When we first got this we were so psyched. Totally gorgeous layout / design courtesy of Hydra Head Honcho Aaron Turner, all silver metallic filligree on what looks like tooled leather. Cool band name, properly tough and mysterious. It's on Hydra Head sub label Tortuga, home to Old Man Gloom, 5ive, Tusk and other like minded metallic dronesters. So when we actually got around to listening to it we were a little confused. Actually a lot confused. We were convinced it had to be a joke. Or at least some HH/Tortuga heavy band's tongue in cheek side project. Straight up MTV country tinged rock. Full on fist in the air, beer in one hand, American (or Confederate!) flag in the other, epic arrangements and super throaty Eddie Vedder / Layne Staley / that-guy-from-Creed vocals, wailing guitar leads, heartfelt ballads, songs about cigarettes, and tombstones, and blood and battles and love and soulful, belted out lyrics like "It ain't right..." and " All I know...." and "I believe in you..."
We absolutely hated it. I mean why wouldn't we? But then something happened. I don't know what it was. I just decided to like it. There it is. Not sure why. No idea. I just did. And now I do like it. A lot! I love it actually. And I've been listening to it like crazy. It's just plain old super kick ass rock! It's sort of like Nickelback for the metalhead indie rock hipster set. That may not sound all that good, but it is. Trust me. I mean, c'mon, why should MTV watching lemmings get all the majestic arena cockrock, slide guitars, lighters held aloft and all that? It's not fair. So Antler is here to settle the score. And settle it they do.
Hard to say if this is tongue in cheek or totally genuine, but it's not really funny, or cheesy enough to be a joke (unless it's the most subtle joke ever), it's just totally commercial and radio ready. But in a good way. Just regular old stadium rock. But with that sort of glam western edge that was so popular a decade ago. Definitely makes me feel 17 again. Tooling around in my crappy 4 cylinder Mustang, feathered hair, ripped jeans, glam rock cowboy hat, blasting the first Bon Jovi record. Or maybe the Hangmen record. Yep. Just like that.
Allan and Elliott think the ballads sound like the Red Hot Chili Peppers at their most melodic and commercial, you know like that "Under The Bridge" song. But if you've been paying attention to the AQ list, you know how much Allan likes the RHCP so no matter how much he denies it, that can only be an endorsement coming from him!
Holy shit, this record destroys me. Within 30 seconds, this record had already given me chills, unnerved me, and literally made me want to cry. On the first listen even! Just listen to the first sound sample and you'll know just what I mean. It's all about Antony's voice. A rich throaty tenor, that slips effortlessly into a keening falsetto. A luxurious vibrato, trilling and wrapping itself around every note. Equal parts Nina Simone, Tiny Tim, Tracy Chapman, Jimmy Scott and even a little Elvis Presley. The instrumentation is minimal, piano, upright bass, shuffling jazz drums, occasional electric guitar. Some songs sound like jazz standards, some like lost gospel classics, others like timeless spirituals. Soaring and maudlin, without becoming overwrought or overly dramatic. He's sort of like an otherworldly, avant-garde Rufus Wainwright. Or the sort of singer you would find in a piano bar in your strangest dreams. Not sure what it was that kept us from getting into Antony And the Johnsons in the past, whether it was the overplayed Coil / Current 93 connection or the whole gender bending novelty aspect, but this record has definitely turned us around. Totally chilling, absolutely haunting and completely beautiful. Features guest performances by Rufus Wainwright, Boy George, Lou Reed and Devandra Banhart.
One of our fave one-man bands is Aqueduct (aka David Terry), and here we have a brand spanking new full length. Once again he's tackling the lion's share of vocal, guitar, bass, keyboard and programming duties, but he's also brought in some friends to handle drums and additional guitar parts. With each release Mr. Terry's songs have gotten more polished, and the eleven on I Sold Gold are no exception, and they continue to give hearty nods to the pop craft influence of both the Beach Boys and XTC.
Dark Out is a dvd by indie filmmaker Chris Arnold, and the 45-minute film features the music of many fond, familiar SF faces... Jolie Holland, Sonny Smith, Mark Growden, Sean Hayes, Ara Anderson, Virgil Shaw and Mark Eitzel to name a few. Certainly worth getting for the music alone which fits well with the visuals, a contemplative, grainy, black and white film shot in the yes, dark depths of night.
Vinyl Headz pay attention! About two years ago we were fortunate enough to catch a few copies of Mulatu Astatke's Ethio Jazz on vinyl. Volume 4 of Ethiopiques (easily the single most popular release in the series) was essentially the album Ethio Jazz, but expanded to include another five Astatke tracks. This release includes those five tracks previously only available on Ethiopiques Vol. 4, plus three tracks of Astatke's which were on Ethiopiques Vol. 1, and one track of his from Ethiopiques Vol. 8. Here's a little background on Astatke from our Ethio Jazz review: "Astatke had the unique privilege to be sent off to school in 1960 (at the age of 17) to study music in London. From there he continued on to the United States, attending The Berklee School of Music in Boston and later moving to New York. One can imagine he picked up a wide range of influence, and that he did. He became absorbed in Latin and Caribbean musics, eventually forming his own group the Ethiopian Quartet in New York. Upon his return to Ethiopia in the late sixties he was treated like a king, being hailed as 'the first-Ethiopian-musician-educated-abroad' and as a arranger/bandleader he was unequalled."
This record is an absolutely stunning collection of instrumentals. Most are composed by Astatke, while others are arrangements of traditional songs or other composers. His music is a wonderful amalgam of swinging jazz tunes, sweet soul and punchy funk and laden with fuzzy electric guitars and tremolo drenched electic pianos. What's more is that unlike the afro-funk of Nigeria, the rest of Africa or the world even, the unique scales of Ethiopian music produce the most haunting melodies that we've ever heard. Now for the bad news: we only have a small handful of these puppies in stock and when they're gone, they're gone... No more, vamoosh! Another small pointer for those that do pick this up: the copy we cracked open had the A side and B side labels mis-printed on the vinyl. We suspect the whole pressing may have this erroneous labelling. No biggy, just something to pay attention to when identifying what you're listening to.
The influence of the folk music of the British Isles (especially via it's '70s hippy interpreters), and Appalachian American folk as well, continues to filter into the indie-rock realm of today. Getting into the act now is Drew Nelson, bassist from post-rockers Sonna, who offers up a project named for an Incredible String Band album. It's mellow and maybe a bit mopey, featuring mostly originals with a few traditional tunes like "Bonnie Boy" thrown in. Drew sings and plays various instruments including guitar, banjo, dulcimer, and is joined by a few other folks on accordion, ukulele, and percussion. So if gentle, old-timey, acoustic folky stuff sung in an tenuous tenor warble -- trying to be Cat Stevens or perhaps Jeff Mangum or Will Oldham -- is your thing, then you could check this out, it might go on your discman or iPod as a pleasant afternoon coffee shop soundtrack.
A while back we got a handful of limited 3" cd-r releases on a label called Battle Cruiser, which just so happened to be a side label of Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, run by the very prolific and very loved around these parts Campbell Kneale. They were super limited, only 30-80 copies of each and we only got 10. The best of the bunch was a little black gem by the name of Black Boned Angel. BBA was Kneale's foray onto massive, pummelling metallic sludge and man was it good. Shame we only ever had ten copies. Well, thanks to our pal Dave at 20 Buck Spin, we all get another chance to pick this up. And the ten of you who got the first version will probably also want to get this because:
A. It's not a cd-r, it's a real cd.
B. There's a twenty minute bonus track!
Fuck yeah! But what does it sound like? Black Boned Angel is a crushing salvo of sub-bass, low end, Earth / Sunn 0))) / Skullflower / Corrupted deathdirgedrone, but filtered through Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel high end ambient, shimmering skree, free noise sensibilities. Guitar tuned so low, the strings droop all the way off the fretboard, amps with the treble controls removed to make room for even more bass knobs, amps dipped in hot tar and pointed at the center of the earth, waves of low end rumble slowly rolling and decimating everything in its path. Hollowed out skulls, pounded mercilessly, beating out a primitive barely-there rhythm from the black abyss. Mysterious incantations, hardly audible from beneath the massive slab of sonic sludge, seem to invoke the very same bass-heavy demons threatening to smother and bury them with this very recording. Totally essential.
Holy shit, this is a rare occasion indeed! A new issue of the beloved, wickedly irreverent Chunklet Magazine has arrived less than a year after the previous one! Normally a single issue might take years to make -- no exaggeration! C'mon, humor this scathing and subject matter this obsessively reported doesn't happen overnight! Henry Owings, Brian Teasley and co. have been busy lil' beavers honing their 'taking the piss' skills to new heights. The few occasions where their acerbic fount o' witty take-downs falters though is when they open up the floor to the bulk contributors forum (i.e, folks who don't quite get that there's more to the Chunklet magic than aggressive mean-spirited bile-spewing a la Vice Mag), then it has a tendency to come across as a bitch session. No, much like the late comedian Bill Hicks (whose dvd is also reviewed in this week's AQ List and whom we're sure is an old fave around the magazine's headquarters), the thing to take note of is that the core of the material is not just about negativity and shock value -- yes, there's a dismay and disgust towards the state of things, but there's also underpinings of hope and positivity lurking underneath it all. Aww, shucks.
