We kind of think the Summer Cats have gotten a bit overlooked in the awesome rebirth of Slumberland records. We loved their peppy and additive full length and this new 7" is making us hope that more folks get turned on to their totally upbeat, immediate and yes, totally Summer soaked sounds, in the tradition of the glory days of sugary pop fueled indie rock like Superchunk, Velocity Girl, Rocketship, Tiger Trap, Heavenly, Henry's Dress, and Boyracer. And with all the disjointed and warped lo-fi sounds we've been bombarded with lately it sounds so damn cleansing and beyond refreshing to hear some seriously sunhsiney pop. Summercats understand that to play this kind of music it has to be all killer and no filler, and they totally get that. Both these songs immediately jump into their hooks and pop glory and leave no room for wasted space or lingering moments. It's immediate, way catchy and gloriously sunny.
With the sunlit psych melodies of, say, the Olivia Tremor Control, and the hushed sweetly plaintive vocal delivery of Flaming Lips, Fuck, For Stars, or Grandaddy, plus a much smaller, more intimate right-there-in-front-of-you sound, Summer Hymns have made a pretty album. It's not the best of the current crop of bright eyed young Elephant 6 popsters, but it's pretty good nonetheless.
As with their two previous full lengths, Athens' Summer Hymns have made a nice album that's certainly pleasant enough but not particularly memorable. Head songsmith Zach Gresham and drummer Philip Brown have taken their pretty psych pop sound, complete with Flaming Lips-y / Grandaddy-ish plaintive vocals, and with the addition of two new members named Matt (Dawson and Stoessel) have fleshed out their sound with a whole lot of mournful, twangin' pedal steel, as well as some banjo, mandolin and dobro. Been listening to a lot of Gram Parsons, I'll bet. The result is mellow and pretty but, well, nothing special. I'd recommend any Court and Spark record over this one.
Although the moniker "Elephant 6" does not appear anywhere on this disc, it might as well. Summer Hymns is from Athens, Georgia, like the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel before them, and they're sporting the same ole pretty pop-psychedelic melodies and drawings and lyrics and what have you. It's unfortunate that they add nothing that's original to the mix, but fans of Elephant 6 stuff will still find much to like.
The sun is warm, the sun lights the way, the sun brings life... what's in a name? Well, it's certainly no misnomer for this group. It'll Be The Same is the second album from Sun, not to be confused with SUNNO))), although these guys are also a duo (Oren Ambarchi and Chris Townsend) and half of 'em (Mr. Ambarchi) have collaborated with SUNNO))) in the past. This Sun isn't from Southern Lord, but from the southern hemisphere (Australia), and play purely pop music, slow and soft and hushed but nothing doomy or blackened at all... some gentle droniness certainly does creep in, experimental glitch techniques n' textures that are of course what we might expect from Oren Ambarchi, who after all is known for solo albums along those lines (in fact, there's a great new one by him, actually on Southern Lord, reviewed on this list too). There are layers of static and field recordings (Townsend's children's voices, perhaps?) that along with Oren and Chris's own voices and guitar strums are formed into six moodily relaxed, truly sun-dappled, electro-acoustic folky-pop songs... a calm, cryptically detailed setting for lovely, wistful vocals that remind us of the Skygreen Leopards' Glenn Donaldson and Richard Youngs.
We loved Sun's first self-titled album (and extra disc of experimental remixes) back in 2003, and are happy to finally hear this excellent follow-up!
Aussie guitar experimentalist Oren Ambarchi has been a prolific gent of late, mainly doing droney improv glitch stuff we've been diggin'. But we know there's other musical sides to his personality as well -- after all, we first encountered him playing in the loud n' noisy scatological Boredoms/Buttholes influenced band Phlegm back in the early '90s. So now here's another, new and different Ambarchi project, a duo by the name of Sun (not to be confused with the doomster duo Sunn) that pairs Ambarchi with one Chris Townend (described as an "Australian music figurehead" whatever that means). And it's not noise, or drone, or improv, or electronics -- it's full on indie-pop! Really nice too, with laid back drum beats, gentle vocals, and pretty guitar strum. They're called Sun (and there's some la la las sung) but they'll have you thinking of rainy days too with their lazy, wistful songs. It's got that 60s Beatles/Floyd filtered through 90s indie-pop thing, like a Elephant 6 band or the Aislers Set or something.
Originally released in 2001 in Australia only, Sun's debut has now been licensed by Staubgold for the rest of the planet. What's great is that they've also tacked on a 2nd bonus disc of remixes, featuring all the tracks from the album redone (or done in) by the likes of Pluramon, Hrvatski, Christoph Heeman, Rafael Toral, Pimmon, Mapstation, Tom Recchion and Norbert Moslang of Voice Crack! Quite an international lineup of experimental artists there, reinterpreting the music of Sun in ways closer to what you're used to hearing from Ambarchi. Droney and fucked up, these mixes add a lot to the package, making it not just real nice but really interesting as well. And what other pretty pop duo would get Voice Crack to do a remix?? I guess Ambarchi might just be angling to become the next Jim O'Rourke...
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For all the deserved attention and press the whole Los Angeles musical underground has been receiving in the last couple years, we still think that Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, is perhaps the most unique musical visionary to come out of that scene. Beyond being so prolific, the quality of his proper records just gets increasingly better and better. On Patrol was one of our favorite albums of 2010, and with Ancient Romans, Sun Araw continues to move forward from that dubbed out blueprint and expand on what has become one of the most singular sounds of any new band of the last decade.
The moment the album starts, you immediately understand that you are at the beginning of a ceremony, some sort of stange sonic ritual, which requires the listener to open up to completely, wholly trusting in these sounds to carry you away. With dirty, hypnotic organs for the opening tones, setting the stage for the textured and layered dubbed out trip that will unfold over the next 80 minutes. More then almost any band we can think of, Sun Araw is a master of creating a unified vibe. The tracks on Ancient Romans just melt in and out of each other, you lose track of what song is playing, and instead just get lost deep in the fuzzed out grooves, and tripped out meditations. It's hard to explain when music feels this spiritual, it's just something you feel and trust. And with Sun Araw we get that feeling so intensely. It places you in some dusty, archaic temple that we could imagine was transported directly from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Once inside the temple, you forget about the trivial details of the everyday, and instead leave your body and find yourself somewhere mystical, magical and totally transcendent. This is going to be a contender for record of the year!
