Yep, another new Acid Mothers Temple transmission, this one the second to come via their Finnish fans the band Circle's Ektro imprint. And, it's a good one, for those who dig the long-form AMT stuff like La Novia. We think they're serious about this Anthem of THE Space stuff. Like, there's a contest to make the music that will be playing far out in space for all time, if you could only hear it. AMT mean to win that contest! This is a seriously spaced-out AMT effort indeed. A cosmic march into the furthest reaches of where no man (or hippy) has gone before. Except Amon Duul II. 'Cause the main part of this disc, the 44 minute title track, has very much of an Amon Duul II's Yeti vibe going on! (And thus it also reminds us of the recently AQ-reviewed My Solid Ground.) Stoner paradise. Very krautrock. A heavy, mantric riff repeating over and over a loooong time. Super hypnotic. We like! That's followed by the ten minute "Poppy Rock", a track that's more like a spacey hoedown. Kinda jig-like. A quick picker-upper after the "Anthem Of The Space".
Maybe we just didn't realize it before, but it appears that guitarist Tabata Mitsuru is now a member of the ever-evolving Acid Mothers Temple collective. Tabata you may know as KK Null's foil in Zeni Geva, or for being an early member of the Boredoms, or for his excellent solo and collborative releases in recent years. Well, now he's in the Temple, lending all of his psychedelic skills to the cause, getting co-writing credit alongside AMT "speed guru" Kawabata Makoto on the two tracks here.
Yet again, a winner from the AMT camp.
From the looks of the felt pen scrawled disc artwork you might be expecting some Wolf Eyes, Black Dice or Lightning Bolt sweaty dirge-noise bursts, but The Alps go in the opposite direction, offering up glistening meditative soundscapes well-suited to gazing at frosty mountain peaks such as those of their namesake. Makes more sense when you discover that The Alps are Scott Hewicker (Troll), Alexis Georgopoulos (Tussle) and Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Colophon, J.C. Ledesma), doesn't it?
Squeaky clarinets and alien flute toots melted into whirls of swish and whoosh, all laid over ominous drones and instrument hum and tape hiss. Quite beautiful. And as with many cd-r releases, quite limited!
Here's Annie! Cruisin' along in her '80s dance pop revival mobile with the top down and the stereo on 10. The songs on Anniemal are not unlike modernized versions of those by formulaic party girl combos the Belle Stars, Bananarama, Men's Room or early Madonna, but Annie's also got the additional cache of being from Norway. Oooh! Unlike other current female dance music singers (such as Kylie Minogue), Annie's tracks are far less slick and hugely produced and considerably more heavy on the saccharine. She floods the dancefloor with lip-smackin' marshmallow fluff. There's a time and place for the deliciously vacant, and it seems like that time is now. We could get all grumpy about this and dismiss it as yet another force-fed hipster flavor of the day, but really, how would you rather expend your energy during these summer months? Dancin' yer ass off or stompin' your foot in disapproval?
Fourth album from everyone's favorite Finnish Metallica coverin' cello quartet! Of course, they don't do any Metallica covers on this new one, as they've long since established themselves as more than just a tribute act (though, at the sold-out show they played in San Francisco this year with openers Hammers of Misfortune, they did indeed include a healthy helping of Metallica numbers in their set -- if they hadn't there woulda been a riot! Why d'you think it was sold out, after all? Metallica!). Like their previous album, Cult, this one consists of originals -- shredding, cello-metal instrumental originals. And like on Cult, the cello quartet is augmented by a drummer -- on several songs his name is Dave Lombardo of Slayer/Fantomas fame! He's not the only special celebrity guest, either. One of the bonus tracks features vocals from Nina Hagen. But the real stars of the show remain the cellos, even if Apocalyptica is sounding more and more like a metal band with cellos rather than a cello band with metal. That there's one in flames on the cover is an obvious but apt visual summation of Apocalyptica's special something. Casual fans can make do with their debut Plays Metallica By Four Cellos but how can you be just a casual fan of this classical music/metal hybrid??
Remastered and reissued for Arcade Fire fans who might've missed it the first time around, here's Arcade Fire's debut EP from 2003. From what we can tell, female vocalist Regine Chassagne seemed to have been suffering from some serious Bjork affectations (which she'd gotten over by the time they did Funeral). Likewise, Win Butler's then very-Coyne-ish vocals and the band's very-Flaming Lips-y overall productions. Nonetheless, if you've dug this band from the beginning, you'll surely find it nice to have the opportunity to hear these songs again in their freshly remastered state. If you're new to the band and are wondering what the big fuss is all about, definitely check out their Funeral album first.
Upon their release, Paid In Full (1987) and Follow The Leader (1988) were instant classics. Pioneering the recipe of simple beats, perfect samples (including a first use of James Brown) and powerful bad-ass rhyming with super smooth flow, EB&R led hip-hop into new territory and have since not quite been matched in their effortless style and effectiveness. If you've lost your cassette tape versions of these classic albums and didn't go for any earlier overly expensive reissues, here's your chance to get 'em pretty true to the original album with only a few new remixes.
Upon their release, Paid In Full (1987) and Follow The Leader (1988) were instant classics. Pioneering the recipe of simple beats, perfect samples (including a first use of James Brown) and powerful bad-ass rhyming with super smooth flow, EB&R led hip-hop into new territory and have since not quite been matched in their effortless style and effectiveness. If you've lost your cassette tape versions of these classic albums and didn't go for any earlier overly expensive reissues, here's your chance to get 'em pretty true to the original album with only a few new remixes.
With all the retro-sixties rock coming out of Sweden (Dungen, The Hives, The Works), one could mistakenly think that Sweden was somehow a land that time forgot where the sixties never fell out of fashion. In fact the opposite was quite true for pioneering garage rockers The Backdoor Men and their contemporaries The Stomachmouths (big faves of ours, see AQ New Arrivals list #166). In 1980 when the group first formed, as The Pow, mod was hardly something understood by their fellow Swedes -- who preferred reggae, new wave or heavy metal -- and the sharply dressed outcasts were constantly derided or attacked. Their home town of Almhult has the claim to fame of being the site of the first Ikea store, if that's any indication of the culture the group was up against. In 1984 with the tiny mod scene splintering and otherwise deteriorating, the group changed their name to The Backdoor Men and cultivated a turbo-charged sound that fused the sounds of English punk with sixties garage. Along with a clear influence from the Rolling Stones, the band owed much to the music of the Sonics, the Chocolate Watch Band and the Music Machine (covers of the three bands are included with this anthology). In contrast to contemporaries the Stomachmouths, the music of the Backdoor Men is a great deal more jangly, with slower tempos and more noticeable shades of soul and R&B latent from their mod days. This reissue comes with a nicely printed 18 page booklet with a detailed bio on the band and archival photos.
The Believer is always a good read, but you won't want to miss the 2005 Music isssue. Plenty of good reading this time around as well: articles about Beck, the Danielson Famile, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater Kinney interviews Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a discussion between comedian Patton Oswalt and musician Aimee Mann, an interview with teenage rpock combo Smoosh, an article about singing drummers and much much more. But you also get a cd jam packed with Aquarius faves, covering -other- Aquarius faves: the Decemberists cover Joanna Newsom, Spoon covers Yo La Tengo, the Constantines cover Elevator To Hell, the Espers cover Fursaxa, the Mountain Goats cover the Silver Jews, Coco Rosie cover Damien Jurado, The Shins cover the Postal Service, San Serac cover Ida, Josephine Foster covers the Cherry Blossoms, Cynthia G. Mason covers Richard Buckner, and Jim Guthrie covers the Constantines. Wow!
