[ aquarius records — Rock Pop ]

MPEG stream: Here We Come
MPEG stream: She Says
MPEG stream: Sleeping Beauty

Heavy noise-rock from these SF locals.

Once again we discover that a band we love, a band whose records we won and dig big time (all of em!), is totally under represented on the aQuarius site. It's unavoidable really, there are only so many hours in the day, which are WAY out numbered by the amount of records released every week. Anyway, enough making excuses, let's just try to right one of those wrongs. A new record from UK bombastic glam power pop trio Supergrass, and with Diamond Hoo Ha, they just might have come up with the most kick ass track of their career with the (sort of) title track "Diamond Hoo Ha Man" a furious White Stripes-y garage-glam stomp, all big crunchy guitars, buzzing synths, swaggery vocals, pounding drums and a massive HOOK! If there were any justice, this track alone would propel Supergrass to the kind of acclaim they receive everywhere else but the US. We literally can't stop listening to this song. Over and over again, as if it was the only good song on the record. But it's not. Not even close. Which should definitely tell you something. The second track, "Bad Blood" is another killer, slithery and sexy, with another bombastic chorus, all minor key and crunchy, another should have / could have been a hit. The rest of the record gradually returns to the classic Supergrass sound we already loved so much, a heady blend of T-Rex, David Bowie, Elton John, rambunctious and wild and rocking, but super well crafted and subtly elegant. But man, that opening salvo floors us every time. If you've yet to check out Supergrass, do yourself a favor and start with this one, and listen to it over and over and over (as if you'll be able to help yourself). You'll be converted in no time!

MPEG stream: Diamond Hoo Ha Man
MPEG stream: Bad Blood
MPEG stream: Rebel In You

... on which they do their best T-Rex (not to mention their best Beatles on a song or two)! Seriously though, the vocals do bear a remarkable Bolan resemblance (especially on "Seen The Light"), and the Supergrass lads have never shied away from wearing their influences on their sleeves (Elton John, and David Bowie to name a couple more). However on each of their four albums including this one, they have managed to create a sound of their own. That is, all-out quality bombastic pop-rockin' with some pretty fab crafty, catchy songwriting. Steeped in '70s glammy exuberance, there's heaps o' hammerin' piano lines, gleeful high pitched backing vocals, and anthemic choruses. Ultra tight, rambunctious fun. Recommended.

RealAudio clip: Seen The Light
RealAudio clip: Can't Get Up

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

SORRY. This record was quite an unexpected surprise. Knowing that Supermachiner is half of the band Converge, we were expecting some sort of hardcore metal mayhem, but were pleased to find something much more subtle, but still super ass kicking. Dark and shimmering soundscapes of fragile chimes and drones that slowly build into hypnotic and pounding tribal freak outs ala Neurosis, and break down into minimal post rock rhythmic workouts ala Godspeed. Pretty amazing actually.

Wow, we're getting old. Our favorite Norwegian electronic/jazz/WTF improvising unit, Supersilent, are already up to number 9 in their discography! Almost into double digits. (Of course, that's not nearly as prolific as some bands, imagine if Circle, Nadja, or good grief Acid Mothers Temple numbered their releases. you'd never be able to recall which one was which, that's for sure. But, hey, you would at least know what order they came in... c'mon AMT fans, do you remember if Ominous From The Cosmic Inferno predated Iao Chant From The Cosmic Inferno, or maybe it was Journey Into The Cosmic Inferno that came first? And where do Demons From Nipples and Crystal Rainbow Pyramid Under The Stars fit in, chronologically? Not that you really need to know either. Ok, enough with that digression...) So, what's Supersilent all about this time? As usual, the lack of titles and artwork don't give a lot to go on. The Kim Hiorthoy designed digipak is a bright sort of blue this time, for what that's worth (being about the only design decision Hiorthoy has to make for each otherwise identically generic looking Supersilent release, probably a lot of thought goes into the color choice). Well it turns out that Supersilent 9 is one of their more atmospheric, almost ambient efforts, with band member / producer Deathprod's aesthetic to the fore. There's four tracks, none of 'em short, ranging from 11:43, to the longest at 14:32... plenty of time for the listener to get lost in their carefully improvised, mostly quiet and slowly unfolding soundworlds... Arve Henriksen's breathy trumpet is ultra muted, really we're not sure if we are hearing it or not, and in terms of percussion, Supersilent 9 is entirely without the quirky rhythmic elements that characterized their chaotically skittery debut Supersilent 1-3 or the almost Autechre-ish glitchery of Supersilent 4. Instead, this, when rhythmic at all, evinces more of slow sawing whirr or thick throb, as on the droning and kinda doomy second track (the loudest one here as well), which pulses with shuddering distortion and has a bit of an atonal 20th century classical vibe to it. The tracks on Supersilent 9 are also more "of a piece", not as eclectic as on 6 or 8... There's certainly variation but it's constrained, the group taking a "less is more", minimalistic approach to this disc. The surprise vocals and psych-rock moves of Supersilent 8 are nowhere to be found this time 'round. Instead this hews closest to the glacial bliss of Supersilent 5, if we recall correctly, but in even more of an abstract manner. In parts, this comes quite close to literally living up to the band name. Dreamy and drifty, this is. And so very nice. What we've since learned about the (even by Supersilent standards) unusual nature of this disc is that their drummer quit the band right before they recorded this... and the remaining three members all decided to play Hammond organ exclusively for this session! Not that you'd guess that's all you were hearing. Ultimately, another very satisfying release from this unique outfit! Leaving us curious about what direction they'll take in the future, when it's time for number 10.