A reissue of record number two from Sun Araw, aka Magic Lanterns guitarist Cameron Stallone, and much like the other SA releases, Beach Head is a fuzzy, druggy, washed out, effects heavy psychedelic krautdrone new age blow out. Four extended tracks of smoldering minimal drift, soft cacophonies of bells and chimes wrapped in streaks of feedback and swirls of spaced out FX, undulating tendrils of sitar buzz, warped calliope melodies, and muted almost folky twang, everything sun dappled and Technicolor ear candy.
"Thoughts Are Bells" is indeed a bell heavy intro, a slow building, dronescape of percussive swirl, smoothed out angular guitars, and a slow motion avalanche of effects and buried melodies. "Horse Steppin'" is all laid back tropicalia via Ariel Pink, and broadcast through loud speakers hung from palm trees on some deserted tropical island. Flirting with Ducktails style lo-fi tropical garage pop, but transforming it into a reverb drenched bit of slow dreampop, that almost sounds like Animal Collective being spun manually at about 10rpm, the guitars glisten, the drums are muted and barely there, the vocals are soaked in echo and delay, everything laid back and stretched out and washed out, hazy and lazy and bleary and deliriously dreamlike.
The rest of the record doesn't deviate too much from those first two tracks, "Beams" manages to fuse the two, the sort of raga drift of the first with the slowcore blurpop of the second, into a Spacemen 3 style druggy drone, replete with woozy basslines, ethereal guitar atmospherics, and all the other various elements, vocals, drums, buried in a glorious sonic murk, while "Bridal Filly", takes the same combination, but stretches it WAY out into something even still more indistinct, an almost Tim Hecker-ish landscape of blurred grit, and pixelated melody, softly pulsing melodies, weightless wordless vox, muted percussion, swaths of thick buzz, eventually coalescing around another lumbering bassline, into some total stoner zoner psych drone spacerock drift. Awesome.
On the 7th full length from Sun Araw, we're not quite sure if Cameron Stallones is pushing boundaries or testing our patience or a little bit of both. Since his (in our opinion) best ever effort Ancient Romans - both on his collaboration with the Congos & M. Geddes Gengra and then on his Inner Treaty ep, he rode a divisive line around here between sublime devotional immersion and deliberately distancing bro-jam cacophony. We had begun to become a bit wary, and we're still somewhat on the fence here, though ultimately, we like this better than the last two aforementioned previous releases. On Belomancie, he reigns in his kitchen sink cluttered dub clouds for a type of long-form minimalism, but not one pivoting on repetition. Rather, Stallones uses a reductive musical approach to create a complex overlaying string of obtusely connected phases that lead the listener into strange sonic spaces. Designed for active listening, one could spend some time with this record and never hear it quite the same way twice. Yet, the synth tones are laid out and built upon so slowly that it seems like ages for a song to take its form and it will likely come across as either a rarefied mystique of plaintive searching or boring meandering noodling depending on your engagement and patience.
Jeez, guitarist Cameron Stallones has been on a roll lately with his solo endeavor Sun Araw. His third lp on the hugely prolific Not Not Fun label, Heavy Deeds picks up where the Phynx left off, more slow grooving jammers that fall somewhere between psych soul and pop-hop. Wailing delayed-out guitar, tons of wah and tons of soul, catchy vocal passages call out over and over as a leisurely turning lumber plods on with a hypnotic groove. Kinda like listening to a Suicide song on half speed while starring at the sun on a warm beach in Florida, whip out the hula shirts and Robitussin, it's going to be a trippy afternoon. All five tracks are so densely layered with all kinds of organ flutters, ripping solos, mumbling vocals its easy to get lost in Sun Araw's psychotic world of ultra catchy, mind melting blues. There's no doubt this kid has loads of talent, and is super productive, and we have to say we really dig Sun Araw's ability to balance pop sensibility with over the top psychedelic melt-down. There's enough here to get a song or two stuck in your head, without the music being at all straight forward or simple, pretty rad. Oh and by the way, the cd version comes with a killer bonus track titled "Hey Mandala"!
Brand new chunk of hazy, druggy, dubbed out psychedelic groove from Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, and it's a doozy, still dipping heavily into reggae and dub for inspiration, with wah wah guitar, woozy groovy bass, and now with what sounds like African high life style vocals, all draped over a wavery droning synth, which adds a weird bit of tension, the sound a dizzying hybrid, but one that kind of works, the guitars grow more active, getting crunchier, adding texture and melody to the proceedings, but all still wedded to that main groove, which pulses and undulates seductively the whole time. If you dug the last few SA records, this jam will be right up your alley. The weird thing here is the B side, which finds Stallones covering Teenage Fanclub, and utterly transforming it into some strange tropical dubbed out power pop jam, all gauzy and shimmery, laced with bird sounds, all sorts of FX squiggles, still underpinned by that droning synth tone, but there's real riffing, and real singing, but tenuously wrapped around all the murky swirl and dubby drift underneath, but again it kind of works. If you weren't familiar with the original, you might not even realize it's a cover, but if you are, you might just like this version too.
Cameron Stallones is back from his pilgrimage to Jamaica, where he made that FRKWYS album with The Congos, and now offers up a new Sun Araw album on his own Sun Ark imprint, full of damaged grooves and new twisted strain of avant dub weirdness, fragmented and spaced out, stumbling and super loose, the guitars spidery and echoey, the rhythms skittery and a bit abstract, the vocals doused in effects and WAY up in the mix, the whole thing sounds like it's melting, gradually decaying, peppered with blasts of fuzzy synth, swaths of swirly organ, percussion that sounds like clinking bottles, shuffling processed glitches. The tracks stutter and hiccup, never locking into a groove, so much as drifting and slipping from sound to sound, a series of swells, often fading out to near silence, before slipping back into it, some folks here thought it sounded kinda like Blues Control making a reggae album, while someone builds furniture next door (!), but some of us definitely got a serious Fastest vibe, total fractured outsider whatthefuck weirdo reggae action that will definitely have lots of folks scratching their heads and wondering what the hell is happening here. Although plenty of other folks will flip for Stallones' new, more damaged incarnation. Listen to the sound samples, and you'll know pretty much right away, which side you'll find yourself on.
