So good to hear New Zealand's David Kilgour continuing to keep things nice 'n' simple. His sixth full length The Far Now contains more of his high calibre, straightforward singer/songwriter pop tunes in league with The Go-Betweens, Mountain Goats and Robyn Hitchcock. Y'know, that cardigan sweater and argyle sock wearin' intellectual pop songs filled with jangly guitars, wide-eyed innocence and poetic sweetheart hooks that get you... right... there! Ever so gently nails your heartstrings every time.
Hamish Kilgour was a founding member of legendary NZ jangle poppers the Clean, along with his brother David, and later played in the Mad Scene after moving to the US, but even after decades of playing music, All Of It And Nothing is his first solo record EVER!
The way it begins, it's fantastically moody and minimal and seriously stripped down, in fact the first few tracks are mostly acoustic guitar and percussion, and Kilgour's tentative warbled vocals. Over the course of the record, that sonic palette expands, though, adding spare, skeletal drumming, chimes, marimbas, dulcimer and vibraphone, yet instead of making it lush and layered, ends up more about adding texture, and melody. Then at some point, the sound does shift, the second half of the record getting more energetic and rocking, a little like the old Flying Nun sound, heavily beholden to the droned out strum and pulse of the Velvets, ramshackle and loose, woozy and psychedelic, those tracks placed between songs that remain dreamily lo-fi, a hushed almost bedroom-folk. That more intimate side a perfect balance to the more energetic numbers, and somehow those tracks, even with that added energy, still retain a sort of languorous, soporific energy, darkly laid back, sort of druggy and hypnotic, especially on tracks like the sprawling "Hullabaloo" which takes a dark pop gem, and stretches it WAY out, into something much more experimental and minimally mesmeric.
2 blasts of no-wave/new-wave from these 3 San Diego transplants who are an instrumental part of the whole San Diego new/no wave scene. Really arty and heartrenching. Kind of similar to Xiu Xiu (see AQ lists #133 and #145), who they play with often. Live they have this circular bench full of effect pedals and drum machines that has one band member hunched over like a mad scientist as he tweaks and contorts the sound. This record had Andee running around the store singing (in his best Nick Cave/Peter Murphy voice) "I've got rats for sale!! I'VE GOT RATS FOR SALE!!!!"
Kill Me Tomorrow really tear things up in strange and wonderful ways on their new album. Dissonant art punk in a similar vein to that of Xiu Xiu and Frog Eyes, but more likely to draw blood -- much more aggressive and unhinged. KMT's angular no-wave propulsions also conjures images of a bastard offspring of Sonic Youth and The Residents. Not to mention, their cover of Captain Beefheart's "Hot Head" only adds to the madness. Super cool and totally hectic!
This is it, far as I'm concerned. The only record I think tops the mighty Pig Destroyer's masterpiece "Terrifyer" this year. This is absolute technical grind perfection, and one of the fastest and most intense 15 minutes of music ever committed to tape. No song on here breaks the hundred-second mark and yet you feel utterly beaten by disc's end -- the pace is relentless, the riffs ever-changing and the intensity exhausting as this Texas quartet blaze through 11 tracks of politically-charged grind. Imagine a cross between the manic controlled chaos of classic Brutal Truth and the technical off-time wizardry of Cryptopsy and then speed everything up tenfold and you're beginning to approach the full-on assault that this band delivers.
Individual playing is just stunning here -- the singer is positively monstrous, sounding like a dead ringer for Brutal Truth's Kevin Sharp and espousing refreshingly thoughtful and original political lyrics on such topics as the Russian mafia, economics, JFK conspiracy theories and even food dyes. The guitars are razor-sharp -- it makes sense that Jody of criminally-underrated tech-metal juggernauts Kalibas was in the band for a while -- both bands demand a proficiency from their players that belie the simplicity usually associated with genre. And then there's the drumming! You knew this was coming -- this guy is fucking insane! Some of the fastest playing ever. On some songs, the blast beat is the SLOW part, I shit you not. For anyone even remotely interested in metal and grind, I simply can not recommend this record enough. Once you allow the wash of noise to bury you into submission, there's a good amount of complexity and memorable moments to wrap your head around. But really the music presented here far surpasses the constraints of the usual metal and grind conventions and summates to a sublime aural ferocity that pushes the very limits of human playing abilities. Yes, it's that good.
Every label seems to want / need their own retro-styled band (Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, et al) these days, and Island Records' entry into the fray appears to be The Killers. They've nabbed all the catchy tropes from your favorite '80s bands, and created a wholly unoriginal but entirely catchy fusion of all of 'em. You get glimpses of the sounds of Duran Duran, The Cure, New Order and Pulp, but perhaps less poncy and sullen. Indeed what sets them apart from F.F. and I. (and what just might widen their potential audience immensely) is the degree to which they embrace the flashy and bombastic (think: The Darkness through a new wave filter). Scientifically formulated to trigger the nostalgia button in VH1 Classic watchin' thirty-somethings.
