[ aquarius records — Rock Pop ]

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Showing results 7401 through 7450 of 19388.

There's so many reasons to love this record. Here's two: (1) it's about the Lord of the Rings! and (2) it's a beautiful, timeless album of psychedelic instrumental music worth listening to even if you don't know Gandalf from Frodo. So lovely. It's a big fave of most of us here at AQ. (Oh, a third reason would be that it was the first release on Sweden's Silence label, and sold quite well, helping them bring the world such essential psych as International Harvester and Algarnas Tradgard later on!) Previously we've stocked the One Way label version of this, but now, no doubt thanks to the success of the LOTR movie, there's a newly remastered edition on Virgin that's got not only nicer packaging but also a previously unreleased bonus track! No information is given about that over eight minute long bonus track, but it's called "Early Sketches From Middle Earth" and sounds like a demo of themes later used on the album proper. This is what we wrote about the disc before: Many of you already know and love Bjorn Olsson's atmospheric "Instrumentalmusik" cd which Omplatten released a couple years ago. What you may not know -- we didn't -- is that Olsson's album was essentially an homage to the work of fellow Swede, '70s prog/jazz/psych keyboardist Bo Hansson, and specifically his fantastic 1970 album "Sagan Om Ringen" or "The Lord of the Rings" (itself an homage to Tolkien's trilogy). Bo Hansson, together with a group of three other musicians -- percussion, saxophone & flute -- make the music. Bo plays organ along with guitar, bass and moog. The tracks, all instrumental, are lovely atmospheric numbers, reminiscent of early Pink Floyd, or similar kosmiche krautrock of the era. The album doesn't necessarily make you think of hobbits and orcs, there's no overt "fantasy/medieval" themes or anything (it's not like German pomp metal band Blind Guardian's version of the Silmarillion!). But it does capture the otherworldly, pastoral feel of Tolkien's work. Indeed, it would be appropriate to call this album magical...whether you're a Tolkien fan or not you should check it out! Recommended. It's just too bad that Peter Jackson didn't use any of this music in his otherwise amazing LOTR film adaption! Now if only they'd reissue Hansson's "Watership Down" album as well...

RealAudio clip: Leaving Shire
RealAudio clip: Lothlorien

Concept albums usually end up too overblown for their own good, or at least those that brand themselves as concept albums. All those secret messages and subtle hints at depth usually come down to nothing more than pretension and bong-ripping late-nights in the studio. Happiness, Gerard Patawaran's one man band, stages its self-titled LP as a marriage proposal to his girlfriend, with the ensuing songs passing through quite a few relationship-stages, most of which many of us have been through. The hesitancy of a crush to the passion of (what must be) true love; the pleasure of fucking in every room of the house to the Joy Division refrain of "love will tear us apart again." There are no song titles on the jacket or the insert, so what we'll refer to as the "first song" sounds like a cross between The Psychedelic Furs and an elecrified Mountain Goats. The second song has a definite Magnetic Fields flavor and not just because of the "love" theme. With simple instrumentation, Gerard's melodic crooning creates an atmosphere that is larger than the simple drumbeat and jangly guitar. Sometimes there's little fuck-ups that endear the listener rather than seeming like fuck-ups, reminding us that no one is perfect and that even true love has the occasional hiccup. The whole album clocks in at around 22 minutes or so, weaving its way through the Psychedelic-Magnetic-Goats themes effectively. There's something really sweet about this record that's hard to describe. The songs are short and diversely written, both happy and sad at the same time. It's a little late for Valentine's Day, but this is a perfect record for telling that certain special someone "I love you".

We had no idea what to expect from this record. It's on Sub Pop, the band's called Happy Birthday, the cover art is a sort of super DIY, bent musical note motif, like some weird eighties power pop demo, the back of the record is all scrawled pen and ink binder art, but what the heck, so we threw it on, and BLAAOW! Holy crap, total lo-fi nineties style power pop bliss out. Jangly guitar, lo-fi production, warbly boy vox and angelic female crooning, hooks galore, reminding us a lot of Nova Scotia pop, think Eric's Trip, Sloan, Super Friendz, Thrush Hermit, Hardship Post, the same sort of earnest, slightly melancholic, ramshackle pop that we never get tired of, and hardly anyone makes anymore (thank goodness for The Memories Attack!). Every song is a cracked bit of peppy, bouncy, effervescent pop, with some angular guitar, some practice space drumming, warbly basslines, everything super distorted and fuzzed out, slipping from rollicking rocking, to in-the-red on-the-verge-of-collapse chaos, to woozy meandering minimal new wave (one track sounds like Ultravox via the more modern lo fi warped garage rock of the moment), lots of the songs have a distinctly eighties vibe, the vocals are sweet and always about to crack, slipping into a falsetto at every possible opportunity, keyboards wheeze and warble, the melodies are playful and serpentine, the production is hazy and reverby, but the band are constantly slipping in weird bursts of distorted crunch, or stretches of hushed crystalline drift, but always stumbling back into their irresistible fuzz pop. Record opener "Girls FM" is a total hit, a chorus that kills, not to mention an equally catchy verse/bridge combo, super sweet harmonies, a main riff that manages to crunch and jangle at the same time, weird fuzz bass that drops in and out, as well as all sorts of subtly twisted recording weirdness, only adding to the fun fucked up vibe. The weird thing is that Happy Birthday is the project of Kyle Thomas, whose previous groups we've raved about in the past, Feathers, Witch, and King Tuff, but never did we expect that he might be capable of this kind of kick ass ultra catchy pure pop bliss out. But we're so pleasantly surprised, and damn if Happy Birthday didn't just leap into the running for pop record of the year!!

