Originally released as two EPs back in 1995 before his seminal Richard D. James LP and name change to Aphex Twin, Hangable Auto Bulb has long been a collectors' rarity, mentioned with hushed reverence amongst electronica types everywhere. When situated against contemporary breakcore / drill 'n' bass artist such as Plug, Mu-Ziq, and even his own Aphex releases, Hangable Auto Bulb holds its own quite well, with clincal tones shaped into wistful melodies on top of complex skittering breakbeats and stalking basslines. Yet in the huge leaps that have been made technologically since '95, whereby beats, samples, and the digital code itself have been imploded / exploded by Hrvatski, Otto Von Schirach, Lesser, and many other post-IDM artists, AFX's Hangable Auto Bulb appears sparse in its production and curiously nostalgic for a time when "Intelligent Dance Music" wasn't a thoroughly laughable concept.
It's really easy for a band to be overshadowed by its gimmick, be it crazy makeup, wacky song titles, insane pyrotechnics, setting your drums up backwards at the front of the stage or whatever. A band has to really have the songs and the sound to keep their chosen gimmick in check. With L.A.'s acoustic free jazz combo The Bad Plus, it's their choice of covers. I mean, what proper jazz band would dare tackle songs by Blondie, Nirvana, Aphex Twin, the Pixies and Black Sabbath? Well, none actually. And since the Bad Plus is not a proper jazz group it works out just fine. Piano, bass and drums, all acoustic. From dark and minor key smokey simmer, to chaotic, splattery post bop freakout, to almost Neu!-like krautrock workouts to lush expansive jazz flecked soundscapes, these guys somehow manage to sound totally traditional and utterly fucked up at the same time. The bizarre cover this time around is Vangelis' "(Theme From) Chariots Of Fire" which the Bad Plus smash into a million little free jazz pieces, stick back together seemingly haphazardly, using just the original melody as the glue, as sputtering spastic percussive squalls rain down on manic piano runs and rumbling throbbing basslines, while that impossibly unforgettable melody creeps and skips and slinks in between. If you had never heard the Vangelis original, you'd think it was just the catchiest, weirdest wildest most perfect slab of freaked out jazz ever. Thankfully the originals play just as well, densely layered, ultra complex, wildly playful and darkly melodic, veering all over the jazz spectrum as well as careening occasionally way outside the realms of anything remotely jazzlike. Booklet includes an exclusive original comic strip from David Rees (Get Your War On). And definitely catch 'em live if you can, supposedly they're even wilder and weirder and likely to whip out even more ridiculous covers!
When it rains it definitely pours -- as long as we're talking about this new breed of metallic post rock we've been digging. We think to ourselves, "Man, we can't get enough of this stuff" (um, because we always refer to ourselves as 'man', when we're thinking) and then whaddaya know? A new ep from the mighty Baroness, whose first ep we raved about not too long ago (what is it with this band and eps?) describing it as Electric Wizard meets the Fucking Champs metal stoner sludge crush. Which is still pretty accurate, but now that we've gotten more familiar with this post rock / sludge metal stuff, I think maybe we'd describe it more as Isis / Pelican majestic sludge metal meets Rodan / June Of 44 style moody post rock. However Baroness lean way toward the metal side of things. Plus, their songs are really weird, strange meters, complex arrangements, lots of slippery guitar harmonies, weird psychedelic wah guitar, spacey electronic burbling, some stretched out slow motion sludge, some intricate riffing and some of the most insane drumming we've ever heard. Not sure if we could handle another ep from these guys (okay, we probably could) but this will tide us over until the FULL LENGTH we're all dying for! C'mon guys!
And like their debut ep, this boasts some killer cover art, kinda like Pushead doing '60s Fillmore poster art.
Every kid dreads finding a lump of coal in their stocking come Christmas morning, so much so that many spend the weeks or months before the big day doing their very best to ensure their spot on Santa's 'Nice' list. No more teasing the siblings, no more grousing about yardwork, cheerfully doing all their chores, eating all their vegetables, doing all their homework. Whatever it takes. But this year kids have something else entirely to worry about. Sure finding a lump of coal is a drag, but how about finding your stocking full of shit!! Well around here, that's something to be excited about. Because this is the year that Brown Santa comes to town. And who better to fill our hearts with Christmas cheer and regale us with tales of Brown Santa than Japan's shit obsessed grind lords Bathtub Shitter? That's right, it's a Bathtub Shitter Christmas. Record! Forget your Nat King Cole, and Perry Como, and Bing Crosby, and Barbara Striesand, this is the only Christmas record you need! And it's conveniently stocking sized, a cute lil' 3" cd, jam packed with furious grind, howling pummeling brutality, and lots and lots of shit.
For those of you new to the wonderful world of Bathtub Shitter, let's refer to a past review that perfectly and succinctly describes the Bathtub Shitter Experience:
Imagine some strange mix of Drop Dead, the Boredoms, Brutal Truth, CSSO, death metal, grindcore, and well....um...shit! Crunchy riffs swing from almost-surf rock, to Zeppelin groove to metallic crunch, but spend most of their time in grind mode, splattered and speeding out of control. Crazy drumming, farting bass and some wicked guitar noodling add to the sick sonic stew. But the vocals are where things get really weird. The main vocals are of the burping, grunting, cookie monster death metal variety, belching out indecipherable tales of shit and shitting, but their foil is a squealing, squeaking little girl of a man voice, sounding either like a babblingly hysterical middle age housewife shrieking at the top of her lungs or a horror movie cheerleader being evicerated, screaming in that terrified way only dying cheerleaders in horror movies do. The two vocal styles swing and switch and battle and butt heads like some sort of bastard grindcore Beastie Boys. Or imagine Chuck D as Chris Barnes in his Cannibal Corpse days and Flavor Flav as the aforementioned shrieking dead cheerleader. With the everpresent S1Ws made up of members of S.O.D. and Angelcorpse. Other sorts of vocals are occasionally introduced like the 'dog barking underwater' and the 'asthmatic yodel'. The truly strange part is that all of the various vocals come from the very same guy!
Speaking of vocals, our Bathtub Shitter Xmas starts off with the a cappella "Brown Santa", a confusing and brilliantly bizarre series of shrieks and gurgles, grunts and wheezes. This guy could very well give Jaap Blonk a run for his money. Track two is the reverential hymn "Holy Shit", a grinding blast of Japanoise flecked surf-sludge-grind-rock, with insane squiggly guitars, chugging downtuned riffs, blasting octopoidal drumming and of course the 'Shitter hi / lo, shriek / growl vocal battle is in full effect. And finally, what better way to finish things off, than with a classic holiday chestnut, this time roasted over roaring hellfire!! WOOOAHHHAAAA. "Little Drummer Boy" turned into a sludgy slab of slow motion drone metal, huge churning guitars, the only glimpse of the original being the martial snare drum rat a tat tat-ing beneath all that sludge and of course the impossibly guttural growling cookie monster vocals spweing out a barely recognizable "parumpapumpum".
Wow! Now if that doesn't sound like something everyone would want to find in their stocking or under the tree Christmas morning then we don't know does!
"We're dreaming of a... Brown Christmas!"
A while back we raved about Maurizio Bianchi's collaboration with Land Use as being a legitimate return to form for the Italian post-industrialist. Bianchi had begun making music in the late '70s first recording under the moniker Sacher-Pelz; but it was the dozen or so MB records from the early '80s that really brought notoriety to Bianchi. On the MB recordings, Bianchi applied extremely grim sonic metaphors to the electronic impressionist templates of Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler, and Cluster. Even to this day the MB dyptic of Endometrio and Carsinosi stands as some of the most devistating and claustrophobic recordings. Ever. Period.
Jump forward almost 20 years and a major existential shift in thinking (Bianchi's now a Jehovah's Witness), and Bianchi's recordings have undoubtably changed. While the Land Use collaboration did explore many of the same bleak metaphors of his MB recordings, A M.B. Iehn Tale shifts away from the heavier ideas, focusing upon a sound that is quite elegiac in nature. Self-described as "piano decompositions," the eight tracks of A M.B. Iehn Tale dissolve the hammered tones of Bianchi's piano into spiralling post-Terry Riley / post-Eno kaleidoscopes of vibrating sound and cosmic Ur-droning. Bianchi is at his best when he thoroughly buries the piano in a thick soup of electronics and effects, echoing his heroes from the '70s once again. Thoroughly mesmerising work from Mr. Bianchi!
We might as well stop denying it, we love this stuff. Maximo Park, Interpol, Kaiser Chiefs. How can you not. Modern twisted takes on stone cold classics, Gang Of Four, XTC, the Clash. Sure it's not entirely original, but so what, it sounds fan-fucking-tastic. And Bloc Party fits right in there, reanimating their own favorite postpunk corpses and getting them (and us) dancing like crazy.