MPEG stream: 9.1
MPEG stream: 9.2
MPEG stream: 9.3

Supersister were a seventies Dutch prog group who released a quartet of classic albums, but none more classic than this, their 1970 debut. And this, Present From Nancy, is so goddamn good, if we had our way, we would have ordered a ton of these and made it a Record Of The Week, or at least PROG Record Of The Week, although it's more like a contender for Prog Record Of The FOREVER!! But sadly, we've been unable to get more than a few at a time, even now we have less than ten copies, and while we should be able to get more, it might take us a while, but we figured it would be better at least that a few of you prog freaks were able to get your hands on these, rather than no one at all. So what's got us all hyped up? What's so great about Supersister? Just listen to the three sound samples, easily one of the best one-two-three punches in classic prog. A dense relentless, super technical ELP-ish workout, with manic piano, fuzzed out organ, incredible complex drumming, impossible time signatures, killer melodies, some amazing flute leads, and yet even at its most manic and relentless it manages to be both jazzy, groovy, heavy and catchy as hell! In the title track, flutes flutter wildly over the bass piano drum jam locked in beneath, with the band occasionally exploding into awesome flurries of piano and flute before the band bursts back into action. Then there's "Memories Are New", with its warm looped fuzz organ, and lilting vocal, thick crunchy fuzz guitar, and again some incredible drumming, and a way with composition that manages to make even the most obtuse time signatures and strange arrangements flow perfectly. Finally, "11/8", named for the time signature we suppose, is another dense acrobatic instrumental workout, the organs and synths fully fuzzed out, even the pass is super distorted, working through rapid fire flurries of notes, the drums somehow locked in tight, with the synths occasionally stuttering into skittery buzz, before the track devolves into heavy downtuned chords and tinkling piano, so dynamic and varied and again, the rare sort of prog that gets stuck in your head like a pop song. AND THAT'S JUST THREE SONGS. The rest of the record continues in a similarly proggy vein, but gets even weirder, adding all sorts of dark shimmering drones, bizarre bits of a capella, pounding fuzz guitar jams, dreamy drifty almost new age sounding soundscapes, and this reissue tacks on two singles, the first one sounds like the Zombies or some other sixties/seventies dream pop outfit, with a B-side that is SO bizarre, a woozy organ driven jam, with a heavily accented spoken word story about an alien or something, complete with processed alien voices. The other single is an Elvis style honkytonk jam that is also truly bizarre, while the B side is a Doors-y groove, with weirdly crooned vocals and warm organs, and what can only be a kazoo solo. This band did get increasingly goofy with each record, almost too much to take by the end, but Present From Nancy is Supersister at their heaviest and grooviest and proggiest. And definitely remains one of our favorite prog jams EVER.

MPEG stream: Present From Nancy
MPEG stream: Memories Are New
MPEG stream: 11/8

Many a Supersuckers fan will be thrilled to find their favorite band has decided to get back on their fast-rockin' highway after taking a brief ramble down a dusty country trail. Yep, the Supersuckers have got it back in gear with this new 13-song ass-kicker, produced by the band and the Fastbacks' Kurt Bloch. And you know what that combination means, right? Raw, raunchy guitars front and center. For a raucous good time you can count on Eddie Spaghetti.

These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out." Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks. The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance. Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for. Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful. Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades. This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is! And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.

MPEG stream: In A Sweet Song
MPEG stream: The Arabian Song
MPEG stream: The Sun's Bells
MPEG stream: Strange Song
MPEG stream: Synaesthesia
MPEG stream: Cuchulain (Blackbirds Loom)
MPEG stream: Columnated Ruins / Seeing Distant Chimneys
MPEG stream: Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise)

These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out." Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks. The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance. Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for. Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful. Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades. This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is! And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.

MPEG stream: Synaesthesia
MPEG stream: Cuchulain (Blackbirds Loom)
MPEG stream: Columnated Ruins / Seeing Distant Chimneys
MPEG stream: Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise)

These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out." Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks. The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance. Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for. Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful. Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades. This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is! And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.

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Super limited tape from these two noisy Texas outfits. Haints deliver some seriously sick, feedback drenched noise rock pummel, all downtuned dirgery laced with distorto sung/spoken vox, over rib cage rattling, bass-heavy churn, some weird samples too. Reminds us of that classic pigfuck sound, the sort of thing we we're digging from our favorite bands back in the day, a la Homestead / AmRep records... Sure are a pretty good match, with the same basic template, but their sound is a bit less noisy and knuckle draggy, more druggy and droney, an old school dirge/noise rock but spaced out, with some Sonic Youth-y guitar noise, shards of feedback, and chiming chords. All wrapped around some reverb heavy, distorted mumble mouthed vocals. Plenty noisy, but with loads of spaced out echoey slow burn psychedelic jammage, swaggery, a little bit swampy, a twisted noise rock / psych-blooz hybrid that sounds a lot like some lost Aussie post punk combo. Killer stuff from both bands. And Sur has another tape on Sleeping Giant Glossolalia which we'll review soon too...

SoCal New Wave surf music for mooks raised on Cream Magazine. Featured Dennis Dragon from The Dragons. Inane.

A bit of a surprise, this here record. Folks from Yume Bitsu and Landing (two bands I think are ok, but not any big deal) have pitched in and come up with this little gem. Epic space rock full of dark drones and shimmering washes of My Bloody Valentine-ish

RealAudio clip: The Open Sea
RealAudio clip: Silence Beheads Us

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

SORRY.