Meandering and gloriously unfocused, The Inner Treaty definitely lacks some of the catchiness and groove of past Sun Araw releases, but for what it lacks in those areas, it makes up for in confusional weirdness, lacing its sundappled WTF dub with James Ferraro weirdo-wave retro VHS wooziness, and Ariel Pink / John Maus style avant drama-pop, and tangles it all up into something totally bizarre, something in fact that is so fucked up, it's like a musical car crash, we don't necessarily WANT to keep listening really, but somehow can't seem to stop ourselves. Very reservedly recommended, and even then, only for folks who like their music a bit baffling. Which come to think of it, is probably a whole lot of you.
As if the music of lysergic, lo-fi drugdub one man band Sun Araw wasn't flipped out and damaged enough, on this latest joint, those already tweaked and twisted sounds get even more far out, the vibe WAY druggier and spacier, a 26 minute blast of crumbling wah-guitar laced psychdub comedown in the form of three skull caving soul freeing innerspace excursions.
"Last Chants" begins with a dense swirling cloud of white noise and damaged effects, shot through with barely there melodies, and loose detuned riffage, as the noise gradually fades out, it reveals the strange slow motion cough syrup psychfunk dub drawl lurking underneath, woozy wah guitar, echo drenched Sly Stone vox, streaked with shards of high end shimmer, distorted fuzzy crunch, all hazy and blurry as if run through a series of bongs, all roped to a loping lugubrious barely there rhythm.
"Midnight Locker" is way more dubby, fragmented rhythms, and strange vocal oooh's, drift in a sea of swirling whirring low end thrum, woozy bass slithers throughout, cowbells surface here and there, little bits of wah, spidery tendrils of psychedelic guitar, the buzz and blur eventually recede leaving just a strange assemblage of percussion and guitar, all over a distant rumbling shimmer, but mostly it's spare and spacious and still seriously drugged out.
And finally, "Deep Temple" starts out almost like a proper dub jam, but within seconds, that woozy groove is wreathed in gorgeously blown out prismatic sheets of shimmery sound, an impossibly shoegazey dub drone bliss out of the highest order, twisted and looped, and as the track progresses more and more heavy and psychedelic.
The cd version tacks on an additional 18 minutes, 2008's Boat Trip ep, which is a bit more lo-fi and a bit more minimal, long stretches of low slung bass rumble, thick swaths of shimmering drones, crumbling distorted heaviness, reverbed vox, loping and hypnotic, still dubby, but not nearly as blown out and explosive, a sort of meditative dreamy druggy coda. So cool...
As if the music of lysergic, lo-fi drugdub one man band Sun Araw wasn't flipped out and damaged enough, on this latest joint, those already tweaked and twisted sounds get even more far out, the vibe WAY druggier and spacier, a 26 minute blast of crumbling wah-guitar laced psychdub comedown in the form of three skull caving soul freeing innerspace excursions.
"Last Chants" begins with a dense swirling cloud of white noise and damaged effects, shot through with barely there melodies, and loose detuned riffage, as the noise gradually fades out, it reveals the strange slow motion cough syrup psychfunk dub drawl lurking underneath, woozy wah guitar, echo drenched Sly Stone vox, streaked with shards of high end shimmer, distorted fuzzy crunch, all hazy and blurry as if run through a series of bongs, all roped to a loping lugubrious barely there rhythm.
"Midnight Locker" is way more dubby, fragmented rhythms, and strange vocal oooh's, drift in a sea of swirling whirring low end thrum, woozy bass slithers throughout, cowbells surface here and there, little bits of wah, spidery tendrils of psychedelic guitar, the buzz and blur eventually recede leaving just a strange assemblage of percussion and guitar, all over a distant rumbling shimmer, but mostly it's spare and spacious and still seriously drugged out.
And finally, "Deep Temple" starts out almost like a proper dub jam, but within seconds, that woozy groove is wreathed in gorgeously blown out prismatic sheets of shimmery sound, an impossibly shoegazey dub drone bliss out of the highest order, twisted and looped, and as the track progresses more and more heavy and psychedelic.
The cd version tacks on an additional 18 minutes, 2008's Boat Trip ep, which is a bit more lo-fi and a bit more minimal, long stretches of low slung bass rumble, thick swaths of shimmering drones, crumbling distorted heaviness, reverbed vox, loping and hypnotic, still dubby, but not nearly as blown out and explosive, a sort of meditative dreamy druggy coda. So cool...
Latest cloud of smoked out dub psych damage from this one man band, a massive sprawling double lp, every song bleeding into the next, one epic druggy abstract sonic trip. The Sun Araw sound keeps drifting further and further out, and in the process, approaching something that sounds a bit like reggae, but filtered through a cracked Not Not Fun filter, and a bank of busted amps and malfunctioning effects pedals. Oh and pot smoke. Lots and lots of pot smoke.
Woozy, warbly, prismatic, sun baked (and just plain baked), stripped down, dubbed out, inner space drift. Wah Wah guitars hover over skeletal rhythms, reverb and delay coats everything in earshot, disembodied chantlike vox are draped over SA's twisted mutant lo-fi dub. The record drifts into some warped murk, still peppered with plenty of upstroke reggae guitar jangle, but wrapped in wheezing keyboards and some super distorted fuzz bass.
The second record begins all ethereal and new age, some hushed glimmering ambient drift, near static, before launching into some dubby krautrock, muted and muddy and minimal, flurries of keyboard tangle spray notes at the relentless motorik pulse, still more abstract vox and lots of gorgeously spidery guitars, all tangled up into minor key melodies that seem to fade into the background, the whole record sort of hazy and ghostly, while somehow remaining krauty and dubby. The sidelong final side strips everything away, or piles it all on, blurring and smearing and winding everything into a dense layered drift, looped and hypnotic and psychedelic, that wouldn't sound out of place on a Monopoly Child Star Searchers record. Rad stuff. Thick vinyl, full color gatefold sleeve, and yeah, probably limited.
