Reissued on (180 gram) vinyl now too!
"Funky Junction are an exciting new group that has the pulse of today". All lovers of '70s classic rock & proto-metal, pay attention. This one's a bit of a curiosity, all right, but one that we'd been *very* curious about� Finally reissued, this obscure footnote to rock history: an album of Irish legends-to-be THIN LIZZY playing a bunch of DEEP PURPLE covers! Originally released on lp in 1973 by a budget label called Stereo Gold Award, this was what you'd call an 'exploitation' album, where a producer would get together a group of studio session musicians to try and capitalize on the success of a currently popular band, by putting out their own versions of said band's hits. In this case, it was none other than the young, not yet famous Thin Lizzy trio, who were recruited to record these Deep Purple tunes under a rather goofy pseudonym, 'round about the same time they made their Shades Of A Blue Orphanage album. But since Lizzy's husky-voiced frontman, bassist Phil Lynott, couldn't be expected to wail like Ian Gillan, they brought in the singer from another Dublin band, Elmer Fudd (that's the name of the band, not the singer!) who does a quite capable Gillian impression. Elmer Fudd's keyboardist also appears here, taking on the Jon Lord role. But for our purposes, the treat is getting to hear original Thin Lizzy guitarist Eric Bell and drummer Brian Downey rip it up in the roles of, respectively, Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Paice.
They romp through these burly Deep Purple hits: "Fireball", "Black Night", "Strange Kind Of Woman", "Hush" (itself a Joe South cover DP did), and "Speed King". But there's also a handful of originals on here too, mostly instrumental psych jams full of wild soloing - in fact, "Dan" is primarily a Hendrixian guitar solo. Good stuff. They were probably all improvised in the studio, though one's based on "The House Of The Rising Sun".
For fans of Deep Purple & Thin Lizzy, obviously, and also those into the likes of Hell Preachers, Inc., The Purple Fox, and other such exploito-artifacts. Pretty neat. Of course, we'd have liked to hear what Phil would have sounded like singing these songs, but it's understandable why he didn't. If only they knew then what we know now.
Funny, they really don't make exploitation albums like this anymore - or, well, maybe today's equivalent are all those string quartet covers albums, like the String Quartet Tribute To Radiohead, The String Quartet Tribute to Bjork, The String Quartet Tribute To Slayer, The String Quartet Tribute To Tool, and A Baroque Tribute To Rush (and by the way, some of those are kinda cool!).
Now, if only someone would reissue the German-language covers of The Sweet that the Scorpions once did�
Sometimes we need to hear the kind of music that just lets us float away. Away from our stress, problems, thoughts, anxiety, etc. Fuqugi have made the perfect record for those times, when you just need to be lifted off, freed to drift and daydream, with a breeze of sound that feels like it's drifting down from the sky and lifting you up to hover in soft comforting clouds.
Hailing from southern Japan, Fuqugi is the work of Daiki Sakae, who uses his guitar with elegance and patience, to create majestic sounds that conjure images of soft waves, gray skies and and that special moment in-between being awake and asleep. At times running his guitar through delay and layers of effects but always with such a tender touch. We're reminded a lot of early Durutti Column as well as Robin Guthrie and the moods created by Harold Budd. In face Gransofa + Nightingale reminds us quite a bit of the amazing collaboration that Budd and Guthrie created on their score to the excellent film, Mysterious Skin. These songs have such an amazing languid quality, never beating you over the head with an emotion yet always slowly taking you to such comforting and mournful states of being. We also hear a kindred spirit evoked by Fuqugi's sounds in the new solo outing by Danny Paul Grody, as they both conjure up such a blissed out state, infused with a patience and restraint that pays off in the form of an ever shifting cloud of hushed dreamlike sound. If Kompakt were ever to make a Pop Ambient record dedicated to folks who use guitar more then electronics then we think Fuqugi could be the star of that album. Highly recommended!
Smooth, flowing and flowering pop. Yes, fans of Stereolab and Broadcast take note. I think you might like this. A soothing and groovy album. Everytime we play this, someone asks if it's the new Broadcast album.
We've long been entranced by the mystical world of Philadelphia's Fursaxa. With her latest offering she dives even deeper into her mesmerizing world of vibrating tones and otherworldly vocals, which sometimes remind us of Nico performing a seance in her secret garden. While recent outings by the likes of Grouper and Valet have been making waves around these parts with their dreamlike swirls of vocal delay and reverb magic, it's so nice to hear new music from someone who helped spawn this recent movement of hazy psychedelic drone-folk. But what makes Fursaxa always stand out is that it's not just her voice and effects which demand your attention but the entrancing instrumentation as well, that pulls you into her irresistible spell.
