn't, that almost seems more appropriate.
There was a time where these guys had a sort of Captured Tracks / Sacred Bones vibe going on, and while that does surface here and there, the group definitely seem to to have moved well beyond any sense of pop music, only dabbling here and there, while spending most of their music crafting strange soundscapes, and conjuring up mysterious sonic spirits. Dense drone out buzz is draped over skeletal percussion, everything wreathed in billows of low end warble, that warble shaped into propulsive pulsations and wedded to a lo-fi distorted sort-of-electro rhythm, over which a deep voice wreathed in a metallic shimmer croons dramatically, only to slip right back into some sitar like buzz, long layered tones, that are soon swallowed up by an undulating sine wave tone and laid out beneath a skittery jazzy drum beat, only to dissipate into a cloud of low end thrum, and rubbery electronic rhythms, surrounded by industrial crash and clatter, which then slips darkly into a rhythmic bit of buzzy drift, and, well you get the idea. Now imagine that constant meandering sonic exploration going on for wholly three more lp sides and you've got Gilding The Lilies, a fantastic head spinning sonic descent into some abstract alternate dimension soundworld, one you might find yourself in no hurry to escape...
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Of all the recent groups channeling the spirit of cold wave and the gothic miserablism of Joy Division, Factums are by and far the absolute weirdest. Capable of whipping up incredible chunks of gloom pop, the instead, often opt for creating totally twisted gloomscapes, weird faux soundtracks, pulsing rhythmic expanses, a series of fantastically warped variants of a sound that is rapidly becoming played out. Which is why these guys remain mysterious, fascinating, and with every record, you really can't be sure what you'll get.
This one sided 12" (the B-side features and awesome etching) offers up three tracks of twisted low fidelity mystery, the first, a pulsing murky rhythm, laid beneath strange processed super rhythmic synths, all glitchy and squelchy, peppered with echo drenched vocal samples and stripped down percussion, eventually the sounds coalesce into a cool retro electro synthbuzz loopscape, super distorted, the sounds crumbling and completely in-the-red, a strange hypnotic lo-fi groove, crunchy and almost industrial sounding, laced with bits of heavy guitar buzz, all processed and clipped. Weird as fuck, but really really cool.
The 2 part second track is also weird, but in a totally different way, a creepy melancholy music box like soundscape, hazy and out of focus, mumbled vocals buried in the mix, the whole thing totally woozy and druggy, the second part introduces electronic rhythms, clouds of cymbal shimmer, strange reverbed guitar strum and warbly organ whir, a fantastically confounding dirgey, gauzey electro gloom music box ballad. Or something. Whatever it is, we dig it. A LOT!!
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With Adult., The Faint, and Fisherspooner actively reclaiming the dark theatricality of '80s electro-pop, an anthology of Fad Gadget's work couldn't have had better timing. That said, it is quite difficult to comfortably classify Fad Gadget amongst the new wave legions including OMD, Human League, and Depeche Mode, as Frank Tovey (who was pretty much the sole proprietor of Fad Gadget)
Boston psych/folk/space rockers Cul de Sac covered a Fahey tune on their first album, Ecim, and here they finally get to collaborate with their hero, an ordeal (so say the liner notes) but with quite excellent results as expected.
Check out these stylin' Brit-inflected synth-wavers from Nebraska! The Faint make music that's coolly sparse and punchy with synth sounds straight outta the '80s. And they throw in a well-placed hook or herky-jerk when they see fit. Makes me think of a young, pouty, punky Pulp. Quite good, yes.
Holy Duran Duran! I Am VSS-bender! What if Ladytron were all guys and into Talk Talk instead of drawing 'inspiration' from Kraftwerk? Yes folks, it's kinda like that. Song-oriented new wave that sounds like the '80s actually happened! Vocoded vocals,
Remixes can be pretty darn hit-or-miss. Among other things, they can breathe life into lackluster songs, or obscure the originals way far beyond any recognition, or fuse two sonic worlds into something new, magical and completely faithful to both artists. Not quite sure yet where these Danse Macabre remixes fall. On the first few listens, I was struck with the sense that most of the remix artists here seem to have very little affinity to the band - diluting the punch and catchiness of these Nebraskans' songs into just so-so, slick house and techno tracks. I mean, the original Danse Macabre songs are entirely capable of packing a dancefloor on their own, thank you very much! Participants includes Paul Oakenfold, Junior Sanchez, Ursula 1000, Tommie Sunshine, and Photek.
