What might you expect from a band made up of one part Everlovely Lightningheart and one part These Arms Are Snakes? What if we told you some of the guys in Isis, Helms Alee and a few of the other These Arms Are Snakes fellas helped out? You still probably wouldn't imagine the sound of Mamiffer, which does share some elements with those bands, but is definitely its own unique entity.
Martial snares, grinding drones, melancholy piano, a strange sort of murky chamber ensemble, like a fucked up malevolent Rachels, that slips smoothly into some jazzy almost post rock. Moody and moving and dramatic and pretty dang cool. And that's just the first track. The rest of the tracks are all over the place, but held together by the everpresent piano, from glitchy buzzing dronemusic that swells to an incendiary Jesu / Nadja-like roar, piano laced folky slowcore, all moaning cellos, and cinematic piano, again underpinned by fuzzy buzzing drones, Godspeed style slow burn epics, Necks like slow jazz shimmer wrapped around a glowing black rumble, wrapped in a hazy shimmer, Fahey-esque Appalachian guitar strum that gradually slips into something much more distorted and heavy, laced with ethereal female vocals, and a distant whirring hiss, all woven into one epic and moving cinematic songsuite.
While this might not hit the spot for most Isis / These Arms Are Snakes / Helms Alee fans, it will almost for sure please fans of all things moody dramatic post rock, Rachels, Godspeed, Explosions, Mono, Magyar Posse and the like...
Simply put, this is a beautiful album. Yes, it's a stark one, but its beauty is unquestionable. Mamiffer follows their 2015 collaboration with Daniel Menche with this grand statement of blizzard-drone distortion cast through hypnotic madrigals for voice and piano. Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner have been perfecting Mamiffer for some time now, with The World Unseen being their best album to date in part due to the cinematic scope of their production. These huge swaths of slow-burning drone, snowdrift stillness, and aggregated density are the stuff of an art-rock dream-date of Godspeed You Black Emperor covering Ride's "Vapour Trail" as a mesmer of icy minimalism and not of telescoped maximalism. Just check out the ear-candy chorale of "Mara" delivered by Coloccia, joined by a maudlin stream of strings amidst the guitar-drone heroics. The album's concluding trilogy "The Domestication Of The Ewe" tracks much darker territories of blackened ambience, ruptured distortion, and isolationist field recordings, breaking the harmonic spell of the songs from the front end of the album with harrowing results.
We never really ever dug Mammal that much. We wanted to, but it just never hit us. A sort of sub Wolf Eyes abject electronic brutality, not noise so much as noisy, very Midwestern, filthy, homebrewed... just typing that has us thinking, well why the fuck didn't we? That's the sort of stuff we'd write about a record we love. Well, now we are, writing that, about a record we love, and it's kind of weird that it's a Mammal record, but it definitely has us reconsidering our verdict on past Mammal releases because this one is an absolute killer. Some sort of electronic flecked nihilist loner doom. Or something. This is most definitely filthy, noisy, and homebrewed, a doomed abject outsider electronic folk record, but with crushing guitars and drum machine. If you're not sold already, there must be something very wrong with you, but what the heck, let's just keep going.
The opener "Repulsion" is utter minimal metallic brilliance. A simple, super processed rhythm, relentless and repetitive, beneath a similarly monochromatic downtuned guitar riff, that occasionally is joined by another even heavier, crumblingly distorted guitar. And that's it. It just loops endlessly, the riffs cycling through some barely there melody, it's more about texture and timbre and groove, it sounds like a super slow motion robotic instrumental My Dad Is Dead, or even a little like Big Black at 16 rpm. It's totally gorgeous in its spare simplicity, and it somehow manages to convey all sorts of emotion through a single riff and a single rhythm. And as we've said about other tracks in the past, as far as we're concerned, that track could have been an hour long and been the only track on the record.
But the record's not instrumental, in fact most of the songs have vocals, a sort of mumbled deadpan drawl, the lyrics, super personal and intimate, a sort of abstract downer folk, the guitar wrapped delicately around the vocals, except for the inevitable crumbling doom guitar that comes in to drape a little filth and misery on the proceedings.
The rest of the record is a slow sick crawl, the drum machine spitting out a simple somehow stumbling beat, over slow corrosive swells of guitar, the vocals more like shadows, some of the songs are so skeletal they almost seem like sketches, which only serves to make them seem that much more fragile and intimate. The misleadingly named "Incinerator Ballad" is a 4 minute burst of white noise wrapped around a churning industrial pulse, a wall of hiss and static and blown out distortion, followed by the whispered buzz of "Lower Depths", a stretched out soundscape of tinny distorted guitar, detuned chords, whooshing ambience, and more stoned crooning. The record closes with the 15+ minute "Cremation", a gorgeous and super intense, super creepy synthscape, the synth buzzing and warbling, minor key melodies spread out into slabs of murky buzz, while way off in the distance, bits of guitar streak and soar, a psychedelic light show, barely visible against the grey sky of dusk, the synth eventually locking into a loop, and suddenly the sound is some fucked up lo-fi Tangerine Dream, but performed on thrift store keyboards and recorded on a microcassette recorder, eventually fading out, leaving just the sounds of night, crickets, other insects, wind, distant trains, mysterious voices, and single guitar, still moaning way off in the distance...
Absolutely unexpected and totally gorgeous. Features amazing and super intense black and white pencilled artwork by the Mammal himself.
So so so utterly recommended. Definite contender for record of the year...
