Ahhhh, here's one you can take home to mom. Heck, you could even play it at grandma's house too! The Choir Practice are ten Vancouverite voices raised in song. Their debut album on Mint Records sounds like equal parts highschool vocal class, The Free Design and maybe a bit of Langley Schools Music Project too. While there are indeed some luminaries of the city's indie music scene gussying up the roster -- namely choir leader Coco Culbertson (The Gay, A.C. Newman Band), Kurt Dahle (New Pornographers) and Larissa Loyva (P:ano) -- there are also some dulcet-piped members whose resumes do not boast anything of the tuneful sort. There's a fashion designer, a radio producer, a photographer, a filmmaker, and a florist even! We all know that Canadian songstresses and songsmiths have a history of abundant earnestness that can inadvertently dribble into syrup territory (maple-flavored?), and The Choir Practice are unabashedly miquetoast. But for the most part, their soft pop sleigh ride glides gracefully through the Rockies... as if the peaks were frosted with vanilla buttercream instead of snow. The group's sweet sense of naivete strikes notes of endearment rather than saccharine ickiness. Their debut album's highs soar up into the fluffy cloud laced baby blue sky ("Failsafe"). The few falterings however almost seem comical. Seriously, when you hear the lyrics to songs such as "Loose Lips" (yes, they "sink ships"), you can't believe they're singing with straight faces. Leaves you wondering if the lyricist has a serious irony addiction or what? Nonetheless if you like Lavender Diamond or perhaps are seeking a less energetic Polyphonic Spree, this is soooo for you!
The return of high concept ambient dronescapers Chord, a sort-of side project of post metal heavies Pelican. Chord, as their name implies, only ever play a single chord, each track a different one, this time around it's EbMaj9, Gm11 and D6. Sounds boring, but it really isn't, in fact probably most drone outfits play one chord their whole career, but this, this is something more, with each member contributing a note, the notes forming a chord, and all of them playing different instruments, different tempos and timbres, the guitars shimmer warmly, the piano (?), swirls and drifts in a sea of hazy reverb, there seems to be some burbling bass too, it's all woven into something lush and dreamy, hypnotic and mesmerizing.
When we reviewed the first Chord album, we pointed out that we had come up with the idea of a 'chord' band on our April Fool's list way back when, with SUNNO))), Earth and Boris each tackling one of the notes, to make a mighty E chord. We still like to think that's where they got the idea. We also mentioned the late great Physics, a San Diego supergroup who always played a C, long spaced out jams, with multiple guitar players, always C. But as we mentioned before, Chord is a much more thoughtful project, definitely on the nerdy side of the spectrum, I mean, they made a song called "EbMaj9", and the group is as much about concept for the players as it is about the sound, but whatever the inspiration, the resulting soundscapes play out like our favorite guitardrone records. Smoldering slow burning expanses of deep layered thrum, hazy, washed out drifts of abstract choral blur. Whereas the other record occasionally built into Sunroof!-worthy squalls, Progression seems to be much more minimal, hushed and restrained, the only deviation is near the end of the epic 40 minute "Gm11", where things get full on heavy, a crushing avalanche of crumbling, superdistorted, blur and buzz, before slipping into the final track, a surprising bit of twang flecked folkiness, wreathed in a hazy buzz, and underpinned by some FX shimmer, but otherwise, sun dappled and dreamy, and for the record, all in the chord of D6.
And speaking of single chords, the most recent Austerity Program, besides being an awesome record, did something similar, in that they only ever used one chord, for the whole record, the band was appalled that no one noticed, but it just goes to show you what someone can do with a single chord, making more with less, a concept that Chord also embody, especially considering their sound has most definitely blossomed into something much more than just a quirky concept. Really great. And WAY recommended for fans of Fear Falls Burning, Final, R.Y.N., Elm, RST, Vulture Club and other practitioners of guitardronedrift.
And just to make things totally confusing, the cd and the lp are TOTALLY different. Progressions is a single collection of songs spread out over both formats, so the record starts on the cd, and continues on the lp, the music on each exclusive to that format. So if you do want ALL of Progression, you have to buy both, although most folks would probably be fine with one or the other.
You can just imagine a bunch of rambunctious childlike outsider artists and freak folk musicians deciding to get all their old sofa cushions and broken instruments and stuffed animals to build a big old Chord Fort in the corner of their practice space / crash pad. And this is sort of the musical equivalent. Jason Honea (who you might remember from Jewelled Antler outfits The Child Readers, the Franciscan Hobbies, as well as the Knit Separates and Teenage Panzercorps) teams up with a couple of other musical miscreants to build their very own Chord Fort, a super lo-fi Steve Reich-ish meditation, a slowly shifting keyboard figure, swathed in tape hiss and fuzzy sonic detritus. Totally mesmerizing, the melody only barely wavering, the fuzz and hiss becoming more and more agitated in the background. The track is titled "Smile Louder" and you can almost imagine hear a face trying to sustain a huge smile for the whole 8 minutes, his muscles twitching, the strain showing on his face, beads of sweat dripping into his eyes, the genuine toothy smile slowly becoming more of a sneer as the corners of his mouth begin to droop. It's a gorgeously tense minimalist exploration. "Smile Louder" is followed up by an ultra brief, one minute long, dreamy ambient coda, a warm whir beneath simple chimes, children's voices and a creepy music box melody.
Another gorgeously packaged cd-r -- full color cover, an amazing painting, printed inside as well, a folded over, textured paper insert, and the disc is professionally printed and quite striking.
Only 9 minutes long, but also only six bucks!