Over the past couple of years, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) has entrenched herself as a mystical queen for the free-folk crowd, channelling the disaffected sorrow of Nico as well as the transcendent visions of 12th Century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. On her previous recordings, Burke sewed together her albums from short vignettes of narcoleptic folk songs, typically in the form of monotone lullabies in which her resonant voice radiated through stoned-and-droned acoustic guitar strum and / or farfisa arrangements. So it's very rare to finds a Fursaxa song that clocks in at anything longer than 3 minutes, which curiously is ample time for her to hypnotise her audience with her utterly compelling songs. Amulet, thus, is a bit of a detour from the collections of shortened songs as she offers four extended pieces of sprawling drones built out of delay-pedal loops. On the first couple of tracks, it's Burke's voice that takes center stage, spiralling into a hypnotic set of oscillating patterns, mossy psychedelic chants harkening back to the dark ages. She accentuates these tracks with occasional interludes for flutes and hand bells. On one of the final tracks on Amulet, Burke sets forth on a slow-motion acoustic guitar renditition of a Glenn Branca symphony, aiming for nothing more than transcendent hypnotic monotone. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!
Well, it's about time! After a couple of cd-rs and vinyl-only editions, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) has finally released a proper cd for much greater distribuition of her immaculate, hallucinatory music. The Philadelphia based chanteuse has crafted a timeless sound that on one hand finds Burke easily situated alongside the best of the acid-folk revivalists (Devendra Banhart, Six Organs of Admittance, Islaja, etc.), yet on the other, she channels the visionary iconography of Hildegard von Bingen and the iconoclastic obliqueness of Nico in equal measure. On Lepidoptera, as with her previous recordings, Burke floats her primal voice over incredibly simple psychedelic songs of tranced-out organ drones and / or acoustic guitar monochord strum, peppered with echo-heavy flutes and bells. There really isn't that more to what Burke does as Fursaxa, but within her arcane lullabies and primieval psychedelia, she has the ability to emote a profound, dreamy sadness much in the same way that Marissa Nadler has done on her two albums, albeit under far more mystical and psychotropic influences. Truely amazing and utterly mesmerizing.
An all too short dose of medievalish ear-candy. Two songs, one a long form folk drone of the likes we are used to hearing from Tara Burke aka Fursaxa. The other is a moss covered but more traditional sounding folk song that sounds like a cover of an ancient but long forgotten tune. Lovely.
With all the attention folks like Grouper, Valet, Inca Ore, and Julianna Barwick have gotten in recent times, its easy to forget that it was the music of Fursaxa that predated their ethereal and ghostly sounds by a few years. Through the years, Tara Burke has consistently released music as eerie and haunting as those above with a distinctive pantheistic foresty vibe that is both ritualistic and witchy but mesmerizing and mystical as well. Previous efforts have been more lo-fi and acoustic, with lots of flutes and bells and blurry squalls of sounds. Her latest, Mycorrhizae Realm, is her more polished and composed to date, sounding like a lost album by Vashti Bunyan or Desert Shore-era Nico in its gentle grace and beauty.
Harmonium drones, bird-song flutes, harps, bells, acoustic guitar and her own floating harmonies accompany ancient sounding folk melodies from a lost civilization. Equal attention is placed on song-form as well as sound. Where previous releases had shown Fursaxa coaxing melodies out of the sound she creates, here melody takes center stage to the compositional decisions taking on a less improvisational feeling than before. This makes the songs more focused and constructed, but with the slow majestic unfolding that the mood she conjures require. Breathtaking!
MTV / Lilith Fair singer songwriter, gets all urban, even raps a bit, enlists Timbaland, and comes up with a pretty decent danceble club record. Fans of Pink, Christiina Aguilera and other such things will dig for sure...
The label calls this slab of heaviness from Fury, featuring Sonny Vincent of the Testors, "1972 NYC Proto Punk", but listening to the A side here, we're thinking this is more proto METAL than proto punk, plenty of raw guitar buzz and a kick ass main riff, pounding drums and some seriously muscly vox, the sound is heavy and hard, and pretty dang metal for the time, although there's definitely a serious blooze rock vibe too, oh and let's not forget the shredding leads. The flipside is definitely more on the proto punk tip, a bit more swaggery, groovy, still heavy for sure, with a definite Thin Lizzy vibe, due in no small part to the vocals. But damn, both jams here are killer, and way recommended for fans of both proto metal AND proto punk!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Second studio recording from the Tokyo trio, led by the self-proclaimed king of darkness, Keiji Haino. Monstrous, in-the-red guitar destruction only Haino can deliver. Recommended as a starter for those interested in the mysterious world of Fushitsusha.
Another awesome find from the diggers at Finders Keepers / B-Music! This '70s Spanish (Catalan) band, as their name implies, plays freaky fusion jazz/rock, kinda like a (more) wacked out Return To Forever! It's psychedelically groovy stuff, high on classical gasses, that at times even reminds us a bit of Bollywood, and much else besides (a goofier Goblin, anyone? Le Orme? Wolfgang Dauner?). Fusioon is for sure fun.