Heavy Santa Cruz psychonauts Mammatus have always been big faves here at aQ. But good grief, has it really been six years since their previous platter The Coast Explodes?? Well we guess time flies (or, actually, doesn't) when you're way out in space like Mammatus must have been. From our perspective maybe it's been six long years, but thanks to the theory of relativity, space travellers Mammatus haven't been gone that long. What we're saying its, it's about time (apparently this lp's tracks were written in 2007/2008, recorded in 2009, and mixed in 2013). What we're also saying, is they're spacey. But, actually it's inner space they've been traversing. Judging from the album title, and the song titles here - "Brain Drain", "Main Brain", "Brainbow", and "Brain Train" - they've got brains on the brain, eh? But not the way zombies are about brains, they're not zombies, or at least, we've never seen an episode of The Walking Dead where the titular shamblers picked up instruments and churned out stoner psychedelic prog rock jams (though that'd be cool). No, it's all about inner space travels, being waaaaaay psychedelic in presumably the most druggy sense of the term.
This vinyl-only (drat say the cd lovers here) third Mammatus opus consists of those four (long) songs, two per side. Get ready for something that sounds like the shimmering droned out ritual ceremonies of OM and the Boredoms meets the martial discipline of fusion-wanked prog metal technicality. Mind blowing, yep. And that's just the first track "Brain Drain". The label brings up The Fucking Champs as a comparison, but also McLaughlin/Santana spiritual jazzrock, so less heavy metal than, uh, heady mental, yeah!
They've just played some record release shows for this one, and the band say they'll actually be recording another record next year, so thankfully it won't be a six year wait for more.
Mighty aQ-faves Mammatus, Santa Cruz's finest purveyors of progged-out heaviness (and what they call "breath metal"), return with a new double lp set featuring four glorious epics, recorded by Phil "Life Coach" Manley. This time around it sounds like Mammatus have been listening to a lot of spacey Cluster and other kosmische krautrock, maybe even new age, as these songs are blissfully, shimmeringly majestic - though also laced with soaring, psychedelic guitar soloing that's extremely 'solo' in sound, that is, utterly exposed and emotive, some Eddie Hazel level communication here. Impressive! (As always!)
Sometimes music is more than just pure sound, or the exposing of deep personal secrets and emotions, or even an homage to one's inspirations. Sometimes it's meant to tell a story... a vessel for a message. Then again sometimes music can combine all of those facets, AND MORE! Such is the case with Mammatus' sophomore effort, The Coast Explodes. On a purely sonic level, this record is absolutely amazing (we'll get there), but it's amazing on a conceptual level as well.
This record is the second installment of Mammatus' gradually unfolding tale of the battle between Light and Darkness. Goodly Light vs. the Evil of Man. Communion with Nature and the casting out of the corrosive agents of Man's doooom. The inhalation of divinity's smoke/breath... exhaling peace from every pore of the translucent flesh. Harnessing the power of Nature in your throat and fingers... swinging the sword to the heart of darkness. Bludgeon the dragon's foul heart! Mammatus is here to bare the Blade of Truth against nature's corrupters, and to ROCK against the cowardly haters of peace! Ahem, their "blade" is of course music, so lets talk about that for a sec.
This epic journey continues right where their self-titled debut left off. The first track "Dragon of the Deep part 3 (Excellent Swordfight)" is a continuation of the Dragon saga (the first album ending with "Dragon of the Deep" parts 1 and 2), and right off the bat you can hear the development. Holy shit! PROG!!!!! Where the last record was more of a trippy blend of hypno-kraut Can-ishness with the slaying heavitude of stoner lordz Sleep, this record somehow maintains that comparison and adds an incredible dose of YES! and YES!!! it rules! So the album starts with a creeping guitar drone, almost as if directly continued from part 2, before bursting in with a driving and hypnotic groove, a la Circle or the above mentioned Can, with little time change shreds at the end of each phrase (kinda proggy) and then suddenly the tempo breaks and we hear a killer stoptime, full-band SHRED! bringing us into another mesmeric groove with beautiful guitar leads soaring perfectly over the everchanging trance. The track builds and builds, ever climbing. Just when you think it can't get more ripping, another amazing riff is unearthed, the band playing so tightly we suspect they might share one cosmically unified mind. In tune with the alignment of the planets and such. All of this is building to something, you can feel it, when suddenly the song crescendos into a freeform cacophonous skronk! Cowbells, drums, and about 500 simultaneous guitar solos! FREAKOUT!
What emerges from this undulating swell is just about all a worshipper of heavy could hope for, an earth shaking riff with the first vocals of the record. Singer Nicky Emmert enters with his first cry to battle, calling us to raise the sword! The vocals are as trippy as ever, beautiful, as if sung from the back of a deep cave. This brutally sick aural climax ends almost as soon as it begins only to plunge axe first into the second track, "Pierce the Darkness", Starting with a gong crash and woodflute solo (!) then charging directly into another trance like groove. The vocals this time start right away, floating and glistening over the motorik pulse, again seemingly a call to arms. The track eventually develops into a blasting free time psychedelic guitar jam which then decompresses into some serious blissy drone.
And what happens next is one of the highlights of the record. The sound of synthesizers enter the drone and build up to a spine tingling harmonized guitar/Moog solo! You know the euphoric feeling you get when listening to shimmery synth part in Yes's "Close to the Edge", and the triumph in the pit of your stomach when Wakeman's church organ finally enters ("I get up, I get down")? A similar energy is in operation here. After this shining moment the song takes another turn towards the HEAVY and some kick ass riffage again fills the speakers. After a bit of strange synth tweakage, the mood of the album changes. Track 3, "The Changing Wind" is an all out drum circle folk jam! Acoustic guitars, propulsive hand drum rhythms, and another lilting melody from Nicky, praising mother nature and her unknowable ways. Hypnotic and blissful for sure. Suddenly the sounds of waves crashing and sea lions barking brings us seamlessly into the final movement, and title track, "The Coast Explodes". Starting with one of the catchiest "stoner" riffs we've heard for a long time. In fact this riff gets stuck in our heads for days at a time. So groovey and catchy, it makes the trees dance. Ahem. This song is a slow builder, rising subtly, and then dipping once more till it finally becomes an almost whisper. The vocals again invoking mother earth, sung in a beautiful falsetto. After this quiet respite the amps again get cranked to 11 and we are blessed with another monolithic slab of heaviness! So satisfying and perfect, it almost makes ya weep. At the end of this journey the chanting of some mythic and mysterious wizard is heard, as if belted out from the peak of a snow covered mountain, beckoning to the children of nature to rise up and join the crusade! The song then gently winds down and the whooshing sounds of the ocean again take over the mix, leaving the listener in a state of utter peace. SHIT! This album really takes you on some sort of transcendental adventure... We got lost there for a minute.