Take the blown-out pop psych euphoria of Les Rallizes Denudes, throw in a dash of Parson Sound's hypnotic kraut feel, and you're getting close to honing in on the futuristic yet tribal psych jams effortlessly conjured up by Cameron Stallones, a member of Long Beach's Magic Lantern who goes it alone as Sun Araw. From the prolific folks at Not Not Fun, Phynx resounds with a heavy California daze, a drugged out, bluesy blend of face melting drones, fuzzed out guitar riffs, and repetitive clangy rhythms. Ritualistic and somehow modern, Sun Araw walks the line between pop and drone. Moments of the album are dense with catastrophic buzzing thickness, and other parts are more rockin' with a pretty defined heavy groovin' psych feel. All very guitar based, we're reminded of dudes like Ignatz, but less lo-fi and intimate, definitely more rhythmic and percussive. We're even sort of reminded of Brightblack's older stuff, heavy lethargic blues on Robitussin.
But Phynx is much more dense and perplexing. Layers of fuzz on top of layers of vocals on top of layers of drones...you get the idea. A seriously engaging album, there's tons of variety and small details to get all wrapped up in. And not to mention the sweet picture on the cover of some mysterious blindfolded figure in the dim hall of a library! Don't miss out on this California tribal psych gem!
Two words we never thought we'd need these two words in a review of solo lysergic space psych outfit Sun Araw: Funky. And Reggae. But indeed this latest slab of effects drenched trip out, indeed requires both of those descriptors to do it justice.
The A side is all fuzzy bloopy bass, over a groovy loping rhythm, lots of wah guitar, drenched in effects, little squalls of psychedelic freakout here and there, super stripped down, synthy and spacey and yeah, a little bit funky. But in some weird way it totally works.
The flipside offers up, right out of the gate, some funky timbales, more wah guitars, he whole thing pretty blissed out and druggy for sure, with super tripped out stereo panning and warm wheezing organ, and a distinct and undeniable rocksteady vibe.
We're trying to remember if these tendencies were present in past Sun Araw outings, and we feel like they must have been, but it's not until now that they were allowed to blossom, seems strange, and it definitely sort of is, but we're digging it. Try to imagine the a totally drugged out, abstract, fuzzy, reverby, effects doused slightly funky, lo-fi reggae drone space jam, and this is probably it!
Some deep and heady devotional vibes from this unlikely dream collaboration of Sun Araw, M Geddes Gendras and reggae legends The Congos for the latest installment of the RVNG label's FRKWYS series. Reminding us of a more churning and lysergic exploration of Dadawah's long form Nyabinghi jams, Icon Give Thank as this disc in the series is titled, turns the standard dub-reggae expectations on their heads and instead offers a strange brew of soft swells, smoky psych drift and oceanic dub interludes, punctuated by the honeyed falsetto vocals of elder statesmen Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson from Congos. This release has garnered the most divisive stance of the FRKWYS series among us at aQ so far, with some of us considering it one of the better collaborations and for others a squandered opportunity smacking of colonialism. Granted, the sound design relies heavily on the Sun Araw side of the coin, but his approach is hardly "the white boy playing reggae" criticisms this release has occasionally garnered. The sound, for one, hovers hazily in the air like swirling smoke while the grounding bass is pushed back way in the mix instead of anchoring it rhythmically. Each member of the collaboration has come together on the premise of praise and invocation of thanks, making this project a more spiritual concern than just a good-times-get-high-let's-jam together record. By the end of it, we're in a completely different headspace altogether, in reverent clouds of the Divine.
And along with the cd, you get an hour-long dvd disc, called Icon Eye, a travelogue/documentary all about the collaboration process.
We first discovered the raga drone duo Sun Circle via a cd-r sent to the store, direct from the band, and as mentioned in the review of that very cd-r, somehow the disc got lost, only to be discovered literally YEARS later, only for us to finally listen to it, and be totally blown away. The band was as adept at growling howling humming dronemusic as it was at ephemeral atmospheric ambience, crafting their own variations of classic ragas, filtered through an aesthetic as informed by modern music, noise rock and who knows what else, as it was Indian classical music and 20th century minimalism.
On their newest, Lessness, as the title suggests, the band do indeed work with less, each side of the double lp performed on single instrument, either drums, tamboura or gong, but in doing so, manage to transform the minimal instrumentation into something lush and expansive, rhythmic and hypnotic.
The first side is just drums, and is most definitely the most minimal of the bunch, maybe too minimal for some, with just a very simple spare rhythm, pounded out on a drum, maybe several, but the sound is spare, and simple, but listen close, and listen for the whole of the side, and the sounds grow ever more complex, on the surface the rhythm never wavers, but as you get sucked in, the sounds do seems to come alive, the overtones, the subtle shifts in timbre, constantly evolving, but so subtly, it might not be noticeable unless you're in it for the long haul and have those headphones strapped on tight. Total rhythmic raga bliss.
The second two sides are both produced with just tambouras, and the sound is incredible, thick and layered, gorgeously lush, an organic, and living sound, the subtle colors of the sound reflective and prismatic, constantly shifting, intense and mesmerizing and strangely meditative and psychedelic. On the second tamboura side, the sound becomes a bit more structured, but only a bit, buzzing steel strings, subtly rhythmic, locked into a looped groove, deep rumbles beneath a repeated fragmented melody, the most traditionally raga sounding of the bunch, and like the two sides before it, seemingly unchanging, as if it really was looped, but this is the sort of sound that rewards deep listening, and blossoms into a world of complex sound, just below the surface.
Especially on the final side, which is all gongs, and very much like the Karen Stackpole records on Dielectric, the sounds is deep and resonant and so sonorous, ringing out, layered here and there, but more often left to just hover in space, before fading away, only to have another tone take its place, no processing, just the glorious sound of vibrating metal, dark and mysterious, meditative and hypnotic. So gorgeous.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!