Ferinstance, the buzzy, bouncy synth and Spanish-languge chant of the quirky, rhythmic "Farsa Del Buen Vivir" is utterly delightful, deservedly drawing comparisons to old kid-friendly funk fave Stark Reality.
The dozen selections here, drawn from Fusioon's singles and lps for the Belter Progressiva label in the early/mid '70s, are percussively propulsive, sometimes soundtrack-suspenseful, and always packed with surprises, including symphonic-sounding bits and electronic blitzes...
And as always, the Finders Keepers folks fit this cd out with a booklet full of colorful photos, graphics, and extensive, expert liner notes (by Cherrystones and Andy Votel) delving into the details of Fusioon's career, and in general schooling us about the psych/jazz scene in Franco's Spain.
It's taken us a while to get enough of these in to list, but it was well worth the wait, the debut full length from this Bay Area metal crust thrash outfit which features our pal Josh Smith, formerly of legendary SF black metal horde Weakling as well as the Fucking Champs and garage popsters the Makes Nice, as well as members of Face Down In Shit and Look Back And Laugh. The label has this to say about Futur Skullz: "They wish they sounded like Anti Cimex crossed with Whiplash, but in reality they probably sound more like Bad Brains and Metallica.", which we're guessing is a (not so?) humble way of saying they sort of sound like all of those. The Metallica thing is big for sure, but we're talking Kill Em All of course, the same sort of classic thrash riffing, plenty of chug, and some surprising hookiness, but the crust element is pretty huge too, which ultimately might eclipse their metal side. Are they punky metal, or metallic punk? Hardly matters really, the songs are heavy and metallic enough that most metalheads should be too busy headbanging to debate the finer subtleties, while this is definitely punk enough to hit the spot for the same folks who have been digging Acephalix, No Funeral, and the most recent spate of Southern Lord signees, all of which seems to be crust punk.
Did we mention solos? Smith gets to unleash the beast as they say, spitting off some seriously shredding solos, which definitely up the metal ante, and are Futur Skullz major selling point, but then that's all balanced by the vocals, a painful glass gargling throat shredding below that goes from gruff howl to near hysterical shriek.
Heavy as fuck and totally kick ass, and thus recommended for metalheads and punks alike.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, vinyl only, includes a download coupon.
This sure ain't no disco for fans of Stephin Merritt's Future Bible Heroes. Nope! Unlike their last release, this is isn't about high BPM boogie fever at all. In fact it's such a departure that maybe it'd be best saved for the latenight party wind-down (as opposed to the party kick-off). A lot more varied, languid, electroni-glitchy and atmospheric, it sounds like Christopher Ewen - the man behind the music of FBH - got some neat, new music equipment and software since the "I'm Lonely (And I Love It)" ep. And as if to showcase this, every second or third track is a brief under-a-minute instrumental interlude. On the downside, it seems like the lyrics got shortchanged this time around especially on songs like "From Some Dying Star" and "I'm A Vampire" (one of the only upbeat dancefloor numbers). A few excerpts: "It's your blood I crave / I am your bitch goddess / from beyond your grave" and "Damn, I am what? I am what I am and I am impossibly glam and I am happy as a clam cause I'm a vampire." Huh??? I mean, sure, it's not by any means a serious song, but when you've come to know and love the razor-sharp Merritt wit, this comes as something of a serious perturbance. The rhymes are alarmingly and almost painfully simple: "Your eyes are blue on blue / You're too good to be true" - as opposed to his trademark romantic lyrical twists. Even with Claudia Gonson delivering them in her alternately droll and sweetly sing-song voice, the words come off somewhat clunky. Filled with lots of pleasingly pretty melodies and textures, but overall, this cd is rather boggling to say the least.
After recording a 3-cd boxset of 69 love songs, what's a guy to do? If your name's Stephin Merritt, you hop right into one of your other musical incarnations and hit the dancefloor running. The Future Bible Heroes (not to be confused with his goth combo The Gothic Archies) deliver five straight-outta-the-'80s hi-energy hits ripe for some serious ass-shakin' (well, one's a bit of a slower number), but with lyrics like "... you left an empty room / a useless bed and a suicidal moon..." you know these are more tales of gutwrenching heartbreak and loneliness from the pen of Mr. Merritt. Here he is accompanied by Christopher Ewen on all instruments and joined on vocals by fellow Magnetic Field Claudia Gonson. Go on, dance your tears away.
Attention Stephin Merritt fans! Here's a little slice of early Future Bible Heroes delight. Not to be confused with another EP from FBH out now, this one is called "Lonely Days" and was originally released in 1997, the other is a new remix collection called "Lonely Robot". Of these five songs, the standout is the final instrumental "Berlin On $10 A Day" - splendidly delicate and lovely - but the rest are pretty darn fine as well though. They include an alternate version of their tune "Hopeless", a cover of "Love Is Blue", and Mr. Merritt singing in Japanese on "How To Get Laid In Japan". We should also note that the title number first appeared on their "Memories Of Love" release.