At the most basic level, Mammatus make some of the most inventive and inspired heavy music of our day. Combining diverse inspirations and molding them into something that comes across as totally genuine and pure, and of course TOTALLY RULING! Crushing and mesmerizing and beautiful all at the same time. The story behind the music makes the album all the more powerful. The listening experience of this record is akin to reading a super epic novel, one where the payoffs happen in all the right places. So duh, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!! For fans of Sleep, Yes, UFOmammut, Can, Circle, King Crimson, and all things heavy and trippy and shredding and rocking and ruling! And by the by, if you have not yet, catch them live for one of the best live shows ever! On tour now with Acid Mothers Temple in the USA!
Whoa, heavy!! This is a whole-body vibrating, brain-melting, serious amplifier worship ceremony! The first time I (Allan) saw these guys, last year sometime at the Hemlock here in San Francisco, I was blown away... I'd been told the were a heavy 'stoner rock' outfit from Santa Cruz and worth checking out, but I didn't realize they were gonna be quite so AMAZING. Hairy backwoods hippy dudes, the drummer wearing what looked to be a home-made Whysp t-shirt, guitars turning the air to cottage cheese a la Blue Cheer while creating a trance-zone worthy of Finland's Circle!! So good that I immediately bought the live cd-r they were selling... we were gonna try to get some for the store, in fact, but then we found out that local label Holy Mountain run by our pal JW was on the case already and would be issuing Mammatus's debut studio full-length cd Stateside (with Rocket Recordings, home to the most recent UFOmammut, putting it out in Europe).
So yeah, heavy stoner rock this is, but waaay psychedelic and Hawkwindy, kinda like what maybe you thought Circle side-project Pharaoh Overlord was gonna (and sometimes does) sound like. Loud, massive and mesmerizing, swirling sludge psych! Their songs, often of epic length, are ever chugging skyward, dripping molten goo, full of feedback and fx. Their energetic riffage and warm drones are adorned by drifting vox (not unlike Dead Meadow, with whom they share certain proclivities) and fantastic, metallic, progtastic imagery. Take note of titles like "Dragon Of The Deep" (parts one and two!) and the Roger Dean-esque cover art by Arik "Moonhawk" Roper.
Further musical comparisions aren't hard to come up with -- Mammatus belong in the company of such bastions of cosmic heaviness as Sleep, Boris, YOB, UFOmammut, Earthless, old Monster Magnet, Acid Mothers Temple (at AMT's heaviest, like on Starless & Bible Black Sabbath), Tarantula Hawk, and even Amon Duul (especially on the druggy, krautrocky jam "The Outer Rim"). And of course they're now labelmates with OM, which also makes perfect sense. If you love many, or even just any, of those bands and the sounds they make, this comes highly recommended.
Time sensitive note: Mammatus are playing tomorrow, Saturday April 1st again at the Hemlock with AQ faves the Grey Daturas!
The latest (third) and greatest album from this impressive Swedish stoner rock band, one that does more than most to avoid the nu-grunge "Kyuss-clone" tag, and really comes into their own on this disc. Sure, thanks to their big sound and pop sensibility,
The Long Hair label digs up another kool krautrock obscurity for reissue here, one that Andee and Allan both happened to have heard already via a previous cd edition. It's an album that we're now glad to be able to get to list (with a bonus track!). Originally released on LP in 1971 (natch) on a tiny label with the wonderful name of Mouse Trick Track Music, this one-off rarity is a bit of a trippy gem, groovy and flutey and fuzzy. And plenty weird too, as is evidenced by the album's odd song titles, each with the word "Mammut" in them:
"Bird Mammut" (indeed featuring birds twittering, and birdsong like flute flutter, amidst propulsively grooving drumming), "Classical Mammut" (a brief interlude of whooshing wind, crying baby, placid piano), "Mammut Ecstasy" (hippy chant, fuzzed out guitar heaviness), "Footmachine Mammut" (laidback groove, what sounds like a lively dinner party in the background, with clinking percussion/wine glasses, more guitar soloing), "Short Mammut" (kinda like "Mammut Ecstacy", but shorter), "Shizoyd Mammut" (shrieking vocals, organ jamming)... and that's just side 1. Side 2 actually consists of just two songs, longer, more lyrical ones, including the 13+ minute psychedelic tour de force "Mammut Opera", that's both dramatic and rather lovely.
The whole thing, the way it combines the acid rock guitar action with Hammond organ, flute, and even field recordings (both outdoor and indoor it would seem), sorta sounds like a demented Deep Purple dosed on drugs, jazzily jamming away at some hippy party place in the Black Forest (where the were, recording in the studios of jazz label MPS). It's more groovy than heavy, but they let loose with some wild guitar riffery now and then, as well as dabbling in some (Beatles inspired?) songiness, particularly on the second half of the record. Krautrock aficionados should definitely investigate! And, especially as we know they overlap, Acid Mothers Temple fans too! There's definitely a precursor to AMT's funny freeform freakout vibe going on here. Specific krautrock comparisons could be to some of the previous Long Hair reissues like Et Cetera, Kollektiv and Wolfgang Dauner's The Oimels.