Second release from this cosmic psych rock ensemble (which features folks from Yume Bitsu and Landing) and it continues their entropic quest for transcendental enlightenment via wah wah pedals, big amps and long, long songs. This is some druggy, space-y, droney, stretched out, blissed out, EPIC shit. This is like Hawkwind played by indie kids, a punk rock Tangerine Dream, a more dreamy Comets On Fire. You get the picture. Noodly guitars are stretched out over droning organs, slowly building into monstrous slabs of psychedelic swirl and heady heaviness. Krautrock rhythms demarcate loose fields of strum and twinkle, inducing hypnotic head nodding and stretched out serenity. PLUS, the record is called Dragyyn AND there's a picture of a dragon on the cover AND the inside text tells the whole Surface Of Eceyon and Dragyyn mythology AND the bands line-up is identified as Seabearde, Lyfeforce, Sephryn, Dragyyn, and Eceyonic Man. I mean, c'mon! If I smoked pot, I would definitely pop this in my boombox, get a bunch of weed, and go lay on top of a hill looking for dragon shaped clouds and trying to figure out the meaning of everything. MPEG Download: "Stolen Wind" [/audio/surfaceofstolen.mp3] MPEG Stream: "Stolen Wind" [/audio/surfaceofstolen.m3u]

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Boy has this been tough to keep in stock. For weeks now, we've been trying to order enough to list, but EVERYONE was out of it (the vinyl is still AWOL, being repressed we think). Makes sense as they were another one of those super hyped, next big thing bands, but these guys happen to be one of those rare bands who might even deserve it. Check out record opener "Floating Vibes", it's like a warped garage pop surf rock hybrid of the Beach Boys and XTC, with plenty of Pavement style nineties indie rock goodness mixed in. A little Weezer too. And these guys take all those influences, and shape them into something special, definitely retro and WAY beholden to much of what came before, but really what isn't, and these guys are good enough to transform those borrowed sounds into something both warm and familiar but also weirdly original, the songs are sprawling, lots of parts, tons of harmonies, even strings and flutes. Back to the opening track, crunchy riffage gives way to warm washed out woozy loping pop, with a soaring bridge / chorus, all tangled guitar leads, and slippery chords, which in turn gives way to a cool hand clap, twangy guitar, ooooohs and aahhhhs bit of ethereal drift, before exploding into soaring psychedelic pound, and then back again. But hell that's just one song. Check out "Swim", which pushes the same buttons that recent Smith Westerns record did, all reverbed hazy harmony vocals, warm crunchy guitars, chiming bells, a killer hook, plenty of fuzz and haze and jangle, some pretty perfect pop for sure, total Weezer / Beach Boys worship, but with some surprising little melodic tangles and some almost African sounding almost-grooves, that might even appeal to the Vampire Weekenders. But Astro Coast is way more than its influences, or some chunk of hipster flavor-of the-moment, Pitchfork approved indie rock, much more, the record throughout remains hazy and a little psychedelic, a LOT jangly, but drifts all over the place, from hushed harmonic shimmer, to shuffling dream pop, to total surf garage crunch, to old school nineties style smart pop, all tangled guitars and clever lyrics, soaring vocals, slipping easily into gorgeous falsettos, acoustic guitars draped over big booming drums, effects swirling and swooping, all manner of subtly employed studio-as-instrument filigree, all of that and incredibly and impossibly catchy songs too, which, after listening to this non stop for the last month or so, has us convinced that these guys really should be the next big thing. Definitely a new favorite around here...

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

SORRY.

The second full length from these fuzzy popsters. A few years back they were being touted as the next big thing, and we were totally on board, their debut Astro Coast was a BIG favorite around here, and the song "Floating Vibes" from that record was reason enough alone to love it, one of THEE greatest pop songs in recent memory, one that ended up on almost every pop mix made since. And we gobbled up the Tarot Classics inbetweener ep, hungry for more Surfer Blood, and before we got to listen to this new one, we read tons of terrible reviews, slagging it for all manner of different reasons, so we were prepared to be disappointed, but in fact, it's so far from disappointing, in fact, we've been digging it like crazy. It IS a whole different best though. That first record was so meticulously crafted, a dizzyingly perfect blend of Pavement and the Pixies and the Beach Boys and XTC, the production seamless and so polished, and as much a part of the sound as the songs themselves, and it worked for sure, but this new one finds Surfer Blood sounding much more like a proper band. And it sounds like they're having fun, and like these songs might sound EXACTLY the same live as they do on the record, which we have to admit, we imagined might not be so true of record number one. The vocals are the first change you notice, we're not sure if it's still the same vocalist, but this time around he sounds just like the guy from the Smoking Popes (who in turn sounds like Morrissey, and if you've never heard the Smoking Popes, trust us when we tell you that a pop punk band with killer songs and a vocalist who sounds like Morrissey is tough to beat!). The music too, is much more simple, and more classically indie rock, fuzzy distorted guitars, plenty of jangle, simple bouncy drumming, killer hooks, really nice organs and synths to fill the sound out, less weird than that first one, but for what it lacks in weirdness, it more than makes up for with some killer songs, that have been stuck in our head like crazy, some sound like they're made for the trailer of some romantic comedy, others like they're the deep cut you put on a mixtape for that elusive crush, others are peppered with rad shrieked screamo-y vocals, some are shuffly and strummy and almost folky, and others get seriously noisy and psychedelic. This week's list is loaded to the brim with new favorites for sure, and you can add this one to the list.