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Another Radioactive reissued rarity, and possibly one of the best yet. Oooh, we've got a weird one here. Seriously. But very cool we think. Didn't know what to expect from the whimsical band name and front cover artwork, but it wouldn't have been *this* anyway! The first track, "3-D, Free" starts things off pretty freaky with spacey vocal effects and a lethargic reggae beat, with heartfelt lyrics, singing lines like "I saw police shooting rats". It's reprised later at the end of the album in an even more wigged out "electronic" version. This is definitely psychedelic rock music, but also very futuristic for its time (circa 1977-1978), hinting at new wave/punk. With track two, "Positive People", things get even more Devo. And it doesn't get any more normal as it goes. Capt. Beefheart also seems to be at this party... weird weird weird. But these folks have a knack for melody amist the madness. The Happy Dragon-Band was the work of one Tommy "The Happy Dragon" Court, who had previously released a now almost as obscure album on Capitol in 1974 as Phantom's Divine Comedy. Never heard it but we're told it's very Doors-ish and mysterious. Loading up on the synths (some very John Carpenter synths) and electronic effects and employing the services of multiple musicans and vocalists besides himself, Tommy's idea of a comeback a few years later was this quite odd band/album/project. Huh? Well, this just might have been a bit ahead of its time... or something. Ultimately, though, it's very original and, to us now, pretty darn cool. What other precedents can we cite, or comparisons can we make? Zappa? Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come? a seriously dosed Andrew Lloyd Webber? Early Alice Cooper? Late Comus? Xolar-X? The Dreamies? Perrey-Kingsley? A back-from-the-future Ariel Pink?? With sizzling electronics, spacey effects, madhouse vocal choruses, definite hooks, serious psychological/cosmic moods, constant pitchshifting in the vocal dept, and song titles like "Astro Phunk", "Inside The Pyramid" and "Disco American", maybe there are no easy comparisons... All ten tracks have their unique charms. A chaotic, confusing, eccentric and yet (im)possibly brilliant and quite enjoyable piece of work!

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As much as we love the Japanese '70s rock band Happy End, we've never been able to list any of their releases before as they have always existed only as ridiculously priced imports. Luckily Erebus has reissued this one at a regular price and we're so excited that folks who have never gotten to hear Happy End before will finally get a chance to dig their enduring sounds.� While most of the '70s Japanese sounds we rave about is typically more on the extreme psychedelic and noisy side of the sonic spectrum, Happy End were much more about a breezy, hazy and salt of the earth sound. Happy End were born from the ashes of Apryl Fool by�Takashi Matsumoto and Haruomi Hasano, who of course would go on to help form Yellow Magic Orchestra. While they were exploring sounds that folks like Neil Young (CSNY), were making at the same time the really cool thing about Happy End was that unlike most of the other Japanese rock bands of the late '60s/early '70s they didn't do any cover songs or sing in English for more widespread attention. You can hear just how organic their intentions were, as these are songs that totally have their own unique approach to wind in your hair, sun soaked psych-pop. We love their whole catalog so we hope other records get reissued, but for sure grab this one to start.

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MPEG stream: Ayakashi No D�butsuen (Ayaka City Zoo)
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This is a MEAL! This punk ass band (and pals of ours) from the town of Watsonville, California are a bunch of snotty creeps with twisted visions of landlords on fire and yuppies being run through the wheat thresher! Their sound is part Public Image Limited (with dubbed out guitars, pounding percussion and general bad attitude) and part Big Black (angular, dark and more bad bad attitude). They hate rich people, they hate meansters, and they are annoying as fuck to see live. Happy Meal is fronted by twin brothers, known only as American Cream (guitar and vocals) and Harinjneesh Al Chone (bass and vocals). If you see them live, they will make fun of you!!! They also write amazing songs! The first track, after the rap station skit intro, is "Kathy". Has a catchier more riffradical song ever been written? You will have to buy this record to find out! The rest of the album is equally killer. Jagged but melodious guitar lines, throbbingly fucked up bass patterns and two little twerps screaming about making pipe bombs and selling weed to the cops. Watsonville's Most Wanted! Also, every cd is garnished with a hilarious comic street by bass-man Al Chone. Why? Happy Meal.

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If your thing is rock music (or pop, or rap, or country, or whatever) and you're inclined to make music, well that's probably the genre of music you're going to be making, right? So if someone's super into "world music", and can't get enough Javanese gamelan or Morroccan trance or Indian raga or Tuvan throat singing... well then that someone would probably come up with their own music in that vein, and that might sound a lot like Harappian Night Recordings! Imagine the murky improvs of Thuja or Kemiallisat Ystavat going full tilt into anything goes "ethnological forgery" territory, an experimental exercise in dronological DIY exotica. The Bo'Weavil label is known for both reissued old time folk and modern day folky sounds from around the globe, every thing from Anne Briggs to Zadik Zecharia. This fits right in, the music of Harappian Night Recordings aka the UK's Dr. Syed Kamran Ali being a one-man synthesis of sounds both East and West, mostly East... with a collection of ethnic instruments from around the globe and an equally broad range of musical-cultural influences, HNR generates mysterious, lively soundscapes both rhythmic and droning. There's sixteen tracks here in this disc's approximately 42 minutes, some brief atmospheric interludes, others more fully-developed songs that could be dances and ceremonies of ancient origin. While you might think this was the work of a DJ with a collection of dusty international 78s to sample, apparently this only SOUNDS like a mix of authentic field recordings, instead all of it was composed and performed by HNR's Dr. Ali! (We say apparently 'cause we still suspect that some of this must be sampled.) He rattles drums and twitters flutes and strums ouds and pumps harmoniums... and occasionally chants and sings as well - the track "The Widow Chang, Lady Pirate" boasting maniacal vocals that wouldn't be out of place on a Sun City Girls album, and in fact we're sure that much of this disc will appeal to SCGs fans, the whole thing coming across as it does like a mashup of music culled from the Sublime Frequencies library! In a similar spirit as the SCGs, this is done with a slightly hallucinatory, gonzo intensity (the Bo'Weavil press release likens HNR's music to "a Cuban guerilla force stepping on Eisenhower's throat, emptying their glorious bladders on his face" among other things). And certainly the warp and warble and distortion inherent in the lo-fi production adds to that sometimes dark atmosphere, though HNR's music is melodic too, often quite catchy, bouncing along ecstatically. Along with the SCG's, we'd recommend this to fans of Siamese Temple Ball (another, possibly, faux-ethnic recording) and the cross-cultural mythmaking of Hungarian composer Laszlo Hortobagyi. But while Hortobagyi invented his own, unknown fake culture, the folk music of which he purported to "document", the HNR's hybrid sounds don't pretend to be from anywhere in particular, making overt if cryptic allusions to many traditions from the far corners of the real world... A quick trip over to Wikipedia clued us in to the meaning of this disc's title, also the name of one of its songs, it comes from a fairly bizarre bit of Indonesian mythology - Hainwele the "Coconut Girl" being a mythical being who had the ability to, ahem, excrete valuables, such items as golden earrings, coral, porcelain dishes, and, indeed, "glorious gongs"! No doubt the other track titles are referencing equally interesting folklore... but even without doing further internet research, your imagination will have much to work with from the sounds and music here alone. Fantastic, in the several senses of the word. But if you would like some visual input, a cinematic analog to the sort of field recording collage that these Harappian Night Recordings resemble, check out the YouTube video for HNR's track "Headless Mule" found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AzLV7zDMtM