Sun City Girls fans rejoice, the vinyl reissue of their epic crowning acheivement "300,003 Crossdressers..." is upon us. Originally released in 1996 on double cd only, "Crossdressers" almost certainly surpassed "Torch of the Mystics" as the Sun City
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After an almost three year hiatus (Sublime Frequencies seems to have been garnering the Girls' attention and finances these days) the Sun City Girls have racheted up the Carnival Folklore Resurrection project with two new titles, both of them live performances by the trio on the radio. This second set, CFR volume 13 was recorded on Kim Sorise's show on WFPK in Louisville, Kentucky in April of 2004. Both sets are quite similar in execution, spanning the gamut of SCG's musical tendencies. Either of these performances could be seen as a great introduction to the group or, equally, one for serious fans only. It's all here: overseas shortwave and field recordings, Uncle Jim rants, skronky improv madness, pretty instrumental interludes, re-engineered soundtrack themes and bizarre mixes. If there's a noticeable difference in the balance of material on the two releases we'd say that Radio One & Two has more Uncle Jim ranting and field recording mixing, while 98.6 Is Death has more actual live rocking, jamming and skronking in the studio.
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Volume 4 in this never-ending (well, 150 volume) monthy series of Sun City Girls releases is here. It's jazz. It was recorded live in Seattle, December, 1997. It is now beginning to sink in that they really are going to put out a new cd every month for the rest of eternity (well, 150 months). This will really separate the true SCG lovers from the mere SCG likers, won't it now?
An absolutely essential, vinyl-only Sun City Girls release, one of our all time favorite SCG records since Torch Of The Mystics. The bad news is, A. it's really expensive, and B. we only got 15 copies and it's totally out of print. So SCG fanatics best act fast if they want one of these, cuz holy shit is this one mindblowing and ear tickling release...
The packaging alone makes this worth the price tag. An ultra thick, eye popping sleeve, housed in a die cut lp slipcase, with metallic embossing on the front. Inside, it's a one sided white vinyl lp, with the flip side gorgeously silkscreened. And there's so much stuff crammed inside the sleeve, it weighs a ton. There's multiple 12"x12" full color flats that seem to be alternate cover art, lots of random sized artwork, all on thick cardstock, two sheets of stickers, a band photo, a childhood photo of SCG Charlie Gocher (who passed away recently) and a page of confusing SCG linernotes from some zine from way back in 1999. Hard to say if that means this was previously released, but none of us have ever heard it.
So when you go to play the record, don't be confused by the needle hovering endlessly on the edge of the disc, it plays from the inside out, backwards, so set the needle down next to the label and let 'er rip. And as if the direction of play was any indicator, the music is almost entirely backwards! And it's amazing. Dark and droney, creepy and haunting, a little bit circusy, but mostly dizzying and hypnotic. Imagine listening to the darkest scariest SCG album backwards.... (and in fact, this is apparently the backwards version of "The Venerable Song (The Meaning Which Is No Longer Known)" from the LP Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings released on Majora way back in 1993!)...
Haunted vocals and mysterious chants and howls, fluttering flickering flutes all drift and hover over a gorgeous landscape of backwards drones and strange pulsing rhythms, created from that swooping backwards 'ffffzzzzt' sound that music makes in reverse... We weren't sure what to expect, but we've been listening to this nonstop, over and over and over, so goddamn good.
Not sure how limited this was (other than REALLY), and apparently there were a million different variations of color and inserts and whatnot in this already tiny micropressing, but we only have 15, and once these are gone, they are gone forever.
Eclipse continues with installment number two in their ongoing and immense task of reissuing the entire Sun City Girls cassette catalog. As we discovered with their previous release of the first two cassettes "God Is My Solar System" and "Superpower" they've taken the liberty of both including odds and ends from other cassettes and leaving out bits and pieces here and there to boot. Which is all good and well, as it leaves those dedicated fans who hold onto the original cassettes with a special keepsake and allows SCG neophytes and collectors alike to both enjoy a time capsule look at the trio in its infancy and a handsome limited edition package to share with our kids when we retire. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The tracks taken from "Bleach Has Feelings, Too!" come to us from recordings made by the Girls between 1982 and 1984. It's a snapshot of three precocious teenagers as they fuck around with a radio evangelist's call-in show, spin some sex records that would make the makers of Flexi-Sex blush and lay down the groundwork for their trademark punk rock free jazz skronk. The tracks on "To Cover Up Your Right To Live", culled from 1983 and 1985 recordings, present yet another disparate facet of the SCG aesthetic, namely that of the (ir)reverent cover tune. Along with fuck you style jams to VU's "Waitin For My Man" and "The Summertime Blues" there's also some kick ass takes on the theme to the "Wild World of Animals", "Caravan", and "Back Stabbers". Forget the album's shortcomings in regards to its definitive aspirations. This is a fine gatefold edition with great photos (demonstrating once again that the Girls are the best dressed men in show business) and, like the cassettes from where this comes, will be long gone and out of print in short time anyhow.
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SORRY.
Further classic SCG's vinyl makes it onto cd, in this case, featuring three long & live tracks.
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Limited to 1000 copies, here's the first installment in a series (of indeterminate number) dubbed Carnival Folklore Resurrection by the always confounding Sun City Girls. Six tracks, all new, recorded live in Seattle 1997. Apparently improvised, and of course not exactly easy listening. Sun City Girls fans know what they're getting into. Newcomers should instead start with all-time SCG classic "Torch of the Mystics".
A-side is the Sun City Girls uber-lo-fi punk rock freak out of the same name (a version of which appears also on "Libyan Dream" in the Carnival Folklore Series). The B-side is a field recording of someone getting their hair cut by a barber named "Carl". True story.