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Surfer Blood's debut Astro Coast, was easily one of our favorite pop records of 2010, due in no small part to the opening track, "Floating Vibes", which has to be one of our all time favorite pop jams, jangly surfy, fuzzy, catchy as all get out, so much so that we spent wholly half the review of that first record just talking about that one song, although we did stress that the rest of the record was in fact nearly as good. We played that record to death, its weird mix of Pavement, Beach Boys, XTC, Weezer and that classic eighties pop sound, something we never seemed to tire of, easily some of the catchiest, jangle pop we'd heard in ages, the sort of smart pop, that few bands can pull off anymore. So we were anxious for a new record, and were so psyched to discover this had just come out, and while it's not a proper new album, it is four new songs (and two remixes) which is more than enough to hold us over until the next record. And while there may not be a "Floating Vibes", opener "I'm Not Ready comes close, with all the things we loved about the first record still firmly in place, the production a little more polished, but for the most part, these songs sound like they could have been plucked from the same sessions. The second track "Miranda", sounds like it could be an Ovens song, if it were about two minute shorter, the same sort of impossibly hooky classic power pop, plenty of jangle and crunch, and some really great vocals, slipping effortlessly into the higher registers, that song leads right into "Voyager Reprise", which is another pop gem, these guys have their shit down, their own secret formula, that seems to make all their songs crazy catchy, and totally irresistible, which is also the case with "Drinking Problem", which is the weirdest track here, all low slung new wave bass, strange percussion, sort of funky drumming, a woozy high end melody, and echoey vox, the new waviest of the bunch, which we'd proclaim our fave, if we weren't digging the other tracks just as much. The remixes are sort of throwaway, fun, but not super essential, the first one turns "Voyager Reprise" into a housey electro pop groove, while the second transforms the already dark "Drinking Problem" into a funky chunk of fuzzy dirgey gloom pop.

MPEG stream: I'm Not Ready
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Nope, don't let the name fool you (as it did me)! Although they certainly are a surf band, this group is definitely not from the former Soviet Union. Surfing USSR are a trio from *surprise* New Zealand who play a disarming blend of surf and klezmer. Armed with the basics - guitar, bass and drums - they rally through 16 songs. Most are based on traditional klezmer tunes although you wouldn't guess it from the titles ("Underage Disco"? "Rock Out"?), but a few are... not. They also tackle the over-tackled "Secret Agent Man", as well as Fred Frith's "You Are What You Eat" and a warbly vibrato guitar-laden "007 Medley" that just might amuse Mr. John Barry. Overall? Kooky and slightly intoxicated fun.

RealAudio clip: You Are What You Eat
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In our reviews of the last couple records from transcendental black metallers Liturgy, we found ourselves focusing a lot on the non-black elements of their sound. Sure they had the whole tranced out insectoid riffing, the blasting beats, the shrieked vox, all the usual black metal tropes, albeit definitely done quite well, and with their own unique spin on the sound, but part of that spin was some serious noise rock / math rock elements woven into the group's black buzz, and while we may have never come right out and explicitly said it, we always kind of fantasized what a non black metal liturgy might sound like. As in a whole record made from just those noise rock and black metal parts/songs/elements. And then all of a sudden, along comes Survival, the new project from Liturgy mastermind Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, which is pretty much just that. Some seriously kick ass super mathed out post rock heaviness, definitely beholden to all the math/post/noise rock greats that came before, but in this case, some of the tranced out mesmer of Liturgy seems to have found its way into Survival. The tracks are dense and lushly layered, intricate and almost proggy, but they also sound almost looped, with the band locking into riffs, and melodic motifs, and just hammering away, and getting super tranced out, the vocals too, almost a sort of monkish chant, a mysterious crooned chorale way down in the mix (which to these ears sounds a little like Alice In Chains, which is NOT at all a bad thing, in fact check out the acoustic brooder "Since Sun Revised", awesome!). And there does seem to be some grungy grooviness to the proceedings, the band unfurling slithery, swaggery tangles of mathy churn, or loping rhythmic crunch, the best moments here though are still when they do lock into a loop, and keep it going forever, total math rock bliss out for sure. Fans of that classic nineties math/post rock sound will definitely dig, Don Cab, Rodan, AMF, etc, but Liturgy-isms abound, as if a bunch of these tracks could in fact be stripped down Liturgy tracks, but ultimately, Survival ply a twisted strain of heady, tangled, trancey, psychedelic mathiness that we're almost digging more than Liturgy!

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We'd been hearing rumors about this band for ages, a new group featuring ex-members of late great nineties post/noise rockers Unwound, who were easily one of our favorite bands EVER. And while we were were prepared to be disappointed, we were actually super pleasantly surprised. The sound definitely has some Unwound too it, but it's WAY popper, and to these ears actually sounds a bit like the Melvins in places, certainly the vocals. But the music itself is some weird nineties beholden post punk / noise rock, with a serious Black Flag vibe throughout, plenty of Greg Ginn-ish guitars, the sound dynamic, and intricate, certainly some post/math rock going on, but then in the middle of a tense post punk jam, the song will blossom into impossible poppiness. Just check out opener "Divine Mob", which is super Melvins-y in the beginning, and unfurls some tense droned out guitar melodies, and some motorik drum pound, before the chorus delivers s hook that KILLS, and then that chorus gets all pulled apart, the vocals wrapped around angular guitar noise and more drum pound. Frontman Justin Trosper of Unwound is reunited with the original drummer from Unwound (now on guitar), so there's bound to be some Unwoundisms, but Survival Knife is a whole different beast, they actually sound like the kind of band that 15 years ago major labels would be losing their shit over, scrappy, but still pretty polished, noisy and heavy, but also plenty catchy and poppy, lots of broody minor key churn, even some shimmery acoustic guitar strum in the mix. Ultimately, this is just a killer slab of nineties beholden post punk / noise pop, that fans of Unwound will definitely love, but really, anyone who grew up on groups like Sonic Youth, The Swirlies, Sebadoh, and all that Homestead / Touch And Go / Dutch East stuff, this will definitely hit the spot.