First off, doesn't the cover for the latest Killers album looks like one of those '90s dime-a-dozen major label bad rock releases that you end up seeing a slew of the next week in the used bin? Oh they're Anton Corbijn photos? Whoops. We hope you're able to get past that unfortunateness, and give 'er a spin though. We did and can attest that the music fares much better than the packaging. This Las Vegas combo extend their shelf life past the fifteen minutes of fame afforded them by their single "Somebody Told Me". For their sophomore release, it sounds like The Killers are aggressively aiming to avoid being 'so two years ago' by shedding the '80s Duran Duran-isms and going heavier on the more timeless big rock pomp.
Slicker than ever, oozing with cocky confidence and so radio-ready. While a few Cure-ish moments do crop up, the band is modeling themselves more like anthemic grandeur of maybe U2, Yes and Queen. Funnily enough though, instead of that, we were thinking 'Gowan warbling with Interpol'. What? Too harsh? Nah. They're big boys now.
The Killers have some ol' odds and ends for you to shake your ass to! Sawdust is their catch-all of b-sides and rarities from the past four years. It totally captures their speedy sleek transformation from remarkably poncy Duran Duran-ites to sullen Joy Divisioners to big modern rock U2-ians in the span of just a few years. Beats us how'd they wrangled up the services of Lou Reed to sing on a tune, but they did for "Tranquilize". Includes four previously unreleased tracks.
Killing Joke's self-titled tour de force in 2003 left us breathless, electrified, floored. The intent and precision of that musical attack was mighty, and the impact was pronounced on mind, body and spirit. Their last album Hosannas From The Basement Of Hell as well as this one are similar in their unwavering address of universal crises, but they have more of a live performance feel. Absolute Dissent is definitely more raw and punk a la early Killing Joke... not surprising though since it features the band's original line-up - Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker, Paul Ferguson and Youth! A sludgey bassy roar rumbles through each song while Walker's trademark eviscerating guitar and Coleman's raging vocals slash their way to your ears. Pretty much anything this 32 year old band does can easily lay to waste most of the current hard rock, metal, punk, hardcore, you name it. The band's sound remains unmistakable and imposing, still vital and volatile all these years later, due largely to Coleman and Walker. Check out the propulsion of "Fresh Fever From The Sky" or the metallic firepower of "This World Hell". The second to last song "Here Comes The Singularity" hits the punk-pop nail on the head. Ultra catchy, but unlike the hooky yet inert anthems of current young bands of that genre, theirs actually present potent ideas with thought-provoking lyrics. That said, the album's seemingly most anomalous song, the slower, haunting "The Raven King" is also its highlight, calling to mind the atmospheric modern rock of Muse, Radiohead or newer Cave-In even. A grand lament! All hail Killing Joke!
We have mixed feelings about dvds and cds that come with bonus material that are primarily comprised of demos, alternate versions, etc... amounting to a mountain of stuff that was rejected for the album or movie proper in the first place. In one hand we have the "More is better, isn't it?" argument and in the other we have the "It wasn't intended to be heard by the public, was it?" debate. More often than not the extras and bonus material serve as nothing more than filler.
Enter Killing Joke's new double disc compilation titled Inside Extremities: Mixes, Rehearsals And Live -- a standalone release which in its entirety is a bit of a convulsive listen, but an electrifying document of the band circa 1990-91. Simply stated, with a band like Killing Joke virtually everything is invaluable, nothing is extraneous.
For fans and recording geeks (like us!), the first disc of rehearsal recordings is a fascinating peek behind the curtain of this mighty band's process in preparation for the recording of their 1990 album Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions. It features undeniably the band's finest, most potent lineup: Geordie Walker's massive guitars snake and roam, but are never ever aimless; Paul Raven's bass is a dirty molten boil; Martin Atkins' drums with a precise yet thunderous tribal pummel; and Jaz Coleman's bracing vocals slice through anything in its path. Even with the (we assume) one microphone room recordings on a lot of these tracks, Killing Joke's raw ideas and raw performances are riveting and filled with conviction.