So a popular band, a popular record, you know what that means. The dreaded REMIX RECORD. Once in a while however, whether it's the choice of bands, the song selection, pure luck, a remix record totally and completely blows away the original record. This is most definitely one of those cases. You know, when you hear a band cover another bands song, like say a metal band covering a Cure song, and you think "Why aren't there bands that just sound like that, a metal Cure? How cool would that be?" Or "Why aren't all that band's songs this good?" Substitute any band or any song, you know what we're talking about. A totally boring band can shine like a diamond when it's taking on a killer tune. Sometimes it reflects poorly on the band, demonstrating how weak their songs actually are when held up to some 'real' songwriting. But in the case of a remix record that eclipses the original, more often, it's a case of the remix record being so much weirder and varied and all over the map, while still retaining that connective thread that is the sound of the original record. Such is the case with Silent Alarm Remixed. A couple of these tracks showed up as bonus tracks on the import version, and were SO good that it got many folks we know to shell out the extra $$ for the 2 or 3 extra tracks (and who are now kicking themselves since those tracks are included here) but here, surrounded by a whole records worth of interpretations, makes us wish that this was Bloc Party's record proper. M83 offer up a buzzy, dense wall of fuzz, with layered vocals, thick synthesizers and just a HUGE sound. Four Tet's track is a smeary, shimmery, drone-y, dreamy, cloudy drone, that eventually kicks into a more jangly reverb drenched blur. Mogwai turn Bloc Party into moody post rock, their track a churning, slow building, pulsing epic. And the rest of the record follows suit, stretching Silent Alarm into strange new shapes: Ladytron turn their track into blissy electronic pop like Postal Service or Styrofoam, Whitey give their song some strummy post pock bounce, Blackbox give their version a bit of eighties new wave sheen with some aggro, angular post punk swagger, the Engineers' turn their Bloc Party into a super murky sexy dirge. Woah. Now, if someone had given us this Bloc Party record, we would have been completely blown away thinking this was the sound of one band, but maybe that's just too much to hope for. So what? Well, we like the remix record more than the record being remixed? Makes perfect sense to us. And for those of you who found Silent Alarm to be just a tiny bit too boring and predictable, this might just do the trick.
Reissued once again! Hi-Scores is the first EP that Boards of Canada produced for the exemplary electronica label Skam. "Turquoise Hexagonal Sun", a track that later appeared on the acclaimed debut album Music Has The Right To Children is featured in a slightly more skeletal form. The other five tracks retain their signature rainy-day electronica grounded by softened hip-hop breaks and post-Eno ambience. As always, Boards of Canada makes for a very pleasant listening experience.
Over the past decade, there has been much speculation about the myth, meaning, and men behind Boards of Canada. Aside from a very few interviews (most recently in the October, 2005 issue of The Wire), Boards of Canada have remained quiet. Perhaps it's better that way, as their music is the sole reason why they have been catapulted from being an obscure electronica project with a couple of singles under their belt to being the flagship band for Warp. As a result, there's not much for us to really say about Boards of Canada. There's no juicy gossip to salivate over, no heavy-handed concepts that preclude any listening experience, no convoluted band geneology. Campfire Headphase is simply another great Boards of Canada record, filled with a dreamy ambience that flickers between a digital clarity and the warbled drag from dirty tape heads. These cozy electronic drone phrases wrap around the same set of slow breakbeats that defined their classic debut Music Has The Right To Children. What sets The Campfire Headphase apart from the earlier Boards Of Canada recordings are the sparse melodies plucked on guitar and then spun through their liminal DSP effects. They've not entered the indie-tronica field of The Postal Service and The Notwist, but instead, they've taken the pastoral warmth of the guitar and made it their own.
Who doesn't love Peter Brotzmann and/or Han Bennink? If you're into skronky European free jazz craziness that is. Saxophonist Brotzmann is a hard-blowin' legend, and Han Bennink is not only a percussion whiz but also a strong "pro" argument in the whole does-humor-belong-in-music? debate. Teamed up here on this expanded (meaning there's a whole bonus disc with ten previously unreleased tracks!) reissue of what those in the know, know as the 1977 Bro-Ben Black Forest recordings, Brotzmann and Bennink actually did the Jewelled Antler natureboy thing here and took their instruments out into the forest to improvise amid the trees and birds and small curious animals. Along with a supply of bread and wine they toted with them an assortment of clarinets and saxophones, a banjo, a viola, some toys, birdcalls, cymbals, and suchlike sundry instruments -- Han had to make do without his customary drum kit, playing instead on tree trunks and rocks with branches and stones. Their free music got all that much freer for being loosed in the great outdoors, and these Black Forest sessions certainly brought forth all the wildman whimsy you'd expect from this duo. In some ways a precursor to the field recording aesthetic practiced today by the Jewelled Antler gang and all those Finnish free-freak-forest-folk outfits we all love, Schwarzwaldfahrt is replete with the gurgling sounds of water, birds twittering, primal yelps from Han and/or Peter, and other things you wouldn't normally hear in more "civilized" jazz recording. At one point, Han pounds (or splashes) out a stacatto rhythm on the surface of a stream or pond, and you can for sure tell how much fun they were having! So much, that they recorded a lot more music/sound than they could release at the time. They had to edit down their tapes to just one LP's worth of material for the original edition of this on FMP, but now Atavistic's Unheard Music Series has given them two whole compact discs to fill up, and it's a joy.
Dear friends, now that Casiotone's first two albums are out of print individually do not despair! They've magically reappeared together here on one disc!
And here's what we said about both albums back when they were first released...
Answering Machine Music: Originally released on the Cassingle label, the debut album from AQ fave one-man band Casiotone For The Painfully Alone now happily gets reissued on Tomlab (also home to his dreamy, sweet second full length "Pocket Symphonies For the Lonesome Subway Cars"). What can we say? It still gives us the warm fuzzies. If you require a more in depth description... here's what we said the first time around: Owen Ashworth has set his ruminations on the awkwardness of crushes and infatuation with rock stars to music. With just a couple of casio keyboards, a distortion pedal or two, and a 4-track, Owen's Casiotone for the Painfully Alone somehow succeeds, teetering between affected bedroom-rock naivete, and excerpts from a musical diary never meant for strangers' probing eyes. A recommended album for fans of early Sebadoh and Magnetic Fields, and especially the legendary early Mountain Goats cassettes.
Pocket Symphonies For Lonesome Subway Cars: AQ's sweetest pal Owen Ashworth moved from SF to lo-fi pop haven Portland, OR a short time ago. And we've dearly missed his quiet, but completely passionate enthusing over our mutual pop faves -- in particular, Young Marble Giants. The minimal, sweet music that he creates under the moniker Casiotone For The Painfully Alone is certainly lo-tech and lo-fi, but totally high on shy boy romance and earnestness. Pocket Symphonies (released on German label Tomlab) maintains the intimate bedroom recording feel of his debut Answering Machine Music. Owen's soft vocal delivery once again really brings to mind the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, but also Mike Donovan of SF's Church Steps, with the barely audible, almost spoken, hesitant vocals, programmed drumbeats and occasional static-y casio-noise bursts... or, I imagine, Stephin Merritt (Magnetic Fields, Sixths, etc) as a young schoolboy. If you haven't seen Owen play live, you're missing a precious experience, this big bespectacled boy behind tiny synths, one heel shyly pivoting left and right to keep time. Super simple but with an undeniable catchiness. Sixteen fragile'n'pretty, electronic toybox heartstring pullers.
NWOFHM. That's what it says on the inside of the cd booklet, in big bold letters. NWOFHM? WTF? If you don't get the joke, explaining it won't help, but here goes: New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal. Our Finnish friends Circle are apparently referencing the famed NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) that took the rock world by storm circa 1979, giving us Saxon, Angel Witch, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Venom, Samson, and many many many more. What's that got to do with the Can and Neu! pulsed space/prog/post-rock normally practiced by Circle?? Well Circle fans know that these guys have indeed established their very own trademark "circular" sound (repetitive, rhythmic, looping, hypnotic rock) that, whirlpool-like, pulls in all sorts of influences, from the aforementioned Krautrock forefathers to jazz and dub and lo-fi drone improv and, yes, metal. When you get a new Circle album, you kinda both know what to expect *and* never know what to expect. Well we'll tell you about Circle's latest studio effort, Tulikoria. In part, it's Circle donning the leather and spikes (metaphorically, perhaps, though they do threaten to do so for real live on stage at their show in San Francisco THIS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2nd, THAT'S TONIGHT IF YOU'RE READING THIS THE DAY WE SENT OUT THIS LIST!! SO GET DOWN THERE!!). Ahem. Circle's love of metal, specifically the true, traditional heavy metal of the '80s, has borne fruit before, on several of the songs from their amazing Sunrise album released in 2002 (sadly now out of print). So, the heavy metal component present on Tulikoira is precedented in the Circle discog. But, like Sunrise, this isn't just Circle "doing metal". It's a lot of other things besides! Nobody will confuse it for an "actual" metal album. But heavy metal is definitely, proudly an element here, amongst others. And graphically, too, it's an inspiration, as you'll see from Circle's new fangled, tough-looking symmetrical logo, which even incorporates a lightning bolt!