Anyways, for the faint-hearted, the overwhelming Issue #19 might be too much too soon, but for the steely hardcore fans of the mag, #19 is simply Part Two of Chunklet's exploration of all things over-rated. So, who and what are the crosshairs this time? Records that were released after 1991 (fyi: Issue #18 skewered pre-'91 releases), guitarists, drummers, music production techniques, record cover art, cities, actors, filmmakers and film genres. Elsewhere in the issue you get Chunklet's ever-loyal coverage of current comedians (Eugene Mirman, The Naked Trucker aka Dave "Gruber" Allen from the Freaks & Geeks tv series and David Koechner also from F&G as well as the movie Anchorman, and the comedy troupe Stella), a great article on the 'King Of Record Collectors' Joe Bussard (if you've checked out the awesome Down In The Basement compilation of selections from his rare record collection, you know who we're talkin' about!), the truly ear-punishing/spirit-crushing Torture Tapes Experiment, articles on Tim Kerr and his stuff, "Seven Degrees of Winona Ryder", "real" offensive bumper stickers, rock venue bathroom graffiti and unintentionally funny people. Oh yes, and AQ's own Chunkleteer Cup contributed her illustrated interpretation of a play written by Henry's eight year old niece Mary! Plus you get all the mag's regulars (Rocktoids, Whatever Dude, Rock Sniglets), as well as Chunkie's unconventional versions of conventional magazine sections such as Crossword and Letters To The Editor. Sometimes shocking, sometimes fucked up, sometimes downright caustic, but almost always hiiiilaaaariioooous! Another hearty fun addition to your bathroom library!
If there was ever a show worth flying 6000 miles for, it would've been this one. In fact Allan and Andee were seriously considering doing just that. Not only was this show unmissable, but we were imagining how completely nuts it would have been to just stroll into a show and say hi to our friends there all casual-like, as if we lived down the street instead of on the other side of the globe! Clearer minds prevailed, but thankfully we're able to experience at least part of the show in the form of this lp. The show of which we're speaking took place in Leeds, in a big old church and featured AQ faves Circle, the amazing prog duo Guapo (formerly on tUMULt, soon to be on Ipecac), the gloriously drone-y Jazzfinger, whose most recent record we reviewed here a couple lists back, Like A Kind Of Matador, who sound like a more prog-tastic Boris, and have a flute player, and who have a record coming out on tUMULt later in the year, Ultralyd, featuring Kjetil Brandsal from Noxagt, and a couple more! Holy crap! Damn those clearer heads! From what we heard it was totally amazing, and everyone seemed to focus on Circle's epic and broodingly ambient set. And rightfully so, as this here slab of wax proves. An ultra slow-building Krautrock roar, airy clouds of ambient flutter, sizzling cymbals, simple plucked guitar rhythms, bleeping and blooping barely-there melodies, looping and clattery, a gorgeously swirly, roiling miasma of sound. Gets more dynamic as it progresses with rough industrial whir and hellish howls. Side two is much more aggressive, noisy and rhythmic, very much akin to later Boredoms, manic percussion underneath billowing sheets of murky guitar blur, before the whole thing slowly decays into an ambient wash of tribal chants and muted drumming. SO NICE. Very reminiscent of the recent spate of Doktor Kettu cd-r's, in its simmering slow shifting murkiness. And for Circle fans who have had issues with the presence of more and more vocals on recent Circle records, Mountain finds the vocals settled way back into the mix, careening wildly -amidst- the music not -atop- it. We have a whole bunch but it's VERY LIMITED. In fact according to the label it's already out of print. So act fast!
Who doesn't love the Coachwhips? All this recording makes me want to do is see them live. Right now! With it's noisy, Olneyville Sound System-infused, bluesish garage rock, PB&J : Live at the Ginger Minge sounds a bit like a well-behaved Zen Guerilla. At least on record, cuz it's hard to capture this sort of spit and spittle garage noise on wax! As the Coachwhips' second release, it seems to be way less of an all out heart-attack and much more a set of fully formed songs on a fully formed album. Still totally rockin', just a little more matured. And seriously, will someone tell me when can we see them live?
Bands have been naming themselves after all manner of objects and creatures since the beginning of rock and roll. Heavy bands tending toward the mighty, the fierce or at least the very large. All manner of monsters and demons, various tigers and lions and even some sea creatures have been represented. But the largest, most imposing objects in nature have been sadly neglected as a source for inspiration and band-naming. TREES. So we have Conifer to right that wrong. And in doing so, judging from this ferocious slab of indie rock / metal sludge hypno-pummel, you'd certainly be forgiven for thinking this particular tree could take on any of the rock demons and metallic beasties that came before.
Conifer sleepily trawl through the dark recesses of post rock, taking the languorous slow burning churn of bands like Slint or Seam Or Bastro, all dark and brooding, simple and insistent, and stretching the riffs and melodies into expansive stretches of moody melancholy, swathed in Pink Floydian swoosh and whirl, before dropping the bomb. Massive downtuned guitars explode, splitting post rock atoms into clumps of corrosive riffage, peppered with raspy howls and screeching banshee melodies, sometimes gaining momentum and becoming unstoppable exercises in epic doomy drone-metal ala Neurosis or Isis, sometimes becoming glacial explorations into slow motion doom a la Khanate, and other times employing distorted ghostly computer vocals and buzzing psychedelia into Butthole Surfers-like sonic freakouts. A lot of this does definitely sound like Isis, Neurosis, Pelican or Buried At Sea, which is obviously a good thing, but more often it sounds like a doom-sludge A Minor Forest or a post rock Boris or a very metal Slint. Which is an even better thing!
Here's one of our all-time favorite black metal bands, and even we are guilty of ignoring them a bit now that they're HUGE rather than being a raw, cult, underground one-man-band operation like a lot of the stuff we've been trumpeting lately. But that's not fair. Cradle of Filth, though some purer-than-thou types see 'em as sell-outs, are pretty much just as 'extreme' as they ever were, and in terms of songwriting have really only gotten better. And they're one of the reasons that we're even black metal fans in the first place -- CoF were the first 'modern' black metal band that Andee, for one, ever heard and got into (along with Satyricon)...and then one thing lead to another. Not everyone's cup of absinthe, but you can't deny their brew's potency.
So, we really should have reviewed this new album the week it came out, but better late than never. Of course, we also know that if you're already into CoF, all you need to know is that this latest album is simply another great CoF opus -- gothically bent, vicious and heavy. Its perfumed and perverse atmosphere of baroque excess lacks not for Dani Filth's trademark screech and snarl (more snarl than screech this time), and some sweet female vox too (a Nymphette, of course, and doubtless corseted), ornate Hammer horror keyboards, blasting drums, and a good deal of very 'heavy metal' guitar riffage. More and more the Filthies have been taking after classic metal mentors like Iron Maiden and Metallica, with some very trad sounding melodies and harmonies cropping up amidst their occult-sexual black metal blasphemizing. Fans needn't know much more, you ought to be happy with this. On the other hand, if you haven't yet been, um, rocked by this Cradle, well, this would be a very accessible starting point (although we certainly must also recommend our absolute fave, Dusk And Her Embrace). And for those of you who once were CoF fans but turned your backs on 'em as they got more popular and more tuneful and better produced...well never mind about Nymphetamine then, I guess. But you're missing out on some damn good metal music!
In lieu of a new full length (this Fall perhaps?), the Crooked Jades have tossed us a very nice bone of an EP. Five tracks, recorded live to multitrack at SF's own Tiny Telephone in August of 2004. Of the five tracks, three are traditional arrangements and two are originals: one by Jades frontman Jeff Kazor and the other by newly added mandolin player extraordinaire Jennie Benford. For this outing the group have reigned in their broad influences and focused their labors to produce an EP that's almost strictly bluegrass, and very traditional at that. The exception is the final track "Gabriel (World's On Fire)" which is a traditional gospel tune sung by the group a cappella, but for some frantic blues acoustic guitar accompaniment. So nice.
Sometimes bedazzled, certainly bemused and maybe befuddled, that's where curious local art-rockers The Curtains keep the listener, one never knowing from track to track where the album is likely to lead. And there's a whole lotta tracks on here, like 23 of 'em! All share the The Curtains charming style of quirky, indie-rock confusion, that can be proggily grandiose one moment, innocent and simple the next. Faux-naive? Beefheart-complex? It's all good. The Curtains make their own rules, and we love 'em for it.
Are you into Chris Watson's "Weather Report", that "Indian Soundscapes" double disc, "Night Sounds From Bali", and the like? Well field recording fans, here's another one for ya! This disc documents the journey of UK improvising musician Peter Cusack to a remote lake in Siberia, on a mission to record the sounds of ice creaking, cracking, and melting in the springtime. The ice in question covers the surface (up to a meter deep) of one Lake Baikal, which geography and/or trivia buffs will know as being the world's deepest, oldest lake, holding one fifth of the earth's fresh water. On his way to the lake, Cusack puts his recording equipment to good use, bringing us audio verite encounters with the Trans-Siberian Railway, percussion on a broken metal fountain, children playing with a village's loudspeaker system, bird calls, and other interesting sounds. Armchair travellers will delight. And then there's the whole reason for the trip: Lake Baikal's ice breaking up after a frozen winter. A crinkling, tinkling sound, like a sharp-edged rain, drones nicely, with louder, larger cracks and creaks and groanings. Several tracks are devoted to this crystalline rumbling, and it's both mysterious and lovely.