This official reissue has been digitally remastered, and comes with a thick, textually informative cd booklet, and the aforementioned 5 minute bonus track ("Da Du Da", recorded by these musicians in '69 for a compilation album, leading to the formation of the Mammut band/album project).
We first heard from weirdo Italian kraut-psych trippers Mamuthones a while back on a split 12" with UK noise rock punks. On this new 12", they take their already freaky, funky, experimental space psych sounds even further out. Look no further than the opening track, a totally transformed Rolling Stones cover, layed into a pitch perfect appropriation of the rhythm track from LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" - all jittery, post punk rhythms, crunchy guitar jangle, strange sung/spoken vocals, not to mention looped background vocals (ooooh ooooh), the sound gradually building momentum, the song soon smothered in swoonsome melodic swaths in wild swirls of FX. The second proper track is more of the same, spoken word over tribal hypno-psych pound, squalls of gristly guitar crunch, a sort of skeletal space psych freakout.
The flipside of the 12" is filled out with remixes, both A side tracks get seriously reworked, one becomes super minimal, sounding a bit like some druggy Steve Reich / Moon Duo mashup, the vocals dripping with reverb and delay, the background sounds, bleeding and blurring into a psychedelic smear, while guitars howl and wail over the top, the other ditches the guitars completely, and is just drums and vocals, with some swirly synths, which makes for a trippy avant kraut-funk, jittery post punk workout.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
The fourth in Rocket Records' 'Collisions series', where the label pairs up like minded bands, and lets 'em rip. Past installments have included nothing but aQ faves: The Heads, White Hills, Oneida, Mugstar, Shit & Shine and Gnod. This volume introduces us to a couple lesser known outfits, up first Italian kraut-psych weirdos Mamuthones, who deliver a sort of motorik grooviness, at times touching on the psychedelic funkiness of Goat, at others, locking into sprawling Hawkwindy headnod heaviness, percussion peppers the proceedings, as does loads of effects, but also plenty of samples. The first track sounds like some strange eighties industrial jam given a psych makeover, while the second drifts into Moon Duo-ish hypno-rock, with distorted vox drifting atop a thick bass throb and choppy guitar crunch, all laced with some squalls of distorto noise guitar freakout. Elsewhere the band channel Devo into something much heavier and noisier, before finishing off with the funkiest jam of the bunch.
The flipside features UK post punk noiserockers Evil Blizzard, whose first track is all low slung and slithery, like a more harrowing Joy Division, reverbed vocals draped over sinewy basslines with some chunky guitars, that the label compares to both P.I.L. and Hawkwind, and we have to say that's pretty spot on. The other track is a remix of that same track by another aQ fave, Teeth Of The Sea, who give the original a sort of John Carpenter makeover, unfurling all creepy and cinematic, a lush, smoldering slow build, all atmosphere and tension, hushed and haunting, spacey and seriously tripped out, right down to the moody trumpets that surface partway through, giving it a sort of psychedelic Morricone vibe.
Packaged in an eye popping green and black die cut disco style sleeve, with a printed insert. And yeah, you guessed it, very VERY limited.
Apparently the impetus for creating this multiple drummer-ed outfit, was to create something akin to Metal Machine Music for drums, which makes sense when you realize the man behind Man Forever is Kid Millions, drummer for NY experimental rockers Oneida, and one of the drum leaders in the huge many drummer-ed Boredoms performances that happened a few years back.
What started out as something more like a mini-Boadrum situation, became something much more subtle and simple, with whole kits ditched in favor of single drums, with the drummers playing single stroke rolls, and amidst this flurry of rhythms, allowing all manner of patterns to emerge, similar in the way that dronemusic often involves various overtones from the various sounds interacting, in Man Forever, the dense drumming, stops sounding like drumming after a while, and becomes more textural, and actually becomes a sort of drone, the shifting rhythmic subtleties adding all sorts of color to the sound. But this is not just music for drum nerds (although if you are one, you WANT this), the group add guitar and bass, but much like the drums, those instruments seem less concerned with 'riffing' and more with adding still more texture to the proceedings, rumbles and drones and thrum and hum and moaning low end, barely there melodies, when the whole group is finally in full effect, like halfway through "Surface Patterns" it sounds a bit like the Boredoms jamming out with Phill Niblock, or SUNNO))) backed by a drumcorps, heady and hypnotic, the repetition and rhythmic mesmer evoking Reich and Riley.
The second track, "Ur Eternity", is another dense drumscape, a smoldering rhythmic slowbuild, that manages to be hypnotic enough sans any other instruments, but when the rest of the band join in, with strange staticky drones, and clipped looped fragmented melodies, the result is something surprisingly psychedelic, still hypnotic and minimal, but also droney and a little bit soundtracky, dense and textural, the drums sounding less like drums and more like the pounding of feet, or the churning of some machine, and until the rest of the track less about driving the music, and more about spreading out beneath it, adding a haunting heft that is more felt than heard. So good!
These days, something like this is a fairly strange occurrence, a (mostly) all drums solo record from a drummer. It wasn't rare at all back in the day for a jazz drummer to step out of his normal gig and go solo, but when was the last time you heard a solo drum record from the drummer of a modern indie rock band, and if somehow you DID, we'd guess it probably wasn't nearly as bad ass, and/or listenable as this, the debut from Man Forever, the Metal Machine Music style all drum freakout project of Kid Millions, the drummer for Oneida and White Hills among others.