There's four tracks here, starting with "Rautakaarme", an atmospheric seven-minute cut featuring monkish chant, eerie drone, and energetic bursts of rock action. Second track "Tulilintu" is *entirely* active and energetic, really bringing in the headbanging, fist-pumping metal, complete with guitar leads and soaring screams in the manner of Rob Halford. Seriously. The lyrics are in Finnish (presumably) so we don't know how tongue-in-cheek-or-not they are. Track three, "Berserk", is kinda weird, another atmospheric exercise with some lines in English like "I'm a scorpion" and "I'm a crocodile" spoken over rather spooky, bass-heavy grooves. A lot of tension in this one. Could almost be a noirish film soundtrack from the '70s, but with additional "circular" electric guitar riffing. Then the final track "Puutiikeri" arrives, pretty much taking over the album since it's an epic 24 minute affair, beginning and ending with authentic heavy metal riffing, but journeying far and wide in-between. Creaky improv splatter, lush keyboards, gently whispering vocals, spacey electronic effects, chugging, pulsating rhythms (of course!), and even some quasi-techno beats (!) are stirred into this weird mix. Ranging in mood from calm tranquility to flat out rockin', this is a real trip, as is all of Tulikoira. If you've been following Circle's output in recent years, and rolling with all their eccentricies, from Sunrise to Guillotine to Forest to Empire, you'll be happy to add Tulikoria to your collection too!
Here's the real deal! Vintage recordings of Ms Patsy Cline! This generous serving of 23 songs from the '50s showcases her awesome voice and stylistic range beautifully. Walking And Dreaming is part of an impressive reissue series of classic old country artists from the mysterious Oakland, CA label The Masked Weasel. Also featured in the series thus far are great collections of early recordings by Willie Nelson, Buck Owens and Waylon Jennings. AQ friend and country music expert Kurt Wolff (author of the Rough Guide To Country Music, among other things) contributed the fine liner notes for each volume of the series.
Despite the recent flurry of bright sunny pop that's come a-flowing down from up north, punk rock's not dead in Canada. No way, the old stomping grounds of hardcore legends such as D.O.A., Dayglo Abortions and SNFU still spews forth a few fist raisers. While the latest Constantines album is not nearly as fully raging as their debut was, nor can we call it anywhere near as politically charged as their hardcore grandfathers', the band still infuses an ample amount of grit and furious energy into their tunes. Their gravelly, hoarse-piped vocals once again recall in turn those of The Clash, Fugazi, Paul Westerberg and Rancid... and actually also brings to mind fellow Canadian, veteran rocker Tom Cochrane, but musically they've at once tightened things up, flexed some muscle and stretched out their range, injecting some unexpected dimensions into Tournaments Of Hearts -- such as a few slower, more sensitive guy tempos, a bit of country twang and a little emo folksy boyishness.
Thanks to an insatiable appetite for British folk and Christian Gnosticism, Current 93 evolved out of the tumultousness of British Industrial Culture into an eccentric avant-folk ensemble grounded by the charismatic singer / visionary David Tibet (who nowadays is qualifying himself as David Late Michael after a particularly convoluted revelation he had earlier in 2005). A few years ago, Current 93's distributor World Serpent dissolved, immediately rendering the catalogues of C93, Nurse With Wound, Coil, Sol Invictus, and Antony & The Johnsons out of print. Yet all of these bands persisted, releasing their works on various labels across the globe. Judas As Black Moth is actually the third double disc anthology of Current 93's work, focusing upon the most recent releases on which C93 has exacted a very precise sound with minimal arrangements for acoustic guitar, piano, Tibet's voice, and very little else to emphasize the profound melancholy of Tibet's lyrics and the peculiarities of his revelatory poetry. This anthology takes tracks from Where The Long Shadows Fall, Soft Black Stars, Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre, All The Pretty Horses, Thunder Perfect Mind, Earth Covers Earth, and a few others; it does exclude all of the exquisitely grim collage recordings from the early '80s. Nevertheless, Current 93 remains apocalyptic in the true sense of the word.
The undulating drones and scraped loops which provide the backbone for the debut recording for San Francisco's John Davis could have easily been plucked from a Phill Niblock or Andrew Chalk composition; but in fact their origins lie in the interactive exhibitions found at the Exploratorium, SF's one of a kind museum of science, art, and human perception. If you've never had the opportunity to get to the Exploratorium, it's well worth the visit as there's tons of contraptions designed to illuminate, educate, and amaze. Armed with a mini-disc recorder, a good mic, and a willingness to explore, Davis captured many of plinks, plonks, and bongs from the Exploratorium's many exhibits that demonstrate any number of acoustic phemonena. He then ran these field recordings through a battery of Max/MSP patches to arrive at this spiralling cloud of pixelated smears, golden drones, and a variety of those aforementioned plinks, plonks, and bongs. Davis certainly draws from the aesthetics of Stephan Mathieu and Fennesz, adding a mechanical and metallic clamour into the mix.
Released on Tarentel's Root Strata label, this beautifully packaged cd-r is strictly limited to 50 copies, of which we only have a handful. You know what that means!
Eeep! Someone get Dead Science's lead vocalist Sam Mickens a cold flannel to cool his fevered brow. Breathless torment and angst spill forth from his lips as his strange nightmares carry over into his waking state. The fourth song is even titled "Sam Mickens' Dream"! If you like an ample dose o' drama in your musical selections, this new album from Dead Science might be your perfect cup o' downers. Much less psychedelic and post-rock leaning than Submariner, the Seattle, WA trio's last full length. Fans of Frog Eyes and Xiu Xiu should definitely check out Dead Science!
Depeche Mode are back, and they're poised to bring out the goth in ya! After some highly publicized tumultuous times on the part of lead singer Dave Gahan, it seems the group has regained some stability and creative flourishes. That said, Playing The Angel is still coming from a very very dark place. Martin Gore still expertly handles the bulk of the songwriting, but Playing The Angel is all about David Gahan's imposing downcast vocals. They're so impossibly burdened by the weight of the world. Sure makes for one big ol' morbid bummer of a listen... but in a good way. Now in their 25th year, they've produced an album that contains some of their best material since the good ol' days of Violator, Black Celebration and Music For The Masses. On Playing The Angel, they haven't rehashed, but rather refreshed their sound -- creating a work that's not only respectful of their analog synth-laden past (not to mention their longtime devoted fans) but also shows an openness to the present and future. Older and wiser, indeed. We were a bit taken aback though by the rather unflattering photographs of the band members on the cover. Hard living, indeed. Just the other day we saw an early photo of the band, and it was quite a shock to see each of the members' transformation from coiffed pretty boys into grimacing elders.