While Exotika is the fourth and final volume of Chris & Cosey's reissue campaign, this is not the fourth record in their discography. That designation goes to the 1985 album Techno Primitiv, and while there might be some reason for this chronological anomaly, here we have the 1987 album Exotica. At this point in the history of Chris & Cosey, the two had been collecting a considerable amount of gear, expanding upon the voltage control Gristlising machines Chris built for Throbbing Gristle and working with a much more complex MIDI set-up alongside a bunch of Roland drum machines, bass sequencers, and the like (There's a long interview with Chris Carter geeking out over all the gear, for those who may want to know what he was using out of the box). All of this was certainly at the cutting edge of technology in 1987, but you get the sense that Chris & Cosey might have had too many ideas for the technology to handle. The punchy rhythms which drove a good number of their earlier records (and some of the TG tracks as well) move on Exotica at a downtempo electro pace, as if the speed of each tune needed to be slow enough for all of the MIDI gear to catch up to without crapping out. Regardless, Chris & Cosey work well with this slinky, disjointed electro pacing that's always punctuated with a whipcrack of the snare for a seductive, dominatrix vibe. "Dancing On Your Grave" is a particularly choice track, noted more for Cosey's uncharacteristic operatic style of singing which meant bellowing the lyrics instead of whispering them as a sultry spell. "BeatBeatBeat" finds Cosey purposefully clipping her words to match the stream of movie dialogue snippets, moans, screams, and howls that decorate all of the percolating electronics and minimal wave surface tension. The production on Exotica is particularly clean, even as they've polished up all of these early recordings for this vinyl remastering. Here, the duo are more in line with the British avant-pop constructions of He Said, Art Of Noise, and some of the more disjointed moments of New Order.
Throbbing Gristle ceased to exist (for the first time) in 1981, shortly after the transgressive industrialists performed in San Francisco in May of that year. TG were deft in their manipulation of media, ominously stating that "The Mission is terminated," with the 'mission' referring to their numerous stark proclamations against society at large conjoined with their adventurous manglings of noise, rhythm, and atonality. But there's another rather self-evident historical fact: that TG's Genesis P-Orridge broke up with fellow bandmate & long-term partner Cosey Fanny Tutti. Shortly thereafter, Cosey and fellow TG member Chris Carter struck out on their own (with a romantic partnership not far behind), and later on in 1981, Chris & Cosey released their first solo project, the minimal wave / synthpunk masterpiece Heartbeat. In TG, Carter's propensity for beguiling electronic melodies and disco rhythms could be heard on such classic tracks as "United" and "Hot On The Heels Of Love." Both of these were signature tracks for Carter's aesthetic, which espoused an economic proto-techno approach to drum machine rhythms and heavily sequenced electro pulse melodies. Such has been the template for Chris & Cosey's sound since.
"Put Yourself In Los Angeles" opens the album with a dizzying percolation of flanged electronics which snaps into a militant march of Cosey's gnashed guitars locked against barked samples of a lunatic radio host and insistent rhythms. At least on this track, it's easy to hear the influence that Chris & Cosey would have on the likes of Front 242, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. Other tracks such as the metronomic spiralling of "Voodoo" and the downright pastoral birdsounds of "Moorby" looked back to the Krautrock electronic meanderings of Cluster. "Just Like You" is one of Chris & Cosey's finest tracks, oozing with paranoia and dread throughout the slashed noises and found dialogue haunting the minimalist techno-horror sequencing and sustained minor-key melodies. The title track completes the album brilliantly by looking forward to any number of Detroit-inspired techno trax with double timed rhythms emerging out of maudlin, if cybernetic melodies and electronic-pop propulsive sequencing that really does act as a bridge between the realm of Kraftwerk and the British new wave that was bubbling up around Chris & Cosey back in the day. An absolute classic!
Album number three from the electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey is Songs Of Love & Lust, which originally came out on Rough Trade back in 1984. It was on this album that the signature sounds of Chris & Cosey really developed as something other than what they managed to produce in Throbbing Gristle. It may not be a surprise that this was also around the same time that the other former TG members began to really flourish in their own projects with Psychic TV's masterful Dreams Less Sweet and the epic Scatology record by Coil. Here, on Songs Of Love & Lust, Chris & Cosey were polishing their electro / minimal wave surfaces with hypnotic cascades of arpeggiating synths, plucky drum machinations, and outright majestic swells of electronic wash. A handful of these tracks clearly became anthemic floorfillers that inspired acid house in Chicago, EBM in Belgium, and the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno. "Walking Through Heaven" is one such track with its soaring sustained electronics counterpointing all of the scintillatingly brilliant sequencing. Chris Carter had long been a non-ironic fan of Abba, and yes, he was responsible for the cold-sex disco TG classic "Hot On The Heels Of Love" which essentially eviscerated the Abba structures of baroque disco down to a skeletal rhythm with an uncomfortably breathy sensuality thanks to Cosey's vocals. And the ghosts of "Hot On The Heels Of Love" and "United" (another stellar Carter engineered TG song) emerge within this album (e.g. "Love Cuts," "Chiron" and "Driving Blind"), although they are wholly detacted from the grand guignol commentaries of TG. Rather, Chris & Cosey spoke more of a cybernetic sensuality, embracing the technologies around them as a means of expressing, well songs of love and lust. This album has held up remarkably well, and is required listening for anybody who's been gobbling up anything on Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, Anna Logue, or Vinyl-on-Demand.
The second record released in 1982 from former Throbbing Gristle alumni Chris Carter and Cosey Fanny Tutti still mines the coldwave and industrial electro aesthetics of their debut, Heartbeat (reviewed elsewhere on this list). But it may be their least regarded record due to its more removed soundtrack feel, exploring supposed realms of medieval chants and non-Western religious music, buried as they are under stuffy rhythms, slithery washes and ambient death-disco permutations. Apparently the band and label, Rough Trade had a dispute over the retail price of the record (our original copy says in printed type along the bottom edge "Please Note: Mid-Priced Record") and moved to various other labels shortly after, so it's hard to say if Trance got any real promotion at all. That's not to say Trance is not a worthy album, but its murky combination of earthy propulsive synthesis and detached ritualism make it less instantly accessible than their debut. Trance works best as a connected suite of songs, than individual tracks, a lot like Demdike Stare's twisted soundscapes, which share Chris & Cosey's fascination with an arcane British-ness. Especially the final two tracks, "Until" and "The Gates of Ancient Cities", which are two of our favorite C&C tracks ever, partially because they offer a shimmer of light from what preceded them and make a beautiful pastoral move towards grace.