Attention Stephin Merritt fans! Not to be confused with another similarly titled EP from FBH, this one is called "Lonely Robot" and is a brand new remix collection (fyi: the other is "Lonely Days" and was originally released in 1997). This 7-song EP features two new songs and five remixes of songs from their Eternal Youth album. Tackling the remix duties are FBH's own Christoper Ewen, Sunroof (not Matthew Bower's Sunrrof!, doing a fine minimal pulse rendition), Client, Soft Cell's Dave Ball (sooo dancefloor!) and Rob Rives (even more so!). Have to say, Ewen's reworking of "I'm A Vampire" into an extended mix actually fares much better than the original version. Maybe it's because the sorta clunky lyrics of the verses are a bit more obscured by the electronic dance melodies, and the ultra catchiness of the chorus is brought more to the front? Not really an essential FBH / Merritt release, but it does provide for a solid 39 minutes worth of mostly boogie fun with Claudia Gonson's lovely, droll vocals drifting in and out to sweeten the party atmosphere.
New project featuring the talents of Stephin Merritt, he of Magnetic Fields and The Sixths fame!
Future Old People Are Wizards, eh? We don't have a problem with the band name, it's kind of interesting, but wish they hadn't used a phonetic pronunciation of the acronym for their name as the title of this disc. FOPAW = "Faux Paw". Meaning what? Seems a little silly. Ah well, we forgive 'em, they're Belgian (mmmm, beer). Also, whatever, the music is way cool, Future Old People Are Wizards being a sort of alternative/stoner rock band, grungy and psychedelic and plenty melodic, with lots and lots of spacey synth swirling around the distorted guitars. It's heavy and rockin' one moment, trippy and Beatles-esque the next. The title of instrumental track "Eastern Sabbath" is also pretty overt in describing what that one sounds like, eh.
The FOPAW equation doesn't really include any utterly original elements, yet it's a particular, precise blend of styles/sounds you don't hear together everyday, all good stuff, and it works! They've got it dialed in on this debut, definitely. Their label references both Tangerine Dream and Kyuss with regards to FOPAW's sound, yeah we hear that, Eno and Zep too, or try UFOmammut meets Queens Of The Stone Age. Another: imagine Aussie synth lords The Night Terrors teamed up with old aQ stoner-psych-pop faves Elope from Sweden, perhaps? Powerful wall-of-fuzz riff repetition, shoegazing melody, drifting dreaminess (particularly on the super-synthed-out final epic track "Cotton Sheep")... FOPAW do it all, and do it well, making this pretty hard for us to resist, not that we're trying, why would we? Recommended rock!
Mr Future Pilot is a Scot of Indian ethnicity whose new record is on The Pastels' Geographic label (which hasn't released a bad record yet), and knowing all that, his new album sounds much like you'd expect. Super light, fresh, and unpretentious melodies are
I (Andee) was initially very resistant to this new strain of post punk new wave whatchamacallit. Bands doing their best to take Pere Ubu, Wire and all that sort of stuff and supercharge it. Interpol did a lot to change my mind, but then the legions of Interpol wannabees and punk-rock-bands-who-were-suddenly-funky-and-thus-hip-again almost cancelled out all my progress. Then came Franz Ferdinand, who initially I couldn't stand, but quickly came to love, and of course the Moving Units who I dug the first time I heard them. Now we have the Futureheads, who embody everything appealing about those other bands. Jagged angular guitars, throbbing bass lines, simple hypnotic almost-funky rhtyhms, shouty sloganeering vocals, and just fucking great songs! Sort of like Interpol mixed with the Strokes. Or a punkier Franz Ferdinand. Short and sharp, bouncy and totally catchy. I was definitely prepared to hate this band, just based on all the best-new-band hype, before I'd even heard them. But the second this hit the deck, I knew it was too good to hate. Recommended for fans of all the above bands was well as jaded fuckers like me who desperately wanted to hate all this stuff!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Managed to get a handful of these SUPER LIMITED lathe cut 7"s from New Zealand noise rockers the Futurians, and it's a doozy. Already they were a sludgey, garagey, noisy, a bit damaged, freaked out and arty, some mix of Chrome, the Stooges and the Brainbombs. If anything this 7"s pushes them even further out. Adding sheets of white noise distortion, some old school Butthole Surfers style vocal processing, and a production that barely surpasses tin can and twine through dictaphone, the band churn out a super repetitive hypnotic groove, the guitars not so much riffy as chunks of static, the drums a muffled barely there throb, the two elements that hold it all together, are the buzzing low end that pulses and throbs beneath the surface, seeming to fade out completely before exploding back into motion, a blackened rumble, and the vocals, a skipping, stuttering, hiccupping high end chirp, that almost sounds more like a malfunctioning synth than an actual human voice. The result is pretty fantastic though, a fucked up garage sludge noise rock wetdream, equal parts Buttholes, Siltbreeze, Brainbombs and shitgaze.