As we've mentioned before, we have all been huge fans of the black metal ambient outfit MZ412, as well as the work that followed from Nordvargr and Drakh, the two masterminds behind MZ412, Folkstorm, Toroidh, BSE and the recent Nordvargr / Drakh collaboration. Well suddenly, for some reason, it's gotten a whole lot easier to get a hold of all their records so we're finally able to share yet another of our musical obsessions with the AQ faithful. This is release number five from Beyond Sensory Experience, aka Drakh. The first three BSE records (all released in 2003) were ritualistic dark ambient experiments, examining through sound, the affect of and the correlation between numbers, music and life. Pretty heady stuff, but somehow the dense drones and ambient explorations found on those records seemed like they could in fact explain and expose, if one was just willing to let go and let the music carry them away. This newest record is much more active, and alive sounding, perhaps because now the focus is on life and sexuality. Ultimately this is still a drone record, or a dark ambient record if you prefer, but the shading is more distinct, and the sonic pallet much more broad, from the dirgey plucked guitar of "Pursuit Of Pleasure", almost like a minimal, distortion-free Earth, to the soaring strings and cinematic grandiosity of "Affection / Devotion", to the staticky submarine rumble and subtle sepia shadings of "Hold Your Breath And Close Your Eyes". Sure to satisfy drone obsessives and dark ambient freaks, but close listening reveals so much more than those broad descriptors would lead you to expect. Layer after layer to gradually unwrap, sounds that sneak up on you where you swear there weren't sounds before, and so many details that lay hidden, only to surface after repeated exposure...
We've said it once, we'll say it again. Actually, we've probably said it a million times, but we'll STILL say it again. There are some sounds we just never get sick of. NEVER. The bombinating buzz of grim black metal is one, a drone-y relentless hypnotic swirl that never fails to lull us into a beautifully blackened state. And of course, super distorted, blown out ragga drum and bass is another (a la aQ faves The Bug). This here is a prime slab of that classic sound. Bizzy B was one of the most influential junglists of the early nineties having released his first blast of brutality in 1991. The stuff on this here ep is BRAND NEW, but you'd never know it from the sound, and is the follow up to Volumes I and II, released in '93 / '94. HUGE amen breaks, super complex and chaotic, crunchy synth stabs and lots of creepy ambience and found sounds. But it's all about the rhythm. We've joked that someone could just make a 24 hour loop of the amen break and we could lay there blissfully listening forever. The Amen break, for those of you who don't know, is a drum loop, THE drum loop, that was sped up and chopped up and basically become the primary building block for jungle and drum and bass. The loop is from the Winstons' track "Amen Brother", hence the name. And the original is the perfect shuffling stutter step funky beat, but once it's been tweaked and messed with and sped up and chopped up, it becomes a relentlessly convoluted, pounding and pummeling beat that we just never get tired of. There are a few snippets of cringeworthy diva style vocals, but skip those brief moments and you're left with a divine slab of darkcore jungle madness!
The return of Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel) shadowy cloaked, blackened dirge-drone-sort-of-metal alter ego Black Boned Angel. The latest in Celebrate Psi Phenomenon's Battlecruiser series of ambient experimentalists gone metal. This twenty minute chunk of grim sludge is a little teaser for a forthcoming double cd!
Not quite as overtly metal as the recently reviewed Supereclipse cd, Eternal Love starts off much more sonically aligned with Kneale's more ambient exploits with BCM. Things start to go south (as in south of Heaven) a few minutes in with the introduction of creepy crawly gothy bass lines, drifting through the abyss, bass riffs begin but are abandoned part way through only to resurface moments later, like the skeleton of Joy Division, reanimated and lurching drunkenly through the scorched and barren underworld. Eventually this haunting bass line slips off the edge and into a suffocating blackened swirl of downtuned ultra distorted bass, grinding slow motion metal guitar, and plodding industrial percussion, a head crushing plod offering some sort of rhythmic guidance through Eternal Love's hellish tar pit trawl. SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
We've been wanting to list this for a long time now but have been waiting for it to get reissued as a double disc with the new ep tacked on. Well, now the wait is finally over. This grim French outfit somehow manage to play some seriously convincing classic black metal, but in the process, do something indescribable to it, adding all sorts of off kilter guitar parts, industrial pummel, totally alien melodies, huge stretches of suffocating ambience, and totally convoluted midtempo dirges, turning it into some of the most demented, deliriously damaged black metal we've ever heard. Even when they sound like they're just blazing through a passage of straight up black metal, all these little bits and pieces just sound not quite right, which is what makes Blut Aus Nord so fucking amazing. When they slow down, which they do quite a bit, the guitars seem to splinter into jagged shards, malfunctioning and becoming what sound distinctly like SST / Black Flag riffs and licks, you know, all stumbling and angular weirdness. And when they kick out the jams and explode into a buzzing blasting fury, there are strange guitar sounds swooping and soaring everywhere, sonic shards careening past, drones and multiple layers of buzz and hiss envelop every blast like a graveyard fog. The record opens with a two minute track confusingly titled "End", two minutes of swirling ambience, chilly winds and distant chimes, all buried beneath a murky barely there drone, and then the record ends with the also strangely titled "Procession Of The Dead Clowns", a ten minute melancholy doom dirge, simple drums and a simple keening mournful guitar melody, relentless and plodding and totally dismally intense. Between the two are ten tracks of the above mentioned grim and evil, relentlessly repetitive confusional black metal, draped with all manner of bizarre moaning, fucked up guitar damage, weirdly sliding riffage, and all drowning in drones and dirge, howling blackened ambience and seriously bizarre blasting black metal brutality.
Also included is Blut Aus Nord's more recent ep release, Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity, five tracks, 28 minutes of haunting, moaning midtempo dirges, bizarre industrial, drum machined drones, massive slow motion doom, and creepy experimental ambience. Essential.
Some of the AQ shoppin' stoner rock contingent ought to remember Buffalo, an honest to gosh band of Austrialian proto-metal pioneers from the early '70s. We used to stock a 2-fer-1 disc (can't get it anymore, dang) that collected their more Monster Magnet than Monster Magnet ever wuz albums Volcanic Rock ('73) and Want You For Your Body ('74). Missing that disc as we do, we were happy to find a few copies of this, a cd reissue of their prematurely tired-of-living debut from 1972. Dead Forever (nice title, they had a knack for that) was originally released on Vertigo, and at the time Buffalo were probably tipped as an Aussie version of Vertigo best sellers Black Sabbath. Close, no cigar, but what they're smoking has its charms anyhoo. This album's a graveyard of grinding dirgey yeah-yeah-yeah rockers, the kind that demand (as the back cover literally does) you to "play this LOUD". You've got to 'cause this band's lurching riffs and electric psychedelic blues bashings need all the help they can get since producers back then didn't yet know exactly what real metal required. True, this has a few quiet, balladic numbers on it (not bad ones either) but will be 'specially valued for trudging lead-foot boogie blooze proto-DOOM like you get with the album-closing title track coffin-nail-hammerer. For folks who also dig the similarly lost and wasted, stoned guitars and wailing vocals of such acts as Captain Beyond, Randy Holden, Juan de la Cruz, Toad, Leafhound, and Sir Lord Baltimore.