This review only really needs to be about one sentence long. Maybe two. Let's see... BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR!!! Ahem, okay, how about, best horror / gore / exploitation movie in the last TWENTY YEARS! Needless to say, we LOVED this movie. We loved the soundtrack too, and the score! It was pretty much a gore-splatter-horror bullseye any way you sliced it. We were preparing to review this when we realized we sort of already did when we reviewed the soundtrack a while back. So here's what we had to say about the movie:
Plenty of folks hated the move House Of 1000 Corpses. We weren't among 'em. Sure it was a bit of a mess, a little confused, and borrowed HEAVILY from the classics (Last House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). But so what?!?! It was a GREAT looking movie. It was fun and gory and gross and pretty wild. One of the problems was putting it up against all the blockbusters, marketing it like a big movie, instead of letting it build momentum and exist as an art house flick, where it belonged. And part of that had to do with the celebrity status of first time director Rob Zombie, of the band White Zombie. The famous rock band, MTV, and all that, the studio probably smelled big bucks. But let's be honest, part of it had to do with the fact that it was not the greatest movie. But that said, imagine you were a total horror movie obsessive, seventies freak, wrestling fan and metal musician, and you were given $7 million dollars to make a horror movie. Doubt I could come up with anything nearly as cool and creepy and evocative as House Of 1000 Corpses. So yeah, we were predisposed to dig the sort-of-sequel The Devil's Rejects. But we had no idea just how much we'd love it. Fuck! This movie totally kicked our ass. Not only was it way more grim and violent and brutal than HO1000C, but the soundtrack was absolutely killer!! The whole movie is way darker and SO VIOLENT. So violent in fact it's a bit hard to believe they got away with just an R rating. A bit less over the top and outrageous than HO1000C, but definitely more confident, none of those debut feature mis-steps, and a much tighter story arc, and lots of cool cult movie legends (Pee Wee Herman's girlfriend Dottie as a hooker! The Hills Have Eyes' Michael Berryman as the pimp's sidekick / janitor! Sid Haig again as the creepy Captain Spaulding) as well as an amazing bit when the sheriff calls in a very fey Gene Shalit like movie expert to discuss the Marx Brothers films! So funny! The crazy part is how blurry the line is between good and evil. The titular Devil's Rejects are definitely evil and reprehensible, but they're also sort of cool. And bad ass. Albeit in a morally repugnant way. And when the tables are turned, you actually feel sort of bad for them, and hope they'll be able to turn the tables again. And the Sheriff who hunts them down, well he's maybe just as bad. Only difference is he has a badge. Anyway, the movie is bleak and brutal, dusty and sun baked, unlike most 'horror' movies, most of the action takes place under a hot summer sun, and the film stock, the look and feel is all very seventies. So evocative of our youth, which is part of what makes it so scary and creepy and fucking great.
And like we said, the soundtrack is so AMAZING. Check the review elsewhere on the AQ website. And the score too!
This double dvd set is the unrated director's cut so it's even more violent and disturbing, which is obviously a good thing. Includes commentaries from director Rob Zombie, and stars Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, and Sheri Moon Zombie, blooper reel, full versions of all the commercials and television shows seen in the film (The Morris Green Show, Mary The Monkey Girl commercial, Spaulding Christmas Special commerical, etc.), Otis FIrefly's "Cheerleader Missing" home video, a Buck Owens video (the one you see in the hotel room), deleted scenes, make-up tests, Matthew McGrory tribute (McGrory played Tiny in both House Of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects and passed away this year), trailers, TV spots, a 6.1 DTS ES digital audio mix and a 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround mix. Phew. Disc two contains a two hour making of, featuring footage from the set, pre-production, behind the scenes, interviews, and all sorts of other goodies.
From the same label that released the amazing and now out of print live Growing cd, as well as exclusive, limited and long gone releases from Sunn 0))), Boris, and the mighty Keiji Haino. This most recent release comes from free jazz saxophonist John Dikeman. Four extended pieces. The first, a pecussion / sax duo, a beautiful moody, skronky romp, the final two tracks, extended jams with Dikeman and full quartet, wild and spastic, lots of chaotic drumming, splattery percussion and free jazz skronk. Our favorite though has to be the second track, a solo sax / harmonica piece for modern dance (the picture on the front of the sleeve shows dancer Zack Fuller all ablur along side Dikeman and his sax), the harmonica wheezes out extended drones, the sax careening through ear piercing high ends, moaning out rumbling bleating lowend, thw whole thing desnse with the big empty room reverb. Quite nice! Packaged in a gorgeous full color oversized sleeve.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!
The Double Leopards have become more and more prolific of late, amazingly so considering there was a time where all we could track down by these cats was a cd-r and maybe an lp. An alluring mystery for sure. The mystery is not gone though, not nearly, in fact if anything it's just being deepened by the recent spate of new recordings, each a blurry buzzy smear of abstract sound, all lovingly swaddled in that Double Leopards haze and grit. A Hole Is True, is three lengthy tracks, totaling about 40 minutes, rough, raw, fuzzy, almost industrial soundscapes, buzzing guitars, grinding distortion, throbbing feedback, all stretched into pulsing, squirming, slow shifting drones. A seemingly endless haze, dense and swirly, tangly and prickly, thick and viscous. Definitely falls square within the sonic world of Skullflower, Total, and of course the Hototogisu (Leopards' member Marcia Bassett's other band, a duo with Skullflower's Matthew Bower)!
The black ice continues to spread, a grim black metal glacier slowly enveloping all with ears to hear. The West Coast black metal contingent's influence grows steadily, until one day hell walks the earth. Sorry, getting carried away. If the above scene had some sort of hierarchy, Leviathan would undoubtedly be the king. Xasthur would be a prince, or perhaps another king vying for supreme power. Crebain would be a knight, sent to slay all who shall dare oppose, and then Draugar, well Draugar would be the kings ex-vizier, locked in a dark dank dungeon, insane and murderous and demented, from years of no light, eating bugs, lack of sleep, and staring endlessly into blackness. Draugar is definitely the black sheep of this already black family, imbuing his home recorded evil, with the grim buzz of classic black metal, but with a healthy dollop of damged brilliance a la Benighted Leams, Lurker Of Chalice, or Striborg. Buzzy and black, droning and depressive, Draugar more than holds his own amidst the blackened elite, but somehow, everything he touches turns to what-the-fuck? Gentle clean arpeggiated clean guitar melodies are way up in the mix, layed atop a sluggish stream of indistinct guitar fuzz and Whitehouse-ish vocals. Sounding a little like somebody taped Darkthrone over a Slint record on an old C90 that had been in their back pocket for a month. Loping midtempo buzz over buried angelic choruses, like Morricone's The Mission performed by Graveland. Occasional ambient breaks, where guitar melodies wander aimlessly across barren soundscapes of distant rumble and creepy shimmer. Sometimes the riff seems to just splinter apart and what was moments earlier a galloping black metal juggernaut, has become a seasick drone. contructed from fuzzy almost melodies and vocals so distorted and so affected they sound like bursts of radio static. As always, heavy and grim and completely fucked!
Finally available domestically... better late than never. This debut album -- actually a remarkably cohesive collection of early EPs from 2002 onwards by this band of Brits and Texans -- caused quite a stir when it was released last year. The British music press surely peed themselves over it. While we don't think you'll be needing any additional absorbency in your pants, we will agree that this is pretty darn great. It perches itself quite comfortably in the midst of the last couple of albums from a couple of old AQ faves Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips -- both vocally and compositionally. Gloriously dreamy, slightly spaced-out orchestral pop with mellow brass, reedy woodwinds, perfectly placed chimes and an ample dollop of Beatles and Brian Wilson/Beach Boys influences melting down on top. Swooon!
Here's the latest album from the always slightly bizarre brother and sister duo Fiery Furnaces. The opener contains their familiar frantic piano playing that often brings to mind visions of the chase scenes in old Tom & Jerry cartoons. From there things launch off into something that resembles a peculiar radio play. Whereas in the past the pair's eccentricities surfaced in their obtusely poetic lyrics and Eleanor Friedlander's vocal performances, here they materialize in the broader array of weird sounds and the prominent vocal presence of the mysterious Ms Olga Sarantos. Curious as we are, we did a little sleuthing to try to figure out what the heck Eleanor and Matthew were goin' on about! What we discovered was that Rehearsing The Choir is even more of a family affair that usual. It's a collaboration with their grandmother Sarantos! Loosely based around her stories of living in Chicago, it's a lively, peppery collection.
Vinyl-only (limited to 500 copies) debut release from an all-girl garage-fuzz five-piece band that takes their record collector obsession with mystical '70s heavy psych stoner rock to an insanely distorted, primal extreme -- these four songs rumble along like an unholy hybrid of Comets On Fire, Angelblood, Hawkwind, Harry Pussy and Amon Duul II. And we sure are sure about the latter 'cause they cover the slayin' "Archangels Thunderbird" from ADII's Yeti album on the b-side of this, and do it so well (the vocals are perfect!), it's worth buying just for that alone, though the other three tracks are great too. They also give thanks to the Edgar Broughton Band, the James Gang, UFO (really early UFO weed, I mean, we'd guess), and you can hear that strain of heavy, hippy, boogie/space rock here, but updated into the grungy lo-fi avant-punk now (either that or cast back into the prehistoric past!). Did we mention the utter utter distortion in which this whole record is bathed? 'Cause they're women, somebody has said that they sound like "hot tar being poured onto the Go-Gos." But not in a torturous way at all, we should hasten to add. It's love, this sound. One song here it titled "Witchy Ways" and yes, these young ladies from Brooklyn are a new wave coven conjuring noisy psych rock grunt.
On 180 gram vinyl, packaged in a hand-screened cover with insert. Get one while you can... and then, like us, wait expectantly for a full-length.