Hand painted sleeves, clear lathe, INSANELY LIMITED. Already out of print. We have 7 or 8. Don't blink...
We kinda forgot how much we love NZ noise rockers The Futurians, but within seconds of throwing this on, their latest, and first for Last Visible Dog (also LVD's first vinyl, and vinyl-only, release), we most definitely remembered. The band clobbering us with their buzzing lo-fi psychedelic minimal garage noiserock dronedirge crush, the guitars crusty and fuzzy and drenched in distortion and buzz, the vocals a buried yelp, the drums so distorted that they sometimes sound electronic, and the production, totally fried and in the red, with the sound seeming to continually shift from brittle and tinny, to murky and muddy, to fully blown out. So weirdly produced in fact, that much of this ends up sounding more avant and experimental than noisy and rocky. The sound is motorik and repetitive, tripped out and mesmeric, NZ style, like a krautrock Dead C or a noiserock Faust, tribal and trancelike, a few tracks are just wild tangles of psychedelic guitar noise, but others, like the final nearly sidelong track, are just total low fidelity outsider spacerock krautgarage bliss. Noisy, heavy, in the red, fucked up and so kick ass.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Pressed on 80 gram vinyl, with super heavy jackets.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Cottage-industry label boss Glenn Donaldson has been splitting his time between the avant-folk productions of Jewelled Antler and the distinctly noiser productions for his other label Pink Skulls, which he describes as being more "punk" than Jewelled Antler. Alongside the militant iconography of Teenage Panzerkorps, the belligerent hallucinations of Leafyard, and the boombox black metal of Dead Raven Choir, Donaldson's definition of punk is not the commonly accepted one. New Zealand's rock primitivists The Futurians add another facet to Donaldson's atypical vision for Pink Skulls. Hailing from the equally obscure, noise rock band Armpit, The Futurians are not a band that resolves any of their art rock songs, prefering to leave a jagged guitar line or a simple drum kit plod or a monomaniacal vocal chant as the only semblance of structure to scrabble through the post-Chome synth squiggles, bleary clattering sound, and general lo-fi ugliness. Think Gate's "Metric" with megaphone vocals delivered by a Lydia Lunch / Mark E. Smith hybrid, toss in The Troggs and Destroy All Monsters for even greater anti-rock references, and you'll come pretty close to The Futurians. For all of the 'fucked up' art rock bands that sound too calculated and too ironic for their own good, The Futurians with their semi-conscious narcolepsy through noise propulsion are a rare gem uncovered from a pile of shit. More please.
The last we heard from NZ sludgy noise rock outfit the Futurians was a long out of print cd-r released on Jewelled Antler offshoot label Pink Skulls waaaay back in 2003. We were pretty into it, a sort of monotone garage rock trudge, simple plodding drums, blown out fuzz guitar, vocals way way way down in the mix, bits of synth squiggle, a sort of Stooges, Chrome, Fall, Brainbombs chunk of lo-fi noise rock dirge.
Well, here we are almost 4 years later, and the Futurians' primitive stomp sounds as good as ever. In fact, it sounds way better than we remember it.
Simple and stripped down, Each track an endless looping riff, swathed in grungy guitar grrrr and tons of reverb, synths in there too it sounds like, but if anything, their sound got more blown out, more primitive, more skeletal, and somehow more filthy and fuzzy. And who can argue with that?
Like a caveman Dead C, these noiseniks, pound out a relentless slow motion krautrock groove, a simple riff ground forcibly into your skull, drums that don't so much swing as thud, over the top drift shards of damaged electronics, swooping alien synths, extra guitar noise. The vocals are usually lost in the skree and buzz, but occasionally, the vocals take center stage with frontwoman Beth Duckling howling and crooning, her voice drenched in effects, the vocals another layer in the Futurians dense barrage.
In addition to Beth, the Futurians also features a who's who of NZ underground rockers, Clayton Noone (Armpit, CJA), Stefan Neville (Pumice) and Antony Milton (PseudoArcana head honcho)
Limited to 300 copies, each hand numbered, packaged in a cool black and silver screened cardstock sleeve, with a color photo affixed to the inside...
It seems like a really long time since we've heard from Fuxa (or from fellow Michigan space rockers Windy & Carl, for that matter). During their hiatus, Fuxa have made a number of changes to their sound, most notably being the near abolition of rock, in favor of a clean drum machine sound standing way out in the mix as if these are to be electronica pieces, which could make sense in comparison to somebody like LTJ Bukem. Their signature psychedelic guitars and constant haze of washed out electronics make themselves known, but submit to the dominance of the rhythm. Fuxa's clean, measured "2000" sounds as if the Durutti Column were to release a trip hop album...
"Spacey analog synth burbles wending their way outwards, floating, propulsive instrumental melodies." From Dearborn, Michigan.