The very first Burzum album, released in 1992, here coupled with the Aske ep released about a year later. This is seriously grim and brutal black metal. Super distorted, very inelegant stumbling buzzing, brooding black metal madness. Lots of folks consider this to be the ultimate Burzum record (the most 'true'). Perhaps because it is in fact the most immediate and openly furious, forgoing musical dexterity for a blast of pure and passionate hate. An all out attack on all things sacred. A gorgeously primitive and profane black metal document.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
The first Burzum album recorded in prison. Not sure whether it was a conscious choice, or lack of access to instruments in prison, but the infamous Count Grishnack's Daudi Baldurs, finally released in 1997, utilized keyboards only. A classical / medieval / nordic concept album that sort of sounds a bit like "Peter and the Wolf" and lacks the unholy fuzz of his past recordings, but does manage to generate a wee bit of atmosphere and boasts some intense paintings on the sleeve, but ultimately not nearly as musically or emotionally charged as the more metal Burzum records.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
Record number two from Count Grishnackh, and here we begin to see the seeds of what is to come. The sound is still raw and primitive, all buzzsaw distortion and howled inhuman vocals. Midtempo and stumbling like a three legged hell hound. But now there is plenty of creepy synths, and occasional swaths of instrumental dark ambience. Fans of the classic Filosefem, will find this much to their liking as well, just as creepy and haunting, but much less refined and much more raw and brutal.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
By now, unless you've been living underneath a VERY big rock, you know all about Count Grishnackh aka Burzum, Euronymous, Bard Faust, Mayhem, Emperor and all the killing and church burnings and suicides. If for some reason you don't know about all this stuff, go buy yourself a copy of The Lords Of Chaos, a book that covers all that stuff in great detail. The problem with all this drama, murder, satanism, whatever, you forget that the whole reason these guys knew each other, and the only reason any of us cared, was the music they made. And that music they made was black metal. A black metal that thanks to the decidedly non-musical drama, would soon make black metal a household name.
So when folks ask us to recommend some classic black metal, we always recommend Satyricon's Nemesis Divina, Immortal's Battles In The North, Emperor's Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk, and of course Burzum's Filosefem. Filosefem, originally released in 1996 holds a special place in our outsider music hearts, as the first black metal record to turn the whole black metal formula completely upside down. Count Grishnackh was the only member and played all the instruments, even the drums, which gives the whole thing a weirdly damaged droning swing. A rhythm that would define the rhythmic sound of later black metal legends like Graveland and Woodtemple. The guitars are a thick suffocating buzz, razor sharp and totally blown out. And the vocals are an anguished wail, some sort of primeval demonic incantation. But where Burzum stands out most is the addition of a creepy synthesizers that hover in the background of several of the tracks, a haunting melody buried beneath the swirl of fuzz and ultradistortion. Unlike other BM bands, the keyboard isn't a huge wash of strings to add some sort of epic quality, these tracks are already epic enough, here the keyboards are much more spare, a simple minor key melody is picked out, almost childlike, hovering briefly, before the next note follows. Except for one blazing blast of a track, Filosefem is mostly midtempo, lurching and heaving, stumbling down dirt road into a smeared grey landscape. But as the record nears the last few tracks, the record changes, beginning with the nearly half hour long "Rundgang um die Transzendentale Saule der Singularitat", a track that eschews any hint of metal, stripping away the guitars, the drums, everything, and leaving just the synthesizer, as it unfurls a seemingly endless Aphex Twin like four note melody. Forlorn and strangely compelling. And in the context of the whole record, as emotionally devastating as anything we've heard. The final track "Gebrechlichkeit II", brings back the guitars, but makes them nearly static, an endlessly blurry vacuum cleaner like riff, slowly shifting, as another haunting melody drifts wraith like in the background. Definitely one of the most essential and unique metal records of all time.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
The final Burzum album, another all keyboard affair, recorded in prison and again the sound is mostly atmospheric, swooshing keyboards, some simple drum machine rhythms, a bit of folky filigree here and there. Supposedly evoking the ambience of Nordic forest and Nordic Pride (a barely disguised white pride, as Grishnackh, now Vikernes, discovered his true Nazi self in prison) this is a mostly disposable dark ambient record, for only the true Burzum completists.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
The title roughly translated is "What once was," but Det Som Engang Var is more about what is to come, the perfect bridge between the grim raw primitive Burzum of old and the beautifully bizarre grim blackness / haunting electronic hybrid that Burzum was to become. Originally released in 1994, the year he was sentenced to prison for murdering Mayhem's Euronymous, Hvis is a buzzing droning black metal masterpiece. Which would have probably remained the most essential Burzum document had Filosefem not been released 2 years later.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
12 live tracks and 4 rare demos of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band are the stuff of OZit's newest anthology. Not much information is included with this release, just a catalog of previous OZit releases. All the tracks are from the early to mid-seventies, so there's lots of French's Mirror Man drumming style here -- lots of toms -- and the songs tend to be long, jammy, and bluesy. The studio tracks included are "Moody Liz", "Beatle Bones & Smoking Stones" (split into two tracks), and "gimme dat harp boy". The live tracks are: "be your dog" (no, not the Stooges song), "upon the my o my", "keep on rubbing", "mirror man", "crazy little thing", "full moon hot sun", "sweet georgia brown", "this is the day", "peaches" (two versions), "sugar bowl", and "abba zabba". Limited (how many, we're not sure), hand numbered edition.
Dizzying! Mathematically advanced, metalcore deathgrind stoner madness (and more!) from these Colorado freaks. Definitely a worthy successor to their previous pot-fueled masterpiece, the labyrinthine Lucid Interval. In fine grind style, you get plenty o' samples and gargled inhuman vox on top of Cephalic's metallic geek frenzies. But just when you think you have a handle on what's going on, you'll find...anomalies. These guys like to mix it up, from Dillinger/Cryptopsy craziness to doom sludge to hardcore breakdowns, to the epic moody almost-goth creepiness of the disc's final track "Octogeny Of Behavior". And for those who think "stoner" rock is supposed to sound like Sabbath or Kyuss, well...just check out the heavy psych riffage that kicks off track five, that ought to make you happy! Overall, pretty amazing, as we expect from these guys. Just imagine a corrupted filesharing session between Meshuggah and Neurosis...
With all of those Jewelled Antler projects keeping AQ's dear friend Loren Chasse busy, it's no wonder that it took over three and half years for him to complete the follow up to his acclaimed 2002 album Hedge of Nerves. Yep, it's true that Loren has released two solo projects under the Jewelled Antler moniker Of; but he doesn't see work such as The Air In The Sand (or Hedge of Nerves, or anything from id battery or Coelacanth, for that matter) as being related to Jewelled Antler. Who are we to argue?
That said, Loren's solo work is made in pretty much the same manner as much of the Jewelled Antler work, particularly The Blithe Sons, where he treks up and down the Pacific Coast making tons of field recordings and then playing those recordings back in similar environments with small speakers and occasional accompaniments from rocks, sand, teasles, leaves, and the occasional alto recorder. Part of this process is an attempt to move away from the constraints of the digital workstation; but at the same time, Chasse is far more interested in the curious alchemy that occurs when a space listens to itself making sound. A nighttime chorus of crickets gurgles within aqueous percolations and the tectonic crash of surf crashing against rock. Rain vaporizes in a caustic sizzle as it falls upon overhead electrical wires, and this sound is compouned by the sharp crack of branches and the slow hiss of sand. For all of the elemental sounds that dominate his recordings, Chasse extracts subtle musical timbres and fragile half-melodies that haunt The Air In The Sand. Beautiful and timeless, this is another marvellous album from Mr. Chasse.