We've been blessed recently with multiple releases from the mysterious Nordvargr, whose dense dark ambience we can never get enough of. Nordvargr was a core member of legendary black ambient outfit MZ412, and has recorded as Toroidh, Hydra Head 9,Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Nordvargr and of course Folkstorm. It's been far too long since the last Folkstorm record, Folkstorm being the guise Nordvargr takes on to produce his unique brand of tense, isolationist, dark and droning industrial music. Thick swells of minor key chords, hypnotic repetitive tribal drumming, all sorts of found sounds and snippets of speeches, traditional songs and old radio broadcasts, huge jagged distorted pulses (sounding almost like Techno Animal or Curse Of The Golden Vampire at times), haunting disembodied female vocals, radio static and amp buzz and all manner of sonic grit and crackle, pounding subterranean rhythms, warm warbly drones, disturbing minor key ambience, creaking industrial clatter, intense nightmarish melodies, all bathed in a thick swirl of fuzzed out distortion and crumbling machinelike whir. Super ominous and dark, intense and strangely beautiful.
Packaged in a gorgeous red, white and black digipak. And while they last we have the EXTREMELY LIMITED special edition (limited to 300 hand numbered copies) that includes a bonus 3" cd containing two unreleased tracks! Once those are gone, you'll receive the standard single disc version.
Whoa, this really takes us back! Seminal dream pop band Galaxie 500 were as dreamy as ever when they stopped by John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show for these sessions back in 1989 and 1990. These eight tracks were compiled from those two visits -- the first four were recorded 10/30/90 and the second were from 09/24/89. Included are a few tasty covers of tunes by Young Marble Giants ("Final Days"), Buffy Sainte-Marie ("Moonshot") and Jonathan Richman("Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste").
The Bay Area's Goat Family are sure kicking up some dust on Unstopperable. It's an off-kilter hillbilly jamboree filled with originals and covers of old classics like "Ring Of Fire", the rousing rais-a-pint "All For Me Grog" and you might recognize the number "Pick A Bale Of Cotton" from the front porch scene of the movie The Jerk!
Imagine that this split release is a see-saw, with Graves At Sea on one side and Asunder on the other. They're both so heavy that the teeter-totter wouldn't totter, but simply snap in the middle, leaving both bands sitting there, glaring at one another, having no fun at all. But no fun sounds good, if you like doom like we do. And both of these bands do the doom quite well, ultra low and slow -- so slow that just to make it through a song they need at least ten minutes (the two Graves At Sea tracks clock in at 10:45 and 11:16 while Asunder's contribution lasts 18:59) and you'll need a dose of anti-depressants. I mean, is this a split release or a suicide pact?
Graves At Sea (who had a cd-r release a while ago, but as yet no full-length cd) are from LA and basically are along the lines of Khanate, Burning Witch, or Corrupted -- nasty, feedbacking, hateful sludgecore, with a dreadlocked vocalist (known as the "bloody guy" around here) who spits out a screech like Edgy from BW or Khanate's Alan Dubin. And they're not to be confused with Buried At Sea, by the way, although both bands play music dug from the same charnel pit!
Graves At Sea make a perfect pairing with Asunder, who are the Bay Area's contribution to the "funereal doom" subgenre, aligning with the likes of Skepticism, Evoken, and Disembowelment. Majestic and morose metal played at a glacial pace, with both the use of cellos and the presence of ex-Weakling guitarist/vocalist John Gossard giving 'em extra dismal atmosphere. Their track here is definitely in the vein of their epick A Clarion Call album from last year.
Tommy Guerrero broadens his already broad musical scope further on Year Of The Monkey. It's much more 'full band' sounding than we recall on past Guerrero releases. While it still drifts back into more late night languid clubland themes, it actually seemed quite reminiscent of a lot of Chicago style post-rock. Jason mentioned that he'd seen Guerrero perform with Tortoise a whiles back, and after hearing these five tracks, that doesn't seem at all out of character. In fact, it makes perfect sense. If you've a craving for a little something that's moody and subtly groovy, this might be the ticket. Equally suited for an evening of well-mixed cocktails, a latenight drive along the coastline or a night in with a thick deep read.
All hail Guitar Wolf! Bands from Japan often take their music to the extremest of extremes, and blisterin' brutes Guitar Wolf are a perfect example of this. While some bands of the same ilk occasionally hit the red on the volume and intensity meters, this rad Japanese trio consistently push things waaay further, frequently roaring right through the red into parts unknown. It's not hard to imagine their vocals and guitars literally tearing your stereo speakers to shreds, and their hammering rhythm section knocking all the fixtures right off your walls. Not always in tune nor in time, but shit, that hardly matters when you're having this kind of frenzied fun! This is a wild collection of twenty six tracks, both "greatest hits" from their albums as well as some rare, out-of-print or previously unreleased material from their past eighteen years of garage rawk mayhem. Yes, it fuckin' rules, but it's also bittersweet because it marks the close of the Guitar Wolf chapter that starred bassist Billy (aka Bass Wolf aka Hideaki Sekiguchi) who passed away earlier this year at the age of 38. News bulletin: Surviving members Toru and Seiji have chosen to go on, searching long and hard for a new bassist. The new Bass Wolf is nineteen year old UG!
Holy shit. Or maybe we should say, Unholy shit! This record scare us to death. Not just sonically, but visually as well. Hell Militia is some sort of black metal super group, can't remember the constituent parts, but the sum of those parts has somehow conjured up the fabulously foul Canonisation Of The Foul Spirit, a sick, hateful, evil and abominable blackened alchemy, equal parts grim buzz, convulsive thrash, furious blast and some of the sickest, brimstone gargling, angel crushing, fire breathing vocals EVER. A relentless musical pummeling, like laying in a shallow pool of black pitch atop a rocky crag in the middle of an endless expanse of dark water, cowering and shivering and praying for death as fallen angels beat you to within an inch of your life with spiked clubs, the whole while horned heads held aloft, burnt wings hanging useless behind them, wailing and squealing like some demonic choir, as all around you squalls of buzzing guitars and fuzzed out bass and shards of blasting beats rain down, burning jagged chunks of flesh searing black metal. So amazing and frighteningly furiously heavy, and then those inhuman vocals just push it totally and completely into the nightmarish black. The artwork is stunningly creepy as well, perfectly capturing the hateful, Christ crushing fury within, gorgeous black and white photos of clergymen, nuns, bishops, all blended with skulls, and corpses, wolves and goats, and all manner of unidentifiable beats and creatures. Like an even more damaged Joel Peter Witkin. So totally freaky but quite striking and creepily alluring at the same time. All printed on gorgeous thick paper stock, the whole thing housed in a similarly garish and striking slipcover.
Do you rememer that scene in the movie, "Hook" where Rufio and all the Lost Boys have a massive feast *powered by imagination* and all the food looks like radioactive play-doh and then they start having a food fight and everyone gets smattered with colorful edible goo? No? Ok well....then just imagine a radioactive play-doh food fight. Now convert that into sound. There you go. That's this album. Except....every 6th or 7th wad of play-doh food is actually a bag full of flaming fists. Sloppy, raucous, and punch you in the face fun. Woah. Disc two is a double feature DVD from Hella's Japanese Tour.
The long awaited return of the sweetly snotty super opinionated rock mag Hit It Or Quit It, helmed by booker / scribe / rocker / indie mainstay Jessica Hopper. This issue features The Hold Steady on the cover, inside: Thursday, Mountain Goats, Dinosaur Jr., Pelican, Spoon, Miranda July, M.O.P., Stones Throw Records, comics, bunches of record reviews and loads more. Two different covers too!
The 43rd album from the one and only Jandek is here! Doing his very distinct thing on acoustic guitar and vocals, a style that has become known to music nerds far and wide as "Jandekian", Khartoum is yet another dark, downer trip into this hermitic Texan's psyche. Well, maybe he's not so hermitic anymore, but even now that he's actually making public appearances (only 27 years after he released his first LP), his music remains as raw and mysterious as ever. And "Jandekian" hasn't lost its meaning. Khartoum consists of alienated, atonal strum-und-twang, teamed with loosely demented vocals, sometimes quietly spoken, sometimes pitched to a warbling holler, delivered with the stream of conciousness lyrical logic of a homeless poet. These songs, with titles like "You Wanted To Leave", "Fragmentation", "I Shot Myself", "In A Chair I Stare", and "Fork In The Road", seem fixated on past (broken) relationships, forgiveness, regret, and despair. Our attempt to transcribe the lyrics of "I Shot Myself" produced the following: "I shot myself I can't get up I am beyond repair I shot myself I'm over some hill beyond the valley stars in the black night sun filters through forgetting a mountain time slides in my mind and I know what it is its time to die..." Something like that. Or, from "New Dimension", another of Khartoum's eight tracks: "You're married, I presume I'm not looking but if you're not be careful I'm the vulnerable kind I love to hurt myself I hurt myself in love and I don't care and all the spirits in the spirit world don't equal you because you're gone and I took you for granted and I miss you so." It's a soul laid bare, speaking directly but in such an idiosyncratic manner that it will only be heard by those with a will to listen. Seriously, his scrabble of strings and chaotic chording provides almost a respite from his depressed words and sometimes excruciatingly miserable wail, one that at times reminds us of Oxbow's Eugene Robinson. So... another fine addition to any fan's sagging Jandek shelf!