MPEG stream: Bate Cairo
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We reviewed Dave Bixby's Ode To Quetzalcoatl record on the last list. A glorious batch of born again, weirdly damaged outsider folk, chronicling Bixby's struggle to recover from drug abuse, and to find God, which culminated in receiving actual messages from God. Needless to say, that record was pretty intense, the music not that far out, spare and sparse and jangly and folky, but the lyrics, woah, harrowing and twisted and depressive and dark dark dark, and did we mention a bit bizarre, especially considering Bixby had achieved some sort of physical covenant with God apparently. So here we we have Bixby's second record, released shortly after Ode To Quetzalcoatl, circa 1969, but much had changed in his life, he had hooked up with a dubious spiritual advisor / guru who eventually joined the band and wrested some of the control from Bixby (as well as being investigated by the government in connection with his sort-of-cult the Group), the performances were much larger, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, at Christian colleges and at secular venues, Bixby had found a home, and had friends and support, but was still tortured by the same questions and fears that haunted the first record. Harbinger is much more polished, recorded in an actual studio, with occasional female vocals, lush harmonies, overall a more positive vibe, but still the songs are intense, and emotional, mysterious and dark, just check out "Cosmic Energy", tense and minor key, Bixby's vocals more confident, but at the same time more intense, haunting atonal guitar figures, lots of buzz, a killer track for sure. And the rest of the record is pretty excellent too, a warm sunshine-y dark Christian folks, with definite dark undertones. A rare lost gem for fans of freaky outsider psychedelic folk and anyone into Jandek, Nick Drake, Bill Fay, Roy Harper, Perry Leopold, Charles Manson and other troubled folk troubadours...

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Here Be Monsters sounds not unlike a dreamy meeting of Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, Nick Drake and Rufus Wainwright. Harcourt's hoarse, weary vocals - often a frail whisper - coupled with pretty darn fine songwriting and lush instrumentation make for quite

RealAudio clip: Beneath The Heart Of Darkness
RealAudio clip: God Protect Your Soul
RealAudio clip: She Fell Into My Arms

Besides being killer (of course), this new tape from Ormalycka has the distinction of being one of the few releases on the label that we could find anything out about online. These Virginia hardcore crushers deliver a demo that's frantic and furious, old school hardcore heaviness, equal parts early eighties UK punk and classic Boston HC, bellowed vox, buzzing riffage, caveman drumming, frenzied punk rock intensity that slips into lurching lumbering doominess, and brooding knuckle dragging swagger here and there. Short sharp bursts of aggro punk fury, tempered by some bass driven dirgery, and some downright poppiness in places. Fans of SS Decontrol, Black Flag, and old school classic hardcore will dig big time...

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What do you think, is it about time for another Turkish psych sensation 'round these parts? Hardal fits right in with Shadoks' previous reissues of Istanbul-based "Anatolian rock" bands we've loved, like Bunalim and Edip Akbayram, even though the date on this is a bit later than those. Hardal (featuring members of Erkin Koray's Underground 4 band) formed in 1976, releasing this, their debut album, in 1980. Maybe a little disco has infiltrated their sound, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Kitschy '70s cop show synths, acid rock guitar solos, and '60s psych-pop catchiness are all also in the mix. Just listen to the first track, the super groovy, yet poppy "Bir Yagmur Masali" and tell us you're not hooked. It's impossible to resist that groove! They should have added this to the Psych Funk 101 curriculum (that comp we reviewed last list)! Reminds us a bit of South Korea's great San Ul Lim, who were of similar style, and vintage. Soulful male vocals are contrasted with fuzzed out, funky bass. Whistling synth lines and cinematically wordless female vocals also adorn these songs. Hardal definitely have a typically romantic vibe derived from the traditional folk music of their homeland, but even at its mellowest, some tasty fuzz or badass groove is never that far away. We don't know what Hardal means, but the album title Nasil? Ne Zaman? apparently translates as How? When? If the question involves getting down to some killer Turkish tuneage, the answer is: this is how, and the time is now!! And as usual with Shadoks, the cd booklet provides informative liner notes, color photos, and press clippings.

MPEG stream: Bir Yagmur Masali
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Debut from this NYC hard rocking new wave glam pop combo, whose sound is a fantastically twisted mix of the Cars, Sparks, Cheap Trick, the Tubes, a little Devo, more Cars, even glam pop hard rockers Kix (remember them?). Just check out opener "She's Flexible", with its crunchy guitar, snarly vox, bouncy kinetic rhythm, and big hook heavy chorus. A sound that perfectly straddles the line between eighties new wave and seventies power pop. The production is massive, the guitars crunchy and fuzzy, the drums muscular and groovy (courtesy of Bill French formerly of SF indie rockers Mist And Mast!) which gives the whole thing a definite modern vibe, not to mention the occasional explosive mathy blowout, but at its core, the sound is total old school glammed out power pop, and it kills. And while the opening one-two punch is a blast of bouncy glammy rock out bliss, the rest of the record settles down into a much more laid back glammy jangle pop, again harkening back to the classic days of MTV and eighties radio, brooding moody verses, big choruses, swirling synths, spidery melodies, still plenty of guitar crunch, there's one almost ballad, and a serious swinging anthemic stadium-worthy foot stomping glam pop closer to finish things off. Vinyl includes a download code that comes with a bonus track not on the lp. Cool trophy cover art too!