A live performance of Lou Reed's Metal Machine music is precisely what inspired Millions to wonder if you could create the same sort of dense wall of sound, replete with strange harmonics and overtones, using just drums, and so Millions tuned his drums in a manner that would theoretically produce the most harmonic complexity and overtones, and went to town, recording himself over and over, layering track after track after track, one on top of the other into this flurry of octopoidal percussion, an endless percussive avalanche, chaotic and frenzied and FREE but somehow still a bit measured, and even composed at times. It does have the feel of free jazz, but it also feels like some sort of heavy noise rock experiment. The first side is a non stop fury of relentless drummage, imagine a hundred drummers all playing intensely and inventively, but not necessarily playing with each other, the sound is dizzying and far out, and in its own way psychedelic, but then as you listen, the notes and tones of the individual drums begin to interact, producing weird buzzed and rumbles and skrees, a symphony of buried overtones and strange harmonics, it suddenly ceased being just a drum solo, and becomes some gorgeous abstract composition for drums, layered and textured and lush, and in its own way weirdly mesmerizing. The only other sounds to be found are a bit of bass accompaniment, the bass itself thick and gnarled and corrosively buzzy, which at one point transforms the sound into something closer to warped grinding noise rock, almost like a more minimal avant Lightning Bolt, before finishing off with a brief squall of just buzzing distorted bass. Exhausting for sure, but also gloriously cathartic.
The flipside gets all dubby right of the bat, various beats wreathed in delay and reverb and echo and sent spinning off into the ether, the low end here is thick, the overtones and harmonics piling up until it's almost like rhythmic dronemusic, and when the bass does come in again, all thick and crunchy and buzzy, it transforms the sound once again into some sort of deep heaving drum driven dronedoom. So cool.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES! Housed in nice hand silkscreened covers.
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California's comrades in power violence want you to get political with their noise. Hardcore to ambient, always heavy. The lp is an handsome picture disc, and the cd comes with poster of the picture disc graphics, you can't lose.
This flagship political power violence band broke up a while back, but those without some of their best 12" vinyl tracks will be glad of having this newly released cd compilation. Includes the songs from their split ep w/ Capitalist Casualties.
Ultra PC "kick in the balls" to indie kid complacency. Mumia, accused of killing a cop, speaks from his cell on death row. MITB add their two cents by bashing in your skull with a two-bass-and-drums hash-induced 4 song assault. PC, my ass. (Includes contributions from Allen Ginsberg, Jello Biafra, Assata Shakur, and Bob Dole. Really.)
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From the label that brought us the amazing Merzbow 'Frog' lp comes this noisy 7" artifact. One side is Man Is The Bastard Noise, more commonly known as Bastard Noise and is the free/electronic/noise offshoot of sludge rockers Man Is The Bastard. BN is Wood from MITB and AQ buddy John Weise. Their side of this single is an almost tranquil blanket of high end whir, sounding like an orchestra of mosquitoes, helicopters, kitchen appliances and madly chirping birds. Almost dreamy in that peculiar noise kind of way. The B side comes courtesy of label honcho Gerritt Wittmer and is three tracks of affected sinister vocals, looped and chopped chunks of low end distortion, very eighties industrial sounding, and I mean that in a good way. Plus Misanthropic's usual impeccable packaging!
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Super-nice lookin' new seven-song effort from these sci-fi surfers, fun as usual.
Space-surf masters' new effort, the latest in a countless line of fan-pleasing discs.
One of the hardest working, most prolific bands from the last ten years have yet another album for the eager ears of space cadets everywhere. Their last bunch of records have ventured away from their decidedly kitsch'n'garage early sounds, but this album revisits those olden days. Actually now that they've settled snugly in their deluxe space-age studios that they constructed
10,000 releases along, these futuristic surf instro-rockers still got it.
Die-hard Man Or Astro-man? devotees, it's finally time to dust off and fire up your rawkets! Pacific Northwest garage rock kingpins Estrus Records has kindly released a limited edition vinyl reissue of the 1993 debut album by these intergalactic surf brainiacs from the South!
For those unfamiliar... While the heart of their sound was driven by a deep reverence for the raw buzzing guitar licks of the legendary Link Wray, The Ventures, The Sonics among others, the journey into the MOAM? cosmos was equally injected with sci-fi kitsch spectacles and science geekery, and genuine smarts. Live shows were wildly fun and rockin', featuring full costumes and a giant working Tesla coil! Over the years, the beloved four piece evolved quite a bit. In later years, their sound drew closer to Sonic Youth than the abovementioned Wray. As well, they eventually added vocals to their instrumental sound, and formulated clone bands to tour in place of the official band members! Hearing this album again will surely bring back some awesome fan memories of this super entertaining and endearing band, and trigger some newbies to search YouTube for live footage to see what they missed. Hurrah!
Super furious, metallic hardcore (heavy on the metal) from Germany. Pummelling and complex, noisy and chaotic. For fans of Knut (last AQ list), Botch, old Cave In, Converge and stuff like that. Really Great.
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Single number two from these Oakland punk poppers, and while their first 7"s was beholden to the Replacements and the Velvet Underground, this one is definitely more on the punk side of the equation, three chords, pounding drums, rollicking and a little ramshackle, BUT, then thee's the vocals, which change everything. The vocals are not shouted or grunted or howled, instead they're delivered in a dramatic sung-spoken croon, reminding us a little of Morrisey, but a lot of the the singer from the Smoking Popes (who always reminded us of Morrissey anyway), and the effects is pretty instantaneous, turning furious punk energy into something a bit more twee poppy, even the second track, which is more furiously punky, is pushed popward by the vox, the lyrics too, goofy and silly and fun, the second track is called "Chased By Anderson Cooper" after all.
Minus those vocals, we can't imagine this being in Slumberland, but with them, it makes perfect sense. Oh did we mention this is a flexi disc? Well, it is, one sided, two songs on the one side, still housed in a proper 7" sleeve and jacket.