The Die Schachtel label's "Zeit" series devoted to current acts from the Italian avant-garde/indie-rock underground has a couple new releases out now -- discs by Christa Pfangen (reviewed here) and Angelo Petronella (which we'll try to get to next time). The Zeit series started off with the fabulous self-titled album by a band simply named A, hopefully you've checked that one out already (we highlighted it on list 248). This cd is almost just as good. Their fragmented, abstract electro-acoustics, and use of silence as well as sound, definitely puts Christa Pfangen in the same experimental ballpark as A, 3/4hadbeeneliminated, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stefano Pilia, Renato Rinaldi, Larsen, Sinistri/Starfuckers, and other artists from this happenin' scene. Playing "guitars, drums, voices, objects, electroacoustic devices", Christa Pfangen is in fact a duo, comprised of Andrea Belfi (who also has a new solo album out on Hapna by the way) and Mattia Coletti. These ladies have named their band Christa PFANGEN in some sort of odd tribute to Nico, whose real name was Christa PAFFGEN...but beyond that we don't think this has much to do with Nico or her music, though maybe there's some harmonium on here somewhere!
A tangle of nervous drumming and ambient drones, all staticky and stuttery, Watch Me Getting Back The End is both challenging and pretty... they've got a moody melodiousness to 'em not unlike 3/4hadbeeneliminated, or Jewelled Antler projects such as Thuja and the Blithe Sons. Certainly there's a lot here for even the not-so-experimental indie pop fan to mellow out to. String-born notes fall like leaves from a tree, melodies blow away in a gentle wind of drone, whispering voices caress the ear... so nice!
As with all Die Schachtel stuff, the packaging is super spiffy -- a digipack with embossed cover art.
Calling all goths! Found two last copies of this 2014 RSD title - a 7" packaged with poster, featuring the tracks "Cavity - First Communion" (alt. version) on the A-side and "The Lord's Prayer" on the B-side. It's the Edward Colver edition because "photographer Edward Colver's photographs of the original Christian Death line-up are so integral to the band's oeuvre we decided to create a special 7" package to showcase them". Includes poster. White vinyl.
The latest jewel unearthed by the B-Music Collective for Finders Keepers is so obscure it was actually never released. Only a small number of privately pressed vanity copies were made of this 1970 Philly-based folk-beat head trip. Using Philly studio session musicians, Axelrod-style breaks, spaghetti-western guitar, A&M strings and the "legendary" production of John Hill, who is dubiously credited in the liner notes as the inventor of both Trip Hop and Heavy Metal for his production work with Margo Guryan and The Riders of the Mark (a heavy psych predecessor to Black Sabbath, supposedly?!). Don't know about that, but the trip hop mystique of Susan Christie is definitely apparent by the opening riff of the title track begging to be sampled a million times over if it hasn't already. But it isn't just the sample potential that makes this a worthy listen. Just about every song is full of hooks and unique arrangements and darkly-tinged songwriting. Check out the nine-minute centerpiece "Yesterday, Where's My Mind?" with its spoken recitations of a bad trip culminating in a damning freak-out, before slipping into a fuzzy downbeat rocker. Freak-folk indeed!
Sometimes droll, atonal singing can work really well (think Beat Happening, Reynols or Magnetic Fields), but unfortunately not on the Christmas Decorations' debut album. Seriously, this is some painfully out of tune singing. It distracts from the rest of the music which taken without the vocals is quite pleasant, if somewhat underwhelming - moody chiming soundscapes comprised of some highly effected guitars, bass, melodica and sequencers. This comes as an enormous disappointment following Revolve the one and only album from the fantastic but crushingly short-lived band that was Beautiful Skin whose nucleus was Nick Forte and Ross Totino. There was an unquestionable musical chemistry between them that propelled their music beyond simplistic new wave references and the Wire / Gang Of Four / New Order worship of Forte's previous bands. This new group however does not draw such glowing praise, instead it truly bummed out a few of us.
The following is taken from the Chroma Key website, but was in fact written by our own Andee Connors! ...
Graveyard Mountain Home is a filmic, expansive musical exploration from Kevin Moore AKA Chroma Key, founding member of progressive metal legends Dream Theater. Recorded in Istanbul, Turkey, where he now lives, this third release from Chroma Key is an entirely different musical beast than Moore's previous musical work, and -- created as an alternate audio track to a surreal educational film from the '50s -- the result of quite a unique approach to album making.
All three Chroma Key releases to date have been self-produced recorded in Moore's home studios, the location of which changes album to album. After leaving Dream Theater in 1996, Moore relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where much of the first album, 1998's Dead Air for Radios was written. 2000's You Go Now was written and recorded in Los Angeles, right before another move to Costa Rica, where Moore lived for 3 years. In Costa Rica he began writing and recording ideas for a new Chroma Key album, during the day producing a bi-weekly, activist, musical radio program for Radio for Peace International, a shortwave station based in San Jose. Last year Moore released a compilation of the program -- a mix of original music and politically volatile spoken word recordings -- as a downloadable album on chromakey.com as The Memory Hole 1.
Long distance Memory Hole collaborator (and fellow CalArts graduate) Theron Patterson was teaching film and doing his own radio show in Istanbul when he invited Moore to visit and collaborate on a show last year. Soon after, Moore relocated to Istanbul and the pair began collaborating on new material for the weekly radio show Music Lab. Moore was also commissioned to score Turkey's first horror film, and the resulting soundtrack Ghost Book was released by InsideOut earlier this year.
The experience of scoring a film inspired Moore to take a new approach to composing the next Chroma Key album. "Instead of just developing song ideas out of nowhere and trying to make them all relate somehow," he explains, "I thought I could find an old film that already had a particular mood and texture to it, and then let that film dictate the songs' themes and structures, and even the song lengths. I eventually found this gem called 'Age 13' in an online archive of public domain films."
One of the many "social guidance" films produced in the 50's and early 60's for schools and police departments, Age 13 proves the perfect subject for Moore's musical ministrations. It is a strangely surreal moral tale of a boy who loses his mother and is convinced that if he can repair the radio she always listened to, he will somehow be able to bring her back. The film is beautifully distressed, on fuzzy film stock, with all sorts of chemical degradation and staticky imperfections caused by aging and exposure. Like a grade school filmstrip or an unearthed home movie, Age 13 is a mysterious glimpse into another life and another time.
"The subject matter and the look of the film was really suited to the kind of music I usually find myself writing," recalls Moore, "and I knew as soon as I watched the opening scene -- which is a burial scene -- that I wanted to get under the surface of those images and play against them."
Moore slowed the film down to half speed, stripped away the sound and crafted an alternative audio track, which is Graveyard Mountain Home. The film's original dialogue and score occasionally bubble up through the songs, playing off and against them, and hinting at the unseen film's space and conflicts.