Oh yes, and let's not forget that there's a second disc too which is a recording of a 1991 live concert in France. The band's performance is blistering, a phenomenal rock maelstrom. Actually we were surprised that it wasn't made the central focus of the release. The disc of rehearsal recordings could easily have been made the bonus accompaniment to the live cd (or to the forthcoming reissue of the album proper for that matter). A strange decision, but nevertheless, as a whole this makes for perfect preparation for the imminent reissue of the Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"The Unperverted Pantomime?" is a hodge-podge of some of the earliest Killing Joke recordings from the late '70s and early '80s. At that time, the band walked a similar post-punk path as Gang of Four and Public Image Limited, with discordant guitars crashing against a mutant dub rhythm section. Those who heard their early masterpiece "Turn To Red" on the "Wild Dub: Dread Meets Punk Rocker" compilation should know what to expect from these cuts, which include a bunch of early singles, a few radio session pieces, and some live recordings. None of these tracks have appeared on CD before. Unfortunately, neither the sound quality nor the performances of the live cuts are terribly good. Oh well. "The Unperverted Pantomine?" paints early Killing Joke as a fantastic studio band, and a less than ideal stage act. Overall, their new self-titled full length is a much more prime example of the incredibly blistering, volatile music of which this band is capable.
It would be a considerable understatement to say this new Killing Joke album is a sobering listening experience -- it's a fierce, visceral, and bleak call to battle. It rocks and rages with echoes of their 1981 debut (and first self-titled) album's feel and spirit. Yes, genuinely punk, and yes, genuinely metal... although those stifling labels can't and won't adhere to this band. Frankly, very few artists today can capture the pure seething energy that this, Killing Joke's second self-titled album, has harnessed.
Jaz Coleman tears out of your speakers like a man posessed. His deeply inspired vocal performance delivers some of his most inhuman gutteral growls, anguished howls and demonic hisses. Birlliant. His lyrics, brutally direct, are steeped in immense disgust and despair, with hard-hitting political critiques -- cross-hairs unquestionably zeroing in on Bush, September 11th and America -- interestingly, a lot of the heavy duty ones are omitted from the liner notes.
Geordie Walker's thunderstorm of guitars drill and grind, at once both tightly clenched and loosely slung -- pelting your ears with metallic shards and sinewed debris. Original bassists Youth and Paul Raven consume any remaining air with glowering lines that boil and stew. With each song, the unrelenting roar of Killing Joke closes in around you.
Drummer Dave Grohl -- apparently not busy enough with Foo Fighters and Queens Of The Stone Age -- does an excellent job immersing himself in the Killing Joke realm, closely resembling the pummeling precision and tribal thrash of Martin Atkins. Hopefully Grohl's presence (his name is stickered prominently on the front of the cd) will draw younger audiences to this venerable band.
Unlike other bands from the past who've regrouped recently for one last hurrah or to cash in on the latest retro trends, it's clear Killing Joke have resurfaced because they truly have something vital to convey (just as they did back in 1990 with Extremities... dirt... etc). They don't churn out albums year after year to fulfill record contract obligations -- they make music with a piercing focus when they feel the need and when it is needed.
Andy Gill's production is beautiful and huge (but not too 'modern rock'), making for a generally accessible and current sounding album (although some of the tracks are overly long) -- one that should have hard music fans clambering.
If you were ever into Killing Joke, check out this album! If you're new, this is a pretty good place to start.
Not sure why we didn't review the recent full length from Killing Sound, a trio of producers which includes aQ fave Vessel, but this remix of the opening track from that record has us thinking we better right that wrong, although here, that track gets reworked as something way more fierce and fucked up and brutal. The more chilled out original, here recast as some dark, dark jungle, all droned out ambience, brooding sonic malevolence, laced with haunting vox, that devolves into some seriously grimy, dubbed out drum and bass, all oozing low end throb, echo drenched skitter, the whole thing laced with all manner of creepy sound FX, what sounds like a power drill, stretched out into a keening tone, plenty of crunch and crumble, a slow build to a seriously bombastic finale, rib cage rattling bass and pounding beats, all wreathed in a swirl of grim atmospheric ambience. Killer!
If you were snoozing a few months ago [uh, kinda like we were...] when The Kills' full length debut Keep On Your Mean Side came out, then goshdarnit, you've gotta check out this hot lil' ep. This duo have been drawing plenty of White Stripes comparisons... and they're certainly not unwarranted. The Kills' sound is plenty trashy bluesy garage rock, but dare we say this pair have something a bit more interesting and darkly intriguing going on? The proceedings are also infused with a dramatic flair, a dash of hillbilly stomp and a hefty dollop of slouch 'n' slur in the ol' Royal Trux or X tradition too. This ep's title track comes straight from the album but it also includes two new ones as well as a video for the forementioned song.