This is the first we've heard from the brilliantly named Manbeard, the fucked up freak folk cabaret offshoot of old aQ faves Urdog. Here they share a cd-r with furry Finnish folk combo Avarus, originally a tour only release, and while it might not seem like it, weirdly it's kind of a good match. Manbeard are tough to explain. Very jaunty and sing songy, almost like sea shanties, big drums, dramatic WAY over the top vocals, angular riffing, a little bit gloomy and dark, gothic even, with squiggly synths, damaged percussion, and really twisted songs. And really bizarre overdubs, strange characters making announcements, speaking to the listener, adding their 2 cents to various songs. Definitely an acquired taste, but if you're into the same weird stuff we are, then acquiring it might not be that difficult. The weird thing is, this disc is jam packed with short-ish Manbeard songs, then right in the middle, tack 5 in fact, is the ONE Avarus song, a massive half hour jam, recorded live, all ramshackle rhythms, and detuned guitars, chanted vocals, fluttering woodwinds, raga like buzzing, stumbling druggy far out freaked out damaged outsider genius for sure. It sounds like a blast, like they just set up on the street in the middle of rush hour, and their merrymaking just sucked in a massive crowd, dancing and howling and whooping and wildly frolicking through the streets of Helsinki. At least that's what it sounds like.�
Then it's time again for more Manbeard weirdness, fragmented song experiments, fucked up drones, lo-fi off kilter bedroom folk, fractured dada-ist pop and whatever else crossed their twisted musical minds.�
In cool hand screened color sleeves, with printed inserts. We got these direct from The Manbeard when he was in town, and he mentioned these might be the last copies, so if we run out that might be it.
MPEG Stream: MANBEARD "Original Performance Of The Manbeard Denizens Folk Classic, Manbearde Folk Classic, Manbeard Factory" [/audio/manbeardoriginal.m3u]
You know that we at aQ are big fans of Turkish psych legend Erkin Koray. We were even incredibly lucky enough to have him spend an afternoon here recently, signing autographs!! We've also recommended stuff by various of Koray's contemporaries, like Cem Karaca and Edip Akbayram. But, we haven't gotten much of a chance to talk about another Turkish psych/pop legend, Baris Manco, a man immediately recognizable by his luxuriant long hair and impressive mustache.
Now, Spain's Guerssen label has, for the first time, properly reissued on cd several classics from Manco's discography. We'll start with this one. It's Manco's first full-length album, we think, from 1975, and is considered by some to be his masterpiece. Certainly it's got its special charms - most notably, as you might guess from the title 2023, there's a futuristic vibe to it. Which means, lots of far out synthesizer sounds accompany the traditional Anadolu Pop folk elements. So it sounds just a bit like Bruce Haack goes belly dancing! Weird that may be, but Manco's smooth singing tends to accentuate the mostly laid back, mellow mood here. Though this Middle Eastern soft rock prog does of course get kinda funky/groovy too. And we definitely can call it "prog", when one track is a 12 minute plus multi-part suite that incorporates both flute and field recordings of bird twitter, right? Oh, and there's one song, we swear if Ozzy were singing instead of Baris, that would sound a lot like Sabbath's "Planet Caravan".
To sum up: pretty cool. We wish our country's "most influential pop artists" made weird sci-fi sounding concept albums like this. And if you were wondering, our guess, without looking at the copious liner notes that this comes with, is that the significance of the "2023" date has to do with how that year will be the centennial anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish Republic.
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Turkish psych singer. [/cat/international18.html]
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Digipack reissue of 1999 album on Manifold from these local weirdos!
On its surface Mandrake's music may ring familiar with elements of Americana folk and pop traditions, but to categorize this East Bay foursome as a folk pop band would be far too simplistic. In fact, that's why it's taken us this long to find words to write about their impressive debut album Featherweight. We should have known from their Prelude cdep which came out a couple years ago. Its title suggested beginnings, and we drew from it a sense of eager anticipation for things to come. Indeed, it and this full length prove 'twas no beginner's luck. They resonate with a depth, composition and composure far beyond their years. The songs echo with, but are not enslaved to the influences of greats such as Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Cat Stevens and Gram Parsons. As has become the norm for contemporary bands, the standard pop/rock instrumentation of guitar, bass, drums and vocals opens its arms to embrace strings of other sorts, horns and such. However, Mandrake never falls prey to empty accessorizing. They fully integrate each one tastefully into their often subtly prog-leaning, but very earthy songs. Each member's exceptional musicianship allows the band to ably leap from skeletal voice and guitar intimacies to fully fleshed rock numbers in a flash. Heavy in mood and emotion, dark in tone and lyrical matter, need we say, this album's title is a misnomer! Recommended for those that dig the more recent sounds of Bright Eyes, Jason Molina and My Morning Jacket.
Now on vinyl - AGAIN!
Finally, the long awaited solo acoustic live set by Neutral Milk Hotel's beloved Jeff Mangum, about whom I simply cannot be objective - the two NMH records *still* make me cry everytime I listen to them, they're that lovely and touching and brilliant. This 1997 concert was performed in an Xmas-light-filled room with an occasional baby enthusiastically chiming in alongside Mangum's super earnest vocal delivery. If you've ever seen Neutral Milk Hotel in concert, you already know that Jeff will deviate often from the recorded versions of his music, sometimes stretching out a multi-note wail for much longer, sometimes speeding up or changing a rhythm. That's what makes this live disc worth it - for the variations he introduces, super sweet but just different enough to keep it fresh for those of us who have listened to the two NMH records hundreds of times already.
This show is super lo-fi (the venue is a coffeehouse), but the performance is quite focused and heartfelt. Contains songs that will be familiar to NMH fans, plus a few others, a cover of Phil Spector's "I Love How You Love Me".