While this is the reissue of the second Chrystal Belle Scrodd record which was originally released in 1986, Belle De Jour features some of the earliest recordings that Diana Rogerson produced with her husband Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound). Belle De Jour opens with three short pieces of bowed cymbal scrapes and metallic screeches bathed in variable layers of reverb sounding not too far off from the early Nurse With Wound album Homotopie For Marie. However, things get really going later on in the disc when Rogerson and Stapleton present "Deadroads / A Gothic Western," which gets off to a groovy start with an infinitely looped '60s go-go rock riff twisted into something that Brainticket would have been proud to have birthed, complete with hallucinogenic guitar freak-outs and Diana ranting in a cavalcade of voices through an impossible to follow stream of consciousness narrative. The thunderous "Riding The Red Rag" follows this piece with Diana's cold-stare vocals haunting above a thick atmosphere of drones and heavily reverbed cracks from a kick drum. Unfortunately, this reissue confuses some of the names of the tracks, as "Riding The Red Rag" is misnamed as "The Demon Flower," and the equally impressive creepfest "Black Mother Mountain" is listed as "Riding The Red Rag." This may probably only upset the die-hard NWW completists; but it certainly does not distract from this amazing reissue of damaged art-rock / post-industrial mantras. Recommended.
Diana Rogerson began her art career in the early '80s collaborating with Jill Westwood in Fistfuck, which has long been referred to as the "female Whitehouse" because of their infamously humilitating performances, intense sonic actions, and degrading films. Some of soundtracks to those films were actually not scored by Fistfuck but by Chrystal Belle Scrodd, the moniker of Rogerson and her future husband Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound. Throughout the early Nurse With Wound recordings, Rogerson made her presence known, thanks mostly to her eeriely zombified vocal delivery which blended perfectly within NWW's surrealist collages of decontextualized sounds and darkly lysergic atmospheres. By 1985, the two conspired to release the first Chrystal Belle Scrodd record as a separate entity from Nurse With Wound. While Stapleton's fingerprints are all over the Chrystal Belle Scrodd recordings, the direction and peculiarties of the debut recording speak much more of Diana Rogerson's sensibility, that's only slightly more indebted to psych-art-rock structuralism than Nurse With Wound. The Inevitable Chrystal Belle Scrodd Record opens with an oblique rhythmic tumble of Egyptian reeds, cat-scratch guitar feedback, and all-thumbs bass fumbling that dissolves into a quiet rumble on top of which Rogerson offers one of her trademark, emotionally detached mantras with plenty of double entendres and overt sexual declarations. Later on, Rogerson and Stapleton get a bit more abstract with nightmarishly kaleidoscopic twists of children's voices, twinkling bells, throbbing ritual drums, and discordant horns soaked in a metallic reverb and haunted drones.
Let's get this out of the way first: most folks around these parts consider Comus' First Utterance to be the greatest seventies pagan tribal folk prog psych freakout record ever. Hard to debate that. But among those folks, about 99 percent also consider First Utterance to be one of the greatest records ever, regardless of genre! One listen and you'll be convinced. Or you'll run away screaming in terror. Either way, it's hard to not be totally blown away and / or thrillingly confused by the mad musical world of Comus.
First Utterance has now been reissued a total of six times now (by our count, with maybe yet another edition on the way!) but this UK import double cd version marks the very first time that the three tracks from the pre-First Utterance maxi-single (i.e. the bonus 12" ep included with the lp reissue) has been released on cd as well. AND this also includes another totally unreleased bonus track from the First Utterance sessions! Holy crap! Every time a new cd reissue would be announced, we'd be thinking to ourselves "please please please include the extra tracks..." but somehow it never happened. Until now! That should be enough to have you Comus obsessives and seventies psych prog freeks all in a tizzy, but that's not all. Also included is their second album released a few years later after the band reformed, as well as a final solo single from Comus frontman Roger Wooten. But we'll talk about that stuff in a moment. First, let's explain just what it is about First Utterance that has us so excited!
THIS RECORD SCARES US. Hearing it is like stumbling upon some forbidden ancient ritual that scares you to death. You stand paralyzed, too afraid to look away. Comus's singular, frightening sound and violently poetic lyrics have kept them from taking their rightful place alongside Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, and the rest of Britain's psychedelic folk royalty.
And we don't write the words psychedelic folk royalty without a certain amount of trepidation. At first glance Comus would seem to fit squarely in the Ren-Faire camp: bongos, flute, oboe, 12-string guitar, and no drummer. But never has the whole of a band so completely defied its parts; their sound is as mesmerizing as it is repulsive. Upon the record's initial release, one British music journalist wrote that she "didn't get past the first track, which sounded like a cross between a frenzied version of the witches chorus from Macbeth, and Marc Bolan being squeezed to death." Funny thing is, that's a fairly apt description. Tales of murder, rape, insanity, and witchcraft unfold amid a swirling abyss of seething acid folk. Squalls of shamanistic wailing jut uncomfortably from serene, tranquil melodies; guttural growls battle a delicate angelic chorus, echoing the violent struggle of the lyrics. Flutes, hand drums, acoustic guitars, and a violin clamber atop one another in a chaotic melee, creating a pagan folk not unlike that of The Wicker Man soundtrack gone totally bonkers.
Although the band has been resolutely ignored by mainstream music fans, the press, and the majority of the underground, a small rabid following has kept a reverential vigil beside the corpse of Comus. Nurse with Wound cronies Current 93 modeled their '90s sound after '70s British folk, Comus especially. They even went so far as to cover "Diana," Comus's only single, on their album Horsey. Swedish progressive black metallers Opeth have always been outspoken about their love of Comus. Their acclaimed 1998 album was called My Arms, Your Hearse, after the lyrics of "Drip Drip". And it's not surprising. This record is so powerful and frightening and totally devastating even 30 years later.
And never would we have thought that a record as old as us, with flutes and bongos fer chrissakes, could be so absolutely malevolent, both sonically and lyrically! But like we said, this record scares us. And we know you like to be scared too! One of our ALL TIME FAVORITE RECORDS EVER!!!
So yeah, there it is. Well worth it for First Utterance alone, and the First Utterance era bonus tracks (especially when you consider this version is a buck cheaper than the single disc, non-bonus-track havin' Japanese import version). But you also get, for the first time on cd, Comus' second album To Keep From Crying (1973), as well as the post-Comus "Fiesta Fandango" solo single from Wooten. Pretty exciting stuff for Comus fanatics indeed, but be warned, the Comus found on To Keep From Crying bears very little resemblance to the Comus of First Utterance. Some would go so far as to say that where FU is one of the best records ever, TKFC is perhaps one of the worst...yet not without its charms. Not sure if it was a bid to find pop success, or just a case of lightning already having struck once, but TKFC is not malevolent or really all that intense, instead it's a very light, very jaunty, lush seventies UK pop record, a little glam, a little Beach Boys, a little Free Design, a little Eno, not bad (well, some of it isn't), but not really all that good. It's as if the original Comus were given entirely different drugs (not bad trip acid but something more "happy") and were forced to attempt to make a Top 40 hit. You can still tell it's them, though (the vocals are just as tweaked as before) so it's pretty darn strange. A few of the songs are quite nice acid folk numbers, just not as dark as the nightmarish folk found on FU. But some of the other tracks, well, they're at least amusing in a so bad it's good kind of way. Even the band members themselves in the liner notes talk about how much they dislike that record now. Andee even bought the original LP a few years back on eBay, even though the description warned "Not as good as First Utterance." Who cares? he thought, it was ANOTHER RECORD BY COMUS!! But alas he too soon discovered for himself that it was no First Utterance. While almost any record would pale when set up against First Utterance, TKFC was a particularly watered down follow up, and outside of that equally weak solo single, that was the end of the band.