AQ fave P. Jeck's 2002 masterpiece (Record Of The Week on our list number 135) has at last been repressed and is back in stock!
Philip Jeck's take on turntable experimentation involves using multiple turntables and scratchy old records to create blissfully beautiful surface-noise looping. His largely improvised compositions make the most gorgeous, repetitive, droning use of good old-fashioned record crackle and hiss. Jeck takes great care to allow for scraps of melody to emerge from the original music on the records with snippets of piano, sitar, and slow-motion vocals, popping out of crackled loops and often recalling the height of the Robin Storey era Zoviet France in the late '80s.
What differentiates this new album from the previous excellent ones in his oeuvre is its dynamics (perhaps due to the fact that these were all live performances?) -- the music is more active in terms of the elements used and their resulting emotional power. In fact, the first track "Above" is the creepiest composition I've ever heard from Jeck. The dynamism is also evident in that he uses more individual sounds that unfold over time but *not* necessarily being looped. It's nice to hear him trusting the sounds to stand on their own rather than needing the looping effect to make them beautiful. Highly recommended!!
If you like old tyme-y country and bluegrass music with lots of mandolin, you're in the company of these folks who clearly love the music that they themselves make and hold a deep reverence for their Americana forefathers and foremothers (foreparents?) such as Bill Monroe, Hazel Dickens, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs and the Carter Family. Jim Krewson, Jennie Benford and co. weave their own faithful rendition of the style on an equal split of traditional numbers, covers and originals on their third album Rivers Roll On By. Whether on lovely numbers like "Mt. St. Helens" or the heartier bootstompers such as "Quit Barking At Me", their strong, achingly earnest male and female voices (Jim and Jennie's, duh!) shine with a burnished glow.
So what kind of a name is JonnyX And The Groadies anyway? Well, quite possibly the only appropriate monicker for the world's only "Party Black Metal" band. Huh? What? C'mon, you heard us. PARTY BLACK METAL. That's right. Might not sound good, at least to all you grimmer than grim blackmetalheads, but it is, in fact it's a heck of a lot more interesting than most black metal we hear these days. And actually the 'party' aspect isn't as obvious on record. Live they seem to be a serious blast, wild and goofy and explosively spastic, with pointy metal axes (as in guitars, although we imagine their might be actual axes as well) and goofy outfits and plenty of mayhem and destruction. But on record, it's all skull encrusted synths and upside down crosses, um... tight pants and foot long spikes, and, well, wild windmilling hair and white belts? The most unholy union of buzzing black metal and insanely aggro spastic screamo EVER. Grinding buzzing guitars, demonic shrieks, programmed blast beats and a thick wall of majestic keyboards. Think maybe Drop Dead, Arcturus, Teen Chtulu, The Locust, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Behead The Prophet No Lord Shall Live, and Cradle Of Filth all packed into a sweaty filthy Portland Basement, playing before some strange mix of metalheads, emo kids and the walking dead! Huge thick blasts of grim black metal segue into fuzzy squelchy ambient synth break downs and then slip into some moody midtempo near-doom, before exploding again in a blast of barbed buzz. Awesome! Nine tracks, the first eight, brief blasts of blackness, all clocking in at under two minutes, the final track, "Unmortal", a massive 14 minute blackened synth doom juggernaut.
You know how we're always listing cds from the mystical, mythical Finnish free-folk crew of bands like Kemialliset Ystavat, Avarus, Uton and others that consist of material long before previously released on super limited edition formats like cd-r, lathe-cut vinyl, and cassette tape? Stuff that, upon inital release, only made it out to the handful of gnomes and trolls who hang out in the Finnish forests and snap up such treasures while they're still warm. If you're a fan but don't dwell in the deeps of the Finnish woods, it's a little frustrating ain't it? Well now here's your chance to get in on the ground floor with one of these releases. No promises that it will ever be available on any other format, either. From the same folks that brought us the fabulous Maan Matoset comp reviewed elsewhere this list... Live Kemialliset Ystavat! ON CASSETTE TAPE. Yup, just like in ye olden days. Packaged with nice, colorful j-card artwork. Recorded live in Hyvinkaa, 2005. Next best thing to being there... Taju is a muttering, howling, clanking, freaked out party of a record, just as mysterious and fun as any other Kemialliset document but very live and energetic indeed. Kazoos compete with rattling percussion, electronic drones, and barnyard vocalizations... It's a preschool Amon Duul on a sugar high. Get it while you can, we won't have these for long (already some gnomes have been by to pick up their copies).
HMKE is a brief 4 track EP from the Italian post-rock collective Larsen, who earned a considerable amount of notoriety for their stunt in flying Michael Gira over to Italy to produce their record, all the while remaining hidden behind a curtain...supposedly. Last year, Larsen continued to be enigmatic with Play, an album of audio alchemy transforming Autechre's electronic melodies into hypnotic, drone-rock epics to amazing effect. Thanks to a poorly worded press-release from the label, it's sort of hard to tell if this is a precursor to an upcoming Lustmord / Larsen collaborative project; or if that collaboration is merely a one-off to appear sometime in the future. We'll shrug our shoulders and simply enjoy this fractured gem of dark, dark, dark drone-rock hypnosis, augmented by some choice remixes. The first track is a remix from the Norwegian audio-virologist Deathprod, who drags the already turgid sounds of Larsen into grim hum of blackened ice. Next up is a new track, which may or may not have something to do with that aforementioned Lustmord collaboration; it's a buzzing dirge of circling bass, guitar, and electronics caught in a downward spiral, much like their material on their earlier recordings. For the last two tracks, Larsen enlisted the remixing talents of dark ambient noodler Oragami Galaktika.
Along with the likes of Captain Beyond, Bang, Dust, and Sir Lord Baltimore, the UK's Leaf Hound are one of the obscure '70s proto-metal acts often cited in the annals of stoner rock history. Heck they're called Leaf Hound and their (only) album is titled Growers Of Mushroom! Can't get much more stoner rock than that. Originally released in (you guessed it) 1971, Leaf Hound's album was a showcase for the powerful pipes of vocalist Pete French (who later spent stints at the mic for both Atomic Rooster and Cactus) and the heavy-duty hard rock riffage of guitarist Mick Halls (who, along with French, previously was a member of the Brunning Sunflower Blues Band and Black Cat Bones). And really Growers Of Mushroom is worth it to all '70s metal fans for the fierce "Freelance Fiend" that leads off the album. That track's a screamin' classic. If the whole album rocked as hard it'd be hard to beat as the heaviest thing from '71. But, while some other cuts on here approach a "Freelance Fiend" level of metal mania, such as "Stagnant Pool" (which sounds like anything but), there's some mellower material to be found as well, wherein French shows off his soulful side. But Led Zeppelin fans won't mind such bluesy workouts as "Drowned My Life In Fear", either. And Zep fans were probably just who Leaf Hound were hoping to hook when they recorded this record way back when. Too bad this was pretty much it for Leaf Hound (more on that in a sec), but their legacy lives on. A lot of AQ customers probably know that there's even a doom/stoner rock label in Japan named after this band! So, we're happy to have this swank 2005 Repertoire cd reish, remastered and complete with lyrics and liner notes in a nice digipack. And it's got three bonus tracks. Two non-album cuts (one wimpy, one pretty good) from back in the day, and a brand NEW track as well. Yep, that's right. Pete French has hooked up with some young 'uns to form a new, revitalized Leaf Hound, who've been gigging anew -- they even played a show with spiritual descendents Witchcraft! Normally we'd cringe at the thought of sullying the reissue of a cult album from 30+ years ago with a "bonus" track recorded recently, but the new Leaf Hound's "Too Many Rock 'n Roll Times" ain't that bad. The guy can still sing and it sounds like Leaf Hound, so why not?