The Chroma Key accompanied version of the film is included as a DVD in the Special Edition of the CD release, and as a Quicktime file on the standard edition CD. Watching the hybrid version of the film, the songs alternately support, upset, and recast the accompanying scenes. Occasionally, character's dialogues are replaced with unlikely sources -- for example deep south AM radio samples (in Give Up) and a darkly comical Krishnamurti parody (in Human Love).
By design though, Graveyard Mountain Home is just as sonically compelling when removed from its visual element, a slowly seeping, darkly dramatic, series of epic musical vignettes: Sweet, sun-dappled vibraphone melodies over fuzzy, glitchy throbs; a dreamy, Tortoise-y post rock filtered through the Eastern rhythms of Muslimgauze and layered over a rumbling drone; ambient street sounds and muted minor key melodies obscure distant vocals, ethereal and indistinct; Sparklehorse-like melancholia, with tinny shortwave vocals and arid desert twang; displaced, lost and lonely voices, snatched from the ether, a warm jazzy shuffle, revisiting earlier sonic themes -- all a framework for Moore's world weary vocals.
In addition to writing with the film in mind, the album was also written to be played in front of an audience, and Chroma Key expect to stage an European and American tour for the first time this winter.
For whatever reason, this album was recorded back in 2014, released digitally then and never given a physical pressing until now, mid-2016. Ever since their iconic 2007 Night Drive album, Chromatics have kept an even keel on their cruise ship voyage of Italo-disco reinvention, via Johnny Jewel's detached production matched by the subdued diva delivery of Ruth Radelet. The band's sultry slow-motion / two-step disco shuffle nobly takes up a version Joy Division's "Ceremony" (with Ida No of Glass Candy stepping into the vocalist role, though we gotta say both No and Radelet have pretty much the same breathy delivery, making them almost indistinguishable). That cover perfectly in the midst of their seductive disco invocations of carnal longing from the forgotten '80s. Along with this record, Chromatics have also released three others simultaneously, also in stock: Just Like You, Shadow, and Girls Just Want To Have Fun. Woo hoo!
REPRESSED, BACK IN STOCK!!! Now including the "lost side" of unreleased tracks featured on the recent deluxe vinyl version.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
With a new perfectly delivered sound, Chromatics have become a huge favorite here in aQ land over the last couple months as we've been playing their new album IV: Night Drive over and over and still not even getting close to burning out on its seductive and steamy sounds. This 12" contains one of their great selections from the scene defining After Dark compilation which will for sure find its way on to many 2007 best of lists. Along with that comes an extended mix, an instrumental version, the haunting vocal only mix and a hot take on Springsteen's "I'm On Fire." We're not sure if the Boss would approve, but we sure do!
So stoked that this awesome album by the Chromatics is available on vinyl now and with a whole side filled with unreleased tracks.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
So short! Four raw spurts of noise-alicious herky-jerk. We barely caught a glimpse of these two new members of the Gold Standard Laboratories clan . Certainly not the black sheeps in this family, they seat themselves quite comfortably in the recently vacated, overturned chairs of spaz-punks LeShok and XBXRX. So who are these mysterious newcomers? Well, arty postpunkers the Chromatics rose from the ashes of Seattle, WA's underappreciated The Vogue (and you might have also heard of another of their incarnations, The Soiled Doves). Like-minded Monitor Bats just happen to be the jazz-punk side project of blues-rockin' kids The Gossip. Word has it that a Chromatics full length is in the works, so keep those ears to the ground. Until then, you might just have to make do with this brief encounter.
Get out the tinfoil, draw the blinds, turn the television to static and brace yourself for the amphetamine-fueled paranoid mind-fuck of San Francisco's industrial wastoids, Chrome!
Their three seminal albums from the late seventies/early eighties, Alien Soundtracks, Half Machine Lip Moves, and 3rd From The Sun have thankfully been re-issued by the Noiseville label who have brought us stellar releases from Skullflower and Wicked King Wicker among others. Led by Damon Edge and Helios Creed, Chrome channeled The Stooges raw garage energy with Hawkwind's mindmelting space rock acid-psych and the electronic proto-art-punk of bands like Debris' and The Styrenes into a spazzy amalgam of sci-fi distortion, glam-punk chaos, and all manner of machine fuckery including television samples, bizarre tape manipulations and random fuzz-filled noise. Inspired by the future-shock visionary writings of J.G Ballard and Philip K. Dick, Chrome were cyber-punk before the term had even been popularized! In fact, they were one of those bands who became much more popular after their demise, when bands like The Butthole Surfers, Big Black and other Touch and Go bands started gaining notoriety in the mid-eighties college rock scene.
Alien Soundtracks from 1978 was Chrome's second album after the relatively straight forward rock of their debut The Visitation. But by then Helios Creed joined the band and Chrome's signature sound, centering on Creed's grinding pitch-shifting guitar attack and Edge's aggro drumming and damaged tape manipulations, were firmly in place. Supposedly recorded as a soundtrack for a live sex show, songs like, "Magnetic Dwarf Reptile" and "Slip It To The Android", display a sleazy suggestiveness with scuzzy rhythms and odd wailed crooning. While their fascination with science fiction's darker side (especially involving man-machine biologies and mind-controlling robots in a techno-industrial wasteland) manifested itself in vicious electronics and disturbing drones over the layers of buried vocals and speed-driven guitar riffage.
Get out the tinfoil, draw the blinds, turn the television to static and brace yourself for the amphetamine-fueled paranoid mind-fuck of San Francisco's industrial wastoids, Chrome!
Their three seminal albums from the late seventies/early eighties, Alien Soundtracks, Half Machine Lip Moves, and 3rd From The Sun have thankfully been re-issued by the Noiseville label who have brought us stellar releases from Skullflower and Wicked King Wicker among others. Led by Damon Edge and Helios Creed, Chrome channeled The Stooges raw garage energy with Hawkwind's mindmelting space rock acid-psych and the electronic proto-art-punk of bands like Debris' and The Styrenes into a spazzy amalgam of sci-fi distortion, glam-punk chaos, and all manner of machine fuckery including television samples, bizarre tape manipulations and random fuzz-filled noise. Inspired by the future-shock visionary writings of J.G Ballard and Philip K. Dick, Chrome were cyber-punk before the term had even been popularized! In fact, they were one of those bands who became much more popular after their demise, when bands like The Butthole Surfers, Big Black and other Touch and Go bands started gaining notoriety in the mid-eighties college rock scene.