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The Survival were a Mexican psychedelic rock band circa 1970, who played morbid, melancholy acid-blues and warped beat music, with an oddly apocalyptic sense of freak-humor, reflected in song titles like "The World Is A Bomb", "Electric Chair", "Nothings

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One of five new tapes from the awesome Austin based experimental tape label, Holodeck. Largely documenting the growing and diverse Texas underground scene of synth conjurers, drone lords, psych meditators, and classical folk devotionalists, each tape conceived as a unique listening experience with beautifully designed minimalist packaging. We listed tapes by Lumens, Smokey Emery and Thousand Foot Whale Claw awhile back, and this time around we have another tape from Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as tapes by M. Geddes Gengra, Silent Land Time Machine, Amasa Gana and this one from mysterious synth quartet Survive. Two side long tracks, the first a pulsating cavernous modular synth exploration, an extended version of a track from their self-titled debut 10" which we had a handful of but are now gone (though if we can get more we'll surely list it). That track is otherworldly, sci-fi and dark, like early Cluster, Klaus Schulze and Alpha Centauri-era Tangerine Dream. The other side is more spacious and primordial, and begins like a still night on some toxic planet. Gaseous rumbles, eerie night whistles and percolating textural bloops, far off some humming phased mechanoid vocals building up to what sounds like it could be the foley for the final hellish scene in the movie The Black Hole. Stripped of John Barry's ominous orchestrations, what we're left with is cold robo-futurist doom, laid to rest by an extended funereal space dirge. Limited to 100 copies!

Here's a second collection of cover tunes by songstress Susanna Wallumrod (also of .... And The Magical Orchestra fame)! With her hushed lilting melancholic interpretation of a remarkably diverse selection of songs such as Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak", ABBA's "Lay All Your Love On Me" (we'd have hoped for "Dancing Queen" or "Mamma Mia", but it wasn't to be!), Prince's "Dance On", Black Sabbath's "Changes", Roy Harper's "Forever", Will Oldham's "Joy And Jubilee", Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", Nico's "Janitor Of Lunacy", and Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More", it's easy to think of her as a Norwegian equivalent to Cat Power, but with perhaps a bit of a broader appeal a la Lilith Fair or Tori Amos! Quite lovely.

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Norwegian songstress Susanna Wallumrod takes a siesta from her group Susanna And The Magical Orchestra. Sonata Mix Dwarf Cosmos is her solo debut and is a warm evening affair with the spotlight centered fully on her lovely voice accompanied by some tasteful minimal piano and acoustic guitar. Her songs are smooth, slow and mellow to the point of drowsiness, and have an almost dinner club lounge feel. Fans of Cat Power might find this particularly enchanting (especially as her voice definitely sounds a but like Chan Marshall). Produced by Deathprod.

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After we just raved about how great Sweden's Rune Grammofon label is (in our review of the recent RG book/comp Money Will Ruin Everything), of course they go and release something we can't quite wholeheartedly recommend. And we liked the looks of it -- good label track record, Deathprod (Supersilent) production, a pretty Norwegian girl on the cover. Apparently, she's Susanna the singer, and has a very Bjork-like delivery, to go with the slo-mo glitchy electronic melodicism of the music. So at first, this just seems like a Bjork rip-off. And you know what, we don't really mind a Bjork rip-off now and then. Not at all. We liked the Emiliana Torinni record after all (whatever happened to her?). And just this list we went on and on about the Bjorkishness of Joanna Newsom. But Susanna and her Magical Orchestra then have to go and combine their un-original (but up to this point enjoyable, esp. if you like Bjork) sound with some terrible English-language lyrics. Whoops. Woulda liked this much much better if she'd stuck to the Norwegian! Or to covers -- her interpretations (in English) of songs by Dolly Parton and Leonard Bernstein/Dorothy Parker are interesting. However, that's just our reaction, you might well not have any problem, otherwise it's nice enough, so give it a try if the idea of some bogus Bjork appeals to you. But unlike Bjork, or what we expect from Rune Grammofon, this just strikes us as a bit too safe and sappy.

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Norwegian duo Susanna And The Magical Orchestra follow up their lovely first album List Of Lights And Buoys with this collection of cover versions. And as was exemplified with their version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" on that debut cd, they do other people's music very very well -- fully re-envisioning each song regardless of the original's genre or artist's sound or gender and without the radical stylistic shifts coming across as being ironic or schticky. Susanna Karolina Wallumrod's drowsy murmury voice easily draws comparisons to Chan Marshall (who also has a penchant and talent for doing renditions of other folks' tunes -- check out Cat Power's The Covers Record). Her musical companion The Magical Orchestra is lone keyboardist / autoharpist / vibraphonist / cembaloist Morten Qvenild (granted the instrumental backing is often quite skeletal so he's not required to be an octopus!). Together they make the most achingly frail and haunting music. Along with the relatively predictable fare from Leonard Cohen ("Hallelujah"), Bob Dylan ("Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"), Sandy Denny ("Fotheringay") and Scott Walker ("It's Raining Today"), the more unexpected artists who are covered here are indeed Kiss ("Crazy, Crazy Nights"), AC/DC ("It's A Long Way To The Top"), Depeche Mode ("Enjoy The Silence") and Prince ("Condition Of The Heart"). They also fit in an almost obligatory Lilith Fair-ian take on Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