For those of you who just skim the list or only read the first few sentences of reviews, let us get your attention real quick. Lurker Of Chalice, in case you didn't realize, is the work of one WREST, aka SF black metal overlord LEVIATHAN. Paying attention now? Good. let's proceed. Lurker Of Chalice has existed in one form or another for several years now, but outside a cassette or two this is the only recorded evidence and man will it blow your mind. Originally conceived as a less black metal, more experimental musical outlet (and possibly inspired by Leviathan / AQ faves Benighted Leams) Lurker Of Chalice is constructed from lots of black metal parts as might be expected, but lot of very un-black metal bits as well: arpeggiated post rock guitars, martial percussion, simple propulsive krautrock rhythms, swirling droning ambience, strange haunting vocals, obscure found sounds and samples, doomy slow motion dirges, reverb drenched, almost sun dappled melodies over creepy warbly soundscapes, warm thick keyboards, heavily strummed steel string guitars, rich throaty crooning, super overblown distorted guitars, all smeared into a warm fuzzed out, dreamy and melancholy, mostly midtempo blackened doomscape. Occasionally, Lurker blasts into full on black metal, like on the second track "Piercing Where They Might", but even in a BM context, things are beautifully way off kilter, rumbling bizarrely affected vocals, dizzying riffs that swirl and slither and make it impossible to focus, huge jangly guitars over miltaristic snare drums and warbly Michael Gira like vocals. So weird. But so perfect. Imagine Leviathan and Benighted Leams and the Swans and Ved Buens Ende, all somehow mixed into some darkly evolving, gothic tinged expanse of moody metallic melancholia. This is maybe the best sounding record Wrest has made which is saying a lot. And it's definitely the weirdest, and most certainly the saddest. The whole record is dripping with intense emotion, minor key and slowly stretching toward some bleak future of broken promise and crushed spirit. From slowly evolving, almost cinematic instrumentals to massive and majestic dirges to woozy effect drenched post rockisms to ultra bleak ballads to damaged black metal crush, Lurker Of Chalice evokes total and utter misery, a musical invocation to the lost and alone, wandering in search of hope, under the suffocating black cloak of night, crushed beneath a starless sky and adrift in a soulless universe, exposing every raw nerve and dark corner of Wrest's twisted musical soul. So fucking good!
It's very rare that a band name cuts so succinctly to the heart of what a band is all about. So perfectly encapsulating the hate and misery and blackness of the music. Thus we have Make A Change Kill... Yourself, certainly doesn't trip off the tongue, but it's not supposed to, like the music, and the sentiments behind it, nothing here is supposed to be easy, or happy or joyful. It's meant to be hard, brutal, sad, dismal, hopeless, miserable. And it is, but on such a massively grand and epic scale it's sort of breathtaking. Huge mournful minor key swirls of buzzing guitars, ultra depressive and and strangely melancholy. Mostly midtempo, often trudging into downright doom, occasionally bursting into brief blasts of furious thrashing, but never for long, always settling back into a seething lurching blackened lament. Massive stretched out epics, the shortest track clocking in at 14 minutes, the longest pushing 30. Relentless double kicks beneath a black flow of downtuned Burzumic buzz, thick and rich and dense and dark, so emotional and intense, fuzz atop buzz atop blur atop whir, swaying and loping hypnotically. This takes the very best parts of Burzum and Xasthur and other blackened depressives to the next level, introducing a massive and majestic Godspeed element, as well as some incredibly catchy melodies, albeit still appropriately raw and black and grim, but they manage to float wraithlike, endlessly in your ears, in your brain, in your soul, like the ghost of a memory, a weird feeling of sadness and loss, that sticks in your head just as much as the bleak and somber melodies. Very rare for any music, let alone buzzy blurry black metal. Incredibly poignant, ambient interludes, ghostly female vocals, strange drone-y breakdowns, mysterious chimes and swells, brief glimpses of desolate soundscapes, all serving, along with the almighty BUZZ, to lead us even further down that dark path to nothingness.
BLACK METAL RECORD OF THE YEAR for sure!
A while back we reviewed a compilation of early Finnish experimental music called Arktinen Hysteria, that documented the lively scene there in the sixties and seventies, from playful goofy sound manipulation, to austere soundscapes, hand built instruments, vocal experimentations, freaked out avant rock and more. A pretty amazing document, that unfortunately seems to be unavailable lately.
Not long after we reviewed it, a Finnish label contacted us with an entire album from one of the artists on the comp, by the name of J.O. Mallander. To be totally honest, at the time we couldn't remember who was who and which tracks were Mallander's, since by that time the comp had been gone for a while, but we figured that folks loved that comp so much that a whole record by Mallander, regardless of which tracks were his would be amazing.
So we got the discs in and they looked amazing, gorgeous eight panel silkscreened sleeve, with totally confusing but eminently readable liner notes form Leif Elggren, and two front covers depending on which way you held it, since it compiled two different sets of pieces. We decided to listen to Extended Play first, two pieces, one from 1962, one from 1968. The first track begins with Mallander repeating a single word over and over. And over. And over. Well, weird. Skip to the end of the first track, still repeating that same word, over and over and over. Okay, we'll go to the second track. Hmmm. Same word. Over and over. Obviously being 'performed' live as you can hear throat clearing and seat shifting and foot shuffling. Wow. 13 minutes of the same word, repeated over and over in a deadpan monotone. Slowly shifting in pitch and inflection, but very, um. similar. But stick with us, after those tracks, which have now grown on us quite a bit, this becomes a super cool, super weird, and totally primitive turntablist / plunderphonic / mashup record. The majority of Decompositions, the pieces that make up the second half of the disc, is manipulated vinyl lps, 78's, 7"s, all tweaked and affected and fucked with. A series of smokey jazz records are slowed way down, pitch shifted up and down, up and down, warbling and wobbling, woozy and dizzyingly soothing, like listening to old jazz 78's through a funhouse mirror, melodies stumble clumsily into each other and pile one on top of another, jostling to return to some normal speed, some semblance of regular jazz, but continue to weave drunkenly, seasick and sleepy, drunken and druggy. Not all that different than stuff we've heard Kid Koala and other modern turntablists do which is pretty amazing. Then: a looped snippet of piano and a weary vocal singing "I'm Alabama bound" over and over, a seemingly endless loop, until the words stop making any sense and become nothing but strange melodic concepts, and then the voice riffs its way out of the loop, the effect similar to when a massive drone finally ends, there's that moment where the tension is finally relieved. Later: a record of thirties boogie woogie is scratched and skipped and looped and becomes a skittering, hypnotic, jumble of female vocals and jaunty horns, all sort of bouncing and hiccuping and skipping, creating strange rhythms and melodic fragments.
Probably the most compelling and amazing piece is "In Reality", where multiple versions of "I've Got You Under My Skin" are played simultaneously,piled atop one another, seemingly at random, performed at different tempos, in different keys, sounding a bit like a random round, until all of the singers sing the word 'reality' at the same moment, and which point the song starts to loop and repeat and blur, becoming a confusing collage of multiple 'reality's. Literally.
Now on vinyl, four years after the cd version was released! Here's what former AQ owner and huge NMH fan (as we all are) Windy wrote about this back when the cd came out in 2001 (though, of course the vinyl doesn't come with a video you can watch on your computer -- for that, you need the cd version which we still have in stock):
Finally in stock, the long awaited solo acoustic live set by Neutral Milk Hotel's beloved Jeff Mangum, about whom I simply cannot be objective -- the two NMH records *still* make me cry everytime I listen to them, they're that lovely and touching and brilliant. This 1997 concert was performed in an Xmas-light-filled room with an occasional baby enthusiastically chiming in alongside Mangum's super earnest vocal delivery. If you've ever seen Neutral Milk Hotel in concert, you already know that Jeff will deviate often from the recorded versions of his music, sometimes stretching out a multi-note wail for much longer, sometimes speeding up or changing a rhythm. That's what makes this live disc worth it -- for the variations he introduces, super sweet but just different enough to keep it fresh for those of us who have listened to the two NMH records hundreds of times already.
This show is super lo-fi (the venue is a cofeehouse), but the performance is quite focused and heartfelt. Contains songs that will be familiar to NMH fans, plus a few others, a cover of Phil Spector's "I Love How You Love Me", and best of all, the entire concert is also playable as a 48 minute film on your computer! Comes with no liner notes to speak of but there is a nice foldout poster. On Orange Twin, the new label started by Mangum and Elf Power's Laura Carter.