Song To Comus' booklet contains lots of photos and amazing liner notes, which include this tantalizing and totally frustrating tidbit: before TKFC, there was actually a Lord Of The Rings inspired suite of songs (a proper follow up to First Utterance) already written called Malgaard, that the band had begun performing live but never got around to recording! We flipped when we read about that. Can you imagine? Sadly, it just wasn't meant to be. And they also never recorded their live version of "Venus In Furs", either (apparently Comus started out doing lots of VU covers!). Ah well. But still, we're more than happy with the amazing musical malevolence Comus left as their legacy.
So those of you who haven't discovered Comus, what else can we do to convince you that you NEED this record? Folkies will love it, but it's plenty dark and creepy and sinister enough for all you metalheads, and way weird enough for all you experimental music lovers. And of course Comus obsessives (like Andee and Allan) who already have multiple versions of First Utterance will for sure need this one as well, probably for the curiousity factor of the second album, just to satisfy your all consuming love of Comus, but certainly to finally have the bonus 12" on cd and DEFINITELY for the unreleased First Utterance outtake "All The Colours Of Darkness"! Let your pagan prog rock psych folk freek flag fly!
Julian Cope. Druidic dunt-rocker, Head Heritage head, krautrock aficionado, megalith expert, and ex-pop sike rock star (with The Teardrop Explodes in the '80s). Here's his latest, a double disc rock fest, and it's very much the product of Julian Cope's various musical obsessions, the classic heavy psych rock he loves (visit www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung to read some of what he's written about so enthusiastically, educationally and entertainingly on the subject!).
The latest (July 2005) issue of The Wire magazine features a piece on Julian Cope. It's not about Cope's own music, really, but about how Cope's great taste in other people's music turned the writer on to lots of stuff that he'd have never heard about otherwise (this was in the pre-Internet dark ages of the '80s). In fact, the Wire scribe's crucial Cope record was an *interview disc* wherein Julian discussed such then-obscure faves as Can, The Stooges, Neu!, and Nick Drake.
Here at AQ, we've heard from Cope on a few releases in recent years -- there was his guest spot on SUNNO)))'s White 1 album, delivering some pagan poetry to go with their heavy duty drone, and also his band Brain Donor, that featured Cope and some members of Spiritualized wanting to be your dog Stooges-style. The Detroit influence comes through too on Citizen Cain'd, an album of clever, heavy psych and pop rock n' roll. Indeed, this could be a pretty darn great Iggy album!
Two sprawling discs with some epic length songs (and radio-worthy alternate universe hits, like the jangly n' distorted "Living In The Room They Found Saddam In" -- that also should get an award for its title/lyric, eh?). We're also really into the slow burn psych rock that disc one closer "I Will Be Absorbed" stretches out into, as well as the more almost indie-rock (but still sorta Iggish) styled stuff that occupies much of disc two.
Since we pretty much know Julian Cope for what he's a fan of, not what's done himself (as per that Wire article), we're happy to discover that all that good taste hasn't gone to waste regarding his own stuff... probably folks who've followed Cope's career over the years already know that. Recommended.
Third album (first we've listed, but the others are good too!) from NYC's Darediablo, a keyboards/guitar/drums power trio that anyone into instrumental heavy rockin' ought to investigate forthwith! Taking sonic inspiration from '70s heavy prog/metal organ-combos like Deep Purple, but losing the singer and upping the math quotient, Darediablo are probably the only band we've ever heard who have been compared in the same breath to both Slayer and Booker T & the MGs and, heck, that does kind of make sense! They surely don't go all the way to either of those two extremes, but you can see how they fit in there between 'em someplace (though, we'd say closer to Booker T). Heavy yet groovy. Stoner rock gone a little bit prog, this could could be a good one for fans of Stinking Lizaveta, Karma To Burn, and the Mystick Crewe of Clearlight to name a few bands that operate in the sonic vicinity of these guys.
There sure seems to be a lot of mediocre metalcore bands around these days, metalcore is the pop punk of this decade. Every kid is mixing in some heartfelt emotion with their pounding metallic pummel. Thankfully Darkest Hour is not one of them. These guys have been chuggin' along since 1995, believe it or not. In 2003 they released Hidden Hands Of A Sadist Nation which was a dark and brutal masterpiece that channelled the Swedish style of the late 90's through a modern metal aesthetic. The follow-up is this here disc and is called Undoing Ruin and their label has done them no favors touting it as "the next Ride the Lightning" or "the next Slaughter of the Soul". Not really fair to US or THEM. Time, as always, is the only way to tell�
What Undoing Ruin brings is this: lots of back and forth chunka-chunkage, some dry-throated screaming, lots of mid-tempo Mastodon-like drumming with loads of little fills and splashes, some killer melodic twin dive-bomber leads whipping wildly back and forth but always in control. For all you metal "purists" out there who would never dare listen to a "Victory Band" or some crappy metalcore band, do yourself a favor, swallow your pride and check these guys out!
If Darkest Hour were on Relapse odds are they would be way better positioned to hit their target audience: metalheads. that said, they don't seem to be doing such a bad job turning little punks onto some very heavy metal! There are even some brief acoustic breaks and cool little melodic bits sprinkled here and there, but it's not long before the pummeling onslaught renews. Reminds us of former metallic greats like Beyond Possession, the Accused, there's even some serious Slayer Reign In Blood / Meshuggah style fretboard dynamics goin' on. You gotta love that.
There is NOTHING emo or screamo or even hardcore about this release despite the label affiliation. Darkest Hour just keep getting better and better, tighter and heavier, and the proof is in the epic /melodic / power / thrash / core of Undoing Ruin.
This out of print mini album has just been re-issued by the kind folks at Kill Rock Stars, so those of you who missed out last time around get another chance. Here's what we had to say the first time around:
A new ep from our favorite Dickensian miserablists. One eighteen minute track called The Tain, a five part mini epic based on Celtic myth, that starts off as a creeping, slowed down waltz, all fuzzy minor keys, and mournful guitars before picking up into punk rock Pogues territory, rollicking and rocking with warbly organs, and a super hypnotic groove, and of course Colin Meloy's insantly recognized lisping brogue-ish drawl. As with any epic, moods shift and sounds change continuously taking the listener on a musical/emotional journey. Throughout the rest of the Tain, the sound shifts from lugubrious ballads of mopery and misery to circus flecked nursery rhymes to Parisian folk and back. So good!
Allan also has to point out that The Tain is the same book of Irish myth that our local metal faves Slough Feg like to drawn upon for their lyrics too...
For Green Cosmos, Deerhoof have kicked things up a notch on their already-deliciously frenetic art-rock quirk-o-meter, and they've done so in impressive style! They've not only branched off in ways that may appeal to a broader audience without alienating their old fans, but also locked into some more out-there planes. Quite a bit more melodic and composed, but also sorta like a tricked-out Beatles' "Revolution #9" mashed up with candy-coated anime soundtracks and of course some Capt. Beefheart and Melt-Banana too. At times very bizarre and epic with its grand assemlbage of tinkly toybox sounds, winky guitar stabs, tight rhythmic progressions and those pussycat-cooing vocals. You can easily imagine this accompanying a giant puppet show. Or if we were to compare it to an amusement park ride, it'd be some sorta mongrel mutant of a rollercoaster and a bumper car. Only seven songs (six new, two revised older ones "Come See The Duck" and "Byun") clocking in at around fifteen minutes, but oh such utterly splendid precision and chaos in every twisted adventure pop bite. Wheeeeeeeee!