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Tim Hardin is a classic example of a great artist who should have been much bigger than he was, but who also contributed plenty to his own undoing. Releasing a string of great records on the Verve label in the mid-sixties, he largely became known for songs that were hits for other people, such as Rod Stewart ("Reason To Believe"), Nico ("Eulogy To Lenny Bruce"), The Sandpipers ("Misty Roses") and Scott Walker ("Black Sheep Boy", "Lady Came From Baltimore"). Karen Dalton also covered his "Green Rocky Road" and "While You're On Your Way". Possessed of an easy but soulful teddy bear croon, Hardin tackled jazz-inflected blues and folk motifs with a sublime melancholic pop sensibility that barely veiled a profound cynicism towards life and love. In fact, Hardin's best songs were bittersweet reality checks to the era's promise of brotherhood and love. Two of those songs, "Don't Make Promises", and "How Can We Hang On To A Dream", bookend this stellar debut record. However, the former song's inclusion of string accompaniments without Hardin's permission began an ongoing and troubling distrust with record companies, that only added to the pile of his own personal demons (including the drug abuse that finally killed him in 1980). Inversely it's these strings and vibes that add a distinctiveness to the production that he would later use on his more successful follow-up record, 2 (and must have been what made Scott Walker take notice!). But it's the rough polish of the debut where we are introduced to Hardin's range. The hints of the Greenwich Village folkie maturing into a soulful and profound songwriter, broadening his palette into open jazz and blues forms that at the time, Tim Buckley and Fred Neil were only beginning to expand on more deeply. Essential!!!!!!!

MPEG stream: Don't Make Promises
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Another lost gem from an almost entirely forgotten band who existed briefly during the just-post grunge glory years of Sub Pop. A band that never would have fit all that comfortably amidst it's heavier labelmates (Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Tad, etc.), and seemd to be signed with the hopes of finding a new Nirvana, The Hardship Post (from the same poppy little province of Canada that gave us Sloan, Eric's Trip, Jale, etc.), were a full on pop band, a bit grungy maybe, with plenty of mumbly Nirvana-isms, but most decidedly not -grunge-. In fact, they sounded more like some weird twisted mix of that rainsoaked Northwestern rock sound, the repetitive riffing of Lungfish, a little Nirvana loud / quiet, and a whole lot of Elvis Costello! Crunchy, bouncy, stripped down riffy pop songs with straight ahead drumming, jangly riffs, and the vocalists's warbly Costello like wail WAY up in the mix, constantly struggling to hit the high notes, cracking and straining, making every song sound totally urgent and emotional and most of all FUN. Simple and super catchy, all of the songs on Somebody Spoke are hooky as hell, with lots of indie jangle, shakers and tambourines, handclaps, lots of oooo-ing and la-la-la-ing background vocals, big dumb riffs, all wrapped up into a perfect batch of irresistable (but somehow still dark and moody) pogo pop perfection. Except for the the two slow sort-of-ballads, that for our money are as just as good as any of the classic Nirvana brooders, dark and slowly unfolding, mumbly and rumbly expanses of downtuned strum and sweetly crooned moodiness (that found their way onto plenty of Andee's mid-nineties mixtapes!). So good!

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You get five tracks, seventeen minutes of beer-fueled metal/punk aggression on this ep from Washington state hairies Harkonen, including a totally killer cover Scratch Acid's "Cannibal". Heavy but kinda arty and rockin'ly catchy. You get the idea that this band likes to have fun and party and all that, but they've got a scary, serious side to 'em and it's probably best just to get out of the way and let 'em play. It makes sense they'd be into Scratch Acid, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear 'em cover the Melvins or Black Flag or Today Is The Day someday too. We look forward to this summer's upcoming full-length on Hydrahead...

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Latest slab of grizzled grungy downtuned sludge rock / metal core (heavy on the metal) from Hydra Head. Harkonen are one of the only metal bands to actually get reviewed in the Wire magazine (and a good review to boot, even though they listed the band as

RealAudio clip: Grizz
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James Harlow might not be a name that's instantly recognizable to you. But long time readers of the aQ list will no doubt remember that Harlow is the man behind the weirdo black metal project Jabladav, who were responsible for the fantastic slab of black grimnity that was the Weakling-worshipping Dead As Duck. And while Jabladav has dabbled in plenty of non-black musics, you still might not be prepared for Harlow's most recent outing, which is not at all metal, not at all heavy, instead, it's a kind of woozy, soft psych prog, all strummed steel string guitar, swirling synths, symphonic arrangements. At times it's almost like a lo-fi instrumental Steely Dan, at others it's like some lost seventies prog rock rarity. And the prog here is not of the bombastic variety, instead it's more of a laid back, dreamy, druggy psych prog, again, that sounds like music out of time. There are flutes, and strings, the strings sounding more like a Chamberlin or Mellotron than actual strings, choral vocals (or at least what sound like vocals), the production is hazy, sun-dappled, washed out and a little bit druggy, moments of Appalachian guitar bleed into saccharine retro-chamber-pop bombast, which in turn gives way to some mutated strain of psychedelic easy listening, like Lawrence Welk on a serious (and seriously Satanic) bender or like a more laid back, but no less over the top Magma. Fantastic stuff, but be warned fans of Harlow's blacker and buzzier outings, this is something else entirely! LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! 150 gram blue vinyl, housed in a full color gatefold jacket, signed by James and the artist.

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A few lists ago we raved about the reissue of Harmonia's first album Musik Von Harmonia and now Lilith has thankfully reissued Harmonia's follow-up release from 1975, Deluxe. Although we loved Harmonia's first album, Deluxe is, dare we say, even better!! Made up of Michael Rother from Neu! and Moebius and Rodelius from Cluster, on Deluxe they are joined on a few songs by Mani Neumeier from Guru Guru, making the line up on this record a kosmiche supergroup of epic proportions! While the first record was tipped in the balance towards the Cluster side of things in terms of sound and the improvised process in which it was made, Deluxe has more of a Neu! feel as the tracks are more composed and song oriented, and for the first time contain vocal elements. Plus the motorik grooves are more rocking, with a real drum kit used more often than the drum machines creating a pulsating drive on par with Neu! 75, recorded that same year. But that's not to say Deluxe doesn't have its Cluster moments, as the two final tracks bring us down into some beautiful pastoral territory with the sounds of a stream with ducks and frogs near the Cluster studio in Forst can be heard amongst the warm and percolating analog synths. This is beautifully packaged tri-fold digipak with liner notes by Asmus Tietchens, who still owns some of Cluster's original analog equipment, and lots of photos including the awesome back cover of the trio lounging by the river in an obvious nod to Neil Young's On the Beach. Absolutely Essential!!!!!!!!