Wow, haven't heard from Fuxa in awhile (hey, didn't we start another Fuxa review with a similar sentiment?). The Michigan space dreamers have never received as much attention as their peers, Windy and Carl, or Add N to (X), but maybe cuz their records are so few and far between. Well, it's always nice to hear from them, and their latest offering is this single which features a cover and collaboration with of all bands, Suicide!? Well, it sort of makes sense, doesn't it, as Suicide were a key bridge between minimalist punk and space rock. Fuxa with the help of Martin Rev along with Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Lun, Dean & Britta)and Sonic Boom (Spaceman 3, Spectrum) take on a gorgeous and driving retelling of Suicide's classic "Cheree" that sounds a bit like all of these bands combined. Hopefully, it won't be forever before a new Fuxa full length.
A split release between the two bands. Fuxa's entry is what you've come to expect, long drawn out melodic post-rock with vintage synth action. Welsh group Ectogram's contribution is the reason to buy this disc -- their repetitive groove will remind you of
Yowza. Hells to the yeah. It's Fuzz II time. If'n you don't know, Fuzz is the stomping heavy psych power trio featuring garage pop wunderkind Ty Segall (playing the flailin' drums) as well as the Ty Segall Band's Charlie Moothart, wailin' on the guitar, and rounding out the trio, Chad from The Meatbodies is now their bassist. After a couple brilliant singles, Fuzz released their eponymous debut in 2013, blowing us away and earning Record Of The Week honors at aQ. Now they're back... with another ROTW, natch!
Fuzz II means the next level of Fuzz. Advanced Fuzz. Definitely more Fuzz - there's 14 tracks here, some short blasts, but others mega jams - including a lengthy, 13+ minute album-ending epic freakout that is apparently titled "II" (yes, a numbered album with a title track, brilliant!).
Of course, if you call your band Fuzz, that's what you gotta deliver. And they sure do, job number one. Lots and lots of fuzz, check. Moothart again channels the likes Leigh Stephens, Randy Holden, Martin Weaver, and other legendary axe-wielding fuzzmasters of yesteryear. Ye olde stoner rawkin' Blue Cheery, Black Sabbathy heaviness is a big part of the Fuzz equation, as are the garage psych pop smarts Segall is known for on all his other records. For us, it's a killer combination!! And this time 'round their longhaired retro-proto-metal riffage is maybe a mite more proggy and complexified, more Sir Lord Baltimore baroque than Blue Cheer basic. Well, they still turn the air into cottage cheese, but there's a whiff of some fancy camembert in there too, with a couple tracks bringing in some orchestrated sounds (must be by the guest credited with "InterstellarStringSweeping"). And there's keys and synths and stuff too. Not that it's nothing but muscular hard-hitting rock action though, sounding like some lost late '60s / early '70s classic that just couldn't be, 'cause it's so grindingly badass and freshly in your melted face.
We're digging it big time, all the freaky sounds and hooks and riffs and FUZZ. Ty Segall never lets us down, and as serious heavy psych lovers, Fuzz is one of our favorite projects of his. For fans of all its proto-metal inspirations like Sir Lord Baltimore, as well as the music of Ty's pal King Tuff, and even moreso, King Tuff-related band Witch.
Second in a new series of live records from John Dwyer's Castle Face records, the first being the recent live White Fence set captured just a few blocks down from aQ at the Amnesia (formerly the Chameleon), and now this, a kick ass smoker of a set from Ty Segall's -other- band Fuzz, whose debut we made our Record Of the Week recently, and whose sound is more like sixties psych meets seventies proto metal, super Blue Cheer-y, all fuzzed out, heavy, and spacey. There's lots of wild and chaotic drumming (courtesy of Segall, who mans the kit, while somehow handling vox too) along with some insane guitar shreddery, courtesy of Charlie Mootheart of the Moonhearts and Segall's band proper, who somehow melds classic rock crunch with blown out, cosmic, brain melting Hendrixian Hawkwindian howl. Live they're even MORE fierce, caught here in the act at local leather-daddy dive the SF Eagle, and on Segall's birthday too (the crowd sings happy birthday, and Segall gets a cake and blows out the candles mid-song!!).
Needless to say, if you dug the Fuzz full length, odds are you're probably gonna want this too, the songs way more loose and raw, stretched WAY out (only four songs!), the sound noisy and fuzzy and in your face, the band are on fire, it's the sort of sweat drenched, blood soaked blowout that deserves to be preserved for all of eternity. Dig it! And if you get the chance, don't miss these guys next time they play in your neck of the woods. Give this a listen and you'll understand why...