A little somethin' to accompany your new Deerhoof Green Cosmos cdep! This split record delivers two suitably unpredictable tunes from that Bay Area band as well as a single more conventional guitar-driven song from Minneapolis based trio Sicbay. Deerhoof's music has always been heavy on the sharp angles and tightly knotted rhythms, and these songs are no exception if a bit moodier than we've come to expect from them. Pretty darn great!
We've featured some BBC Radiophonic Workshop collections in the past, but these two discs are especially exciting as it's all music and sound effects from the cult British television show Doctor Who! Before we get into it, Doctor Who fanatics, please go easy on us. We're new to this whole Doctor Who thing (not me! says Doctor Who fan Allan). For one we only recently learned that the Doctor was not indeed named Doctor Who, but simply 'The Doctor' which then prompts the response "Doctor Who?". We know, we know... Anyway, our pal Jay Lesser introduced us to the wonderful world of Doctor Who, by lending us a massive load of Doctor Who DVD's and now we're hooked. So hooked that we had our friend Lynda record the NEW series for us and send them over as they aired. And while we know everyone has a favorite Doctor, and for us it was Tom Baker (maybe just because he was our first!) we have been pretty smitten with the NEW Doctor, Christopher Eccleston (Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later, 24 Hour Party People). Unfortunately he only signed up for one season, and we've only gotten a brief glimpse of the new Doctor (that would be Doctor number 10!). Anyway, point is we've been all fired up about the new season, which features the same music, the same sound effects, but in a much more modern package. Still properly cheesy, but way more advanced. The important thing is all the classic sounds are there. It's part of what made the show so great. And makes the new version great too. When you hear the sound of the TARDIS landing, you get that familiar little chill. Part thrill part deja vu. And all those sounds are here on these two discs: the materialization of the TARDIS, creepy music for the Daleks, as well as loads of random sound effects and bits of incidental music, even multiple versions of the classic theme song (composed by BBC Radiophonic Workshop legend Delia Derbyshire)! So cool! Just listening to these has gotten us all excited to watch more Doctor Who. Volume One covers the early years, 1963-1969, while Volume Two is subtitled New Beginnings and covers the years 1970-1980. Doctor Who fanatics will no doubt probably already own these (or if not will buy them immediately without even reading the review), but anyone who loves weird sound effects and digs crazy sounds will love these. And even though they seem to be a bit of a hodgepodge of random sounds and snippets of music, they are a surprisingly cohesive and totally enjoyable listen! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
We've featured some BBC Radiophonic Workshop collections in the past, but these two discs are especially exciting as it's all music and sound effects from the cult British television show Doctor Who! Before we get into it, Doctor Who fanatics, please go easy on us. We're new to this whole Doctor Who thing (not me! says Doctor Who fan Allan). For one we only recently learned that the Doctor was not indeed named Doctor Who, but simply 'The Doctor' which then prompts the response "Doctor Who?". We know, we know... Anyway, our pal Jay Lesser introduced us to the wonderful world of Doctor Who, by lending us a massive load of Doctor Who DVD's and now we're hooked. So hooked that we had our friend Lynda record the NEW series for us and send them over as they aired. And while we know everyone has a favorite Doctor, and for us it was Tom Baker (maybe just because he was our first!) we have been pretty smitten with the NEW Doctor, Christopher Eccleston (Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later, 24 Hour Party People). Unfortunately he only signed up for one season, and we've only gotten a brief glimpse of the new Doctor (that would be Doctor number 10!). Anyway, point is we've been all fired up about the new season, which features the same music, the same sound effects, but in a much more modern package. Still properly cheesy, but way more advanced. The important thing is all the classic sounds are there. It's part of what made the show so great. And makes the new version great too. When you hear the sound of the TARDIS landing, you get that familiar little chill. Part thrill part deja vu. And all those sounds are here on these two discs: the materialization of the TARDIS, creepy music for the Daleks, as well as loads of random sound effects and bits of incidental music, even multiple versions of the classic theme song (composed by BBC Radiophonic Workshop legend Delia Derbyshire)! So cool! Just listening to these has gotten us all excited to watch more Doctor Who. Volume One covers the early years, 1963-1969, while Volume Two is subtitled New Beginnings and covers the years 1970-1980. Doctor Who fanatics will no doubt probably already own these (or if not will buy them immediately without even reading the review), but anyone who loves weird sound effects and digs crazy sounds will love these. And even though they seem to be a bit of a hodgepodge of random sounds and snippets of music, they are a surprisingly cohesive and totally enjoyable listen! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
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We've been a bit remiss in our mission to continue listing all of the great Gooom titles that have yet to make it over to our part of the world (some recent Gooom faves: M83, Abstrackt Keal Agram, Cyann And Ben, Purple Confusion, Mils, etc.) so we'll get back on track with this ep from Eisebs. The title, Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, couldn't be more appropriate. This is bouncy, sugary, caffeinated electro pop. Playful melodies, goofy fuzzed out synths, super lo-fi Nintendo rhythms, all crunchy and fuzzy and totally goofy and fun. Weird robotic voices, skittery almost jungle rhythms and lots of other little sonic surprises are sprinkled liberally throughout. Sounds a bit like if Add N To X were 15 year old girls, and were asked to make music for a video game that featured starfish riding giraffes and battling giant pink penguins and tiny purple bats, on a quest to rescue the Little Prince. Fun!
Whoah, man. Missy keeps bringing us hiphop gems. And this just might be the shiniest yet. We dig this album so much more than her last one (which was good too). Joined by Slick Rick, M.I.A., Neptunes, Mary J. Blige and Grand Puba, ME blends several different production and hiphop styles into one completely amazing album. Wird and wonderful, fun and funky. The songs sound fresh and interesting, mostly because they don't seem overly mixed or fussed with.
Her big hit on this one, "Lose Control", features a Kraftwerk sample(!) and is thus pretty minimal and mesmerizing. Highly recommended.
Some seriously sassy summer party jams go bananas in a smothering of cotton-candy & Miami-bass. A bit of a turn away from the electro-clash scene, FP get more all about hiphop on See You Next Tuesday, their follow-up to the Camel-Toe brining debut. This is a super fun album. Are you ready for it? For fans of M.I.A., Peaches, Missy Elliot and crazed boardwalkian beach parties.
Good grief! FUZZ. Don't you love it? These guys do. Or, should we say did, since this was recorded back in 1973. Fire were a power trio from Yugoslavia, relocated for the purposes of playing and recording to Holland. Could You Understand Me is the only album they made -- though they cranked enuff fuzz guitar on this sufficent for ten albums! Aside from one run of the mill bar band blues cut (track three), this disc BURNS (as per their name) with heavy duty psych guitar mayhem. The last and gnarliest track here is even called "Flames". It's an instrumental, nearly nine minutes of extremely distorted, repetitive, pedals mashed, goin' for broke brainmelt. Dunno how they recorded it, musta done something wrong, but it's brilliant. They can also pen a decent tune, with the title track fer instance having a nice melodic element amidst the fuzz riffage.