Half Machine Lips Move was the 1979 follow-up to Alien Soundtracks and it's definitely our favorite! The songwriting is completely fucked, with aggressively manic jump-cuts in and between songs. Sounding like the music analog machines would make if they just became sentient drug-taking monsters, the paranoid mind-control trip is full throttle, with nightmarish conspiratorial songs about the government and the media in cahoots with aliens to enslave the public ("TV As Eyes" "Zombie Warfare" and "You've Been Duplicated"). Rife with layers of sinister lo-fi electronic noises and television samples, over fast riff-heavy rhythm hooks and lysergic face-eating vocal effects. So awesomely damaged!! If you were to get only one Chrome album, this would be the one!
Helios Creed is back under the Chrome name with a new studio album. Is Chrome's sci-fi punk retro yet?
Get out the tinfoil, draw the blinds, turn the television to static and brace yourself for the amphetamine-fueled paranoid mind-fuck of San Francisco's industrial wastoids, Chrome!
Their three seminal albums from the late seventies/early eighties, Alien Soundtracks, Half Machine Lip Moves, and 3rd From The Sun have thankfully been re-issued by the Noiseville label who have brought us stellar releases from Skullflower and Wicked King Wicker among others. Led by Damon Edge and Helios Creed, Chrome channeled The Stooges raw garage energy with Hawkwind's mindmelting space rock acid-psych and the electronic proto-art-punk of bands like Debris' and The Styrenes into a spazzy amalgam of sci-fi distortion, glam-punk chaos, and all manner of machine fuckery including television samples, bizarre tape manipulations and random fuzz-filled noise. Inspired by the future-shock visionary writings of J.G Ballard and Philip K. Dick, Chrome were cyber-punk before the term had even been popularized! In fact, they were one of those bands who became much more popular after their demise, when bands like The Butthole Surfers, Big Black and other Touch and Go bands started gaining notoriety in the mid-eighties college rock scene.
3rd From The Sun from 1982 was the band's final outing, after a couple years in the wilderness of label and line-up changes. More accessible songwise then the previous two records we reviewed, 3rd From The Sun still displays the sonic weirdness and alien paranoia that is classic Chrome! Dirge-y and brooding but with a new and crisper sounding rhythm section, this is heavier and more feedback laden with a greater emphasis on Creed's psych guitar than Edge's tape manipulations. They're definitely building the darker atmosphere here, rather than aggressively filling the space, on some tracks feeling like they're going in a more Zodiac Mindwarp direction (read: black leather and sunglasses) that Helios Creed would pursue more fully on his solo records. Definitely the type of sleazy sinister vibe that would fit right in at a strip club owned by David Lynch!
More modern electro funk party jams from these guys. We know lots of folks love em, but we've never been able to really jump on this party train, but who knows, maybe this could be your dance party cup of tea...
Much like the vibrant clothes of eras past that twenty-somethings are currently sporting to wild nights at dive bar dance parties, the soundtrack to those dance parties has become vibrant and '80s-esque, with a '00s spin. It's what you could call synth-wave with a digital flare. In fact, Chromeo's Fancy Footwork is the third ultra-Moogy album we've reviewed for this list -- check out our reviews of Justice and Digitalism... While those two tip their hats to the '80s with uber-synths and samples, they also combine more modern sounds (Daft Punk, Faint, and Fatboy Slim come to mind) to give an overall feel that the Deathstar has just descended on the sweaty dance party. Chromeo, however, has taken a more pure approach in their nod to the '80s, and it isn't the '80s that never stopped being 'cool' (Cure, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, etc). Oh no, Chromeo have managed to create the the sound of Don Johnson walking into the room and eyein' your girlfriend, that kind of '80s vibe in the year 2007. We're talking Rockwell and Ray Parker Jr. kind of '80s folks. We figure this balls-to-the-wall synth resurgence might go as fast as it's come, but will no doubt shape what comes next and will be remembered fondly by many as they look back when the decade has passed reflecting fondly on the raging party they attended when the world was so close to the edge.
A friend played me the song, "Me And My Man", a while ago and I was instantly addicted to one of Canada's best current electro exports, Chromeo. Shockingly, we haven't carried it until now. Well, reminiscent of Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue", Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" and Egyptian Lover (minus some nasty freakiness), She's In Control features analog synths, some rockin guitar, 808, rhodes and lots of talk-box... yeah! That it's on Vice's label should tell you something on how it rates on the hipster scale, but it's definitely an album for delightfully uncool people too. It's chock full of party tracks like "Needy Girl", "Woman Friend" and "Ah Oui Comme Ca". The production is just good enough not to sound too polished, leaving the songs sounding fresh, like they were put together by two inspired best friends - which is true. It is also true that they are pulling from such a specific type of nostalgic sound, it will easily date itself now... but it's just soooo fun! If you plan on having a kick ass dance-party soon... invite me. If you want to listen to something fresh and totally awesome, you must must must have this!!
As much as we love all the indie rock and noise pop that's been coming out of China, and we do, hell, check elsewhere on this list for a couple new Chinese bands, we tend to become super obsessed with the more out there, experimental groups and records that have also been coming from the same scene. We made the latest record from White+ our Record Of The Week a while back, the sound like Yellow Magic Orchestra crossed with Neu!, or so the label suggested, to our ears it was way more far out and psychedelic. Out latest discovery / obsession comes from this Beijing based experimental four piece called Chui Wan, who according to the label, count Beach Boys, Arthur Russell, Les Rallizes Denudes and the Sun City Girls among their primary influences, but as always, there's no way a band could possibly sound like that, and Chui Wan, to our ears at least don't really sound like what we imagine that band math would produce, but that's not to say we don't dig it, we do, a LOT, in fact this is one of our favorite of all the Chinese records we've gotten in recently, but the sound is a bit harder to pigeonhole, the opener is a sort of loping, instrumental jangle pop jam, all blooping basslines, shimmering guitars, and motorik rhythm, surrounded by burbling cascades of swirling melodies, and chiming spidery guitars, so we were kind of prepared for a whole record of that, but then the second track swoops in, all distorted guitars, and driving drums, not to mention some strange echo drenched vocals, lots of swirling psychedelia, the track veering from spaced out mesmer to heavy, chaotic freakout, with brief bits of mathy angular pop, it's a weird mix, but it somehow works, at times sounding like a warped WTF version of Television, maybe with a little Boredoms mixed in, with plenty of spaced out psych jamming, and hypno-kraut grooves.