Hot damn! Wherever you are, The Kills are gonna find you, take you down and sex you up! Keep On Your Mean Side contains a dozen super smokin' gritty blues rock numbers! Yeah, you're no doubt thinking "more goddamn blues rock male/female duos?!" And yes, with White Stripes, Boss Hog et al packing the garage, it's nearing its saturation point. I know! I know! But do yourself a favor throw out that old toboggan and give those buckets of leftover paint the heave-ho 'cause you've gotta make some room for The Kills! We'll admit, we were sleeping on the job back in April when this album came out, but their most recent ep "Fried My Little Brains" sure snapped up to attention. A major part of the success of The Kills sound is the vocal chemistry between the myteriously named VV and Hotel (aka Alison Mosshart formerly of Discount and Jamie Hince). She sings, speaks and moans in her great, slightly broken voice - so throaty and soulful and not unlike P.J. Harvey, it just might leave you reeling - and his mildly British oft-muttered delivery is the perfect foil. A fantastic smoldering, down'n'dirty debut.
For their second album, The Kills have taken a more urgent, aggressive stance with most notably Alison Mosshart sounding even more like Ms Polly Jean Harvey (circa Rid Of Me) than she did before and more than the lady herself does these days. And when Jamie Hince sings along they're a total deadringer for Boss Hog... that is if PJ gave Christina the boot. Ultra gritty, tense and sultry.
When we first heard about this band we though they were called Kill WHITEY Dead which seemed like a pretty provocative name. And initially when we realized it was actually Killwhitneydead, we were a little bummed. Yet another stupid band name. But after listening to this record, a furious grind metal hate letter, presumably to a woman named Whitney, it all makes sense. The fury and bile of a man scorned, channelled into one of the meanest heaviest records we've heard in a while.
Imagine one of the best metal/grind bands you've ever heard, unbelievably complex, stop start arrangements, weird Iron Maiden-y guitar melodies, huge chugging riffery, with totally almost black metallish demonic vocals, and blasts of grinding melodic hard rock, leads all over the place, almost like some eighties metal band strapped into the electric chair and supercharged into a flesh eating, city destroying grind metal monster. Then imagine a second vocalist, who isn't a vocalist at all but a sampler spitting out clips from every violent / weird / cool movie from the last 20 years. But not just like samples over music, KWD take samples and literally use them like another vocalist, with the music edited and the songs written and arranged around the movie clips. It's been done in the past, but never so perfectly. Misanthropic, and pummelling and chillingly hateful. If I was Whitney I'd actually be pretty flattered that I was able to illicit the kind of passion it must have taken to birth this kind of musical monster. The clips are from Unfaithful, Buffalo 66, Harry Potter, Platoon, Wall Street, Black Rain, Natural Born Killers, Se7en, Lord Of The Rings, Memento, Aliens, Road To Perdition, The Longest Yard, House Of 1000 Corpses, Kiss The Girls, The Crow, Tenacious D, The Breakfast Club, The Usual Suspects and about a million more.
The insane thing is they actually list them all and got permission to use every single one of them. Wow.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Following up their 1998 full length (still available), this Lousiville-based indierock quartet grace us with two new songs. Melodic, emotive, and deliciously epic in the best ways... all the good adjectives apply. The recording is pretty lo-fi but the songs MORE than make up for it. Highly recommended.
Finally a full-length from this Louisville, KY combo! Majestic, soaring, hook-filled indie rock on the always trustworthy Temporary Residence Ltd. label. Very nice.
Super limited new lp from this free form blackened doom-drone-noise combo, two sidelong sprawls of twisted improvised blacknoise, each track awesomely and hilariously titled ("Satan Fe" and "Denvhorr"), and featuring at least one member of LA black metal horde Harassor, but this is far from black metal, there is most definitely a blackness, but the sound Kilt conjures up is more like droned our power electronics, lush and layered but corrosive and chaotic, churning low end burbles beneath grinding sheets of burnished white noise, streaks of feedback wrapped around heaving swells of super distorted thrum, blasts of super blown out buzz that sound almost like DHR beats recontextualized, clouds of cymbal shimmer, the sound woozy and warped, slipping from hushed drift to roiling speaker melting ferocity. There seem to be vocals too, chant like, but before they can form they seem to melt into the sounds around them. The sound is also fairly dynamic, with some of the low end peeling away, and leaving blasts of keening high end, or swirling fields of static, even a weird whistling melody at one point, or a wheezing chordal thrum, but even at its most ferocious, for a 'noise' record, it's surprisingly listenable, the textures and fractured melodies, the tone and timbre, not as harsh as it might seem at first blush, it's pretty tranced out and mesmeric. The second side starts out with a blast of fractured sound, jagged jump cuts and blasts of noise, before settling into a warm swirl of muted crunch and blurred rumble, and from there on out, the sound drifts from washed out crackly drift, to face melting howl, and back again, seeming to attain a sort of sonic equilibrium right in the middle, making this more mesmerizing than brutal, and we're far from being proponents of harsh noise, but this is the sort of sculpted noise, the sort of blown out power electronics and textured blacknoise dronemusic that we can't seem to get enough of.