Their influences were most likely Hendrix and Cream and possibly Blue Cheer. But when Fire really get burnin', we think this sounds more like current psych-mongers The Heads from the UK, or Japan's motorpsycho outfits High Rise and Mainliner.
We ended up digging the last GGD, even though it took us a little while to get into. And we're guessing this new one might also take us a little while. Not because it's a bad record, it's just.. weird. But weird in a way we don't always find appealing right off the bat. The first record set up the sound: a chaotic almost dancey mix of hypnotic drum circle clatter, off kilter This Heat-ish rhythmic propulsion, scattered snatches of jazzy piano, almost circusy melodies, burping low end and all sorts of other sounds. The sound on this record is quite similar, if not a bit more refined. And definitely a bit busier. Like they had this band, and then had all their friends over, and had each friend add the one thing they really loved, whether it was those weird new age pan pipe flutes, or brittle music boxes, or Copshootcop junkyard percussion or any one of a million things that makes this record such a scattered, albeit joyous mess. But the maker or breaker here is the vocals. Very childlike and heavily affected, a bit like the vocalist from Deerhoof mixed with Laurie Anderson or Diamanda Galas, swooping and wailing and mumbling and back to wailing, all in the space of a single track. Very haunting and strange, but a definite acquired taste. This record is at its best when it sort of blisses out and becomes an expansive abstract sound field, all glittering and spacious. Because the music here definitely hits all the right buttons, woozy and drone-y, skittery and playful, sometimes ominous and aggressive, sometimes joyful and resplendent in all its post-funk splendor, but then the vocals kick in and you're either sold or you're not. Listen to the sound samples and you make the call.
Another 'metallic' masterpiece from the Battlecruiser label, the side label of Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, specializing in all things metal or sort of metal. However the metal found on Battlecrusier releases is not the metal of Maiden or Priest, nor is it the metal of Carcass or Napalm, instead, this is the metal that occurs when drone obsessed minimalist noisemakers take a stab at invoking the beast: everything from from ultra-repetitive riffing, to blissed out expanses of slow motion dooooooom, to smeary stabs of grind, to pounding industrial metal pummel.
The couldn't-be-more-aptly-named Ghoul hit us which just might be the creepiest BC release yet. A haunting plodding doomscape constructed from slowed down Krautrock and Skinny Puppy scraps, with rumbling bass thuds and a skeletal rhythm cobbled together from chopped and clipped vocals, malfunctioning synths, and a distant swirl of Earth-en guitars. Imagine an electro Skepticism, or Red Lorry Yellow Lorry jamming with Sunn 0))). Weird and weirdly hypnotic. Not heavy per se, but quite dark and evil and grim and spare and spooky. As with all things Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, this is VERY VERY LIMITED!!!
Another Radioactive reissued rarity, and possibly one of the best yet. Oooh, we've got a weird one here. Seriously. But very cool we think. Didn't know what to expect from the whimsical band name and front cover artwork, but it wouldn't have been *this* anyway! The first track, "3-D, Free" starts things off pretty freaky with spacey vocal effects and a lethargic reggae beat, with heartfelt lyrics, singing lines like "I saw police shooting rats". It's reprised later at the end of the album in an even more wigged out "electronic" version. This is definitely psychedelic rock music, but also very futuristic for its time (circa 1977-1978), hinting at new wave/punk. With track two, "Positive People", things get even more Devo. And it doesn't get any more normal as it goes. Capt. Beefheart also seems to be at this party... weird weird weird. But these folks have a knack for melody amist the madness.
The Happy Dragon-Band was the work of one Tommy "The Happy Dragon" Court, who had previously released a now almost as obscure album on Capitol in 1974 as Phantom's Divine Comedy. Never heard it but we're told it's very Doors-ish and mysterious. Loading up on the synths (some very John Carpenter synths) and electronic effects and employing the services of multiple musicans and vocalists besides himself, Tommy's idea of a comeback a few years later was this quite odd band/album/project. Huh? Well, this just might have been a bit ahead of its time... or something. Ultimately, though, it's very original and, to us now, pretty darn cool.
What other precedents can we cite, or comparisons can we make? Zappa? Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come? a seriously dosed Andrew Lloyd Webber? Early Alice Cooper? Late Comus? Xolar-X? The Dreamies? Perrey-Kingsley? A back-from-the-future Ariel Pink?? With sizzling electronics, spacey effects, madhouse vocal choruses, definite hooks, serious psychological/cosmic moods, constant pitchshifting in the vocal dept, and song titles like "Astro Phunk", "Inside The Pyramid" and "Disco American", maybe there are no easy comparisons... All ten tracks have their unique charms. A chaotic, confusing, eccentric and yet (im)possibly brilliant and quite enjoyable piece of work!
Another lost gem from an almost entirely forgotten band who existed briefly during the just-post grunge glory years of Sub Pop. A band that never would have fit all that comfortably amidst it's heavier labelmates (Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Tad, etc.), and seemd to be signed with the hopes of finding a new Nirvana, The Hardship Post (from the same poppy little province of Canada that gave us Sloan, Eric's Trip, Jale, etc.), were a full on pop band, a bit grungy maybe, with plenty of mumbly Nirvana-isms, but most decidedly not -grunge-. In fact, they sounded more like some weird twisted mix of that rainsoaked Northwestern rock sound, the repetitive riffing of Lungfish, a little Nirvana loud / quiet, and a whole lot of Elvis Costello! Crunchy, bouncy, stripped down riffy pop songs with straight ahead drumming, jangly riffs, and the vocalists's warbly Costello like wail WAY up in the mix, constantly struggling to hit the high notes, cracking and straining, making every song sound totally urgent and emotional and most of all FUN. Simple and super catchy, all of the songs on Somebody Spoke are hooky as hell, with lots of indie jangle, shakers and tambourines, handclaps, lots of oooo-ing and la-la-la-ing background vocals, big dumb riffs, all wrapped up into a perfect batch of irresistable (but somehow still dark and moody) pogo pop perfection. Except for the the two slow sort-of-ballads, that for our money are as just as good as any of the classic Nirvana brooders, dark and slowly unfolding, mumbly and rumbly expanses of downtuned strum and sweetly crooned moodiness (that found their way onto plenty of Andee's mid-nineties mixtapes!). So good!
The droning dirgelike beauty that is Harvey Milk's legendary Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men record, finally get's a deluxe digital reissue on our very own Andee's tUMULt label!
Crushing and pummeling majestic beauty, interspersed with delicate moments of hushed whispery strum. Lumbering down-tuned hyper-rhythmic skull crack dropped delicately into suffocating expanses of near silence. Delicate pointillist piano mutates into a dirgey exercise in tension that sounds like a lost Dario Argento soundtrack performed by the Melvins. Lilting and
melancholy near-ballads are disrupted by incessant and brutally heavy riffs. Amidst the pummel and beneath the negative space swirls a barely audible maelstrom of whispered vocals, warbling turntables and whirring vacuum cleaners, all adding to the confusional brilliance that was Harvey Milk. And their heart wrenching cover of Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" features what has to be the most tortured and anguished vocal performance ever recorded.
Too heavy to be post rock. Too weird to be metal. Too everything to be anything, Harvey Milk were unconventional and wholly unique, both structurally and sonically, touching on territory mined by the likes of Gastr Del Sol, Codeine, Queen, Husker Du, Man Is The Bastard, the Melvins, and ZZ Top, but slowing it down, making it HEAVY, and fucking it up. Making it more beautiful, while making it difficult to listen to at all.