As promised, Locust Music has just re-issued the Sun City Girls' Dante's Disneyland Inferno. Long out of print, and never before released on vinyl, DDI was originally released in 1996 along side the fabulous 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. Unlike 330,003 Crossdressers, Dante's Disneyland inferno is less likely to appear on anyone's "Sun City Girls album to own if you had to pick only one" choice. DDI is pretty much the Girls "spoken word" album (though not without its share of singing, of which there is much on here to boot) and as such is generally only good for one or two listens, kind of like God Speed You Black Emperor. Dominated primarily by the voice of Charley Gocher and accompanied by himself, the Bishop Bros., Scott Colburn + some special guests, the album isn't necessarily bad, it just doesn't lend itself to many repeat listens. The musical accompaniment to Gocher's sordid and seedy tales run the gamut of the SCG musical experience: off kilter beat jazz, improv. skronkery, world music tomfoolery and gloomy-folk freak out. And the poetics / songs themselves are two parts Grimm's Fairy Tales, one part Current 93 and 1.666 parts Ethel Merman on PCP. The end result of which is like a seriously disillusioned Tom Waits or a satanically possessed Violent Femmes, take your pick. As a bonus, you lucky vinyl buyers get an additional photo of the Girls and a comic adaptation of the song "The Brothers Unconnected" within this deluxe, double gatefold sleeve edition.
It's Christmastime for Sun City Girls fans it seems... well it's almost Xmas anyway for everybody as we write this, but what we mean is that some hard to find gems from the SCG's extensive and bizarre discography are finally finding their way back into circulation, with several long out of print LP titles getting cd re-release on Abduction in recent months. Sad as it is that the SCGs are no more (the trio's drummer Charles Goucher tragically a victim of cancer earlier this year) at least it will be a while before they run out of recordings to reissue, as this prolific band's back catalog of obscurities goes way back to the early '80s...
This particular item, a soundtrack (or is it? the film "was never completed" and perhaps was never begun, either), was originally released on limited edition vinyl in 1998. Based on this music though, we'd LOVE to see this film, if it did in fact exist. According to a "reliable" source (Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls, in the liner notes) the story goes that the SCGs were approached by a mysterious Japanese film director to provide the music to his film about a secret underground alien base in New Mexico. This alleged director turned out to be a member of the infamous Aum Shinrikyo cult, perpetrators of the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. Unfazed, the SCGs took the commission... but never heard from the Japanese man again. Hmm. Well we're happy that the SCGs followed through and produced this album (OR, made up that story, and produced this album).
On it, they blend delicate, melodic moments of overwrought cinematic beauty with the usual surreal SCG shenanigans. There's breathy, wordless vocals, industrial-strength noise, improv clatter, and cocktail-jazz flourishes... it's weird, it's spooky, it's sometimes quite lovely. Now, while we know the Sun City Girls could have easily done all this by themselves, they actually got some help from their friends, this album featuring contributions from violinist Eyvind Kang, clarinetist Jessie Miller, and last but not least, Japanese spazzprog drums/bass duo The Ruins (Tatsuya Yoshida and Ryuichi Masuda)!! Ends up sounding something like Mike Patton's Fantomas attempting to make music for a cattle mutilations movie, in the imagined style of a '70s Italian soundtrack, as if released on ESP-Disk (whew! stretched out that implausible string of doubtful comparisons didn't we...).
The second volume in the ongoing series of singles compilations from legendary outfit the Sun City Girls was one of the many duds that frustrate so much of the die-hard SCG fanbase. It was especially frustrating given that the first volume - You're Never Alone With A Cigarette (which as of spring 2013 is sadly out of print) - was so fucking good, mostly due to the fact that much of that material was made up of tracks that were left off the group's masterpiece, Torch Of The Mystics. At one time, TOTM was slated to be a double lp set with the Girls working towards fleshing out the whole album with a bunch of similar sounding tracks. So when the album dropped just as a single slab of wax, all of the remnants ended up finding their way onto various singles back in the early '90s. As Volume One did feature many of those leftovers, Volume Three thankfully completes the task, with two of those discarded Torch tracks culled from the Three Fake Female Orgasms 7" (released on Majora in 1991) as well as all of the cuts from the Eye Mohini and Borungku Si Derita singles (both released through Majora in 1992 and 1993 respectively, the latter featuring a different version of "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" from Torch Of The Mystics, just to make things all the more confusing). There's also a different version of "Kickin The Dragon" from the other SCG masterpiece 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, as well as a live version of another Torch classic, "The Flower".
The title track here in particular is a classic Sun City Girls jam, with Richard Bishop's desert-blues inspired fingerpicking seamlessly shifting from Arabic flourishes to Southeast Asian folk-pop and the more commonplace No Depression styled Americana, all with brother Alan plaintively sounding out syllabically a maudlin melody that may or may not be complete nonsense or some polyglot of languages dialed in by the Girls' esoteric antenna to all sorts of wild and wonderful songs from around the world. "Gum Arabic" is a terse re-interpretation of heavy Turkish psychedelia which would certainly foreshadow Sublime Frequencies eventual reissue collection of Erkin Koray's works. "Abydos Carousel Tapsel" has a bad-ass south-of-the-border vibe which shifts into an unhinged jubliant psych-folk in "Borungku Si Derita" which strangely sounds a lot like Comus! With so much of the Sun City Girls catalogue terminally out of print, getting a hold of anything from the band is a cause for celebration; but getting an album as great as this, even a collection, maybe especially a collection, is all the more reason to rejoice. And for those uninitiated into the demented psych-punk weirdness of SCG, this is a really great place to start.
Cassette archive reissue number four from Eclipse brings us two more long out of print Sun City Girls cassettes. Like the previous releases, these LPs do not definitively reproduce those old cassettes, but both include tracks previously unreleased and lack the inclusion of several tracks on those original cassettes. Folk Songs of the Rich and Evil comes out of the Girls' old stomping grounds of Phoenix, Arizona circa 1985. Through and through this one's an avant-punk-free-jazz-nightmare, demographically designed to fuck with the hopes and aspirations of the ethno rock loving crowd. Elliott likens Alan's fever pitched vocals to that of sleep talker Dion McGregor. The tracks on Exotica on $5 a Day come primarily from 1983 and 1985, also recorded in and around Arizona. For the tracks on side A brothers Alan and Richard drop their guitar and bass to join Charlie in a maniacal tribal faux-Native American drum and vocal jam. Ironically enough, the final -- bonus -- track on this side "Hopi Ceremonious" was recorded at a Big Mountain benefit in 1986. Side B is a set of droney improvised tunes, the likes of which must certainly be seen as sowing the seeds for a future No Neck Blues Band.