First of all, this album is undeniably incredible. Secondly, if you don't already own this or the expensive Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, buy it. For yourself, for friends, for your stuffed animals, whatever. Make sure you have a copy around you at all times. This album, the object of cult-like fascination for decades, is now remastered and easily available once again.
Inspired by his own deep passion for the art of boxing, Miles created this soundtrack in 1970 for the documentary about legend-in-his-own-time boxer, Jack Johnson. A time change in the very first couple of measures hints that the two twenty-five minute tracks here were captured mid-jam. Musicians involved on these sessions also worked on Bitches Brew (1969) and include John McLaughlin and his soon-to-be fellow Mahavishnu Orchestra member Billy Cobham on, respectively, guitar and drums; electric bassist Michael Henderson; soprano saxist Steve Grossman; accidental walk-in Herbie Hancock on Farfisa organ; and, on the second track, "Yesternow," an uncredited Sonny Sharrock on additional electric guitar. Jimi Hendrix was also meant to be involved but sadly shuffled off his mortal coil prior to the session. Even without the Hendrix element, Tribute is by far the closest Davis ever really came to ROCK. Not your typical white pop-song/performance-driven rock of the time (for instance, The Who and other artists who joined Davis at the legendary Isle of Wight festival in 1970), but a deep, spacious jazz funk rock fusion that one would absorb introspectively rather than conjure up an immediate energized reaction. This "music" was way ahead of its time. Rock audiences of the time couldn't fully grasp Davis' electric direction here, and on the flip side, jazz audiences/critics blasted him for his deviances from classic (acoustic) jazz. It may sound a little gratuitous, but honestly it's as totally mind-blowing today as it must of been then, perhaps and hopefully now more welcomed by a broader audience. Again, we must insist you BUY THIS NOW. You will not regret it.
You know when you buy a present for your boyfriend (or girlfriend) and it's really so you can enjoy it yourself -- also fondly called Homer Simpson gifting? Well, I have to admit my own HSG guilt, the gift being this Miles Electric dvd. Honestly, I wasn't really sure what to expect. But man, am I glad I bought it for "our" enjoyment. It's an incredible look inside later period (electric) Miles Davis. With in-depth and well-edited interviews of his Isle Of Wight era musicians (Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea) as well as Carlos Santana, and others, this documentary explains how the Electric took shape in the eyes of Miles, in the studio (with Bitches Brew) and in juxtoposition to the acoustic jazz establishment from which Miles' electricity exploded to a seriously unprepared audience.
The unfolding dramatization culminates with the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival performance by Miles and his septet before 600,000 festival-goers in its 38 minute entirety. Some extra talking head style interviews give further explanation of Miles at that time. The film itself could be critiqued at length, though its interviews render such a full story, there should be no doubt of this documentary's importance.
Geez Mr. Bejar, the paint is barely dry on your last album Your Blues and you're already revisiting and reworking some of those songs! Unlike other artists whose intentions (and their record label's) might be more suspect (i.e, marketing ploys, etc), Bejar's artistic sincerity is untarnished. You do believe that this ep's existence is not due to an unhappiness / dissatisfaction with his previous renderings. No, not at all. Instead, perhaps inspired by the volatile artistry of his recent tourmates (and AQ faves) Frog Eyes, Bejar has approached these songs with a slightly more unhinged vision. Whereas Your Blues was thoroughly composed and grand, this is much more stripped down and guitar-driven. The contrast is immediately noticeable from just one look at the two releases' cover art - the subject matter is the same, but the brush and pen strokes are drastically different, one is calmly shaded while the other is almost violently slashed out. What these six songs really unveil though is the fresh, potent chemistry that flows between Bejar and the Frog Eyes crew who perform with him on this release. Sparks fly with a tingly energy! Check out one of the cd's highlights, the title track "Notorious Lightning" on which F.E. mainman Carey Mercer joins Bejar at the mic. Pretty darn great! Should cause much cross-pollination between the two bands' fanclub memberships.
We obviously don't need to say much to convince all the Earth / Sunn 0))) / doom-dirge-drone obsessives out there that this disc is ESSENTIAL. Most of them are willing to shell out $50 or $100 or even more for limited vinyl releases by any band even tangentially related to Sunn 0))) or Earth, anyway. But for those of you who are new to the Earth phenomenon, as long as you already own their ALL TIME CLASSIC album Earth 2, you might also want to check this disc out (and the OTHER, NEW Earth cd reviewed elsewhere on this list!). 070796LIVE collects the WAY out of print, one sided live lp from a few years back, the equally WAY out of print tour only split 12" with KK Null, an unreleased live recording on WNYU, and a remix by James Plotkin (O.L.D. / Khanate / Phantomsmasher, etc.) In terms of eBay value alone this disc is worth at least $100 if not more!!! But so what? More importantly it's another essential slab of crushing, mesmerising, slow motion drone-metal! The first two tracks are "070796" (from the live lp) and the live radio recording "Dissolution III (Oversaturated Intervallic Collisions)". These tracks are classic Earth, stumbling, droning, rambling, and endlessly heavy. The funny thing with Earth though, is sometimes they sound like they must be taking the piss. A couple scraggly haired dudes, wacked out of their minds, tuning and fumbling for twenty minutes, sometimes sitting there in a stupor, letting the feeding-back guitar do all the work, sometimes plucking and scraping and manipulating the sound into rumbling sheets of drone and skree. But sometimes, that fumbling becomes absolutely divine, which is, we suppose, the magic of Earth. The ultimate outsider drone outfit. Who somehow manage, with the same amps and guitars and effects as the rest of us, to simply stumble into dronerock nirvana! The third track, from the KK Null split tour 12", features the current incarnation of Earth with Adrienne Davies on drums. Bookended by that classic stationary Earth feedback-drone, this track eventually morphs into an actual song, with a fuzzed out, minor key riff, and simple hypnotic drumming, falling sonically somewhere between moody post rock and midtempo Burzumic black metal. Throbbing and loping, and totally mesmerizing. The last track, the Plotkin remix, takes the live track and stretches it into thick ropy drones, with the original track's constituent parts blurred into indistinct smears of fuzz and rumble, a slowly shifting glacial crush, with occasional squalls of buzzy white noise and electronic filligree. Really really nice. And of course as we now know, the rumour we had been hearing, about a BRAND NEW Earth record has proven to be the truth, with the release of Living In The Gleam Of An Unsheathed Sword (read all about it elsewhere on this list), which IS a new record, but features live tracks recorded in 2002. And while one of the tracks here is inexplicably duplicated on the new cd, both discs are well worth the price, with 070796LIVE including three tracks essentially unavailable anywhere else, and Living In The Gleam containing an epic one hour track only available on that cd.
That's right. Another new Earth record. Holy crap! Our drone doom dreams come true! But with Earth, it's not as simple as just releasing a new record. Or records. Or even new. Let us explain. Elsewhere on this list you'll find our review of the Earth 070796LIVE cd released sometime last year on Autofact records, which collected two super rare vinyl Earth records (the one-sided live lp, and the tour split with KK Null) as well as two bonus tracks -- a James Plotkin remix, and a recording of Earth mainman Dylan Carlson playing live on the radio. Earth had been hauling this disc around with them for the last year on tour (yep, they've been touring, mostly in Europe) but we were only able to track 'em down and get copies for the store last week. So already the Earth obsessed among us were in heaven, when what do ya know? ANOTHER Earth record comes out. Featuring supposedly BRAND NEW RECORDINGS. And they are brand new, sort of. Initially we were going to have to recommend this disc ONLY for total Earth obsessives, since there are only two tracks, both live, and one of them is actually *already* on that 070796LIVE disc. D'oh! Rip off we were thinking. If you get Live, then you'd be buying this disc for just one track. Thankfully though, that one track is a doozy -- an hour long! Album-length in itself, a sprawling doom dirge, recorded live in 2002. (2002!? How hard is it to get this band into a studio? Pretty goddamn hard it seems, since all of their releases since the Sub Pop days have been live recordings.) So while this is a NEW record, it's not an especially recent recording. But what the hell. We'll take our Earth where we can get it. The first track, the one that is duplicated on the Live cd, is a fourteen minute, solo guitar buzz / dirge / scrape that sounds really damaged, stumbling and clumsy, and definitely messed up. The hour-long second track features drummer Adrienne Davies, who seems to be a permanent member of Earth now, and whose spare, hard hitting style perfectly compliments Carlson's new riffier songwriting. Gone are the glacial fuzzy dirges that inspired Sunn 0))) to become Earth 2 (too) and in their place, is a massive fuzzed out riffy doom metal / post rock groove, super repetitive and totally hypnotic. Much more reminiscent of Earth's under-rated, more song-oriented final Sub Pop album Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons. Definitely still doomy and drone-y and drug-addled and head nodding, but dare we say, more rocking!