And amidst all this krautgroove and psychedelic drift, the band add swoonsome viola melodies, soaring ethereal vocal harmonies, plenty of almost proggy arrangements, subtly deployed samples, Eastern melodies, swirling electronics and FX, with some tracks sounding like psychedelic ragas, others blossoming into horn flecked almost-klezmer, and still others field recording laces tribal dirges. The record finishes with a nearly eleven minute closer, that's like some sort of doom-prog / kraut-folk, epic and majestic, weirdly recorded so the sounds are all blown out and crumbly, the arrangement strange too, in constant flux, the whole final half of the song peeling back all the noisiness, leaving just a gorgeous sprawl of processed horns, pointillist pianos, swirling synths, layered electronics and strange samples, super heady and hypnotic, tripped out and utterly mesmerizing.
WAY recommended, for fans of space rock, psych rock, experimental avant pop, and the weirder side of the new wave of Chinese indie rock...
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NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!!
We made the first Chui Wan release, White Night, Record of the Week, and now they have returned with a self-titled album on vinyl and it continues in the same dreamy, spacey, and krauty vibe we loved so much the first time around, but this time with much tighter focus on rhythm and movement. The spidery guitar lines and synth filigrees are still very much a signature, but they service more angular post-punk structures feeling like Television combined with the percussive pummel of A Certain Ratio sheathed in dreamy space rock shimmer. Murmured male and female voices anchor the intricate arrangements, and help give thematic weight to songs that are at times seemingly shrouded in beautifully wayward melancholic mystery. So, recommended.
A killer live DVD from our favorite Japanese, serial killer obsessed, stoner groove doom lords, Church Of Misery. We've gone on and on in the past (and elsewhere on this list, their debut was just reissued) about how much we love these guys. Some impossible mix of Sabbath, Electric Wizard, Eyehategod, Antiseen and Boris. Heavy as fuck, groovy and spacey, blown out and super psychedelic. Live it's everything we would have hoped for. A band of crazy Japanese hippies in ripped concert shirts, bell bottoms, berets, dreadlocks, furry coats, big ol' silver rings on every finger, flying V's, on a tiny stage, heads banging, hair swirling, in a closet sized dark club, packed to the gills with a heaving, sweaty, head banging crowd. The sound is amazing. A truly MASSIVE guitar sound, huge blown out crumbling riffs, the band a whirlwind of lurching groove, and a bass player who wears his bass lower than anyone we've ever seen (even the Ramones!). SO low in fact, that the body of the bass is at shin level and he ends up sort of playing way up on the neck. Awesome! Three live shows filmed over the last two years, a handful of CoM classics as well as some free form freaked out space jams. Also included are videos for "Filth Bitch Boogie" and "I, Motherfucker" (best song title ever maybe), both look quite similar, filmed in creepy black and white, on fuzzy degraded film stock, haunting shots of two emotionless girls making out, dead bodies in forests, plenty of violence and gore (mostly perpetrated on the band themselves) and of course the band trudging through mysterious woods all very Sabbath-like. So cool.
Packaged in a blood red Japanese style DVD case. NTSC and ALL REGION!
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Don't miss out on this very limited UK import. Only 500 were pressed. Three songs from this San Francisco duo. Chris and Mike create layer upon layer of electronic textures, thoughtful, hushed vocals and lovely, tentative guitar melodies. We should note that this record has a much more aggressive electronic presence from Chris (alias OST/Rook Vallard) than the fragile, pretty Jewelry cd-ep.
Sounding a lot like indie rock fave Smog (if Bill Callahan would only keep up with the state of music today, instead of sounding more and more dated with each release), Church Steps cloak the most heartfelt sensitive-guy vocals in a shimmer of melancholy.
Cover art by beloved local artist Jo Jackson.
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This split release is between the wonderful SF-based, lo-fi melding of dreamy electronics and melancholic, sensitive boy strummery known as The Church Steps and the very mysterious group called Gang Wizard. A limited lathe-cut 7" pressing which - you may or may not know - is not the sturdiest of music formats. So we definitely recommend transferring the songs onto a more durable medium for extended listening enjoyment.
The Church Steps are Mike Donovan (on guitar and vocals) and Chris Douglas (electronic sound-meister aka OST). The duo's brilliance lies in their coming at the music from opposite directions, meeting in the middle where few dare tread. Mike writes and sings quietly pretty sometimes melancholic songs. Some so quiet and personal that it almost seems that he's singing them to himself more than anyone else. And while on his own releases Chris is a well documented eardrum shredder/pummeller, here he takes it down a few notches and applies a very nice counterpart to Mike's lo-fi meditative guitar lines. Lightly abrasive textures and occasional beats almost like a very fine metallic sandpaper swirl over and around the often murmured vocals.
The duo's artistic vision is completely realized, an irresistible mix of Smog-like loner vocals mixed with epic yet quiet electronica, like ambient-era Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Portishead. So good! Better than, yet similar to, Wisdom of Harry!
The Jewelry EP is five songs in all, a perfect "jewel" of a record and a fine intro to Church Steps. Released on Mike's own Dial label (home to releases by Blectum From Blechdom, Iran, OST, and Hot Fucking Jets).
Here's an old AQ fave, happily back in print on cd! Psychedelic rock from Israel, circa 1968, the original lp a rare collectible, and a classic. With Middle Eastern touches, backwards FX, lovely melodies, and twanging guitar solos, Churchill's should appeal to all fans of international sixties psych. Influenced by the Beatles and other British rock groups of the era (in fact, Churchill's later on became very Led Zep-ish, and covered "Living Loving" on a 7" single!), the Churchill's debut was apparently recorded as the soundtrack music for a pair of obscure films entitled A Woman's Case and The Dress. But the album is definitely a collection of songs, not instrumental/incidental music. And great songs they are. Some soft and mellow ("When You're Gone"), others weird and wigged out ("Straight People"). No doubt drugs were involved. One of the best tracks is the melodic, mandolin-fueled "Subsequent Final", an East-meets-West stunner indeed, pretty much worth buying this disc for just by itself, though you get lots more treats besides, in fact, this new reish includes TEN bonus tracks, unlisted for some reason, but we think they're songs from various non-album singles, as they do include their version of "Living Loving".