Finally in stock, the long awaited solo acoustic live set by Neutral Milk Hotel's beloved Jeff Mangum, about whom I simply cannot be objective -- the two NMH records *still* make me cry everytime I listen to them, they're that lovely and touching and
This show is super lo-fi (the venue is a cofeehouse), but the performance is quite focused and heartfelt. Contains songs that will be familiar to NMH fans, plus a few others, a cover of Phil Spector's "I Love How You Love Me", and best of all, the entire concert is also playable as a 48 minute film on your computer! Comes with no liner notes to speak of but there is a nice foldout poster. On Orange Twin, the new label started by Mangum and Elf Power's Laura Carter.
Since there's no track listing, we'll provide that for ya here: Intro / A Baby for Pree / Glow Into You / 2 Headed Boy / I Will Bury You in Time / Gardenhead / 2 Headed Boy Part 2 / I Love How You Love Me / Engine / Naomi / Jesus Christ / Up and Over We Go / Oh Comely.
Remade in 2012 by unlikely genre film fan Elijah Wood, the original Maniac was released in 1980, and was a grimy, gritty story of, well, a maniac: a serial killer who collected mannequins and scalped his female victims. It's a hugely infamous film, eliciting revulsion from reviewers when it first came out (due in no small part to a super graphic and gruesome head-being-blown-off-by-a-shotgun scene) but has become a serious cult fave in the ensuing decades.
The soundtrack is a stunner too, with composer Jay Chattaway (who would go on to compose music for the various Star Trek TV series) crafting a haunting, minimal score, equal parts hushed ambience, and sinister synths. Fretless bass warbles beneath tinkling chimes and fluttering flutes, gradually disappear in clouds of pulsating electronics, which over the course of the score, drift from tense, almost Carpenter-esque synthscapes, to moody melancholic introspection, to tripped out psychedelic electro-rock, to creepy, haunted house dronemusic.
SUPER LIMITED!!!!
One half of avant experimental dronescapers the Starving Weirdos strikes out on his own, teaming up with some other mysterious noisemaker to form Manilapede and craft this disc of 'dune rock', which is essentially a Starving Weirdos record writ buzzing and black, super distorted and blown out. A series of thick undulating drones, cobbled together from dense churning slo-mo metal riffage, buried hiss-like skree, which to these ears sounds like some sort of barely recognizable vokills, peppered with bits of weird percussion (which on the opening track sounds like someone hitting a chainlink fence with a two-by-four), Manilapede are basically some sort of avant-SUNNO))), and "Peninsula Overdrive" lays out their modus operandi pretty perfectly, a sprawling buzzscape, roils and grinds, the sounds so distorted they seem to ooze, the low end rumble and thrum, impossibly thick, shot through with streaks of high end melody, wrapped around the aforementioned chainlink fence percussion, it's a creepy, haunting bit of mysterious dronedirgedoom, that barring its experimental leanings, holds up pretty damn well alongside the various more metal practitioners of similar sounding heaviness. And that opening track is good enough that we would have been perfectly happy if the whole record was just an hour of that and nothing else.
Thankfully, the rest of the record is essentially variations of that same sound, multiple movements in a singular sprawling epic songsuite, trancelike riffs are blurred and smeared and stretched into loooooong streaks, then layered and set to undulating, various bits of crunch and glitch and hiss are harnessed to form skeletal rhythms, giving the proceedings an obliquely industrial vibe, glacial and corrosive, buzzy and fuzzy and near static, dune rock is essentially a more experimental drone metal, a sort of modern minimalism applied to the new wave of dirge/drone/doom, and the results we are happy to report, are as awesome as you might imagine. Hypnotic and heavy, droney and dark, murky and mesmerising and in its own way, pretty fucking metal.
If you're into metal that's both "cult" and "true", you're probably into those underground epic metal legends from Kansas, Manilla Road. How many bands as obscure and eccentric have been around for over 30 years and are still making (good!) records? And maybe what's more incredible than the fact that Manilla Road still put out cool records (as recently as 2008's Voyager, reviewed elsewhere on our website along with several others from their long career), they've apparently also got enough "long lost" recordings from way back when for entire albums of previously unreleased material to occasionally appear! There was a complete studio album from 1981 that finally saw the light of day as Mark Of The Beast over twenty years later, and now this, a live-in-the-studio session from December of 1979, recorded for a radio show on Wichita State University's KMUW, by Manilla Road's original lineup, the trio of Mark "The Shark" Shelton (guitar/vocals), Scott "Scooter" Park (bass), and Rich "Ziggy" Fisher (drums), shortly before they released their debut album Invasion in 1980.
Apparently, this disc represents the second half of their set that night - the tapes of the first half, mostly stuff from Invasion, haven't been located, yet. What's cool (and surprising) is that these particular songs DON'T appear on any other 'Road recordings, though we do think maybe we hear echoes of a few parts in some later compositions of theirs. There's just five tracks here, but the disc is still 44 minutes long, as these are all prog-rock length jams (the longest one, "Life's So Hard" clocks in at 12:42), and as we said, they're an EPIC band. Although of course some of the time on this disc is also occupied by chatter between the female radio host and Mr. Shelton, introducing the songs, which can be rather amusing - at one point the DJ mentions all the calls they've been getting from listeners, that "everybody seems to be getting off and partying to the music". Right on! It's still the '70s you gotta remember. And so too, this is Manilla Road in their early daze, before they were really exposed to NWOBHM influences like Iron Maiden (though you can hear how they were certainly primed for that stuff).