You might as well just go ahead and do it. You know you're gonna. Buy BOTH of the new Earth cds. You sort of have to. No more trawling eBay or scouring used record stores. If we had to make the call, we'd say the Live album on Autofact is perhaps more essential, but if you're anything like us, you for sure need both. And while at first we thought that'd be like getting one and a half cds for the price of two, the fact that the track unique to this release is an hour in length really dismantles that objection.
The French shuffletime electro maven known as Electronicat has his admirers here at AQ, and apparently 'round the world as well, as this obligatory remixes disc goes to show. It's got a completely hip and fairly diverse lineup of remixers: Adult., Dat Politics, the ubiqitous Kid606, dDamage, Felix Kubin, The Hacker, Mike Ladd, Original Hamster, and even Zbigniew Karkowski, amongst others. If you like your beats crunchy and catchy, glammed up with gobs of electro-punk guitar distortion, you should be an Electronicat fan -- and if you're an Electronicat fan, you already know if you would be interested in remixes I suppose. We enjoyed 'em.
Gosh, we're rarely as, um, anticipant (is that a word?) of a new album release by a metal band as we are of anything new by Norway's Enslaved! Pant, pant, pant. And this new album from them, Isa, really got us worked up waiting for it, as an European version was released towards the end of last year but we never were able to buy, beg or steal import copies of it -- although we did get a handful of the vinyl pressing, now gone. But, those extra few months of waiting was worth it, as this domestic cd version boasts some bonus cd-rom footage: the video for the title track, and a twenty minute band interview. Patience pays off. So why were we so excitedly anticipant about this you may ask? Well Enslaved have always been a band who've been adept at pushing all of AQ's buttons (in a good way, that is). There's the old-school Nordic black metal button (which Enslaved, who's first release was a split with Emperor, has no trouble pushing, and here they get guest throats Abbath from Immortal and Nocturno Culto from Darkthrone to apply extra force). There's the epic Floydian psych button. The mood-shattering dynamics button. The Viking tunic and tights button. The avant-garde '70s keyboard-laden prog button. The leather and spikes rock n' roll button. Even the vaguely jazz-fusiony guitar soloing button. The so many buttons button. Now, to be sure, their various records (this is number eight, or so) push these buttons and others in various combinations. At first listen to any of their albums, we often think, hmm, is this working for us? And always it does. Isa is no exception. It continues in what we might call the Opethian progression of recent Enslaved efforts like Monumension and Below The Lights, away from the pure speed and violence of such earlier albums as Frost and Blodheim, but all the polished parts and techy time-changes and such are always offset by a stab at that blackened Norwegian nastiness button, y'know? Jarring yet repetitive riffage coexists here with some clean, Michael Gira style crooning, and droning metal blur, Geiger-counter drumming, and majestic minor-key melody: an art-rock cruise ship rammed and boarded by a Viking longboat. Even with new members (Dirge Rep's replacement on the drum stool is the guy from Red Harvest, we think) and hence new directions, Enslaved have crafted an album that's definitely a progressive part of their now hallowed legacy, replete with menace and grandeur. Too soon yet to tell if this is pushing ALL the same buttons as the godly Mardraum (an AQ Record of the Week once upon a time), or Eld, or Below The Lights but that's what those records are for, anyway. Time for them later, here at last is the NEW Enslaved, so let's let it let us enjoy it!
Here Andee gushes about his favorite record of the last couple years, one that he put on his top ten list the last two years (much to Allan's chagrin) even though it came out in 2003, and a record that we have somehow never gotten around to reviewing, until now, which is perfect, since it's just been re-released with bonus tracks and some other crap:
I have no idea how to review this record. I absolutely love it. It is the only record that I have consistantly listened to almost every day, for the last two years. I never get sick of it. I always defend it as a guilty pleasure, sort of sheepsihly admitting to my obsessive love of this record, but the more and more I listen to it, the more I'm not so sure it's a guily pleasure after all. But before you go any further, answer this question: do you love the Posies, the Get Up Kids, Sloan, Weezer, The Stereo, Reggie And The Full Effect? If the answer is yes, continue on, and let me tell you about another record you ABSOLUTELY MUST OWN. If the answer is no, then what the heck is wrong with you??? Seriously... um, no, sorry, in that case, well, there's plenty of other stuff you could be checking out, so you are hereby dismissed. But those of you who did indeed answer yes, and who like your pop of the power variety, and love complex harmonies and unforgettable hooks and kick ass guitars, well, then let me tell you about Fallout Boy.
To my ears, this is the perfect mix of metal and pop. Like a metalcore pop record. The guitars are HUGE and crunchy and super metallic, but they are playing totally catchy melodies, intricate harmonies all over super dynamic start stop arrangements. And the vocals are totally perfect, high and clean and soaring, lots of harmonies there too, very emo sure, but the whole thing is just totally massive, heavy, emotional perfect pop. Easily my favorite 'pop' record since the Stereo. One of our 'pop' customers thought this sounded too "boy", but that's part of the appeal, if by "too boy" he meant TOO METAL. Then maybe it is. It is kind of metal, you can totally tell these guys grew up on metal as well as pop. It's heavy and relentless, and epic and CATCHY AS FUCK. We went and saw Coheed And Cambria a while back, and the whole crowd bounced along and sang along to EVERY song. It was insane. And C&C are pretty proggy and weird, so I can only imagine how nuts kids must go at a Fallout Boy show. And like C&C, Fallout Boy are about our age which makes us love them even more, for only -kind of- making us feel old. Anyway, if you're not sold by now, not sure what else I can do. Listen to the three sound samples. The ultimate metal-pop one-two-three punch. The most perfect three song opening to a record I can remember.
Ahhhh. Ok. I feel a whole lot better. No more guilt at all. I LOVE this record. And I'm gonna go home and listen to it again. And again. And again.
The reissue comes in a spiffy slipcover, includes a bonus disc label sampler, has two bonus tracks, a Police cover, which is pretty cool, and a completely pointless 'dance remix'. It also has a sort-of director's commentary where the band discuss and dissect their songs / lyrics piece by piece. Pretty funny. Also includes a video for the track 'Saturday.'
Philip Jeck. Janek Schaeffer. Otomo Yoshihide. Thomas Brinkman. Saule. These have been some of the recent crop of avant-turntablists whose praises we've sung in the recent past; yet the use of the turntable with experimental music is nothing as novel as the current infatuation would indicate. Turntablism could be traced back to John Cage's Imaginary Landscape (1939), but perhaps a better historical jumping off point for those artists' delirious collage work would be with the early work of Christian Marclay and Non, who both reconfigured the noise and disembodied cultural reference from skipping records in the late '70s. It was that environment of Industrial culture that spawned Gum -- the Australian avant-turntablist duo which began quite literally with a skipping Brian Eno record. While Gum's Andrew Curtis and Philip Samartzis shared a common interest in Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and Whitehouse, their work centered upon the volatility of surface noise from cheap turntables that they rescued from thrift stores and junk shops. At the same time, Gum balanced their destructive pursuit of tumultuous noise and electrically charged static with a clinical disembodiment. Even when disco-grooves from the Bee-Gees or porno climaxes get mangled in their Frankensteinian aggregates of loops and layers, it's hardly funky or sexy... rather a wonderfully disturbing mess. Having only a couple of singles on RRR and Korm Plastics as well as two self-released LPs, Gum had remained a secret history within the prolific oeuvre of Australian sound art; and now, thanks to this Vinyl Anthology compendium which features the bulk of their recorded works, the ecstatic expressionism of Gum can now be rediscovered for what it really is: precocious genius.
We've been sitting on this one for a couple weeks 'cause we wanted to be sure it got everyone's full attention.�On the surface�this may appear to be just another comedy dvd, but�it's considerably more than that. It's a�potent posthumous release and historical document of, for lack of better words, 'highlights' of the mighty Bill Hicks' career as a stand-up comedian.�
Arguably, the bulk of the current crop of incisively insightful comedians are reduced to mere fluff when held up to the unforgiving fire of Hicks (who passed away in 1994 at the age of 32)... and they fuckin' know it! Many (David Cross, Patton Oswalt, Dave Attell to name a few) bow their heads in deep reverence to the memory of this seriously groundbreaking individual, and others would do well to do the same. Much of their material comes directly from the provocative seeds this man sowed. Much of his material comes across as fresh and as relevant as it did over a decade ago. When you hear him speak of President Bush, it's startling to realize he's speaking of Bush 41 not Bush 43. He blazed his own trail in much the same unrestrained and unrelenting tradition as Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce or�George Carlin. Not always funny nor entertaining per se, and not always giving the audience what they want... that wasn't the point. He had things to say. He raised�and skewered topics -- often scathing and remarkably direct -- that other people (comedian or otherwise) would cower away from. Don't be mistaken though, when Hicks deemed it time to be 'funny', he laid to waste all in his presence. The title says it all. It's impossible and completely inaccurate to simply peg this man solely as a comedian. It can truly be said that he was one of the best in each category.
With the increased prominence of indie comedians -- particularly stand-up and sketch on television (Mr. Show, Insomniac, etc) -- over the past half decade, the time is more than ripe for this dvd which contains three of his 1991 performances (in Chicago, Montreal and London which for years have only been circulating in grainy vhs copies) plus a documentary. His diehard cult following has certainly grown over the years, but now with this dvd and the aforementioned individuals' giving props to him in their interviews, Hicks will hopefully receive the attention and respect long overdue.