Rad! If you're already a fan of this Omaha, NE band, you're gonna love this! And if you're an older (i.e., pre-Danse Macabre) fan you're probably going to love it even more 'cause it's juiced up with some earlier Faint elements (like some infectious hooks and saucy lyrics) that the band more or less ditched on their last album, Wet From Birth. That album had the band going in a more balls-out rock direction, and their live shows followed suit. Fasciination finds them getting back to the synthesizers and electronics - super textured, thick and gnarly! -- and perhaps increasingly so. They seem to have devoted much more attention to sculpting the sound design, but not at the expense of the aggressive energy and the songs themselves. Although their access to recording production resources has no doubt increased with their popularity, they haven't been blinded by the bright lights or technology. Nothing's too glossy and no one seems to be sitting on any laurels, they still sound like The Faint. As we've said before this band too often gets unjustly lumped in with the legions of dumbshit vacuous dance punk bands, but c'mon, it's usually just a new-wave prejudiced knee-jerk reaction to the synth sounds and arpeggiated basslines (something which the band no longer seems to rely on anyways!). If you dismissed them long ago, you just might want to give Fasciination a spin because while they're quite capable and willing to whip a dance party into a frenzy, The Faint have always had far more going on in both craft and intent. Released on their own label Blank.Wav.
Check out the early sounds of Nebraska's new wavers' The Faint. This is their first album which was released back in '98.
Grab this up before it's gone! The Faint take on Sonic Youth's "Mote" for this one-off GSL release (their usual label is Saddle Creek) and they do so in supreme synth-rock style. They busted this track out for their encore at their recent show here in SF. These lanky Omaha new wavers are positively driving the kids wild. Triggering the dance mechanism in all. This vinyl-only release
The long-awaited,�highly anticipated follow-up to the ultra rad Danse Macabre album has arrived, saddled with the burden of high expectations (it also comes with perhaps the worst title and cover art). Unfortunately and unjustly lumped in with the vapid electro-clash crowd (they were actually head and shoulders above the dance-punk fashionista pack -- showing some brain behind the style sheen), The Faint's new album has already been receiving the post-trend backlash. A number of us here at AQ dug D.M. quite a lot and wanted to�resist that post-trend trend, hoping for an onwards and upwards progression from that album. We'd heard rumblings about intriguing changes in direction, new focuses, etc. However much to our chagrin, the first song struck us�like an uninspired�rehash of something that didn't even make the cut last time, but with the addition of more high-tech bells and whistles (E.L.O.-esque string flourishes, a wider range of vocal processing, etc). Their former insanely infectious hooks are nowhere to be found. Disappointed, we found ourselves asking, did they too succumb to�the vacuous hipster hype machine? Well, not entirely... although it does seem�that when they were making this album they were�at least partially conscious of the newfound demands of appealing to the more mainstream kids. There are many songs that are clearly going to be instant crowd pleasers, but they're also among the band's most superficial work with lots of simplistic 'short-hand for new wave' accessories. That said�Wet From Birth has�some of The Faint's most�ballsy 'rock' sounding�songs in years (check out the big distorted nu metal-ish guitars in "Dropkick The Punks").�As well, vocalist Todd Baechle has clearly been working on his delivery, expanding his dynamic range so as to not have to rely on studio applied effects�to provide�depth, personas, etc.�Simply put, he's no longer enslaved to the vocoder.�The�space between the highs and lows of this album are considerable (for instance, the abovementioned "Dropkick..." is revved-up and exciting, while the album's single "Disappear" is�downright aggravating), but we suppose that's to be expected from a band�poised to make the jump to the next level of commercial success while at the same time still trying to�eke�out some artistic progress.�Nonetheless, we'd still recommend revisiting Danse Macabre or their earlier Blank Wave Arcade.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Angular art rock, very lo-fi. This is an extremely limited edition of 100 clear vinyl lps hand cut in New Zealand, and we've got the West Coast exclusive.
If you have been digging the recent Kaleidoscope (UK) reissues, then here is another treat: This re-issue of Fairfield Parlour's debut album on the Vertigo label, From Home to Home. The story behind this album and band name have never been fully made clear, as Kaleidoscope and Fairfield Parlour were the same band. Perhaps tired of being confused with the American band Kaleidoscope, who were better known; or sensing that the candy-coated psychedelia they had been dabbling in for two albums was waning fast, Kaleidoscope decided to adopt the new band moniker, Fairfield Parlour, and change their look from colorful twee paisley folksters to Old Tyme country-psych balladeers. So what is the music like? Well, while there is definitely a more haunting, lushly orchestrated sound evoking a darkly antique and mystical psych-pop vibe full of harpsichord, mellotrons, flutes and 12-string guitars, and the songwriting is more serious, it's not too far from a type of sound Kaleidoscope would have naturally progressed toward had they kept the same name. Lots of bands of the era from the Kinks to the Byrds had similar stylistic evolutions from psych pop to roots rock, but perhaps the band (or the label) felt that audiences somehow wouldn't make the transition. We can't help but think the confusion over the name change only made things worse for the band (they disbanded the following year after making one more album which was never released), it's a shame too because this album is really really great! This re-issue features the original album plus eight bonus tracks of singles demos, and alternate tracks. For fans of Euphoria, The Byrds, the Incredible String band and Muswell Hillbillies-era Kinks.