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MPEG stream: Monza (Rauf Und Runter)

A new five lp box set devoted to the works of krautrock supergroop Harmonia has just come out (and are already backordered) and for those of us who already have most of the stuff in the box except for the fifth lp of unreleased material, and couldn't afford the hefty price just for that, Gronland has kindly released that material on cassette for a limited time. A cassette may not satisfy everyone, but the amount of unreleased material is actually quite slight, just 4 tracks from 1975, a tad over 30 minutes, two live and two studio alternate takes of what would be fully realized tracks on other records. So far this cassette is currently the only means to get this material outside of that box set. Here is the track listing: A1 "Tiki-Taka At Harmonia Studio In Forst " 6:28 A2 "Live At Onkel Po In Hamburg" 9:12 B1 "Proto-Deluxe At Harmonia Studio In Forst" 4:30 B2 "Live At Fabrik In Hamburg" 11:38 Needless to say again, but this is very limited!!!

Record covers like this one just aren't fair. Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius hiply dressed on a platform in an abandoned train station with their backs turned to the audience playing all manner of amazing looking analog electrical equipment: synths, farfisas, banks of tone generators, oscillators, patch bays, stacks of amps, leaning guitars, and cords everywhere, amongst racks of machines with all sorts of knobs and levels. It just makes us soooo jealous. Not only for such beautiful equipment, but also nostalgic for this period of time in Germany in the early seventies when so much thoughtful and incredibly inventive music was being produced. First Amon Duul II, Can and Faust then Kraftwerk, Cluster, and, Neu!, with Harmonia being the perfect synthesis of the latter three bands both in sound and personnel. Especially when you see the back cover and you get a closer look at the band and you can tell the trio just have this alchemical connection with each other and the sounds they make. Each member is focused but self-assuredly calm. Not exactly what you would expect from a band whom Brian Eno once called "the world's most important rock band". Not that much of the world had ever heard of them. Nor is it what most folks consider rock music to be. So this is it! We've been reading about this for months, and it's finally here: a live document of a now legendary show on March 23rd, 1974 at Penny Station in Griessem, Germany. Not that it really matters that this is live, as their is no applause or chatter to clue you in, just bits of mumbled talking as the songs wind down at the very end. Harmonia members attribute this to there being only 50 or so people in the audience most of which were either too stoned to clap or too unsure at what points the songs begin and end. Doesn't seem to matter to the band anyway as we've already seen their backs were to the audience the entire time. But for a live document the sound quality is impeccable and what's even better all of the tracks performed weren't on any of their recordings, giving us, thirty-three years later, 5 new vintage Harmonia tracks to pore over. Most of which are over 9 minutes long. Recorded between Harmonia's woozy debut, Musik Von Harmonia, and its more rock-leaning follow-up, Deluxe, Live 1974 is the logical conglomeration of both sounds, sort of like the merging of Terry Riley-ish repetitions with Robert Fripp's or Heldon's spacey and searing guitar extrapolations. But unlike conventional rock bands, Harmonia's music doesn't climax or necessarily change all that much, making their deceptively simple musical structures more akin to trance, electronica and slow disco. Beginning with the slow burn of "Schaumberg", an 11 minute epic of Rother's sinewy guitar lines that build and loop over gentle pulses of Moebius's programmed percussion and Roedelius' repetitive tonal keyboard patterns merging into a more sped-up and hypnotic version with bass rhythms on "Veteranissimo", an extended 17 minute meditation on "Veterano" from Musik Von Harmonia that breaks down to quiet heartbeats before slowly building again. "Arabesque", the shortest track at five minutes, does away with the percussive elements altogether, instead focussing on overlapping patterns of melodic synth and guitar before slamming into the loping quarter-hour stoner lurch of "Holta-Polta", then finally culminating in the blissful pastoralism of "Ueber Ottenstein". It's been a stellar year or two for krautrock reissues as most of the Klaus Schulze, Cluster, Harmonia, Popol Vuh and Michael Rother catalogs have been reissued, re-introducing to the world the proto-new age realms of seventies German kosmiche music at a time when we can easily see its influence weaving through so many new bands like Arp, The Alps, White Rainbow, Lichens and Sylvain Chaveau. Always timeless, and never dated, Harmonia, like most of their German contemporaries mentioned above, were the most important rock band in the world simply because they cared about what they did, kept it simple, never indulged, and always left us wanting more.

MPEG stream: Schaumberg
MPEG stream: Veteranissimo
MPEG stream: Holta Polta

All right! One of our favorite album covers and probably the best kosmiche supergroup ever finally see the light of day once again. Called the "world's most important rock group" by Brian Eno, Harmonia consisted of Neu founder, Michael Rother and Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster. Michel Rother, after contributing to Cluster's breakthrough record, Zuckerzeit, which heralded a new direction in sound from their earlier dark and cavernous analog synthscapes to a more pastorally melodic and motorik driven percussive vibe, decided to take a breather from Neu. He moved into Cluster's newly built studio in the German countryside where they began collaborating on a more combined sound. While each member still continued to focus on their own main projects Harmonia was never considered a sideline affair, recording two stellar albums plus a series of recordings with Brian Eno that didn't see the light of day until twenty years later. Connecting the aesthetics of Pop and Minimalism, the first Harmonia album is a product of their source bands but with a fresh twist on the motorik ideal. Less clinical than Kraftwerk, less funky than Can, each member's multi-instrumentalist abilities are employed in a variety of approaches at once playful and murky, steady and mechanical, using electronic beats, distorted rhythms, warm keyboard shimmers, drifting piano, and gliding electric guitars. Its no wonder Brian Eno was a fan. Fans of Boards of Canada, Susumu Yokota and electronica-heads of all types should check this out too. They even coined the term "hausmusik"! Totally Recommended!!