This dvd includes one of�Hicks' most moving and insightful segments --�his�imagined editorial comment�for a news broadcast: "Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves... Here's Tom with the weather."
Fucking brilliant. Seriously. Not to be missed!
Flap flap flap. More like flwwaapp flwwaapp flwwaapphhgh. Blessed Black Wings cast a shadow across the land, blotting out the sun in their demonic leathern flight. It's the third album from the Bay Area's louder-than-thou High On Fire, the first to feature new bassist Joe Preston (Thrones, ex-Melvins, ex-Earth) and it's not going to disappoint any fans of their previous discs, that's for sure. On this Steve Albini recorded effort, the sheer volume and pummel is cranked to full force, ex-Sleep guitarist Matt Pike's Lemmy-vs-Cronos styled vox doing damage atop a fast-marching mountain of riffery. It really sounds like these guys are beating the bejesus out of their instruments, and not just the drums. It's like an angry, aggro version of Sleep, really. And more than ever, this is somehow sludgily reminiscent of the underground metal thrash of a decade or 15 years ago...I'm hearing Nuclear Assault, Laaz Rockit, Exodus, and oh yeah, Slayer!! Includes (while supplies last, we assume) a bonus dvd disc with five live tracks. So, "Cometh Down Hessian" (that's one of the song titles) and buy this!
Japanese psych fans! Here's the follow-up to Alchemy label boss and Hijokaidan guitarist Jojo Hiroshige's Donari Chirasu Boku No Koe Wa Amari Ni Mo Chiisai (whew!) disc that we reviewed not long ago on list 200. At the time, we erroneously identified that as being a Jojo collaboration with the all-girl psych band Doodles, when in fact only one half of the Doodles duo that was present on Donari Chirasu..., that being guitarist Akiko Terashima. And the other, non-Doodles musicans were bassist Yoshie Tanuma and drummer Naoko Otani, she formerly of Angel'in Heavy Syrup. This same backing band is, um, back with Jojo this time for Boku Wa Mo Utawanai Daro. And again it's one of the most 'musical' efforts we've heard from the notorious noise-meister, Jojo and Co. getting really into a '70s inspired heavy psych thing that all you stoner rockers and krautheads and Terrastock natives ought to dig. The gentle and melancholy parts (with words we wonder if, as on the previous album, are by cult '70s singer Sai Yoshiko?) are perhaps more prevalent here, the album striking a balance between blown-out, thudding rock riffery and actual out-and-out psychedelic pop, that tilts more towards the latter. For a guy that's best known for utter destructo noise mayhem, this can be shockingly sweet and melodic! If you liked those Night Gallery comps from Jojo's label, or that other recent Jojo disc, or a lot of other things on Alchemy or PSF or wherever that fall in line with the Tokyo Flashback aesthetic, this is definitely one to check out!
It's been a while since we last heard from Hood, but in anticipation of their forthcoming full length Outside Closer, they've resurfaced with these five breezy tracks. Much less split personality than their past efforts have had the tendency to be -- they would be postrock-y on one track and blissed-out indie-tronica the next -- Hood have integrated their two selves into a consistent shimmery dreaminess of glistening guitars, processed beats, gauzy washes and hushed vocals. On the surface, this may simply seem cut from the same cloth as the current crop of pretty euro-pop-tronica (such as Morr Music's Styrofoam, LaliPuna, etc... heck, not to mention that just like those artists, Hood's also been cavorting with indie hiphoppers such as Themselves!), but closer listens reveal Hood's music to possess considerably more dynamics and substance. Nice! Can't wait for the new album!
After Comus' genius First Utterance record was re-released (soon, supposedly, to be re-re-released, with bonus tracks), this left Jan Dukes De Grey as THE missing seventies psych / prog / folk holy grail. And rightfully so. Originally released in 1971 (the year Allan has determined that almost every great seventies record was released, even though he was only two years old then), this record manages to be totally brilliant and absolutely absurd at the same time. It has much in common with the Comus record, super dramatic trilling vocals, frenzied acoustic guitars and manic bongos. But there the similarities end. Where Comus took those elements and created a harrowing pagan ritual, Jan Dukes De Grey take those same elements and embark on a freaked out prog journey into utter madness. Sweetly melodic flutes, acoustic guitars, and weirdly bombastic drumming are woven into a weird and wonderful lilting British folk, peppered with an ultra-memorable little arpeggiated guitar lick that you won't be able to get out of your head, pausing once for a fierce heavily strummed riff that sounds almost Sabbathy before resuming it's sweet folky journey. Then suddenly the whole thing is thrown into chaos by a brief splattery drum break, which the band emerges from in entirely different garb. An epic journey through angular, almost eighties sounding nowave skronk, damaged seventies prog, ultra twee psychfolk and avant jazz krautrock. Weaving wildly from sound to sound, muted duck like saxophone, super distorted acoustic guitar, warbling trumpets, manic bongos, soaring strings, fluttering flamenco sputter, employing a massive arsenal of instruments: violin, cello, zeldaphone (!), clarinet, recorder, chanter, harmonica, hunting horn, glockenspiel, as well as a 'clothes horse' contraption with a hanging flat drum, tabla, cymbal, chimes and Indian bells. And that's all in the first song! Twenty plus minutes of freaked out psych-prog-folk brilliance.
The second track sounds much more traditionally seventies British folk, but only compared to the first track. Jaunty and folky, occasionally dark and menacing, with bursts of maniacal strumming, and sweet vocal harmonies, before the band switches gears and belts out a wild klezmer folk-prog shuffle that sounds quite a bit like Uz Jsme Doma. The final track is a dense and relentless, heavy psychedelic swirl, with jagged wah guitars, throaty theatrical vocals and wild octopoidal Krupa-ish drumming, thumping tribal tom toms and sizzling cymbals. Phew.
Take a dash of Comus, a pinch of the Incredible String Band, a hint of Jethro Tull, a splash of Captain Beefheart, a drop of Uz Jsme Doma and a whole lot of LSD and shake vigorously! Liner notes by Current 93's David Tibet.
There is something about this band I really like, though I can't necessarily put my finger on it. A friend of mine described Jennifer Gentle in the following manner and I don't think I could have done a better job. "Jennifer Gentle is like biting into an acid sandwich. It's like Deerhoof reading Alice In Wonderland. Like Sister Seance Stepple, her eyes as black as treacle, sitting in a cave of candy floss, on the side of Witch Mountain. It makes the goblins giggle with delight." Ok... to this I'll add the following: Jennifer Gentle is an Italian duo, their band name derived from a Pink Floyd lyric. Valende is their US debut release. Their music generates something I'm not sure exactly how to digest but that's why I like it so!! Jennifer Gentle tours as five piece this year in support of AQ faves Dead Meadow so be sure to go check em out!
What the hell happened to Godflesh? We've been wondering that for years. Streetcleaner was a stone cold classic. Heavy and clinical and completely brutal. Slavestate, Pure, Selfless all great records as well. So what the hell happened? The riffs got more generic, the vocals, always the possible sticking point, got louder and louder and more pointless and distracting, until Godflesh became a shadow of the industrial metal legend they once were. That's why we thought it was a bit funny that people were chomping at the bit for this Jesu record, the first we've heard from Justin Broderick AKA Godflesh since 2001 and the godawful Hymns record. Why would anyone expect anything but more of the same watered down industrial crap? Well, that'll teach us for having so little faith as this record is something else. Figuratively AND literally. It's great. no doubt about it. Heavy and beautiful, haunting and crushing. But at the same time, it's not a Streetcleaner rehash, which we all certainly would have been happy with. Instead, Broderick has taken the harsh industrial crunch of Godflesh, and tempered it with layer after layer of thick sonic grandeur and lots and lots of melody. And gone are the shouted vocals WAY up in the mix, and in their place, actual singing. Melodies, harmonies, some serious crooning by metal standards, but thankfully, the vocals are nestled way back in the mix, cozied up next to the warm thick guitars and the rumbling bass. Unlike the cold clinical fury of Godflesh, Jesu is dark and warm, thick and harmonically rich. These tracks are massive, glacially creeping epics, spelling out minor key melodies in lurches and bursts, haunting vocals draped over the thick riffs like sparkling Christmas lights, barely visible through the snow. Sort of like a metal northern lights, a thick rippling curtain of subtle disonnance, My Blooody Valentine filtered through the epic sludge of Neurosis. M83 playing at 16rpm. A gloriously hopeful, sonically sparkling dirge-y doom pop. Yes, pop. Because underneath the wall of guitars, and the dubbed out melodies, and super affected vocals, and lugubrious tempos, are actual songs. Good songs. Heavy sure, but beautiful and strangely delicate, especially for a 'metal' record. Reminiscent of Slint's Spiderland in the way it takes minor key moodiness, and imbues it with a gleam of hope, a hint of joy, barely discernible through the suffocating cloak of despair.