LIMITED TO 120 COPIES!! Each in a swank hand silk-screened cover.
All of you who loved Light In The Attic's career-spanning collection of music by Korean psych guitar maestro Shin Joong Hyun, that we recently made Record Of The Week, should be happy about this. It's an brand new official reissue, the first in a series, of Shin Joong Hyun related albums. As you perhaps recall, soothing psych-pop-folk singer Kim Jung Mi, backed by Shin Joong Hyun and his group The Men, appeared on that Beautiful Rivers And Mountains anthology with a song called "The Sun", which we said reminded us of Galaxie 500!
This 1973 full-length from Kim Jung Mi, as masterminded by Shin Joong Hyun, is also quite special. "The Sun" is just but one of the ten dreamily melodic tracks found here, including a four minute version of the song "Beautiful Rivers And Mountains" itself, a signature Shin Joong Hyun tune. Other titles include "Wind", "Blow Spring Breeze", "It's Raining", and "Lonely Heart", and although the lyrics are all in Korean, we get the idea that love and nature form much of the subject matter here (actually, the thick cd booklet provides English translations of the lyrics, along with EXTENSIVE, ultra-laudatory liner notes and lots of full-color photos of the sexy young chanteuse). In those liner notes, Shin Joong Hyun is quoted as having said: "There is no person who can sing Psychedelic music as well as Kim Joong Mi".
Kim Jung Mi's lovely voice will go straight to your heart, and the emotive music accompanying her is moodily lush, majestically melancholic... it's not really about hard-edged fuzz guitars, though they surface occasionally, as more often do propulsive psych "beat" grooves, but for the most part this album seems to hover on a higher, more heavenly pop plane of psychedelia than that suggests... The groovier stuff, though, reminds us of Serge Gainsbourg's Historie De Melody Nelson at times (on "Your Dream" especially). And it's no stretch that the liner notes call Kim Jung Mi the "Francoise Hardy of Korea". Recommended to any fan of the Forge Your Own Chains comp, in addition to those who already heard her on that Shin Joong Hyun collection. Gorgeous!
Comes nicely packaged in a miniature lp-style sleeve, with that aforementioned info/photo packed booklet. There's a vinyl version forthcoming as well, fyi.
King Biscuit Time is Beta Band head guy Steve Mason's alter ego. This domestic release compiles the "No Style" ep along with last year's "Sings Nelly Foggit's Blues In Me And The Pharaohs". Imagine Pink Floyd meets electronica with scratchin and muggin' gone even more crazy, then add some occasional jungle beats. Beta Band fans will love this. We think it's better than the slightly boring second Beta Band album.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Long time readers of the aQ list no doubt remember Tetuzi Akiyama's Don't Forget To Boogie record, ostensibly, as the title suggests, a boogie rock record, but in reality, a twisted droned out hypnotic psychedelic minimal psych record, with the boogie elements stripped down to a single riff, then drenched in distortion and repeated over and over and over, creating super mesmerizing fields of layered repetition a la Reich or Riley, it quickly became a bigtime aQ favorite.
This debut lp from one man 'boogie' outfit King Blood, approaches boogie rock in a similarly oblique fashion, taking those boogie riffs and fucking them up big time. Not quite as minimal as Akiyama's opus, Eyewash Silver adds drums, and what sounds like multiple layers of guitars, not to mention WAY more distortion, a gloriously blown out chunk of experimental abstract minimal boogienoise weirdness.
Opener "Black Money" is probably the most traditionally song-y, a loping lumbering midtempo groove, a main riff locked tight and looped over a similarly tight barely there rhythm, but then all around it, guitars howl and grind, churn and crunch, loads of distortion and tangled melodies, swirling clouds of corrosive sound wrapped around that fantastically incessant groove, gradually growing more and more explosive, before the noise guitars nearly swallow up the boogie riff completely.
"End Of A Primitive" sounds like a Stooges sample dipped in distortion and left outside to crumble and decay before being brought back in and recorded onto some 20 year old 2" tape that had been stored in a wet basement. Another groovy riff, multiple guitar lines, the song gradually shifting, but so gradually, it's easy to get totally mesmerized. "Grimhaven" and "Grimhaven (A Return)" are all twang flecked dirge, like an echo drenched Earth, via the desert rock of Scenic, but again way more minimal, a single riff, a single part, looped and locked and totally hypnotic, while much of the melody is supplied by the bassline which is fluid and woozy, drifting beneath the song's core hypnodirge.