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Another in the Eclipse series of LP reissues of old Sun City Girls cassettes. If Byram was back from Java we'd have him explain all about it, as he's the big SCG expert 'round here, but we figure better to get this listed now, before it sells out, rather than wait for Byram to get back and shake off the jet lag. Plus how weird would it be for him to write about the Sun City Girls' faux-ethno shenannigans after having been in the real world locale from which they take so much inspiration? So, SCG fans, you need to know (perhaps) this: Fresh Kill Of A Cape Hunting Dog and Def In Italy (ugh) were both Cloaven cassette releases from 1987, although recorded from '83-'85 and on tour in '84, respectively. This luxurious gatefold vinyl edition is limited to a mere one thousand copies. Four sides of high weirdness you probably want real bad.
Already out print, this is the fifth in the Cloaven Cassette reissues from the Sun City Girls on vinyl. There were 23 of said cassettes which the Girls released themselves from 1987 to 1990, although some of the material dates back to their beginning in the early '80s. These two sets of recordings were recorded in 1986, most of which features live recordings of the 'Girls free improv / middle-eastern skronk dotted with some choice songs of their mangled psyche-punk including a live version of their single "Sev Asher." Like all of the previous Eclipse 2LP sets, not all of the original cassette has been rescued and preserved on vinyl, BUT there are some unreleased extras which do make their way onto these very nicely packaged sets. We only were able to get a handful, and when they're gone, they're gone...
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
The vinyl of Funeral Mariachi is undoubtedly limited, but a cd is scheduled for release later in October, we're told.
Eclipse has undertaken the ambitious yet noble task of re-releasing the entire Sun City Girls cassette recordings -- some of which date back to the band's pre-Placebo origins. This first re-issue (in a series of ten) includes the first two releases by the band, taken from their cassettes "God Is My Solar System" and "Superpower". Recorded between 1982 and 1983, these tracks show the Girls in all their youthful exuberance -- an unselfconscious & spontaneous collision of punk rock and free jazz-- and probably made when the members of bands like the No Neck Blues Band were just a twinkle in their mamas' eyes. Sadly for SCG completists, we aren't entirely sure whether these two slabs of wax actually contain all the tracks on first two cassettes. While none of us personally owns either, according to Scott Colburn's very complete discography -- http://www.gravelvoice.com/scg/scg.html -- there are quite a few tracks missing and some included which weren't even on the original cassettes. But before you poo poo this and the upcoming LP's as unworthy of your attention, know that you a) will only be able to find these tracks otherwise on crappy nth generation dubs and b) that these handsomely pressed gatefold double LPs are limited to 1000 copies. On top of that this album cover is attractively decorated with nice archival live photos of Sun City Girls demonstrating to all who stand before them just who the Gods, or Godesses, of costume rock are.
The 'Girls have finally gotten around to releasing volume 8 in their Carnival Folklore Ressurection series and is it worth the wait? Err... well, the dwindling fanbase around here say "nay!" But then again, we haven't been the staunchest supporters of this
"High Asia Lo-Pacific" comprise volumes 9 and 10 of the Sun City Girls' Carnival Folklore Resurrection series. High Asia, disc one, finds the Girls returning to their quasi-ethno folk which they seem to do so well. Using primarily stringed instruments --
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This record is fucked. Maybe you're thinking that "fucked" is one of the best compliments we can offer for a record. But seriously, this record is fucked-up. The Sun City Girls have long been known for the devilish personas which adopted liberally from the South East Asian pop and Bollywood scores. Slowly, erratic Beat poetry, bizarrely theatrical ideas, and uncomfortable experiments began to creep into their recordings. Jacks Creek was one of the records that had long been reviled as one of the Sun City Girl's biggest red flags for a serious lack of quality control. Loosely, a 'hillbilly' album, Jack's Creek begins with the Goucher and the Bishop Brothers muttering in badly rendered, redneck drawls about the terrible odor coming from an Indian burial mound somewhere nearby. For 10 minutes three men groans and whisper their fears, for one of the more convoluted extracts from the Sun City Girls catalogue. Eventually, a back-porch improv jam of warble and strum on harmonica, banjo, and voice brings this track to a conclusion, leaving more questions than answers. The hobo freak-folk of Jacks Creek with more hoots, false starts, and faux-drunk dialogue than actual songs, would certainly turn off anybody looking for an entire album of dramatic psych-punk ecstasy a la Torch Of The Mystics (although a few meandering gems like "Fact The Business" work their way into Jacks Creek). Like we said, this record is fucked.
Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls has been the curator of many of the finest Ennio Morricone collections, including the brilliant compilation on Ipecac Crime & Dissonance, despite the John Zorn written liner notes that seemed to suggest that Mike Patton had done the compiling. Needless to say, it makes a lot of sense for the Sun City Girls to find their way into the realm of the soundtrack, given Alan Bishop's love of Morricone; and Juggernaut is one of those Sun City Girls soundtracks. While this soundtrack was originally released on vinyl through Abduction back in 1994, the corresponding film by Mark Roman Bodnar and Kyrill Kazemirovitch Protsenko had never been officially released. That said, it did make an appearance at an Italian film festival in 1997; so, it probably is an actual film, and not some fiction propagated as a strange in-joke by the Sun City Girls. But then again...
Anyway, Juggernaut is a pretty good Sun City Girls album. The band had always been a difficult proposition, as they had thrown every idea (from the great notions of smashing Southeast Asian pop melodies with SoCal skate punk energy to the better-in-theory modes of junkyard gamelan via free jazz) at the audience and let them sort out the mess. Juggernaut follows suit, as an entirely instrumental album with the highlights giving nods to the classic SCG album Torch of the Mystics through lysergic guitar solos splattered across acid-punk jams that could easily ground the work of early Flaming Lips or Thinking Fellers, if those bands were way more fucked up. The semi-focused, stoned ritualism that makes up the rest of the album could have had some atmospheric purpose in the original film although they're not out of character for any given Sun City Girls album.