After being out of print and unavailable for far too long (a coupla years anyway), the kind folks at VHF have repressed this, at last. Here's what we had to say about this great record back when it came out in 2001, originally:
"The entirely too prolific Kawabata Makoto (who fronts Acid Mothers Temple) joins AQ fave Richard Youngs for a surprisingly tranquil, and beautifuly melancholic record of swirling haze and delicate melodies, employing acoustic guitar, autoharp, organ, and voice. Rather than have titles, on the back cover this disc's songs are differentiated by colored bars of varying length.
Medium length blue bar: distorted autoharp over a fuzzy drone of muted melodies, with beautiful plaintive vocals soaring over the rich sonic miasma.
Longer orange bar: gentle finger picked guitar over far away wind chimes and dreamy soundscapes.
Green bar shorter than the blue one: manipulated vocals time stretched and twisted into alien melodies over a warm buzzing hum and acoustic guitar.
Short red bar and really short purple bar: two tracks of gorgeous melodies on acoustic guitar with simple droning organ chords and fluttering high end organ noodling.
Really beautiful and totally mesmerising. Some of the best work by both Makoto and Youngs, who have curbed their penchant for all out noise and given us a glimpse into their sensitive sides."
Of course, since we wrote the above review (which first appeared on list 124), the ever-prolific Kawabata has explored some other equally "sensitive" realms, but this is still one of the best from amongst his mellower stuff. And Youngs (who often allows that glimpse) has also increased his profile to some degree, bringing us such AQ-faves as May, Airs Of The Ear (especially), and River Through Howling Sky. So we imagine there's got to be a bunch of you out there who have only discovered either Youngs or Kawabata relatively recently, or otherwise somehow missed this before and thereby (not to use to strong a word, but...) NEED it now.
So here it is! Hard to believe it's finally here -- some of us have been waiting forever for this record, or at least ever since we discovered a tiny, super compressed, thirty second long sound clip on the internet over a year ago. In all of half a minute, we became OBSESSED. Completely captivated by this band's totally alien, lush, organic 'world music' weirdness. We eventually tracked down a (great) live record by Konono No.1, which we listed here a few weeks back, and then after tons of internet sleuthing and a bunch of emails we finally managed to get in touch with someone at the Crammed label in Belgium who was willing to sell us this brand new studio album directly, since they are without US distribution. Phew! So was it worth it? Hell yeah! Anyone who heard that infamous sound sample (which was from this album), or who got to hear the live record, knows that this band is totally amazing, and indeed this record is beautiful, wild and wonderful, chaotic and festive, totally perplexing but completely mesmerizing. For those who missed out on the live record (which we've also just restocked!) or are new to the wonders of Konono No.1, here's the story: twenty five years ago, Konono formed in Kinshasa, an area between Congo and Angola, performing their own version of traditional Bazombo trance music, incorporating the then-unwanted distortions of their haphazard homemade sound system. They left the bush and settled in the capital where they were forced to compete with the harsh sounds of the city: cars, trains, buses, shouting, etc. So with very little to work with they fashioned pick-ups, microphones, loudspeakers and amplifiers from stuff they could find on the street -- old car batteries, pots and pans, magnets, even branches. Their main instrument is the likembe, a kind of thumb piano. Konono features three of 'em (bass, medium and treble) and the sound of the electrified and amplified likembe is what defines their sound. Accompanied by dancers and percussionists, the likembes wail and drone, buzz and moan, totally overblown and distorted, sounding a little like sixties fuzz guitars, turning a glorious high life jam into something much more strange and wonderful. Super rhythmic, and thick with the buzzing melodies of the likemebe's, Konono weave a massive sound. It's the wildest weirdest street party you've ever been to. Throbbing with energy and emotion, rambuctiously rollicking and totally infectious. Seven lengthy tracks that all sort of bleed and fuse into one epic world-psych jam. The African high life Hawkwind? So so great!
Check out this video clip:
KONONO [http://www.crammed.be/craworld/movies/konono_promo.mov]
Perhaps one of the most recognizable figures from the old school SF punk scene -- if you've checked out Jim Jocoy's great photo book We're Desperate, you might've seen a snapshot of her from back in the day! -- Bambi Lake has just released a lounge cabaret-styled album of covers and originals including "Cockettes Remembrances", "The Golden Age Of Hustlers" and "I'm One Of God's Children (Who Hasn't Got Wings)". Recorded live at the Dark Room here in SF.
None of us were surprised by how good this movie was. After all, we pretty much all love Bottle Rocket, The Royal Tennenbaums, and of course Rushmore. And really none of us should have been surprised by how great this soundtrack is either, since Wes Anderson movies are as much about the music as the movie itself. But somehow the soundtrack was a surprise. For the content as much as the way it was incorporated into the movie. The focus of the soundtrack has to be the gorgeous acoustic numbers by cast member Seu Jorge. There are 5 of them, and they just happen to all be Bowie covers, and are all sung in Portugeuse! I'm not a huge Bowie fan, but the minute we walked out of the theater, I was hoping that the soundtrack would have those tracks, and it did! Warm and languid, melancholy and dreamy, Jorge's tracks are absolutely beautiful, giving those classic rock and roll numbers a totally different nuance. And once you see the movie, those tracks will make even more (non)sense! But that's not all. Classic tracks by the Zombies, Joan Baez, Scott Walker, and the Stooges! The Stooges' "Search And Destroy" has always been one of those songs that makes you want to rumble -- that RIFF! -- and it's put to excellent use in the film! Plus a killer score by Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh. But a discussion of The Life Aquatic would not be complete without a quick digression into "The Cheadle". Not sure how many of you saw Ocean's Eleven, but Don Cheadle played a demolitions expert, with the WORST British accent ever. FOR NO REASON! Responding to every query with "Right guvnuh!" or "Cherrio!" Arghh. So infuriating. WHY WHY WHY? So consequently, pointless and poorly-performed accents are now referred to as "The Cheadle" (others refer to it as "The Kidman"). So in Life Aquatic, Owen Wilson is the one responsible for "The Cheadle", a Southern accent that at best is superfluous, and in execution is thick and impenetrable sometimes, totally non-existent at others. But fear not, that hardly detracts from how great this film is. Owen Wilson is still cute. Bill Murray still rules. The movie is still amazing and funny. And the music is still perfect!
You'll be glad to know that M83 still basically sound like some strange and wonderful mix of My Bloody Valentine, the Orb, Boards Of Canada, Stereolab and New Order. And they most definitely are still the only band around making this sort of lush, fuzzed out, electronic bliss pop. But the new record takes a strange turn. Some around here think a not so advisable one. But we'll elaborate a bit and you make the call.
First, strap yourself in, and set the controls for the heart of... the eighties.
It starts with the ultra-cheesy cover art, a late night big city scape with the band name written in a thick white graffiti scrawl. If you didn't know M83 was a band you'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a Bacardi ad for some new drink.
And sonically it follows a similar time travelling path. Imagine the eighties is a big packet of Lick-Em-Aid, you know that weird colored sugar you'd eat as a kid. So after a year of listening to the first M83 record non stop, it's nice and wet, so go ahead and dip it into your packet of eighties Lick-Em-Aid and you've basically got Before The Dawn Heals Us. Where Dead Cities was almost timeless sounding in its seamless melding of eighties pop, anime soundtrack, modern electronica, nineties shoegaze and classic Krautrock, the new record is eighties through and through. Every song could be music for a montage from Gleaming The Cube or Pump Up The Volume or Back To The Future. When you close your eyes, you can almost visualize the credits rolling over garish splashes of pastel, listing all of the other songs on the 'soundtrack' by folks like Rick Springfield, Ray Parker Jr., Cyndi Lauper, etc. That said, this is still an amazing record. For every moment of cringeworthy fluff, there's three or four of utter pop brilliance. Totally alien snatches of shimmering synth, stuttering studio fuckery, the entire thing peppered with little sounds, electronic and organic, some barely noticeable, some completely defining the songs. Before The Dawn Heals Us sounds best when the band is going full bore, firing a warm beam of thick guitars and fuzzed out synths straight up into the starry sky, stretched out over a rigid framework of drum machine and pulsing bass, that gets so bombastic it almost sounds like Dimmu Borgir or Cradle Of Filth. On first listen the cheese factor was definitely too distracting, but on each listen, those bits of dated pop just sound like pieces of a glorious bigger picture. They may stick out at first but soon, you can't imagine the rest of the record without them. Which makes sense as soon as you spend some time with the record. The whole thing just sort of flows like some unearthed eighties arthouse soundtrack. A deliriously abstract, emotionally charged musical arc, with strange snippets of dialogue and spoken word moving the musical plot forward.
On its own this might not be the perfect record, but as the second part of M83's fuzzy, blissed out musical journey into the shimmery ether, it's an absolute masterpiece.
At loooong last...and not just 'cause it's been, like, seventeen years since they last released a studio album, or even longer than that since they put out a really classic studio album (1978's Attahk), here's the new (NEW!) Magma album. It's at loooong last also in part 'cause our copies got lost in the mail coming over from France, and now *three* months after ordering 'em, a second box was shipped and we've finally got them in. Whoo-hoo! And what's the really good news? This album, K.A (short for Khontarkosz Anteria), is freakin' great! Actually, we expected it to be good. Of course we're Magma fanatics and all, but we're realistic about bands doing stuff thirty years past their prime. But we had high hopes nonetheless 'cause 1) the current incarnation of Magma absolutely slays live which Allan for one can attest from life-changing experience and 2) the material on this disc was in fact written back in the '70s, but never recorded for an album back then. (So, this is kind of Christian Vander's Brian Wilson's Smile, I guess, but better.) The results are magnificent, and gratifying.