"Poison In Jest" is the killer here, super short at 2+ minutes, but an insanely super distorted chunk of garage dirge minimalism, Stooges riff and about ten tons of crumbling super blown out distortion.
The other songs follow a similar path, taking simple riffs and stretching them way out, adding layer after layer of thrum and howl and fuzz and buzz, occasionally letting the sounds slip into full of in-the-red freakout, but just as often, keeping them just this side of total chaos, the result, a gloriously hypnotic bit of riffy mesmer.
SUPER LIMITED, ONLY 100 COPIES, we got 12 or 13, and those are all we'll ever get. Way recommended for folks into droney, dirgey, hypnotic heaviness, which should most definitely be most of you!
Eyewash Silver, the debut from one man knuckle dragging minimal psych avant boogie one man band King Blood, was a massive hit around here, every track seemed to be a Reich / Riley style deconstruction of psychedelic boogie, a thick corrosive riff, dipped in distortion, then repeated trancelike over and over, inducing a seriously psychedelic state in the listener, we haven't been that blown away by a mysterious debut in ages. So we were super psyched for this follow up, and were expecting another does of blown out caveman riffing, but instead, something strange seems to have happened, at least judging from the opening title track, sure the sound is still insanely in-the-red, the low notes crumbling and seeming to tumble from the speaker in corrosive gouts, but the vibe is much more laid back, the sound much more melodic, a serious fuzzy psychedelic groove, multiple melodies, intertwined guitar lines, there's still really just one part, repeated over and over, but it's downright catchy, and near the last minute or so the low end drops out, leaving just the drums and some soaring guitars for a strange sort of majestic psych coda.
So we were expecting the second track to drag us back into the murk, and while it too is all thick and slithery, the low end a seriously dense buzz, it too is pretty goddamn melodic, the low end locking into a groove, while other guitar lines soar and wail over the top, and like the opener, it's blissed out and hypnotic, and yet weirdly melodic and catchy. "Wheels Across The Night" does touch on some of the Stooges vibe that was present on much of Eyewash Silver, all swaggery super distorted stomp, but then "I'll Take What's Mine" strips things way down, practically acoustic, lilting and balladic, sounding a bit like some lost Les Rallizes Denudes recording (which we're sure was the intention), buried crooned vocals, shards of feedback, spidery melancholic melodies, it's a cool side of King Blood we hadn't seen before, but we definitely want more. "Here Comes A Candle" is a brief bit of super melodic boogie, which leads into the closer, the 8+ minute "Silent Dust", which is the most abstract of the bunch, and ends up sounding like Six Organs Of Admittance or Ghost, albeit run through a daisy chain of malfunctioning distortion pedals and blasted out of a cabinet equipped with shredded speakers, and as good as that sounds, the actual jam is even better, blown out, dusky and deserty, lazy and druggy and dreamy, and yet still plenty distorted and heavy and seriously psychedelic.
Beautifully packaged in a heavy screen printed cardstock jacket, already sold out at the label, so these may be the last copies we're able to get!
The return of our favorite lo-fi, distorto boogie, zoner-psych one man band, King Blood! Is there even more than one? Hell, even if there was, we'd be hard pressed to dig their music more than the dirgey, distortion drenched trance-out mesmer KB kicks up, and on this new two track single, it's another couple blasts of hypno-drone, modern minimal dirge boogie bliss. We've mentioned Reich and Riley in past reviews, positing that KB sounded a bit like deconstructed, decayed guitar boogie, via modern minimalism, with each 'song' a looped cyclical sprawl crafted from single riff, or melodic line, repeated over and over and over, super mesmerizing and intensely druggy and so easily to get utterly lost in. We were extra excited for this single, knowing a little secret about both tracks here, one that becomes more obvious once you get a load of the B side, and one that's probably more fun to discover on your own, so fans of King Blood here's your SPOILER ALERT!!! Both tracks here, while not specifically 'covers', are in fact impressions of / variations on / ruminations on, tracks by none other than the mighty Guns & Roses. The A side is not so obvious, so let's start with the B side, which is essentially the main riff from "My Michelle" (the title is "Well, Well, Well" after all), slowed way down, slathered in soft swirly distortion, and wreathed in crackle and amp buzz, and transformed into a woozy, slithery, looped crawl, hazy, and druggy, and dreamily dirgey. We say this all the time, but we would have been so happy to have this track / side stretched out for the length of a whole lp, total G&R minimal boogie bliss trip out radness for sure.
And while the A side is not so immediately recognizable, it's equally rad, with a huge echoey, cavernous main riff, reminding us of a slightly better produced Les Rallizes Denudes, swaggery, snarly, slithery, with a killer distorted psychedelic melodic lead, draped over the churning distorted tarpit riff, again, some seriously woozy slo-mo glam-boogie dirgery that RULES.