MPEG stream: Watusi
MPEG stream: Hausmusik

Well, it's about time that this artifact showed itself again, what with all the Cluster, Kluster, Michael Rother, Kraftwerk, and Fripp & Eno reissues popping up all over the place, finally we have this last piece of the Harmonia puzzle, and it's never sounded better! Tracks and Traces is one of those curious krautrock documents, mainly because it was recorded in 1976, but never released until the late nineties. Its late release was always rather inexplicable, as there were no liner notes, but with this new reissue that bookends the original release with three previously unreleased bonus tracks and poetically expository liner notes, its former relegation as an "odds and sods" collection of sketches, can with all confidence be considered now to be one of the great lost krautrock records! If you bought this when it was first released, you may need to buy it again for the extra tracks that change the whole flow and feel of the album considerably. Harmonia as a group was always meant to be temporary. When Eno went to see them live in 1974, he ended up on stage with them and was invited to come out to Forst to experience Moebius and Roedellius's placid countryside studio first hand. But it took Eno two years to make good on that invitation, and by then Harmonia had essentially disbanded. Michael Rother was working on his first solo material (Flammende Herzen), as was Roedelius (Durch Die Wuste), while Moebius was working on the Liliental sessions. But they were all there in Forst for eleven days, experiencing the wind, river, trees and sun, casually improvising music, but really just treating the sounds they made as a meditation on process and time together without a goal to make a product. Eno was eventually called away by Bowie to work on Low, and the recordings of their time together lay dormant for two decades. It's easy to think that without the benefit of returning to the original recordings for overdubs, that these might be shrugged off as sketches, but the starker quality of these recordings are really what set them apart from the pastoral sweetness of the Cluster & Eno collaborations, and give them a distinctive expansiveness into the more shadowy and vague corners of their sound. Lots of ideas are explored, from rockish extrapolations, and baroque dirges to sinister and angular abstractions (Eno even sings on one track) but it never feels forced or indulgent. The sound just flows naturally. Essential!

MPEG stream: Vamos Companeros
MPEG stream: By The Riverside
MPEG stream: Weird Dream
MPEG stream: Les Demoiselles

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

SORRY. Wow! Long-lost (or neglected) tapes starring electronic krautrock luminaries Moebius and Roedelius (of Cluster) and Michael Rother (of Neu!), and Brian Eno!

The last Brian Harnetty record was a sleeper hit around here, fusing sampled bits of Appalachia and fragments of oral histories with dark brooding collaged soundscapes, the results were haunting and captivating, the two sounds working surprisingly well together, creating a sort of ghostly old world folk, the cracked and weathered voices wrapped in warm whirs and spectral ambience. For his latest record (which has taken us a while to get in to list), Harnetty has assembled a conventional band and composed a set of gorgeous and dark chamber rock / dark jazz vignettes, utilizing piano, accordion, clarinet, trumpet, violin, drums, bells, vibes as well as vocals on a few tracks courtesy of Mr. Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy, but more on that in a second. Harnetty hasn't abandoned his use of the strange old time samples either, they pop up throughout the record, a little burst of old timey Appalachia, a cute introduction from the bandstand of some dance, wild sawing fiddles, it sounds like a strange fit, but it weirdly sort of works. The record opens with a haunting ballad, all softly reverbed piano, and droning strings, shuffling drums, super moody and mysterious, when all of a sudden, right at the end, some old timey fiddle music fades while the song proper fades out, and the player says a few words and then we're already into the next song, another dark brooding drift. The whole record is pretty haunting and moody, a little Dirty 3, a little Max Richter, quite lovely, with the various old timey samples just adding a little bit of odd mystery. As for the vocals, Will Oldham actually only sings on 3 of the 12 tracks, not sure it's worthy of co-credit, but his songs are in fact quite nice, his creaking about-to-break croon perfectly complimenting Harnetty's dark and dreamy arrangements. And in some ways, Oldham's songs as well as his voice manage to sound as old and dusty as the sampled songs and voices...

MPEG stream: The Night Is, And Lights Are
MPEG stream: The Top Hat
MPEG stream: Sleeping In The Driveway

MPEG stream: Open Up The Door
MPEG stream: Living Circa 1920
MPEG stream: Winter Time

More Roy Harper for you, folks! We've been importing the hard-to-find reissued albums of the veteran British folk-rock singer-songwriter (always a cult figure, who shoulda been huge) and reviewing our favorites one by one. The first two Harper cds we listed were from the very early '70s -- his fourth and fifth albums, Flat Baroque And Berserk and Stormcock. But now we're gonna take a foray further along into the Roy Harper discography to feature album number ten, Bullinamingvase from 1977. 'Tis a full-band affair, and one that, as with quite a few of Harper's records, features a number of famous musicians as guests -- even though he never enjoyed much in the way of chart success, he was always being a big favorite among the rock royalty of the era. Notable among 'em this time are guitarist Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, Ronnie Lane of the Faces, and both Paul and Linda McCartney of Wings. And if you're a Wings fan (we are!) you will also immediately recognize the guitar of Jimmy McCulloch. You can't miss it. There's a trademark wavery sort of lick he plays that you've definitely heard before in Wings songs. (Sadly, McCulloch died just two years after this album was released, at the ripe old age of 26, due to drugs.) Fans of Stormcock know that Harper is one for the epic, and certainly the twenty minute opus "One Of Those Days In England Parts 2-10" is indeed "the major event on the record", as Harper's typically digressive and poetic liner notes say. Yet the other wonderful cuts here with single-digit running times shouldn't be overlooked. Fragile, emotional tracks like "These Last Days" and "The Naked Flame", (songs that show that Harper, though a romantic, had decidedly realistic views on relationships), alongside the much more rambunctious "Watford Gap", about a greasy spoon frequented by touring musicans in England, make the whole album something to savor. The single version of "One Of Those Days...", also included here, actually became the closest thing to a pop hit that Harper ever had. And indeed Bullinamingvase was Harper's most successful album to date (ever?), reaching number 25 in the UK charts. But despite all that he had a falling out with his record label and didn't release another album for three years... He's still going strong today, though, and maybe next time 'round we'll list his brand new anti-Bush, anti-Blair single!!

MPEG stream: The Naked Flame
MPEG stream: These Last Days

Ok, we're really rolling out the Roy Harper here at AQ, as promised last time 'round in our review of his Stormcock album (which got a *great* response, thanks everyone, we hope you liked it!). And if you did, as we not only hope but pretty much expect, then we've got another one for you: Flat Baroque And Berserk from 1970, the album that immediately preceeds Stormcock in Harper's discography. Compared to Stormcock, well, it's similar in feel, but there's more songs and they're shorter (though some venture into the seven and eight minute range) and thus more variety. The strings and orchestration of Stormcock don't make an appearance, this is a pure singer-songwriter setting, Roy Harper showing what he can do with just his acoustic guitar and his impassioned voice. Just try the intense, confrontational "I Hate The White Man" on for size. Or the opening salvo of "Don't You Grieve". The outpouring of emotion, the depth of feeling, his verge-of-insanity intelligence regarding themes both personal and societal... sheer brilliance in both his poetry and his playing. As a unique talent, Harper was surely a worthy contemporary to Bob Dylan and Donovan and Syd Barrett. Adding to the intimacy of the album, some of the tracks are interspersed with Harper talking (and laughing) about his songs, interacting with what sounds like a small audience, or just hamming it up with the recording engineer. Fascinating and sometimes quite amusing. His hippie humor lightens up music that's often delicate yet dark. So again, we urge anyone who still doesn't know why Led Zeppelin wrote a song entitled "Hats Off To Roy Harper" to check out this, and his other albums as we get them in. And, again, if you're at all enthralled by today's lauded folk troubadours -- the likes of Devendra Banhart, Ben Chasny, and Iron & Wine -- you need to hear Roy Harper.