Imagine if any amazing band from the '70s suddenly came out with a new album, that actually could fit in comfortably with one of their beloved old LPs? Hard to imagine, actually. Like if Led Zeppelin suddenly reformed (with a Bonzo clone, say) and recorded some hitherto unknown, lost link between Houses Of The Holy and Physical Graffiti. Impossible right? Well Magma's basically done the impossible here. You won't be entirely fooled into thinking this is a vintage '70s release -- the production and some of the synth sounds give it away -- but it comes darn close. And the composition K.A is without a doubt an authentic Magma masterpiece worthy of their reputation. Three tracks, one long piece.
Pretty sure this is a for-fans-already oriented release, so I dunno if we need to try and describe Magma here or not. And they're not that easy to describe anyway, being a French '70s avant-rock band that combined John Coltrane and Richard Wagner (to use the usual shorthand) in a spiritual, sci-fi, jazz-prog stew that sounds nothing like any of the other prog rock or jazz fusion bands of the day, really. Except for the ones they then influenced, of course. K.A will indeed give the uninitiated a full grounding in the classic Magma sound, that's for sure. Bombastic, epic, large-scale stuff dominated by chanting, acrobatic vocals and relentless rhythms. There's perhaps more guitar than you might expect, along with all the choirs and keyboards -- and of course, drums! Magma mainman Christian Vander is a god among drummers and shows no signs of slacking on this album.
The packaging is pretty special too...I've never seen a digipack quite like this one. There's two booklets -- one half sized. The bigger one is devoted to all of K.A's lyrics, in Magma's own made-up language Kobaian (no translations, sorry -- I guess this is just for singing-along-to purposes: "Wi wi siwili do ri / siwi do woh wehre sehn deweloi / hel hel...")
And the cover art, a moss-covered gravestone carved with the Magma logo, jutting out of the dirt against a star-strewn sky, might be a bit silly but I love it.
So, it's kind of cool, for those of us who weren't of record-buying age in the '70s, but got into Magma from buying cds by such bands as Ruins and Guapo and Koenjihyakkei and even Flying Luttenbachers, that we can now go purchase a brand new Magma!
Yet another mysterious musical discovery from the wild wooly world of underground Finnish rock. On first listen, Maniacs Dream sounds like they just might follow the same path as fellow Finns Avarus, Anaksimandros, or Kemiallliset Ystevat, with splattery, droning, free folk clatter. But we're in for a rude awakening as the band launches into a series of massive psych rock jams, echoey, reverby and relentlessly propulsive, with heavily affected riffing underpinning huge shards of angular guitar melodies. Like some unholy union of Faust and the Butthole Surfers. The ban dips into homemade electronica, damaged and slathered in all sorts of cobbled together effects, and what sounds like some sort of alien circus music, skronky and bouncy but still noisy and sinister. But those get sort of chopped up anyway, into stumbling bursts of rhythmic space rock oddness that become more raw material for MD's freaky psych rock weirdness.
As, I suppose, with so many things we sell, for some this release will mean nothing -- to others, holy crap! Check the label name: Cult Metal Classics. Well, with this release they're not lying. Perhaps you're a metal cultist yourself and/or recall us here at AQ raving about this '80s vintage metal band and the various recent (and already, again, often hard to come by) reissues of their albums, or even their latest, the return to former glories that was the Spiral Castle album. Wichita, Kansas' Manilla Road, the epitome of obscure epick, eccentrick metal! The band that The Lord Weird Slough Feg can't avoid being compared to (not because Manilla Road were an influence, they weren't, but because both bands, as traditionally metal as they are, can be so gosh darn weird). And this here is doubtless the weirdest of the whole screw-loose Manilla Road discography. Two albums actually, their 1980 debut Invasion and the 1982 follow-up Metal, which had been bootlegged before but never properly compact-disc'd until this double cd release. Though the production (and the cover art) is oh so low-budget and lo-fi, the band's imagination certainly wasn't limited. These guys were into Rush, Hawkwind, Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Motorhead -- and dosing on LSD and reading pulp fantasy fiction. And, in these early days, they were bound by no "traditional" metal blueprints (or, for that matter, commerical considerations). Heck Iron Maiden wasn't even an influence until at least their second album, the bluntly-titled Metal. So Manilla Road were free to blend psych and prog and hard rock and whatever else into what they considered to be "epic space-metal". Who else would do a song called "Defender", written from the perspective of a Defender video arcade machine?? You gotta love that. And then there's the love 'em or hate 'em vocals of guitarist Mark "The Shark" Shelton -- growling, soaring, dramatic and outlandish, ranging all over these songs, whether they be riffy and rockin', or epic and theatrical. And his guitar does the same. Quirky, pioneering, pure underground metal (or, proto-metal) indeed. About as underground as it gets. Now most folks aren't gonna like this, I'll admit right now, but a select few will -- and if you're already like Manilla Road, or the aforementioned Slough Feg, or Cirith Ungol or Brocas Helm, or are perhaps just into retro, ridiculous, unashamed rock n' roll, that might be you. There's just an infectious zeal to these proceedings that I for one can't deny.
And by the way, this reissue is a fan's delight, including lyrics and lengthy liner notes that give a very detailed early history of the band.
On his sophomore outing PREfection, Mr. Cass McCombs proves he's no run of the mill singer/songwriter. Imagine the quirky pop of Robyn Hitchcock crossed with the swoonsome elegance of Rufus Wainwright and laced with the British melancholia of Morrissey, but then drench it all in cavernous cathedral reverb a la Neko Case or My Morning Jacket. Sound good to you? He's sure got quite a knack for crafting seemingly straightforward songs that your ears will like, but he's got a few tricks up his sleeve to boot. Check out the peppy retro British pop stylings (complete with organ!) of the second song, "Subtraction". It's a great kickstart-your-morning kind of tune, not unlike a gentler version of Iggy's "Lust For Life". The next number "Multiple Suns" is quite a bit darker and more brooding, but still wholly engaging. He saves his most unconventional track for last, "All Your Dreams May Come True". For the first few minutes it's a straightforward sensitive pop song but it eventually dissolves into a lengthy soundscape.
Merzbow may be prolific to the point of no return by now, and so you may scoff at yet another release (that makes what, 10 so far this year?) but don't pass this one up. All of us around here have been mildly obsessed with Swedish ambient / noise / drone technician Nordvargr, from his days in the dark-ambient-in black-metal's-clothing outfit MZ412 to his later militaristic folk ensembles Toroidh and Folkstorm. Strangely these two noiseniks make the perfect combination, Japanoise meets Scandanavian power electronics and the result is a crushing slab of low end doom drone dirge. Merzbow created the source material for Nordvargr to process in his inimitably grim fashion. Three lengthy tracks. The first is a spine tinglingly creepy and gut churningly, ominously oppresive rumbling glitchy throb, crumbling slabs of low end over sinister whir and brittle crackling skeletal beats like the scary parts of Tron, or the part in some demonic anime snuff film when you first discover the true face of evil. Track two turns crushing ambient sludge into HUGE crunchy stuttering beats, not just block rocking beats, but beats that flatten entire neighborhoods like Autechre or Aphex twin jamming with Sunn 0))), spare and skittery, wandering through a precarious landscape of hissing blasts of Japanoise and keening squalls of high end iridescence. The final track is clicky, glitchy, haunting almost-IDM filtered through the noxious fumes of demon's breath and dipped in boiling pitch. ominous and frighteningly lovely. One of the best noise / sludge / drone / slow-motion-dance-music-for-demons record of the year!
Get ready extreme metal fans -- the most punk rock band in death metal return again with perhaps their single best recording yet. I've been an enormous fan of these Baltimore-area death/grinders since most of the band's members initially splintered off from Dying Fetus and its more narrow death-metal trappings. Misery Index retains the intensity of death metal, but further incorporate more focused song structures from a hardcore punk perspective. Don't be misled -- they're still a million times more technical than most, but they have the most anarchist-friendly smash-the-state lyrical agenda this side of a Crass compilation. Misery Index stand alone in their ability to achieve the rare combination of totally brutal heaviness contained within the context of distinct, catchy memorable and unique songs -- a sadly rare anomaly in metal these days. And the drumming! The Herculean drum abilities of the inimitable Kevin Talley have been mentioned in these pages before, but it bares repeating, if only because Talley has been absent from the last couple recording sessions. Well, he's back again, and just a few seconds of his playing will send prospective metal drummers back to the rehearsal studio, tail between legs and head bowed in shame. Overall, an intensely powerful five-song ep and a very welcome return to form. Stay with the band Kevin!