Hypnotic, repetitive and jarring. Unpredictable, exhausting and perplexing.
Comes in a beautiful gatefold, letterpressed, silkscreened cover, replicating (in miniature) the LPs original cover.
2005 postscript: Harvey Milk freaks rejoice!! With the sudden surge in interest in all things sludge-y and doomy and drone-y, as well as loads of HM-specific attention, Harvey Milk have decided to reform, tour and record a brand new album!! FUCK YEAH!
Managed to get a few more of these back in (random copies on "birdshit" colored vinyl (a sort of swirly grey)!!
It had to happen. And of course, the minute we heard that it actually had happened, we knew we had to have it. A death metal band... with a PARROT on lead vocals!!! How completely and stupidly brilliant! We love it! And so will you. The music is furious and blasting death metal, grinding riffs, pounding drums and crushing bass. Only, the usual cookie monster grunts are replaced by the evil squawks of Waldo the parrot. And Waldo does a pretty decent job, offering lots of unintelligable grunts and growls and other birdlike vocalisations. Our pal Brian at WFMU tried to get Hatebeak to perform on his show, but apparently Waldo can't really handle loud sounds (death metal included) and records his 'vocals' separately, so Hatebeak will sadly remain a studio only project. The artwork is pretty inspired as well. They appropriate Judas Priest's Screaming For Vengeance metallic bird cover, change Hatebreed's logo just a litle bit (and include a little bird-hatching-from-an-egg graphic) and title their side of the split Beak Of Putrefaction (a play on Carcass' Reek Of Putrefaction). Awesome! And there's a rumoured upcoming split with a band called Caninus fronted by a dog! We kid you not.
The other side of the split comes courtesy of AQ fave crank calling phenom Longmont Potion Castle, who instead of his usual phone prank schtick, offers up two "metal interludes", all instrumental blasts of blazing noodly metal! The perfect compliment to Hatebeak. And he's also sampled at the beginning of the Hatebeak side. Maybe the best split 7" of all time although the more recent Hatebeak / Caninus split might definitely give this a run for its money!
While Architectural Failures may be the first release from Brooklyn, NY quartet Hi Red Center they have been making quite a footprint live, having played with the likes of Deerhoof, Cheval De Frise and USAISAMONSTER. Like these contemporaries, Hi Red Center are masters of wedding rock hooks with avant-jazz & prog structures/harmonies. Although only a mere four person line-up Hi Red Center creates a big and varied sound through their battery of instrumentation which includes guitar, trombone, vibes, drums, electronics and vocals.
Hrsta is the project of Godspeed You Black Emperor co-founding member Mike Moya (also of Set Fire To Flames and Molasses). he's assembled a full band for this, the follow-up to his first solo album L'Eclat Du Ciel Etait Insoutenable, and it's a beauty. The first song draws back the heavy curtain on a darkened stage with a droning chorus of shadowy faceless chanted vocals which immediately drew comparisons to the Italian ensemble Larsen's fine album Rever which was an AQ Record Of The Week a couple of years ago. In fact, we'd venture a guess that much like that mysterious group, Hrsta also draw deep inspiration from Swans and Michael Gira. Weighted by an immense emotional gravity, Moya's music is a heady, hypnotic force -- half dream, half nightmare. Recommended!
Pieces of Winter was born of two compositions that the sound artists John Hudak and Stephan Mathieu recorded as holiday gifts for their friends during the 2002 Christmas season. Hudak is reknowned for his stone-faced minimalism of deconstructed acoustic phenomenon; and for -his- seasonal recording buried a contact microphone in the snow and captured the sound of the snow turning to ice. Mathieu had composed a piece with Eva-Lucy Mathieu for pump organ and ocarina, which in turn he transformed into calm and exquisitely warm piece of delicate drones. Commissioned by the Portugese label Sirr, the two married their previous recordings into a gentle exercise for minimalist grace, in which the two have removed all recognizable traces of the source material's distinctive qualities and extracted digital fragments that allude to the poetry of winter, snow, and the cold without overtly stating it. Steady cracklings form a steady stream of hushed gray textures, accentuated by crystalline pinpricks of pristine feedback whistlings. Later on, Pieces of Winter glistens with the delicate glitch collages that have become a signature for Mathieu on his celebrated Full Swing album. A word of warning, this album is very quiet, and you really have crank the volume to perceive the amount of detail found within!
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This could be considered the runt of the litter in the trio of country reissues on Masked Weasel (the others being Willie Nelson and Buck Owens). It's not so much Waylon himself (as big a country songwriting/singing mensch as the others), but the material is definitely not Jennings at his zenith. Then again, it must be stated that these are all early, early Jennings tracks. His earliest. This one is still worth picking up if only for historical reasons -- to hear the earliest foundations of this seminal country artist. As one might deduce, being his earliest recordings, just about, if not all, of the tracks here are not from his pen. One of the best covers he does though is the opener "Crying" which is as heart felt as Orbison's version, but possibly bests it. The production is haunting and sounds as though Waylon is crooning to an empty auditorium. It's almost worth it to buy this disc for this track alone. Like the other two, this disc comes with great biographical notes from our pal Kurt Wolff (of the Rough Guide To Country Music fame).
Though we sadly haven't been able to get copies of the first Kaleidoscope album on cd of late (the one entitled Tangerine Dream, not to be confused with the krautrock band of that name), we are very happy to now have copies of this perfectly twee UK psych pop combo's recently reissued second album, 1969's Faintly Blowing! And it comes in a nice digipack with six bonus tracks! Now if only we had some tea and crumpets we'd be all supercalifragilistic. Ahem.
Kaleidoscope were one of the best unsung post-Peppers British psych-pop acts. This one carries on from their first (a solid AQ fave) with more of the same delightful dreamy oh-so-melodic and lysergically lyricized pop psyke, some of the best ever in our humble opinion. Orchestrated, emotive, shoulda-been-hits abound, along with some way-out psychedelic experimentation. The Kaleidoscope story continued into the proggy '70s with a name change to Fairfield Parlour but Faintly Blowing was really their last colourful hurrah of dainty dandy '60s poppiness.
If there was ever a more unlikely split record, we sure can't think of one. But if there was ever a split we'd most like to see, it would be hard to do better than Konono No1 and the Dead C. Not sure if the two bands are a perfect fit, or just happen to satisfy our weirdly eclectic tastes, but this split 12" is fucking amazing. Two new tracks from Konono No 1, who if you are an avid reader of the AQ list are no doubt already familiar with ( we carry both their full lengths, their live record Lubuaku, as well as their studio album Congotronics). An African ensemble led by a trio of amplified Likembes (thumb pianos) and whose equipment is cobbled together from car parts, branches, batteries and other urban detritus. The sound is wild and joyful, rollicking and totally exuberant, the likembes sounding like some alien underwater psychedelic guitars. Wow. And then there's the Dead C. What can you say? One of the most important bands to ever come out of New Zealand. The masters and originators of the NZ free rock sound that has influenced hundreds of bands and been copied by hundreds more. The first 5 tracks are locked grooves, but skip past those (or not!) and you'll find three brand new tracks, 17 minutes of the Dead C in clattery chaotic rock mode, bursts of stumbling, distorted, propulsive free rock, like some lost Krautrock classic, played through crappy practice amps and on a beat up old drum kit, everything drenched in tape hiss and recorded in some cavernous space. Now if they had only managed to get Konono to record WITH the Dead C...