Volume 7 in the Carnival Folklore Resurrection series, and all four of Aquarius' Sun City Girls heads give it the thumbs up. According to the liner notes the Sun City Girls originally made 50 cassettes of "Libyan Dream" and dropped them off in cassette
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We were thinking, yay, Singles Volume 2! Singles Volume 1, entitled You're Never Alone With A Cigarette, was soooo good (see our review elsewhere on the site, sadly though it's out of print now).
But... er... well... not yay quite so much. This one is kinda hard to take, though certain diehard SCG fans will doubtless disagree. It's the skits side of their ourvre represented here, rather than the music.
Maybe go for the Master Musicians Of Bukkake's Totem One or Totem Two, instead, if you haven't already.
So the story goes that a young Italian director named Antonio Pomola got in touch with the Sun City Girls in 1993 to score a film about a giant pre-historic flying reptile terrorizing a 19th Century Native American tribe somewhere in the Midwest. According to the Girls, the film was never completed; and the soundtrack is the only document from the film's creative genesis. There doesn't appear to be any further information about the career or even existence to this Pomola character, beyond the fact that the Sun City Girls composed this soundtrack of fragmented interludes, raga instrumentals, and weirdo atmospherics. Needless to say, the Girls self-released this soundtrack in 1994 on vinyl; only to have it disappear from circulation in quick fashion.
Jump a dozen years into the future, and the soundtrack is available again at last with a cd pressing. Composed immediately after their Juggernaut soundtrack (reviewed elsewhere on this list), the Sun City Girls offered a series of edited fragments, which mostly touch on a psychedelic ritualism which foreshadows the Finnish free-folk splatter of Avarus, Kemialliset Ystavat, and Kuupuu. Faux-indian raga blues drifts into lumbering plods for plenty of chicken scratch guitar noodles, free-jazz drum stumblings, and glossalaic vocals. At times, the Bishop brothers and Charlie Gocher tease us with a glimpse of their mutant songwriting talents; but more often than not, it's sinister atmospheres for gongs, Tibetan horns, and amorphous guitar pluckery.
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After an almost three year hiatus (Sublime Frequencies seems to have been garnering the Girls' attention and finances these days) the Sun City Girls have racheted up the Carnival Folklore Resurrection project with two new titles, both of them live performances by the trio on the radio. This first set, CFR volumes 11 & 12, was recorded in November of 2002 on Brian Turner's radio show on WFMU in New Jersey and was actually originally released a year or so ago as a super limited edition available only through the group's website. Both sets are quite similar in execution, spanning the gamut of SCG's musical tendencies. Either of these performances could be seen as a great introduction to the group or, equally, one for serious fans only. It's all here: overseas shortwave and field recordings, Uncle Jim rants, skronky improv madness, pretty instrumental interludes, re-engineered soundtrack themes and bizarre mixes. If there's a noticeable difference in the balance of material on the two releases we'd say that Radio One & Two has more Uncle Jim ranting and field recording mixing, while 98.6 Is Death has more actual live rocking, jamming and skronking in the studio.
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How time flies... We're now on volume 5 in the Girls' monthly "Carnival Folklore Ressurection" series. Seven more to go. This one was recorded on March 18th of this year in -- surprize, surprize -- Seattle, Washington. The disk opens with a mock blues piece with curmudgeonly vocals by Mr Gocher, and then proceeds into a rather nice 10 minute, organ led instrumental dirge rock jam. After a track of more Gocher-led rambling (this time more akin to the tracks on "Dante's Disneyland Inferno") the rest of the show is occupied by guitar, bass and drum improv madness. Not exactly crucial, but who is to understand what is it is that Sun City Girls fans really want...
Ah the Sun City Girls. Ever perplexing and unpredictable... yet reliably weird. It's nice to know there's always the Sun City Girls. It's kinda that "there'll always be an England" feeling. But different. Very different. Anyway, and now we're up to number fourteen in the SCG's "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series. Static From The Outside Set recorded (or should we say compiled?) for a BBC radio program, On The Wire Lancashire, in the summer of 2005. There's 29 diverse tracks here, many of them collaged tracks-within-tracks edited to simulate the spinning of the radio dial. Highlights? Well there's a lot of almost Jewelled Antlerish tinkering and droning, we liked those cuts quite a bit. The SCGs can do the psychedelic drone folk thing quite well (and they also play on our heartstrings by doing a very faithful cover of "Gently Johnny" from The Wicker Man soundtrack!).
But there's more: fake-jazz ("Tea Boy Attitude", "Django-ized"), Beeheartian skronk ("Iced-Off Broccoli"), interminable talk radio parody ("Sacrifice in the USA"), blues, a limerick, a Brian Wilson song, all sorts of jibber jabber and non sequitur interludes, like the track "Elvis and Machinery" wherein the Colonel tells Elvis, "stay away from that wheelbarrow, you don't know nothin about machinery". You'll go "huh?" but then the Girls will spin that dial and you'll be dealing with something else already. So it's something of a grab bag, but one we sure didn't mind groping around in.
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Six discs into the Sun City Girls' rather indulgent "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series and even the most fannish of fans could be forgiven for starting not to care. So, in accordance with their contrary ways, leave it to the SCGs to spring a surprise: this one is probably the best yet in the series, an actual collection of pseudo ethnic psychedelic "pop" songs mixed with mysterious field recordings, both providing much evocative, "exotic" ambience. So, if the messy spazzy skronk of the live stuff that comprises a lot of the first five discs in the CFR series turned you off, you should give 'em another chance with this one.
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Volume three in the "Carnival Folklore Ressurection" series. This one was taken from a live show, once again in Seattle, from September 13, 1997. Jim and Byram both rate this one somewhere in between the second and the first (Andee would just as soon see them stop altogether) -- a bit of their rock fuckery and a bit of their jazzy improvery. Our man on the inside, John at Revolver, says that there are twelve of these due for release (one a month.) I suppose that there are people out there that will need all twelve, but I just wish they would re-issue all their cassettes on cd -- remastered or not -- or get the rights to re-issue their old Placebo releases?