MPEG stream: How Does It Feel
MPEG stream: Tom Tiddler's Ground

'Bout time for some more Roy Harper on our list! This time, we've imported copies of the cult British singer-songwriter's third album, 1969's somewhat goofily titled Folkjokeopus. It's an opus all right, and folky (with lots of exquisite acoustic guitar playing from Harper) but jokey only in that, as a "folk" musician, Harper is irreverent and idiosyncratic for sure, and witty -- but no joke. The mood here is actually pretty dark and serious a lot of the time. The track "One For All" is dedicated to Albert Ayler, whom Harper knew from his days of busking in the streets of Copenhagen. According to his typically cryptic liner notes, Ayler liked to call Harper "tough guy". And as delicate and beautiful as so much of this music is, there's a definite toughness to Roy Harper, as he rails against the wrongs of society, spitting out clever couplets or crooning high and emotively over his own impassioned strum. This record is the immediate predecessor to 1970's Flat Baroque And Berserk and 1971's Stormcock, both of which we've already listed, and if you like those two you should certainly get this one as well! The powerful, eighteen minute "McGoohan's Blues" (which grapples with some of the same themes as Patrick McGoohan's TV series The Prisoner, it seems) definitely foreshadows the epics of Stormcock, and is a crucial early composition in Harper's career. So we very much recommend this to all you '70s folk-rock fans, and/or those into the current scene inspired by such sounds (Devendra Banhart, Six Organs, Skygreen Leopards, Richard Youngs...). You need to hear Roy Harper and this is one of the classics of his discography.

MPEG stream: Sgt Sunshine
MPEG stream: She's The One

To those of us who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Roy Harper might already be something of an implied legend, stuck in our adolescent memories as the name referenced in the Zeppelin III song, "Hats off to Roy Harper". Some of us may even have noticed in the liner notes to Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here that it was Roy Harper belting out the vocals on "Have a Cigar". Sadly, for most of us from this generation we have heard very little or none of this man's own music. Harper's life story (as raw material for some of the best songs ever written -- seriously, just surrender your ears to "Goldfish" or "Tom Tiddler's Ground") is full of drama and obsession: joining the RAF in order to escape a Christian upbringing, Harper's "legendary" self-inflicted nervous breakdown in order to get out of his military service provided the prima materia for some of his first songs (e.g. "Committed" on his debut album Sophisticated Beggar). After escaping a mental institution in order to elope with a pregnant girlfriend, Roy headed off into London where his rebellious ways got him arrested. Serving a prison sentence, he spent most of his time in the library reading and evolving his creative spirit. Following his release in 1964 he busked around North Africa and then returned to London to join the folk club scene alongside the Incredible String Band, Donovan, Joni Mitchell, Bert Jansch and Nick Drake. During the recording of his first record he hosted the vagabonds of London in his flat and sermonized, guerilla-style, to the church-goers across the street from his flat window. So Roy's records were full of such expressions of protest against religion, politics, and the countless social forces subverting individuality and the imagination of the day. With every Roy Harper record, the listener gets extensive stream-of-consciouness rants, often surreal and often quite funny, complementing the songs with a voice that is at once confounding and endearing. The spirit in Roy's songs, one complicated by fits of great joy, sadness and absurdity, where the most banal things in life are rendered the most beautiful (such as "How could you say such terrible things with a wonderful wife like yours?") still coheres as the voice of a truly singular spirit. So...why can't we find Roy Harper sections in most record stores? After all he has dozens of albums and is still very much alive and making music. Well, a rare and wonderful thing in light of the typical artist versus the record industry scenario is that Harper has somehow managed to own all rights to his records and now distributes his material exclusively under the name Science Friction. But doesn't distribute very widely as his is but a small operation, based in Ireland. However, we've gotten in touch with Science Friction and are now happy to offer our customers, at long last, a selection of what we consider to be some of Roy's best. Starting with Stormcock! Recorded in 1970 at Abbey Road, Stormcock is a four-song, 41 minute opus of folk-rock genius (what has been dubbed by one critic a masterpiece of its own genre, "epic progressive acoustic"). Basically, the sort of thing that, despite the current upswing in the underground of psych-tinged folky songsmithery, you just don't get to hear much these days. A rare talent, fully on display here, and without some of the confounding eclecticism and eccentrities that may make some other Harper albums take a bit more work to get into. No, this is a definite "wow" from the very first few bars of the first song, continuing solid and stellar all the way to the end of the album. Gorgeously melodic, slow and langorous, sparkling with Roy's brillant acoustic guitar playing, otherworldly arrangements, and of course his voice, phrasing and lyrics. Roy wrote all the songs and sings and plays most of the music -- there's a few additional musicans on hand at times to help flesh out Roy's sound-world, among them one S. Flavius Mercurius (aka Jimmy Page) contributing lead guitar on "The Same Old Rock", as well as the orchestral musicians employed for the magnificent album-closer "Me And My Woman". Anyone who digs Six Organs Of Admittance or Devendra Banhart or the like owes it to themselves to experience some Roy Harper. Likewise anyone who loves the quieter, folker sides of the aforementioned Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Packaged with lyrics, art, and Roy's cryptic latter-day liner notes.

MPEG stream: One Man Rock And Roll Band
MPEG stream: Me And My Woman

Harper's still at it, taking Bush and Blair to task on this new single.