BJ Nilsen was a precocious youth, having recorded for the acclaimed Cold Meat Industries with his project Morthound back when he was only a teenager. By the time he was 21, he began working under the name Hazard. While the first Hazard album Lech was a bit of a clumsy attempt at tape loop trickery and elliptical dark ambience, his second album North earned him a well-deserved spot on the Ash International / Touch roster with his shivering gray drones and shadowy, X-Files paranoia. After having recorded 5 albums as Hazard, Nilsen may have dropped the pseudonym for good, although his minimalist signature mastery over electricity and ether remains firmly intact. Like the bulk of his Hazard recordings, Nilsen composed Fade To White from field recordings coupled with some acoustic and electric instruments; and his edits and digital processing thoroughly abstracts all of the original sounds into gliding dronescapes that are at once imposingly monolithic yet always intriguing and welcoming. Aside from a crunchy passage of sodden leaves being mulched underfoot at the beginning of the record, most of the source material for Fade To White is thoroughly abstracted within his majestic crescendos for slow-burning tonal interplay and subtle psychoacoustics. Really fantastic!
For now, the AQ list / site may not reflect it, but we have been MASSIVE, almost obsessive fans of the work of one Nordvargr, who we first discovered as the driving force behind the mysterious black metal dark ambient outift MZ412. He would later go on to record some of the most gorgeously bleak, martial ambient / drone musick as Folkstorm, Toroidh, and under his given name Henrik N Bjorkk. He is a modern master of dark ambient death drone. Most of his records have been really tough to track down, so we were super excited to be able to get enough of these to list. The name Drakh may be even less familiar to you than Nordvargr, but some of you may immediately recognize him as Nordvargr's partner in MZ412! So the hopes were quite high for what basically amounts to a new MZ412 record. And thankfully, you dark ambient death drone doom fanatics will not be disappointed. This is a crushing black souled threnody. Massive sheets of dark sound, shift and shimmer, disembodied voices crumble into sonic shards, oppressive walls of suffocating rumble, roll endlessly into the dark oblivion. But what sets this apart from other dark ambient / drone records is the guitars. Yep, guitars. About halfway in, bookended on either side by bleak shimmering lowend ambience, sirens wail, and drones creep slowly onward, as huge downtuned guitars unfurl slow motion riffs, lugubrious and lumbering, so distorted, and tuned so low you can hear the chords crumbling into pieces, while the whole thing lurches forward, through a cloud of black tar mist. It's like a Sunn 0))) track stuck in the middle of a Lustmord record. Like endless blackness being painted even more black. Like dropping a black hole into another even blacker hole...
Early in 2004, Steven Stapleton offered a taste of the Angry Eelectric Finger project in the form of a CD released through World Serpent on his United Dairies imprint. The intent was to offer a precursor to a massive 3LP / 3CD set in which Stapleton had commissioned reworkings of unpublished Nurse With Wound material from irr. app. (ext.), Cyclobe, and Jim O'Rourke. As World Serpent went out of business some six months after releasing this teaser to the Angry Eelectric Finger project (without paying Stapleton a dime for two years worth of royalties!!!), the 3LP / 3CD set fell into limbo.
Fortunately, Beta-Lactam has picked up the slack where World Serpent failed miserably, and released the Angry Eelectric Finger project in its entirety.
The Nurse With Wound source material for all of the Angry Eelectric Finger project includes interlocking varispeed warbles, prepared piano recordings, ominously seasick rhythms, and a variety of metallic crashes and slashing cymbals. Stapleton also gave the remixing artists recordings made with members of Krautrock icons Xhol Caravan as well as with David Tibet on "apocalyptic guitar." For the most part, this template of sounds is similar to the spacious, bleakness of his early Surrealist masterpiece Homotopy For Marie, although each of the remixing artists takes the material in a unique way reflecting both their own artistry as well as Stapleton's genius.
Cyclobe's alchemy upon the source material is clearly the most extreme of the three reworkings, as very little of the Stapleton and Xhol source material emerges intact on this album. Comprised of former Coil member Stephen Thrower along with Ossian Brown, Cyclobe (not Cylob) has often paralleled the golden, decadent timbre's of Coil sidereal dronescaping. With sparse and eerie ambience ghosting throughout the stereofield, Cyclobe's contribution to the Angry Eelectric Finger is probably the best we've heard from them.
Early in 2004, Steven Stapleton offered a taste of the Angry Eelectric Finger project in the form of a CD published through World Serpent on his United Dairies imprint. The intent was to offer a precursor to a massive 3LP / 3CD set in which Stapleton had commissioned reworkings of unpublished Nurse With Wound material from irr. app. (ext.), Cyclobe, and Jim O'Rourke. As World Serpent went out of business some six months after releasing this teaser to the Angry Eelectric Finger project (without paying Stapleton a dime for two years worth of royalties!!!), the 3LP / 3CD set fell into limbo.
Fortunately, Beta-Lactam has picked up the slack where World Serpent failed miserably, and released the Angry Eelectric Finger project in its entirety.
The Nurse With Wound source material for all of the Angry Eelectric Finger project includes interlocking varispeed warbles, prepared piano recordings, ominously seasick rhythms, and a variety of metallic crashes and slashing cymbals. Stapleton also gave the remixing artists recordings made with members of Krautrock icons Xhol Caravan as well as with David Tibet on "apocalyptic guitar." For the most part, this template of sounds is similar to the spacious, bleakness of his early Surrealist masterpiece Homotopy For Marie, although each of the remixing artists takes the material in a unique way reflecting both their own artistry as well as Stapleton's genius.
For my money, the irr. app. (ext.) is the best of the three. Much like the stunning NWW album Salt Marie Celeste, Waldron's album rumbles as a sustained droning mantra; this time, it's from a muffled funereal bell while broken springs, distant mechanical engines, and washboard scrapes bounce throughout the stereofield as an aggregate of sonic detritus suspended against a black hole of sound.
Early in 2004, Steven Stapleton offered a taste of the Angry Eelectric Finger project in the form of a CD published through World Serpent on his United Dairies imprint. The intent was to offer a precursor to a massive 3LP / 3CD set in which Stapleton had commissioned reworkings of unpublished Nurse With Wound material from irr. app. (ext.), Cyclobe, and Jim O'Rourke. As World Serpent went out of business some six months after releasing this teaser to the Angry Eelectric Finger project (without paying Stapleton a dime for two years worth of royalties!!!), the 3LP / 3CD set fell into limbo.
Fortunately, Beta-Lactam has picked up the slack where World Serpent failed miserably, and released the Angry Eelectric Finger project in its entirety.
The Nurse With Wound source material for all of the Angry Eelectric Finger project includes interlocking varispeed warbles, prepared piano recordings, ominously seasick rhythms, and a variety of metallic crashes and slashing cymbals. Stapleton also gave the remixing artists recordings made with members of Krautrock icons Xhol Caravan as well as with David Tibet on "apocalyptic guitar." For the most part, this template of sounds is similar to the spacious, bleakness of his early Surrealist masterpiece Homotopy For Marie, although each of the remixing artists takes the material in a unique way reflecting both their own artistry as well as Stapleton's genius.
Jim O'Rourke offers a soft kaleidoscope of DSP-impacted organ drones which mutate into clanking industrial loops. The second track features much more of the aforementioned Xhol Caravan sessions of free-improv sax and flute solos. Kinda 'jazzy'.
The return of the only true, cult, black metal magazine out there. Immediately recognizable beacuse of it's unweildy format (17" by 5" or thereabouts) and it's gorgeous silkscreened silver on black cover. This time around there's articles on / interviews with SF black metallers Ludicra, the mighty Watain, Crebain (who had a recent split with Leviathan on Andee's tUMULt label), Unearthly Trance, Atomizer, Gospel Of The Horns, Hell Militia, and of course Leviathan. As well as some record and demo reviews. Well written, and nicely laid out. With some serious financial backing these guys could easily topple the Terrorizer / Metal Maniacs / SOD / PIT / BWBK metal mag monopoly in one fell swoop. Be sure to peep the gorgeous tUMULt ad on the back cover, designed by Oaken Throne designer Ben West. Wow! Maybe even nicer than the actual cover!
And remember, that due to the magazine's size, unless you want it folded up, you're gonna have to spring for a little extra postage for it to be shipped separately. But well worth it!
Fretboard brainiac Mick Barr (of Orthrelm, Crom-Tech, Quix*o*tic, and Octis) is back with a new album from his solo manifestation Octis (and is also now living here in San Francisco, playing in the Flying Luttenbachers). Ocrilim is one 33 minute track of squiggly quasi-metallic guitar and drum machine. Electro-shock therapy too expensive? Try this! A tinny drone jabbed and jarred with manic outbursts of hyper spazz guitar, with which the drum machine can barely keep up. It's, in a word, maddening. And of course we love it.
Although this cd is credited to the individual talents of three artists -- Colophon aka Jefre Cantu of Tarentel, the guitar and synthesizer duo 1 Mile North and The Wind-Up Bird aka multi-instrumentalist Joe Grimm -- you really can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Indeed, Conduction. Convection. Radiation. as a whole is a cohesive, near-seamless work. Very spacious, drifting and atmospheric, the first three tracks are by 1 Mile North, and the following three are by Colophon. Gauzy drones cloud the skies with occasional austere guitar melodies coming in and out of focus. The latter four tracks are by The Wind-Up Bird and they're crafted from delicate elements such as violin strings that softly wheeze, and piano keys that sound as if they're being struck as if by random raindrops. Beautiful and haunting.