And if you really wanna get dirgey and sludgey, crank it down to 33rpm... sounds even more like some lost seventies Japanese psych bootleg!
Album number two from this hot Japanese trio! After an amazing overdriven garage monster debut on Bulb and years of touring for these Osaka mod rockers, "In the Red" is a long awaited and highly anticipated follow up. Released on Toshiba EMI in their
Well, troo Melvins freaks are prolly gonna want this, and maybe some non-Melvins fans will get curious about it too. Imagine the Melvins minus most of the heaviness, stripped down to just voice and acoustic guitar strum. Basically, this solo album from Melvins frontman Buzz Osbourne really just sounds like it could be his acoustic demos for the next Melvins record, like before he brought the songs to the band, which is kinda cool, though we'd rather hear these songs with amplified electric guitar and the full band (which would include at least one, if not two drummers). But, still, we can dig this. The riffs, hooks, Buzz's charisma, it's all there, like a skeletal Melvins album really, though a couple tracks he's polished up and really focussed on the poppiness, and then this sorta sounds like Alice In Chains' "unplugged" Sap ep! Which we all liked, right? Remember?
Buzz does attack his acoustic with commendable ferocity, and his sometimes effects-laden voice is still in the 'heavy' style of his main band. Any coffee house where he performed like this would get complaints for sure.
So, definitely interesting to hear Buzz in this context, for the novelty of it at the very least, but as Melvins fans, we wouldn't want him leaving the Melvins to do this full time or anything.
No, not the '80s hair metal band led by drummer Carmine Appice!! This King Cobra is a brand new band formed by drummer Rachel Carns of The Need (also ex-Kicking Giant), bassist Tara Jane O'Neil (Rodan, Retsin, The Sonora Pine, and solo y'know), and a third party named Kwo on guitar. There is, however, a distinct metal element to be found here as you'd expect from The Need connection. I guarantee you that people will be headbanging and making the devil sign at their shows! This trio's sound is fat and heavy yet sinewy, additionally incorporating bombastic electric organ, some wild horns, and even wilder vocals. You'll hear how they distort metal, new wave, prog, and punk into their own supercharged sonic brew as they grind, gallop and gear-shift their way through six tracks in eighteen minutes. Short this may be but The King Cobra pack a lot of music into that span of time! We're definitely looking forward to a future full-length!
Live 1969 Crimson, the original line-up. You get a couple of versions of "20th Century Schizoid Man" but also tons of great improvisation. Packaged in a keen cardboard box, with a thick full-color booklet of reminisces.
We didn't expect that this new Crimson disc, some sort of pre-album ep of new songs, mixes, and acoustic versions, would be all that great. But you can always hope. Well, so much for hope. This includes "Larks Tongues In Aspic Part VI" but a better title would be "Larks Tongues In Aspic Part Suck". The King Crimson line-up listed here consists of Fripp, Belew, somebody, and somebody else. No Bruford or Levin (we mention, for those that care). But it seems that this must also include uncredited contributions from Stone Temple Pilots, Blues Traveler, and some vocoder vocals from a bunch of Battlestar Galactica Cylons. Yuch. Must have been touring with Tool that got Fripp & Co. thinking they needed more of a "modern rock" sound. It's not all bad, but it's a mess. There are a few moments of Frippertronics on here, but in this context they sound weak and New Agey... How 'bout they start working on "Happy With Never Making An Album Again 'Cause We've Totally Lost The Plot"? Just a suggestion. Sorry to be so harsh, but even the biggest Crim/Fripp fans we know were disappointed.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Debut from Robert Fripp & Company. Mini-LP sleeve version (with that great, disturbing cover painting).
"The King Crimson Collectors Club" (god, what's gotten into them?) presents: "Ladies of the Road", a double cd of live Crimson from 1971-72. While oddly enough it doesn't actually have their song "Ladies of the Road" on it, it's a powerful document of Crimson's unique insane math-rock jazz-prog from an underrated, underdocumented era and lineup of Crimson (circa their album "Islands" and the recently reissued live disc "Earthbound") that was definitely being influenced by American R&B and jazz, moreso than the classical elements prominent in the original Crim of 69-70.