This vintage material is almost proto-metallic, kinda like on their first couple of albums, displaying their unique spin on various classic rock, space rock, progressive and AOR influences, we're pretty sure stuff like Blue Oyster Cult, Rush, Thin Lizzy, and Ted Nugent. It's mostly hard rockin', though they mellow out sometimes too, and you get the idea that maybe back then they thought their career could go in a commercial, pop direction, rather than heading for the true cult metal status they eventually achieved. But it's Manilla Road all right, with Shelton's gravelly wailing vox and squirrelly psychedelic soloing here being recognizable (and trademark) parts of their sound even today.
While this is live and raw, the young band is definitely ON and kicking ass, and it's decent sounding recording. So, obviously this is an archival discovery for Manilla Road enthusiasts to get excited about! Especially fans of their earlier stuff, before they got thrashy in the later '80s. If you're not already a MR fan, though, we suppose this might be a strange place to start.
Released on limited vinyl last year by High Roller, now on cd via Shadow Kingdom, with a booklet including lyrics, photos, and liner notes by "The Shark" himself.
Back in print, back in stock!
Here's one for fans of the USA's most cult '80s era true/power/heavy/epic metal band (who are still around, as a matter of fact). We've lauded them before, as being a uber-eccentric low-budget take on Maiden and Manowar, with hints of '70s prog, precursor to the likes of The Lord Weird Slough Feg. But it's also one of their weirdest, a lot more than hints of that '70s prog here, so others than strictly Manilla Road and/or metal fans might wanna check out...
First issued by pre-Rockadrome imprint Monster Records back in 2002, this is actually much older than that - it's an unreleased album from 1981, originally titled "Dreams of Eschaton". The band, for some reason, didn't like the recordings at the time and shelved them, but bootleg tapes have circulated among the Manilla Road faithful for years. Eventually Monster Records persuaded Manilla Road mainman Mark "The Shark" Shelton that it was time to give the album a proper release at last. Boasting cover art from Jim Fitzpatrick (who a lot of art for Thin Lizzy - as well as being responsible for the famous Che Guevara portrait poster you see everywhere), Mark of the Beast is a worthy addition to the Road's official catalog, though not their heaviest - it's a doomy but kinda mellow and psychedelic and spaced out album of epic, sad melodicism and majesty. The vocals are doused in FX, the entire recording is echoey and rickety, a few songs (like "Black Lotus") totally rock out, while many others wend and wind in a laidback druggy daze.
Like all Manilla Road, this doesn't fit any generic metal template...some of this reminds us of Rush's early songs, and there's even a proto-Current 93 narration thing happening on one track too!
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Just a few months ago this French post/chamber/drone rock (rock? no, not rock...) duo successfully piqued our interest with their two song debut ep, rounded out by Justin Broadrick (Jesu) and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) remixes. Now they've followed it up with a sprawling double cd (11 tracks, 110 minutes)... when they said a "full-length" was upcoming, they meant it! And it's magnificent. Maninkari's music, made with viola, piano, drums, cymbalom, santour, synth, and samples, is exceedingly textural, almost classically eerie. Like Thuja scoring a thriller or horror film soundtrack, perhaps. There's droning and groaning strings, mumbled, whispered voices, the rattle of bells and percussion, rumbling electronics, a drifting wash of sound usually underpinned with repeating, precise piano parts, compelling rhythmic figures, or some other driving sonic element emerging from the moody murk. Each track is carefully composed and undoubtedly effective, simmering along with slowly unfolding suspense, showing quiet restraint, allowing the minor key melancholic melodies and repetitive motifs to go to work on your nervous system! Hypnotically lovely yet ever so creepy, a bit like The Necks gone goth... ambient "dronejazz" soundscapery, abstract industrial chamber music, whatever you want to call it, we like it!
Mysterious, quaking, hissing, clattering instrumental post-rock soundscapery, a murky improv, weird and warm, full of shimmering strings slightly dissonant, like something processed from the sounds of a symphony tuning up, building to bombastic dense, droning nirvana. Very cool... What is this? Well, we're always interested in what Belgium's Conspiracy label decides to release (just look 'em up on our website and you'll find a slew of AQ faves, from a bunch of Boris to the recent Sunburned Circle album). Never heard of Paris' Maninkari before, but this debut release of theirs being on Conspiracy gets our attention -- as does the fact that Jesu's Justin Broadrick contributes a remix (as does Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner). That's right, as the title suggests, this disc is just two songs, plus two remixes... it's 42 minutes total, though, so if it's not a full-length album, it's not exactly just an ep either.
Maninkari construct a gorgeous soft cacophony of epic post-rock drift and minimal jazzy shuffle on 8:21 opener "Pyschoide". Dense drumming, frenzied strings, wound into tense soundscapes of slow burning shimmer. Godspeed plays the Dirty Three, or maybe Angus Maclise jamming with Chris Corsano, dark and druggy, some sort of glorious mantra-like minimalist dronejazz, with a super cinematic Phillip Glass like coda... That's followed by "Participation Mystic", a 16 minute track of lilting pizzicato strings, underpinned by deep soft swells of shimmering warmth and distant bits of industrial clatter, a slow burning ambient drift that is eventually joined by a simple motorik rhythm, transforming the pulsing ambience into something jazzy and minimal, propulsive and hypnotic, channeling the spirit of Finnish hypnorockers Circle and minimal dronejazz combo the Necks... and again near the end, everything enveloped by intense swarms of frenetic strings...
The two remixes are different enough from the originals to be quite worthwhile, and stand by themselves, not surprisingly being more "electronic music" sounding, and in the case of Broadrick's remix, more "extreme"!
Limited to 1000 copies. Full-length to follow soon...
Lush & beautiful, wry & too clever, stumbling pop songs from an ex-member of the Curious Digit. Great!
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The dreamy pop-tronica second album from this unassuming artist who was formerly known as Manitoba, and is now Caribou! FYI: His early releases such as this one have been reissued with tons of extras. You can find 'em under 'Caribou'!