Israeli psychedelic rock band from the late '60s/early '70s who started off playing covers of Beatles and Led Zeppelin songs and then slowly worked original after original into their set. They became famous. The Churchill's peak was with their absolutely stunning, mandolin-fueled song "Subsequent Final" which alone is worth the price of this disc, one of Windy's favorite songs ever. Their first self-titled LP is now one of the rarest and most collectible albums from that period, so aren't we lucky to have this cd, which also has 4 bonus tracks (including the aforementioned Beatles and Zep covers). Now with the Jericho Jones (Churchill's successor band) album on a second disc. Here's our review of that: Late '60s Israeli psych rock group Churchill's is well liked here at AQ -- indeed, it's one of Windy's all time faves -- so we were quite curious about this band Jericho Jones, which was the hard rockin' '70s incarnation of the Churchill's line-up. Recorded in England, this is essentially the second Churchill's album, but with a new singer and a new name 'cause they didn't want to offend the Brits. And also, how could a record called "Junkies Monkeys and Donkeys" not be good? Released in 1972, it's very 'of the period', and pretty much what we expected. The Churchill's were into Led Zeppelin (they covered "Living Loving" after all), and this sort of bluesy hard rock psych is a logical progression of their pop psych sounds. "Junkies Monkeys and Donkeys" is nothing incredible, but manages to rock hard (they almost sound like Bad Company) as well as having mellower moments of melodic bliss. Some good songs, some forgettable ones. We'd say "get the Churchill's disc first" but you can only get the two together now it seems.
Yay, this old AQ fave, now reissued on vinyl!
The Churchill's is psychedelic rock from Israel, circa 1968, the original lp a rare collectible, and a classic. With Middle Eastern touches, backwards FX, lovely melodies, and twanging guitar solos, Churchill's should appeal to all fans of international sixties psych. Influenced by the Beatles and other British rock groups of the era (in fact, Churchill's later on became very Led Zep-ish, and covered "Living Loving" on a 7" single!), the Churchill's debut was apparently recorded as the soundtrack music for a pair of obscure films entitled A Woman's Case and The Dress. But the album is definitely a collection of songs, not instrumental/incidental music. And great songs they are. Some soft and mellow ("When You're Gone"), others weird and wigged out ("Straight People"). No doubt drugs were involved. One of the best tracks is the melodic, mandolin-fueled "Subsequent Final", an East-meets-West stunner indeed, pretty much worth buying this disc for just by itself, though you get lots more treats besides!
Many a Cibo Matto fan wept when Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori decided to go their separate musical ways back in 2001. Sure, each of their solo endeavors has been engaging and impressive in its own right, but there was a special groovy chemistry (not to mention a penchant for food obsessed song lyrics) between the two ladies that oomph'd their music into an irresistible confection. Very distinctly Japanese in both its meticulous craft and adorable, effervescent charm. With an appeal that reached far beyond the initial NYC art school / hipster Hello Kitty set, they could just as effortlessly disarm the big boys with a candy coated rap, bust out a shuffling jazz-inflected romp, 'love u down' with an r'n'b soul styled ballad, and lure the indie pop kids onto the dancefloor long before the dance-punk frenzy. Along the way, they also dabbled in Tropicalia, downtempo, lounge, Bacharachian dream pop among other things.
Super puffed with nineteen tracks including two previously unreleased ones ("Sword And A Paintbrush" and a Dan The Automator remix of "King Of Silence"), rarities and b-sides, Pom Pom is indeed an essential for CM fans, and it makes for a thoroughly cool CM primer for those that missed out the first time around. Yes, you get to have your "Birthday Cake", "Sugar Water". "Know Your Chicken", "Beef Jerky", "Artichoke", "Apple" and "White Pepper Ice Cream", and eat it too!
Pronounced 'chee-boh mot-toh'. 2 Japanese expatriates living in NY make a tasty and very fun racket (that you can dance to) with synthesizers, numerous recognizable or tantalizingly familiar samples, and lyrics solely about food: white pepper, beef jerky, etc.
Ciccone Youth was a one-off Sonic Youth side project, in which the band was paying homage to their favorite pop icon of the day: Madonna. If memory serves correctly, The Whitey Album was originally supposed to be a full on collaboration between Mike Watt (Minutemen, Firehouse) and Sonic Youth, in which the band just did all Madonna covers. Tongue in cheek, stoned ideas may be good on the couch with a bong while mocking how bad MTV is, but executing them is a recipe for artistic failure. So, The Whitey Album evolved beyond the Madonna cover album and into a pretty darn good example of how Sonic Youth could beef up avant-trance rock with mack-truck riffs, propulsive rhythms, and cheeky drum machine programming. Released just before Sonic Youth's unquestionably brilliant Daydream Nation, The Whitey Album enjoys many of the dynamic atonal noise/drones and screwdriver-in-the-guitar-strings tricks employed elsewhere in their early catalogue. As adventurous as much of The Whitey Album is, it's most memorable for the covers: Mike Watt does make an appearance all by his lonesome in covering Madonna's "Burnin' Up," Kim Gordon takes the vocal duties in the purposefully flat karaoke cover of Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love," and Thurston Moore gets the honor of singing Madonna's "Into The Groove." If only all joke bands sounded this good!
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We'd never heard of Luciano Cilio before, but of course Jim O'Rourke has. The ubiquitious O'Rourke (Wilco/Sonic Youth/you name it) contributes liner notes to this beautifully presented deluxe digipack cd reissue of what amounts to the collected works of Cilio, an Italian avantgarde composer from the '70s whose music is indeed experimental but less academic than you might expect. But even without O'Rourke's endorsement, a listen to the cd should reveal to you that Cilio was exquisitely talented, and maybe something of a genius. This disc is a simply fantastic document of what we might consider a hybrid of 20th century classical, minimalist psych-prog, and folk music, not entirely of this world. The all-white cover perfectly echoes Cilio's lovely, quietly haunting compositions for acoustic guitar, cello, piano and flute, sometimes visited by wordless female vocals. Achingly melancholic, immensely deep, truly beautiful. Limited to 500 copies, this cd consists of Cilio's sole album, Dialoghi del Presente, originally released on EMI in 1977, along with several previously unreleased tracks. Apparently he more or less abandoned music after the album's release, and sadly committed suicide in 1983. Allan's favorite new long-lost reissue after the Flamen Dialis disc reviewed on list #194...