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One of three recent releases from this Bay Area black metal / black ambient horde, that make up a part of a loose trilogy, which included the recent Monument Of Decay 12" on Black Horizons (reviewed on the last list, and still available) and continues / culminates with the Become lp, which was originally released in an insanely limited edition on aQ beloved label Auris Apothecary, in the form of a lavishly packaged reel to reel tape. Two sprawling fifteen minutes tracks, maybe SH's most abstract work to date, where other records displayed a distinct delineation between the atmospheric movements, and the buzzing black sections, no such separation exists here, with each track/side, existing as a single sonic ritual, the group's black buzz, smeared into blurred squalls of washed out noise, heaving swells of abject industrial thrum, buried vocals, oozing riffage, buried rhythms, according to the band Become was specifically created to inspire madness through repetition, a tranced out minimal/maximal cloud of roiling black sound. Playable at 45 or 33, both deliver a similar experience, although we are of course partial to the slower speed, which causes the sounds to grow even more indistinct and blurred out, a heaving, tarpit doom-drone that oozes from the speakers. But even at 45, this is more noise than black metal, a near psychedelic blacknoise, the A side featuring some seriously rib cage rattling low end, and when the noisiness abates, the sonic clouds part revealing some haunting beauty, tangled melodies and almost shoegazey textures, lurking just below the surface, eventually building back up to a dense death march crawl, more of a ghostly drift actually, the sound shedding low end, gradually growing more and more brittle, until at the finish its nearly Merzbowian white noise. The B side delivers more of the same, shadowed beauty, beneath cloud of demon breath vokills, of keening ur-drone shimmer, crumbling Caretaker-like atmospheres, occasional gouts of face melting howl and crush, but those moments are balanced by brief passages of sublime sonically tarnished beauty, that drifts darkly through the ether, before being obliterated by one final blast of speaker shredding blacknoise crush. LIMITED TO 351 COPIES!! Packaged in swank Stoughton style tip-on jackets with super striking metallic gold offset printed cover art.

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MPEG stream: The Voice / The Void

Sutures is the rare musical beast that appeals to both freaks who like to get weird on the dance floor late at night, in dingy basements and sketchy clubs, as well as those who would rather hole up at home alone, and enter different dimensions while blasting these murky and hypnotic sounds. We hear elements of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voiltaire and Coil filtered through a dark techno lens in these nocturnal, narcotic sounding tracks. Listening to Sutures makes us want to be in a pitch dark space filled with smoke machines, fucked up projections and piercing strobe lights. This cassette is an awesome blast of crunchy, industrial-techno left-field dance music. It's the kind of music that punkers and weirdos would call dance music, but most people who go to traditional dance parties would find way too alien or dark to get down to. As if we even needed to tell you, it's pretty clear where aQ stands on that spectrum. If we're gonna let loose and let the music move us, we want our soundtrack to be as haunting, propelling, warped and dizzyingly tripped out as the sounds Sutures conjure up here!

First album we're reviewed from either artist in this collaboration, somehow, but we may have to go back and check them both out more thoroughly now.. Sunns is indie rock band of Canadian shoegazers, not to be confused with SUNNO))), and Jerusalem In My Heart is one guy, also Canadian, of Lebanese descent, named Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, who does more experimental sort of stuff, with a release on Constellation. On this self-titled release, they create a pulsing, pumping backbone to their music together, that's maybe like a combination of Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians and the trippy new Follakzoid record we reviewed on the last list. Synth-heavy, driving rhythms that are part krautrock, and part Drive soundtrack. Swirled throughout you get sort of Rhyton or Muslimgauze-esque Middle Eastern guitar riffage that gives the record a strong psych vibe. As the tracks build and settle into a groove, you get the feeling that this collaboration was meant to happen. On "Metal", you get a dark groove with layers of percussion that alternate between syncopated and a techno-like drive. "Self" is a straight Middle Eastern sounding groove and one of the few times you'll hear discernable vocals, a track that stands out among the others. Perhaps the only downside to this record is how quickly it seems they give up on a good idea. "In Touch", for example, seems to end suddenly right when it feels like it should be building even more. So while not perfect, it's damn promising - we'll be stoked to hear more from this collab if they keep at it!

MPEG stream: 2amoutu 17tirakan
MPEG stream: Metal

Pretty sure that most of the times we've listed a disc by our favorite Finnish post/prog/space rock band Circle we've made reference to rhythmic krautrock masters Can somewhere in our review. Circle and Can both cast similar spells of hypnosis upon the listener, and Can certainly are one of Circle's ancestral inspirations. So it was perhaps destined that members of Circle would someday, somehow collaborate with someone from Can. And it happened. In 2003, at the Jyrock Festival in Finland, former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (the singer on such classic Can LPs as Ege Bamyasi, Tago Mago and Future Days), who has been travelling the globe for many years now, playing with various impromptu units of young, Can-lovin' musicians under the rubric of Damo Suzuki's Network, shared the stage with three from Circle: Jyrki Laiho (Circle, Hot Guitars, Stalwart, etc.) on guitar, Jussi Lehtisalo (Circle, Pharaoh Overlord, Ektroverde, etc.) on bass, and Mika Ratto (Circle, Ektroverde, Ratto Ja Lethisalo, etc.) on drums. Guitarist Jorge Ledezma from the Chicago based band Defender was also on hand, presumably 'cause he was touring with Damo. In a fifty one minute, continuous improvised performance these guys provide a churning, freaked out, darkly cosmic backing for Damo's echoed and energetic yet spaced-out vocal exhortations. Of course, there was no way that Circle mainman Jussi wouldn't want to document this event for posterity, so now here we have the cd on Jussi's Ektro label entitled 3 Dead People After The Performance. Hope that's not really true, though I'm sure that there are indeed people in this world that would at least die happy after seeing their heroes perfoming together!

MPEG stream: "3 Dead People...
MPEG stream: "3 Dead People...
MPEG stream: "3 Dead People...