Did we get the word jazz in there? This is VERY jazz, with lots of Mel Collins' saxophone all over the place, along with of course Robert Fripp's unmistakable guitar genius. The songs and improvs presented here are in part and together gorgeous, heavy, pretty, crazed, gentle, funky (!), psychedelic, smooth, noisy, intense, and (of course) schizophrenic. Speaking of which, the second disc in this set, entitled "Schizoid Men", is a mammoth edited-together collection of NOTHING BUT THE GUITAR AND SAX SOLOS from a whole bunch of live performances of "21st Century Schizoid Man"! Yes, fifty-some energetic minutes worth. As Fripp says in the liner notes: "King Crimson has often been accused of a capital offence in the annals of Prog Crime: the endless guitar solo. Who cares that prosecutors had not listened to the band? Schizoid Men is one approach to offering a plea of guilty, on the basis of manipulated evidence long after the events. Extended soloing by Mel Collins is not, in my book, any kind of crime at all. Rather, an instruction in performance by a young master." Not to mention, humble man he is, his own extended soloing... Pretty cool, actually, really way out there. We were playing it in the store, and one of our more avant-garde and drunken customers, who claims not to like Crimson, even felt compelled to buy it.
So, after last list's panning of the new 2002 Crimson effort, here's a nice (sad too, I suppose) reminder of how great (and different) they once were. Maybe Fripp ought to take a close listen... By the way, this has really good live sound, not like a shitty bootleg!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Mini-LP sleeve version.
Fripp & crew live in concert, 1973. Fine sound (a portion of this was overdubbed for use on Starless And Bible Black), great music, plenty of beyond-prog improvisation.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Mini-LP sleeve packaged version of this essential Crim album. A must-have, certainly, for fans of Don Cab!!
It's too bad sometimes that we don't get to really sit down with some records until right before it's time to review them for the list, cuz often, records that we were only able to hear once or twice in the shop, or briefly on the computer, reveal themselves as something super special, and in the case of this latest full length from the oddly and somewhat inappropriately monikered King Dude, a potential Record Of The Week! All the promise of past releases seems to be full realized here, in what is no longer really neo-folk, or post industrial, but is instead, some sort of alternate reality classic country music. Imagine some dark shadow version Johnny Cash, and that's King Dude, aka T.J Cowgill, a modern man in black, whose sound is equal parts classic country songsmithery, warped echo drenched rockabilly, and brooding sinister balladry. All reverbed twang, murky percussion, and Cowgill's impossibly deep croon. It's like some fantastically demonic Johnny Cash / Woven Hand / Der Blutharsch hybrid, the sound sinister, and haunting, emotionally heavy, dark and shadow, death ballads from beyond.
The opener "Holy Land" is a roiling murky twang flecked dirge, a churning rhythmic backdrop, wreathed in washed out chords, the vocals a woozy croon, everything so doused in delay and echo, that the sounds blur into one single hazy sprawl of black country shimmer. But King Dude ain't no one trick pony, "Barbara Ann" ditches pretty much all the effects, leaving just acoustic guitar and vocals, Cowgills deep voice, made even more so (almost cartoonishly), but the effect is simply harrowing and haunting, it's on tracks like these, that the classic country comparisons are so apt, albeit with a slight twist making the sound just that little bit darker.
"Im Cold" returns to the cavernous sonic underworld of the opener, with jagged twangy strumming, swaggery snarled vox, lots of percussion, again everything hazy and indistinct, the verses super dynamic, but the chorus is a druggy, drowsy sonic blur, the sound reminding us of Dirty Beaches, but a much more sinister, demonic version of them. It's a modern post industrial trip to the fabled crossroads, where the power of the blues was given to Cowgill, but stained black, with the blood all who came before. The songs here are so dark, and ominously powerful, whether it's the bluesy country dirge of "Jesus In The Courtyard" rife with muted industrial percussion, those deep growled vox, and a crooned chorus, or the soft focus twang-gaze dream drift of "My Mother Was The Moon", with fantastic female vox, over simple muted strum, everything gauzy and washed out and otherworldly, the woozy ooooooh vocal refrain utterly captivating and spellbinding, maybe the best track here, the post industrial black country analog to the Afghan Whigs' "My Curse".
The rest of the record unfurls darkly and dreamily, the weird processed vocals on "Lorraine" leading into the classic fifties style country pop of "You Can Break My Heart", all dark torch song balladry, but sprinkled with soft swirls of celestial synth, the sounds weaving from speaker to speaker, wrapped in some extra grit and noise, and laced with ghostly female backup vocals, finally finishing with "Lord I'm Coming Home", which like the title suggests, the intro a dark, shadowy spiritual, all echo drenched chorale voices, and muted smears of soft focus feedback, before the song proper kicks in, that deep dramatic croon, over urgently strummed steel string guitar, all beneath a haze of chiming ethereal melodies, the vocals blurring into the background, taking on the form of some alternate reality spiritual, drifting dreamily on a bed of warm whirring organ, before finally fading out for good.
So fantastic, and another one of those records that makes it hard to review anything else, since this is all we want to listen to. Consider this a could have / should have / would have been Record Of The Week, and thus consider it highly and extremely recommended!