Longtime regular aQ customer Joshua Maremont commented that Cindytalk's Camoflage Heart is a record which was only really meant for about 30 people. Not that only 30 copies of this record were released, or that it is so terminally obscure and willfully difficult that it by design has a marketing ceiling of an elite few. What he's on about is that Camoflage Heart is such a personal document of self-realized torment, pain, and sorrow that when Cindytalk embarked on the project, it's hard to imagine that they had any delusions about the intensity of this album and the potential for these songs to alienate beyond a limited few.
At the helm of Cindytalk is transgendered vocalist Gordon Sharp, who to this day is probably still best known as one of the multitude of vocalists who appeared in This Mortal Coil. In many ways, Sharp is the masculine equal to the Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser in delivering expressionist falsettos, trills, and banshee wails in an eerie, yet heavenly fashion. He's one of those few vocalists who can make the lyrics embody their content by shaping the words into emotionally charged sound. In fact, Sharp and Fraser had come together for a duet back during the Cocteau Twins' Peel Sessions of 1983. In his 4AD lineage, Gordon Sharp's first band was the criminally overlooked punk-glam ensemble The Freeze, where his Marc Bolan strut matched the nightmarish lyrics on top of some truly fantastic Bowie / Buzzcocks sparkplug riffs. Sharp, alongside fellow Freeze band members John Byrne and David Clancey, found shortcomings in the glam punk agenda, and sought a wholly new direction that became Cindytalk.
While undeniably dark and theatrical, Cindytalk cannot be pigeonholed as an '80s goth band, even in comparison to such off-kilter groups like The Virgin Prunes, Princess Tinymeat, or Sex Gang Children. Camoflage Heart was Cindytalk's first album and originally came out in 1984; and it's an album like those This Heat albums which is quite unique in terms of production and aesthetic. The album opens with the militant drum machine of "It's Luxury" setting the stage for an explosion from a monotone guitar riff, coated in amplifier grit, distortion, and detuned heaviness that comes across as a mix between late-'80s Skullflower and The Cure's Pornography. At this moment, Sharp's voice also erupts into the mix crooning with a downtrod beauty to this industrial dirge, spitting and swooning at the same time. The next track "Instinct (Back To Sense)" is more of an ambient interlude with distant heartbeat rhythms, haunted with impressionist piano trickles and Sharp's siren song buried between an atmosphere of smoke and mirror. Two more explosive tracks -- "Under Glass" (featuring Mick Harvey from the Birthday Party for a disjointed stutter of abject rock) and "Memories of Skin and Snow" -- are examples of loud / quiet / loud dynamics, later embraced by the likes of Slint and Mogwai to equally profound effect. "Everybody Is Christ" is often viewed as the pinnacle of Camoflage Heart with its harsh arppegiation of electronics cast against Sharp's heavenly voice. Soon after, the album disintegrates in a cascade of delicate piano, voice, and grim drones.
As Cindytalk had suffered through the fate of several record companies going out of business (first Midnight Records then World Serpent), their work might have been forgotten had it not been for this reissue. Thankfully, that oversight can now be remedies with this long overdue reissue.
So the rumor goes that Gordon Sharp was invited to join Duran Duran after Sharp dissolved his Edinburgh glam-punk band The Freeze in the late '70s. He turned them down. Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie also put out the request for Sharp to join the Cocteau Twins. After a brief stint accompanying the Cocteau Twins for a Peel Session in 1982 and a guest spot on This Mortal Coil's It'll End In Tears, he opted for his own project -- the obscure, yet majestic Cindytalk.
In This World is an opus in every sense of the word. Originally, In This World came out in 1988 as two separate albums under the same name, each with slightly different artwork. One album, a masterpiece of abject post-punk that in all honesty is the closest parallel to Swans' Children Of God; the other, a delicate ambient construct of melancholy piano scarred with surface noice prognosticating pretty much everything that Type Records has released (e.g Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, etc.). It's very good thing that both of these albums have been repackaged into one self-contained object, as the only half of In This World that seemed to be floating around was the piano-laced ambient one. As good as that half is, you need the grit and dirge of its companion album to complete Cindytalk's ideas of grand dualities: heaven / hell, pleasure / pain, holiness / transgression, etc.
While billed by Sharp as the 'disgusting' part of the In This World diptych, the first half begins with a lovely tonefloat of scratched violin drones and painterly piano notes. Yet, with the crushing rhythm and noise attack of "Janey's Love," Sharp does not disappoint with his disgusting tag. This is a monstrous industrial dirge with huge monotone slabs of distortion and atonal drones counterpointing Sharp's soaring falsetto. The punk poet Kathy Acker supplies a brief spoken word interlude as the coda to this incendiary number. Immediately hereafter, Cindytalk continue their turgid rhythmic marches with an angular distorted rhythm, slippery bassline mired in audio rust, and twin guitars spitting acid, fire, and brimstone on such tracks as "Gift Of A Knife" and "Circle Of Shit." As the first half of the album progresses, the songs steadily disintegrate as rhythm, song structure, and noise all collapse into a blur of smeared grey that is eerily reflective of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. The piano which opened In This World becomes the dominant sound in Cindytalk's soundscapes, also marking the delineation between the two halves of In This World. Yes, this is the beautiful side of Cindytalk, coated in ash, snow, bruises, and rust. Gordon Sharp's piano playing comes from Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon, which in turn came from Erik Satie; and that impressionist sentiment continues forward amidst subterranean drones and field recordings of barren spaces. Sharp's voice is mostly absent from these tracks, although the eponymous finale to the album showcases one of Sharp's most emotive croons. They really don't make albums like this any more, with such attention to detail and dynamics between rage and beauty.
Fortunately, both of these records were concise enough that they could both fit onto one CD; and if you've not had the opportunity to hear Cindytalk, please do not let this album and its predecessor Camoflage Heart pass you by!