By this point, if you're at all familiar with Britain's weirdest black metal bunch The Meads Of Asphodel you know to expect the unexpected. You'll be unphased by breakbeat breakdowns, trumpet solos, and syrupy strings amidst Venom-inspired vocals and Cradle of Filth-worthy black metal bombast. And you already know there's gonna be spacerockin' Hawkwind guitar on here from an authentic old Hawkwind guitarist. Yet somehow we still suspect that at some point whilst listening to their new, third album Damascus Steel, even the most dedicated Meads fan will have a "what the fuck is this, what the fuck are they doing??" moment. And that's one big reason why you're a Meads fan after all! Maybe that point will be when they burst into a sarcastic version of Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful Life" with the lyrics altered so that vocalist Metatron is delivering lines like: "I see newborn graves / dirt dimmed with steam / open womb flesh / death and disease / and I think to myself, what a wonderful world," over that familiar melody, his gravelly voice really rather reminiscent of Satchmo's! Or maybe it will be at the very start of the album, when you're confronted with a sampled speech by George W. Bush. They don't manipulate his words with cut and paste tricks, either, he just says what he said. It's as if in the black metal competition to be the most EVIL they couldn't think of anything more effective than to incorporate our President into their band! Though, we suspect Bush is sampled for reasons of geopolitical commentary, as he's speaking about his views on the Middle East, a region that has long figured centrally into The Meads' peculiar musical and lyrical vision (this album's entitled Damascus Steel, remember).
There's a been a few metal bands with Middle Eastern obsessions -- Melechesh, Absu, Morbid Angel -- and maybe that's because of the ancient mysteries and mythology of man spawned from that land. Just the Biblical associations alone give it resonance for both the Christian and (in this case) the anti-Christian. Not to mention that it's the location today of so much suffering and strife. Warfare has always been a metal topic, terror too. So it's no wonder that metal bands would look to the Middle East for subject matter. But in the case of The Meads, we'd always assumed that it also had to do with the fact that, well, they like to wear medieval armor a la the Crusaders. Maybe that's how their interest first was stoked. But it's clear that they have something subversive to say about religion and politics and that flashpoint region of our world. Of course, Metatron's words (and song titles like the Bal-Sagoth worthy "Behold The Kindred Battle Carcasses Strewn Across The Bloodred Dunes Of Gilgamesh Mute In The Frenzied Clamour Of Death's Rolling Tongue And Ravenous Bursting Steel") take some deciphering, and it doesn't help that his band has set your head spinning with their bent blend of metal and psych and techno and ethnic music... In one song, for instance, blasting blasphemies segue into a groovy keyboard guest solo from Mirai of Japan's Sigh (one of the few bands in the world also so eccentric that they're naturally soulmates with the Meads blokes). And you'll think to yourself, what a wonderful Meads album!
MPEG Stream: "Satanic Black Nubian Pharaohs" [/audio/meadsofsatanicblack.m3u]
We first heard the oddly named Mudboy on Last Visible Dog's recent mammoth six-cd Invisible Pyramid: Elegy Box. Curiousity thus piqued, we're pleased to now find a Mudboy full-length cd has now also just been released by LVD (actually, this is a reissue of a recording previously put out by an even smaller label). This Rhode Island feller's woozy music, performed with home-built electronics and modified vintage keyboards (a circuit-bent church organ we're told), would be the perfect soundtrack to a creepy, sleepy sort of imaginary movie... this cd's full of ominous drones and sinister synth but it's also soothingly repetitive and goshdarn lovely. Whooshing interludes bridge the spaced out explorations of minor-key organ melodies that permeate the disc, occasionally infiltrated by field recordings and broken rhythmic glitch. It's an atmosphere of menace that's strangely warm and inviting. If Bo Hansson's ghost made Halloween music, or down on his luck Eric Malmberg (keyboardist of Sagor & Swing) was hired to play a lullabies for a monster baby...they'd sound a bit like Mudboy, perhaps. And if "this is folk music", then Cluster and John Carpenter are folk music too, 'cause Mudboy seems to be inspired by both kraut-tronics and analog fright flick scores. And we're ready to snuggle up with that monster baby...
Mum fans, you're probably already aware that Mum's debut album has been reissued, aren't you? But if you've yet to acquaint yourself with the shimmering pop majesty that is Mum's music, you simply won't go wrong with any of their gorgeous albums, but this one is a mighty fine place to start.
Here's what we had to say the first time around...
Mum hails from Iceland, a land whose musical exports have received proportionally higher praise per capita than bands from any other country on the planet. And, yes, Mum has been hailed as the next big thing from Iceland after Sigur Ros. This outfit places themselves within the border regions of electronica and post-rock, where they augment delicate IDM algorithms with Durutti Column-esque guitars, trumpets, and clarinets, but never dabble in the stagnant Tortoise sound. As a result of incorporating acoustic instruments into digital structures, their sound has a rich color palette somewhere between rich acoustic warmth and glistening digital. Mum's sound often recalls the romantic leanings of the early IDM sound (Aphex / Reload / Autechre), but without any of the big floor-filling techno rhythms. It's the aural equivalent of layer upon layer of delicate tulle, gauzy blankets, and goose down duvets. May we say this is dramatic and ever so much more than ok.
Mum fans, you're probably already aware that Mum's debut album has been reissued, aren't you? But if you've yet to acquaint yourself with the shimmering pop majesty that is Mum's music, you simply won't go wrong with any of their gorgeous albums, but this one is a mighty fine place to start.
Here's what we had to say the first time around...
Mum hails from Iceland, a land whose musical exports have received proportionally higher praise per capita than bands from any other country on the planet. And, yes, Mum has been hailed as the next big thing from Iceland after Sigur Ros. This outfit places themselves within the border regions of electronica and post-rock, where they augment delicate IDM algorithms with Durutti Column-esque guitars, trumpets, and clarinets, but never dabble in the stagnant Tortoise sound. As a result of incorporating acoustic instruments into digital structures, their sound has a rich color palette somewhere between rich acoustic warmth and glistening digital. Mum's sound often recalls the romantic leanings of the early IDM sound (Aphex / Reload / Autechre), but without any of the big floor-filling techno rhythms. It's the aural equivalent of layer upon layer of delicate tulle, gauzy blankets, and goose down duvets. May we say this is dramatic and ever so much more than ok.
This is as grim as it gets. Yet another legendary lost French black metal classic gets reissued. The French Black Legions, Vlad Tepes, Belketre and Mutiilation (yes, two i's are more evil than one) were stirring up black clouds of hate way back in the early nineties, early enough to influence basically every black metal band worth a shit, but a little too early (and a little to far from Norway) to be caught up in the black metal mania that made Emperor, Mayhem, Satyricon and the like household words (even in only mildly blackened households). But that's probably for the best. As their records became impossible to find, and only the grimmest and truest BM warriors could boast of ever having heard Mutiilation, their legacy and legend as black metal visionaries was sealed. And listening to this, arguably their best and most revered release, it's easy to see why. And let's not forget that Mutiilation continue to record, having just released a brand new record earlier this year, easily as grim and buzzy and amazing as ever. Vampires Of Black Imperial Blood, released in 1995, sold out of its limited pressing and has remained incredibly difficult to find for years. So this reissue is a godsend (um, devilsend?) with extra artwork, two bonus tracks and remastered sound. But no amount of remastering can disguise the ultra primitive sound quality, that 4-track, practice space sort of recording, the -sound- that fits this sound so perfectly, making Darkthrone sound downright hi-fi. Buzzing minor key guitars, a mournful sounding arpeggiated midtempo droniness that certainly informed Xasthur's sepia toned fuzz, chaotic way-up-in-the-mix drums, guttural, growled vocals, and strangest of all some really catchy songs underneath all that buzz and blackness,
Even this reissue is for some reason ULTRA LIMITED, so if we run out we may not be able to get more.
Crashing waves of balls of yarn. That's one attempt to explain this band's sound... Along with bringing in the usual Earth, SUNNO))), and Boris comparisons. The Toronto based duo of Aidan Baker (guitars, vocals, flute, piano, drum machines) and Leah Buckareff (bass and vocals) are an "atmospheric doom" band whose slow moving, heavy and heavily distorted music definitely shares something with the likes of early Earth, but although they've done a split 3" with UK doom nasties Moss (among several previous underground releases) you can't really define them as being a "metal" band at all. Their gauzy, droney, doom-spelled-backwards music has a warm, melodic underpinning, somewhere within the billowing clouds of distortion that form the three long tracks found here. I guess it's something like the churchy, "funereal" doom of Finland's Skepticism, really, but even more calm, echoed and ambient. Melancholic but very pleasant, with both growled vocals and gentle singing hovering just beneath the surface, this music somehow suggests rays of pure white light shining down from on high to illuminate their low-end murk... and during the final third of the last track "Breakpoint" the heaviness drops away altogether for a quietly sung coda that could be from the most mellow and poetic of indie-pop albums. Nadja's music is definitely more abstract and altered than, say, Ocean (another sludge-dirge outfit reviewed elsewhere this list), and is so much more beautiful than the monochrome darkness dwelt in by many other doom bands. If you can imagine an ultra-distorted hybrid of Growing, Codeine and, uh, Ras Algethi you'd maybe come close to the sound of Nadja... Recommended!!