Unanimous aQ favorite Daniel Higgs, he of the mighty Lungfish and more recently a prolific solo artist, returns with a collaboration featuring fellow Baltimore noisenik Twig Harper, best known for his work in Nautical Almanac. Anyone keeping up with Higgs' output is undoubtedly aware of his brilliant grasp of minimalism, and with a voice like that, few people are complaining. While his recent solo work has included instruments like banjo, a shruti box, Jew's harp, and some spacey electronics, the emphasis here is on Higgs' voice and his words. Harper's sparse electronic accompaniment works perfectly on these performances, adding subtle layers of sound that never venture too far into full on noise territory while adding some necessary dimensions to Higgs' spiritual narratives. Comprised of seven pieces, Clairaudience Fellowship represents another evolutionary step for these two artists, utilizing spaciousness to a new effect. Higgs' voice is the one constant, mutating electronically throughout the record and sounding kind of like an alien delivering a religious sermon underwater. We're not entirely sure how Harper's sounds are made, but they often come off like field recordings of watery drips and breathy repetitions that soon change into clipped electronic noises, causing you to wonder what it is you are really hearing. Musically, one can detect similarities to the experiments of a wide range of groups like Cromagnon, the Red Krayola, Yahowha 13, and more recently, Amps For Christ. It might be misleading to call this "folk music", but then you have to wonder what such a term even means in 2010, and in a more abstract way, it seems pretty apt for this stuff. By the end of the record, Higgs' voice is warped beyond comprehension with only the occasional decipherable word popping up. Still, you know whatever it is he's saying, Higgs is speaking the truth steadily and surely. While it's hardly the feel good hit of the year, Clairaudience Fellowship is an amazing and engaging listen to anyone willing to sit down and pay attention. By now we can always count on Daniel Higgs to keep things surprising and interesting. Harper ain't no slouch either. Highest possible recommendation.

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

SORRY. Only a few copies of this one left!

Fans of infamous noise rock combo Harry Pussy might not be so familiar with this strange release, which came out in 1998, right after the band broke up, on which a one second feral yelp from vocalist/drummer Adris Hoyos is transformed by guitarist Bill Orcutt into an hour long drone. Sorta makes sense that it would end up on Editions Mego, partially due to the fact that Orcutt has seemingly been embraced by the minimal / electronic / avant music scene, but also the fact that even though this was recorded way back in the nineties, barring its source material, the resulting sounds are definitely some sort of abstract minimal electronic drone music, which definitely sounds right at home on the label, and except for that initial yelp, the four sides of this double lp set offer up a strange bit of extended buzz and whir, and within a few minutes, the source is irrelevant, and all we're left with is long layered stretches of undulating tones, of mysterious overtones, and slow shifting textures. It's mesmerizing and trancelike, long stretches of Niblockian minimalism, but made somehow more potent by their punk rock sound source. Certainly a strange 'final release' for Harry Pussy, but one that seems now in retrospect to have foreshadowed Orcutt's unlikely sonic trajectory. Ultimately, Harry Pussy fan or not, this is a cool ultra minimal drone record, that will no doubt most likely hold way more appeal for fans of Editions Mego's austere minimalism, than fans of Harry Pussy's brutally beautiful caterwaul. Packaged in a super swank, heavy gatefold sleeve.

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

SORRY. Live tour footage from 1997 in Bellingham and Chicago.

Who doesn't love Harry Pussy? Actually probably a lot of folks, but don't count us among them. One of the finest noise rock bands ever, with a strange flair for infusing their racket with something special, not melody necessarily, or musicality, something more ineffable, and something much more abrasive and harsh. But heck, female fronted noise rock was a rarity back then (and still is sadly), and Adris Hoyos, was a whirling dervish of damaged drumming and freaked out vocalizations, and their sound was totally unique, a stumbling super distorted acid fried feedback drenched blow out, and this here disc captures the band at their best, live and out of control, on their last tour, live in Texas in 1998. The music is amazing of course. Fucking heavy as shit, a maelstrom of drum chaos and super distorted guitars, the recording SO in the red, but the best part is probably Adris' crowd baiting, so much shit talking, calling the crowd a bunch of assholes who dress like jocks, but in the same breath trying to pimp shirts and records, usually met with a chorus of "FUCK YOU"s, before launching back into an explosion of fucked up glorious pounding noise rock. LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, but beautifully packaged in a full color sleeve, with a cool printed insert.

MPEG stream: Live In Austin (excerpt)

We love Harry Pussy, and we take every opportunity to tell the world. Unfortunately we don't get that many chances as the noise rock trio known as Harry Pussy has been broken up for years now, only the occasional live bootleg or video surfacing now and again. And as much as we love Harry Pussy, and their amazing studio albums, live is where they really shined, and by shined we mean fell totally apart, erupted into utter chaos, started fights with audience members, punished all within earshot, caused every indie rock noiserocker in the world to fall in love with drummer / vocalist Adris and generally annoyed and brutalized every club owner, promoter or opening band they ever crossed paths with. But holy shit, did HP pack a wallop. The recent live cd-r we listed, for what it lacked in fidelity, it made up for in spunk, and sheer speaker shredding brutality. So here we have yet another live document. Well, pretty much live. Half the record was recorded in a rehearsal space, the rest live at various locations. And needless to say it all rules. Heavy and noisy and off kilter and unhinged and spastic and wild and chaotic and freaked out and funny and fun and fucked up and GENIUS. HP were like the scarier, more lo-fidelity, less technical, noise obsessed Melt-Banana. Short sharp bursts of frenzied fury, all shrieking and thrashing and pounding, it's a little surprised the grindcore crowd didn't go nuts for HP as they share much sonically, but the sound of HP is so much weirder and unhinged. Some songs fly by in a matter of seconds, others pound away hypnotically for a few minutes. The guitars are gnarled and tangled and atonal, the drums a what-the-fuck splatter, and Adris' vocals a wild banshee wail that switches from hysterical shriek to guttural growl in the blink of an eye. This collection is awesome, the sound is excellent, the songs destroy, they even do some covers, a Nip Drivers tune, a Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, and they even tackle Kraftwerk's "Showroom Dummies", and it sounds pretty bad ass. Also included is a single 18 minute live recording, we originally thought it was a live show, but it sounds like ONE LONG TRACK, lots of chiming high end guitars and clouds of cymbal sizzle, moaning vocals, a bit like a stumbling off kilter Sunroof! The disc finishes off with 10 more live tracks, the sound super hot and in the red, the band totally on fire, sounding like quite possibly the raddest live band ever, which for that 14 minutes they almost definitely were. and we get a good dose of Adris' goofy cute stage banter to boot!

MPEG stream: Drop The Bomb
MPEG stream: Sex Problem
MPEG stream: New Song (Nip Drivers)
MPEG stream: Velvet Pussy
MPEG stream: Showroom Dummies (Kraftwerk)