For a while the identity of this local garage fuzz combo was a big mystery, and the group's first single disappeared in a heartbeat, multiple pressings gone before you know it, with most of those ending up on eBay for stupid amounts of money. At that point we still hadn't actually heard Fuzz, but they were rumored to be like a garage rock Black Sabbath, and to include some local garage rock bigwig. Well, the second part definitely proved to be true, as Fuzz was revealed to be none other than Ty Segall and a couple of his pals, kicking out jams, a bit more heavy and fuzzed out (so much so that it even spawned a custom Fuzz distortion pedal!). And while it might not quite be Sabbathy, it is pretty fierce and fuzzed out, blown out and super rocking, with big chunky chugging riffs, and LOADS off fuzz (obviously), and yeah, the vibe IS sorta sixties/seventies proto metal, wild drumming (courtesy of Segall, who mans the kit here, while Charlie Moothart handles the axework), a little bit progged out, the recording super hot and in-the-red, and the songs, both of 'em here, could almost be lost proto metal artifacts, the B side in particular, has a serious "Godzilla" vibe, a lumbering, churning BIG riff crunch, peppered with slithery psychedelic breakdowns, which continually explode into wild proto metal freakouts, and it's not that difficult to imagine these guys, and these songs on one of those seventies TV shows, where the band plays on a stage, while trippy primitive video FX swirl all around them. Needless to say, it's fuzzy, crunchy, heavy and hooky, Ty Segall fans who aren't already hip to these guys, here's your chance, and anyone else into the current crop of garage fuzz locals (Thee Oh Sees, Segall, Mikal Cronin, Blasted Canyons, etc.) these guys might be your new favorites. And while this must be pressing #3 or #4 by now, imagine even this batch won't stick around for long, so you know what to do...
The latest single from these local psychedelic fuzz rockers, featuring none other than Ty Segall behind the drumkit. Although listening to this (and the other singles) it definitely sounds like Segall had more to contribute than drumming, cuz Fuzz definitely doesn't sound that far removed from Segall's own records, maybe a bit more fuzzed out (obviously), but fans of Segall, Mikal Cronin, Thee Oh Sees and all the rest will no doubt flip for these guys too. Imagine a slightly Sabbathier Segall, and you're getting closer, the A side is total sixties psych radness, super charged and doused in crumbling fuzz guitars, a wicked hooky, and some wild drumming, has us dying for the forthcoming full length (soon!).
The B side features Fuzz taking on the oft-covered "21st Century Schizoid Man", by King Crimson of course, and they definitely do it justice, sounding like some lost proto metal band, the sound furiously fuzzy, more wild drumming, the vocals raspy and feral, the whole thing appropriately fierce and heavy, especially the double time freakout, here totally supercharged and seriously metallic. Fuck yeah!
At first blush, the debut full length from local trio Fuzz, sounds a lot like a Ty Segall record, as it should, since Fuzz is actually Segall's new band, which was originally described to us as sounding like Ty Segall crossed with Black Sabbath. Needless to say we were pretty skeptical at first, but their preceding 7"s proved the point, and now that the highly anticipated full-length is here, goddamn if this isn't some seriously heavy garage-psych proto-metal retro-rock radness! In fact, you'd most certainly be forgiven for thinking this was in fact some genuine lost proto metal artifact, the songs, the sound, the guitar tone, all harken back to the classics, that sound we here at aQ obsess over, in fact, if we were trying to describe Fuzz with some succinct rock band math, we might replace Sabbath above with groups like Power Of Zeus, or Dust, or the Groundhogs, cuz it definitely has that old school hard rocking vibe BIG TIME.
The interesting thing about Fuzz, is that while Segall is still singing, he's now behind the kit, and is actually a seriously kick ass drummer, very much in the style of say Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell, busy and loose, slipping from wild octopoidal freakouts to locked in hard rocking grooves and back again, while guitarist Charlie Moothart (who also plays in Segall's band, as well as the Moonhearts) proves himself to be a serious shredder, who should be getting the same sort of love that dudes like Isaiah Mitchell does, in fact fans of Earthless will find much of the jamming here right up their alley, with Moothart unfurling, crumbling, blown out heavy rock riffs, alongside wild blasts of mega shred psychedelic freakout. And while most of the songs her are loose and jammy, with much of the record sounding like different parts of the same mega-jam, rife with lots of space, and stop/starts, stretches of amp hum, lurching abstract almost doomy breakdowns, even some almost-drum solo bits, a few pop gems surface here and there, like "What's In My Head", which would have sounded right at home on any of the Segall record proper, so catchy, with a hook to die for, but still somehow fitting into Fuzz's retro fuzz-rock soundworld. That sound in full effect on "Loose Sutures" which is about as loose as these guys get, the midsong breakdown total heavy seventies psych-prog radness, complete with fuzzed out bass solo, killer drumming, and when the main riff comes back in, SO HEAVY. The record finishes of with three more blasts of blown out riff heavy psych rock that kills, lurching from fuzzy lope, to full on near metallic crunch, to total classic old school heavy psych, and as much as we love pretty much everything Segall has done, this Fuzz record is fast becoming our favorite.
Killer psychedelic space dragon cover art, the lp includes a download code as well!