The "Icelandic Invasion" continues, as Shadoks reissues some more crucial '60s/'70s psych-prog action from that island nation. Last time we highlighted the groovy "hairy funk" heaviness of Odmenn. This time, two more: the debut from Trubrot (1969), and this one, the sole album by Svanfridur (1972). Both bands demonstrate definite Beatles influence, and do so well, but also are quite eccentric in their own right, which perhaps can be ascribed to their Icelandic heritage? This group was definitely musically talented, hot stuff on the live circuit in their native Iceland, though the sales of this self-released lp were disappointing. And thus it ended up being their only album. Too bad, it's a good 'un after all, considered a Nordic prog classic by many collectors today, and something we think that fans of the modern day Swedish group Dungen might totally dig, for that same sort of Scandinavian prog/pop/psych blend only this is the real deal, not a retro remake. Svanfridur, like Odmenn, is also fairly heavy and fuzzed out, often enough, on acid blues rockers like "My Dummy", whilst being simultaneously super catchy on the pop side of things too, exemplified by opener "The Woman Of Our Day", which sounds like a hit to us. It's a diverse album though, Svandfridur happily mixing things up, getting moody with flute and strings on the title track "What's Hidden There?", and moodier still with the strange synth atmospheres of "Did You Find?"... Then there's the staccato folk violin into acid rock distorted guitar rippage of "Finido". Great stuff all over. Like most Shadoks reissues, this includes extensive liner notes in the cd booklet (revealing, among other things, that members of Svanfridur, like SO many other bands of the day it seems, had been involved in a production of the musical Hair), along with tons of photos and graphics. The original sleeve bearing the lyrics (in English) and recording credits is reproduced, and if you look close you'll note the presence of the classic admonition that this record is "To Be Played Loud"! Indeed.

MPEG stream: The Woman Of Our Day
MPEG stream: What Now You People Standing By
MPEG stream: My Dummy

Fresh off his collaboration with Aidan Baker and Andrea Belfi as B/B/S, Norway's Erik Skodvin aka Svarte Greiner outdoes himself on this one, one of the most "miasmatic" of the releases on his own Miasmah label yet. Doomiest anyway. And while some doom or dooom or dooooOOOOOoooom relies on heavy, highly amplified guitar riffs and anguished (or Ozzyish) vokills, Svarte G has none of that, pure instrumental atmosphere instead, drones and tones and ominous percussive sounds only, stately and suspenseful, "acoustic doom" he calls it and it IS. Seriously, imagine your most bummed out session of existential "why am I here, what is life about" angst, this is the soundtrack, but one that somehow finds the radiant beauty in that mood. Mood being doom spelled backwards as we all know, and Svarte Greiner has it both ways. Two long tracks, "Black Tie" and "White Noise" (hmm, is he a Bowie fan?), each 20+ minutes, both slowly unfolding, strangely soothing, yet total void-embracing, never-to-awake-or-return sonic nihil. How does he conjure such blissful darkness, with sudden soft-edged reverberating crashing chords interspersed amidst sparse, quietly textural soundfields? Sure probably with a piano or cello, guitar, synth and effects and other mundane everyday musical gear; but the results sound like they're sourced not from within an instrument or a computer but within the inner spaces of your own mind and (damned?) soul, for good or ill, the way you might, in a isolation tank, listen to your own heartbeat or bleakest unspoken thoughts and feelings, gaining solace from the blurred continuum of self and non-self. Whatever that means, but that's the sort of thing that the music of Svarte Greiner makes us ponder, and THAT at least should mean something. If you're already a fan, and so many are for good reason, then that this gets the eyes closed, zoned out, thumbs up from us should be enough, get it, it's another transcendent slab of Svarte Greiner's cinematic downer drone loveliness. Also recommended to anyone into other Misamah soundscapes, Deaf Center and the like, stuff on Type too. Those still on the outside looking in, take a chance on crossing over and sink into this, it will sink into you.

MPEG stream: Black Tie
MPEG stream: White Noise

Another special limited Record Store Day release that we managed to get enough of to review and list post RSD. Aquarius faves Svarte Greiner deliver another dark gem, ominous strings woven into a sweeping cinematic soundscape, laced with plucks and scrapes, distant keening high end tones, plucked pizzicato melodies, a bit like a symphony tuning, transformed into some haunting and harrowing ambience, tense and intense, the creeping low end thrum hovering beneath clouds of cymbal shimmer and splattery percussion, all blurred and smeared into a hazy sprawl of dark sonic mesmer. The flipside come courtesy of a band we'd never heard before, but who definitely exist in the same space as SG, which is obviously why they're sharing this 7", their sound is a lot like SG's only with much of the darkness peeled back, leaving just the hum of strings, and a minimal orchestral arrangement of plucked melodies and drifting chords, that is until the sudden surprise of a super distorted, crumbling doom riff, wrapped in a warped production, the sound is suddenly caustic and crunchy, the second 'movement' finds that riffage reigned in and transformed into a tense dronescape of rumbling metallic guitar buzz and longform Niblockian tones, all wreathed in streaks of feedback and underpinned by buried melodies and slow shimmering textures. Definitely need to hear more from these guys (this guy?). Once again, this was a Record Store Day release, we have a tiny handful left, it's unclear whether once these are sold if we'll be able to get more, so your best bet is to act fast and grab one before they're gone!