The LAMC series of 7"s features tons of our favorite bands (Fuzz, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees), delivering an exclusive track on the A side, while the B side features one of THAT band's favorite new artists. A pretty cool concept for sure and we're reviewing 3 of our favorites in the series.
Number 10 comes from none other than Fuzz, Ty Segall's heavy psych combo, who offer up, you guessed it, a fierce and fuzzy slab of super rocking psychedelic garage crunch, churning, blown out distortion, wild drumming, shredding leads, wailed vox, this jam in particular reminds us of Redd Kross at their heaviest, which is a very good thing for sure. A jam that would have been right at home on the recent Fuzz full length.
Fuzz's pick for up and coming artist is a band we had heard of but never heard until now, CCR Headcleaner, and it's easy to see why Fuzz would have picked them, murky, drone-y, druggy psychedelia, urgently strummed acoustic guitar, wreathed in a gnarly haze of blurred distortion, wasted, drowsy vox, the whole thing woozy and washed out and seriously trippy. Mesmerizing psych-noise garage-dirgery that sounds a bit like a ramshackle, lo-fi Loop! Killer tracks from both bands. And as you might imagine, also SUPER LIMITED!!!
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Moon Glyph is back with a new tape from aQ pal Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, Thuja, Art Museums, Blithe Sons and Horrid Red). And this outfit's second release seems to be all about the nostalgia of freeway driving in Southern California and listening to tapes while gliding through a maze of freeways in the cool desert air. Half of aQ's staff probably can relate to that as many of us are transplants from the southern half of the state and while the reality of being stuck in traffic is no fantasy, some of us do miss driving the long freeways and canyons at night listening to our favorite tapes. With songs like "Irvine", "Orange Circle" "Sepulveda" and "Garden Grove", FWY! channel a motorik New Order vibe in extended instrumental synth jams that are both bright and moody with a languid romantic groove that's hard to resist. A real road trip!
So, Glenn, do you even know how many bands / projects / monikers you've been in? Or are currently in? Somebody may know the answer to this question, but that person probably isn't Glenn Donaldson aka Edmund Xavier aka FWY! We can go all the way back to Mirza; and then there was Thuja, The Blithe Sons, Franciscan Hobbies, The Ivytree, The Birdtree, The Knit Separates, Tomes, and probably a handful of others aligned with the Jewelled Antler label; and we've also got the primitive punk stylings of Teenage Panzerkorps / Der TPK and Horrid Red, and we can't forget about the paisley-tinted art-pop of The Skygreen Leopards and The Art Museums. There's stuff we've left out of that list... Needless to say, Glenn Donaldson is a very prolific musician, adopting a new moniker with each new idea he has when it comes to recording. FWY! keeps true to the idea of an instrumental project of motorik post-punk dedicated to late night driving amidst the Byzantine network of Southern California freeway interchanges and nondescript four lane roads that might connect from somewhere in Orange County to somewhere in Los Angeles, or not. These wistfully nostalgic songs are aligned with some of the jauntier aspects of Factory records (especially The Wake's earliest recordings) or even some of those Cure demos which graced the expanded cd versions of Faith and Seventeen Seconds. Clockwork drum machines gird each of the songs that spiral through the harmonic interplay between the Marr / Reilly guitar melodies and the taut Gallup / Hook basslines. Nice work, Glenn!
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Another band featuring Glenn from Blithe Sons, Horrid Red, Skygreen Leopards, Art Museums, etc., etc.... etc., etc..... etc., etc.....
Gabby La La is known in the Bay Area and beyond for her very imaginative and playful musical mind. She has played alongside folks like Les Claypool, who actually released her previous solo outing. I Know You Know I Know finds Gabby making all her beats and electronics with a Nintendo DS Lite as well as playing sitar, Theremin, ukulele and singing in her childlike voice. In fact the record sounds like it could be an awesome soundtrack for some new super cool psychedelic cartoon for kids...
5:55 is one of those chance musical meetings that end up sounding just oh so perfect. With music written and performed by Air, Jarvis Cocker penning the lyrics, Nigel Godrich (Radiohead) twisting the knobs and helping create a gorgeously warm and spacey atmosphere, Charlotte Gainsbourg brings all these elements together with her effortlessly beautiful voice, as dreamy as it is breezy. Having spent much of her life struggling to get out from the long shadow cast by her legendary father (Serge) and mother (Jane Birkin) her recent streak of great acting (The Science Of Sleep, Happily Ever After, Nuovomondo, etc.) and this, her most assured and rewarding recording to date, have helped her come into her own. While she sings primarily in English, there is a sole French track that is a soft melty treat that recalls the musical elegance and seduction of her parents' generation. An extra treat for Air fans of course as this plays out like a great Air record, which just so happens to feature Charlotte on vocals throughout. Finally available domestically at a much lower price then the sky high import and with some pretty great bonus tracks to boot. Very nice!
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