Yet another backroom discovery, found a stash of this mysterious missive from someone calling themselves Swagger Jack, some sort of hillbilly drunken pirate, armed with a busted up old acoustic guitar, a jaw harp, a harmonica, maybe some busted up old keyboards, but very little else. A little digging is all it takes to discover that Swagger Jack is in fact long time aQ fave / pal Antony Milton, head honcho of killer cd-r label PseudoArcana as well as a member of various awesome groops (The Stumps, AM, The Nether Dawn, Mrtyu, Glory Fckn Sun, etc.), but as Swagger Jack, Milton is in full on hillbilly/folk/bluegrass mode, laying down simple lilting chunks of slo-mo Appalachia, lo-fi and hazy, druggy and minimal, simple steel string buzz augmented by jaw harp twang, harmonica wheeze, some minimal percussion, and a ramshackle backing of creaking, groaning whir and shimmer. The whole record sounds as if it was recorded on a rickety old porch, or in a forest clearing, like a more songy Avarus, or Tower Recordings with a backwoods hillbilly twist, some Velvet Underground druggy drift stripped down and recast as some sort of Fahey-esque dronefolk, bits of classic NZ soundmakers like Roy Montgomery, The Clean, Alastair Galbraith, and the like, woven into rickety backwoods twang flecked drone laced zoner country ballads. Pretty incredible stuff for sure, listening to this now, we're sort of surprised more folks didn't go crazy for this, and surprised that we somehow missed listing this completely, but better late than never, gorgeous stuff, and way recommended.

MPEG stream: Internet Cafe
MPEG stream: Sculptor
MPEG stream: My Good Guts

You might recognize Mr. Dominic East as the lead vocalist for that fine Bay Area band Our Lady Of The Highway, but now please acquaint yourself with Swallow and Swallows. That's his solo indie folk songsmith alter ego and these are his personal home recordings circa 2004-2006. As we've mentioned with regards to OLOTH, East bears a striking resemblance to both Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and The Weakerthans' John K. Samson in not only his earnest vocal delivery, but also his songcraft and heart-baring lyrical intimacy. It's even more evident on this release as he keeps the arrangements to a minimum with spare and solitary guitar accompaniment. Whenever we've played this, someone invariably asks if it's a new (or long lost) Mountain Goats record. Now, we're by no means griping, but geez, these guys are virtually doppelgangers! Not a bad thing when it sounds this gooood!

MPEG stream: Of All The Ways
MPEG stream: Firesign

If we can holler out an aQ Acid Mothers Temple alert (as we have numerous times over the last few years), then we sure can have an aQ Canada alert too, can't we?! So... *Super duper Canada alert!* *Super duper Canada alert!* *Super duper Canada alert!* If you dig the ornate poetic eccentricities of bands such as Destroyer and Frog Eyes, as well as the rambunctious playfulness of Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire, you'll get the best of both worlds on this new band's album. Go on, take a dip into this Swan Lake. We think you'll find it quite enjoyable. Our maple leaf sensin' antennae went up when we noticed just how much this band treads curiously along those other bands' peaks and meadows. And it's no wonder that the singing has such a strikingly similar soaring all-or-nothing emotiveness because... Swan Lake is Destroyer's Daniel Bejar, Frog Eyes' Casey Mercer and Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug! Yup, a new Canadian supergroup rears its Beast Moans. Inevitably it sounds as if Destroyer's Daniel Bejar took over vocal duties for Arcade Fire. We're by no means raising protest though 'cause the tuneful racket they raise is a genuine pleasure. Equal parts catchy and cryptic and really really good! Very very recommended!

MPEG stream: Widow's Walk
MPEG stream: A Venue Called Rubella

After a few years as a drum-machine backed two-piece, Andy Zevallos and Cynthia Mansourian have joined forces with Jim Andersen (former drummer of The Pattern & Year Future) to make an extraordinary EP of dark post-rock. Possibly the best song on the record is the haunting "Siren Song" which shows off Andy's talents on the bass and Cynthia's rich vocals to their fullest. Backed by just a tambourine, the bass sounds like Three Mile Pilot's Zac at his finger-picking best. The minimal pounding of the last track, "Thin and Gold", uses space and delay just as effectively as the opening track "You Were Down" uses relentless and almost breathless pounding. In addition to the bass, drums and heavily effected guitar, there's all these weird little shimmers and buzzes floating around in the backgrounds of the songs, like gothic insects. Recommended.

Brand new tape from LA's� indie headquarters, Not Not Fun, this time a debut cassette from SF's own Swanox.� We've seen a couple live sets from Anthony Bourch, aka Swanox, and he's also a regular here at aQ, so we're happy to finally give this stellar, drugged-out, cosmic-pop opus a home in our humble tape case. Dawnrunner unfolds with deep, distorted guitar ringing out into a wash of cavernous reverb, crumbling minor leads luring you further into utter darkness, sporadic riffs and low-end sizzle offer up the perfect dose of atmospheric haze.� A dash of light leaks from the cavern's end as a shimmering guitar line fades in, the piece shifts from dark to light as the sounds gradually grow into a dense cloud of Popul Vuh-ish bliss. Just when we thought Dawnrunner was solely instrumental, "Through the Alders" rolls along with looong, Daniel Higgs-type vocal chants, slightly discernible lyrics buried in layers of distorted organ (sort of reminds us of the organ on the recent German Oak album we featured last list), moments of spritely flute and layers of murky droning build into a wall of weirdness until a quickly picked, uplifting guitar lead lifts over the psychedelic wash, the perfect summit to this monolithic track. While there's a hefty dose of washed out weirdness and droning decay, there's also a catchy, pop undercurrent flowing throughout, each song perfectly crafted with just the right amount of structure, falling somewhere between Night Control and Flying Saucer Attack, definitely not your run-of-the-mill home spun tape.� Noisy, psychedelic and super distinct, this will no doubt satisfy your fill for far out, loner bedroom weirdness.�Limited to an edition of 100, you know these will be gone in no time, so don't miss out!