Final glorious missive from Austrian militaristic folk / post industrial / dark ambient outift Der Blutharsch. Ex members of The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud and former collaborators with Death In June, DB carved out a truly unique and musically diverse niche in a genre rife with problematic politics and unoriginal ideas. The music of Der Blutharsch was and is a seemingly impossible mix, taking the apocalyptic folk of Death In June, the Teutonic metallic stomp of Rammstein, the clattery industrial caberet of Einsturzende Neubaten, the swampy fire and brimstone dirge of Sixteen Horsepower and the dramatic gothiness of Sisters Of Mercy or Bauhaus and crafting all of those disparate elements into something dark and delightfully dreary, creepy and sometimes truly harrowing. Their sound has gone from dark ambience to industrial clatter to dramatic doom, and have now arrived at a sound that is even more difficult to describe. We once wrote that the music of DB sounded like "Dead Can Dance with the vocalist from Rammstein, performing in the forest, covering the Comus record in its entirety, backed up by a military drum corps. Or some impossible mixt of Current 93, Magnetic Fields, World War 2, In The Nursery, Ennio Morricone, a gypsy caravan and every great black metal intro ever" and that still pretty much sums it up. BUT, somehow, for their last hurrah, they've managed to sound even more bizarre and unique and all over the map. The core sound is still dark and droning, but the rock element is much more noticeable this time around, with a seemingly omnipresent churning low slung bass weaving a dense framework of rumbling low end, supporting doom laden soundscapes constructed from moaning cellos and martial snares, wartime sound samples and military speeches, pounding rhythms and dramatic teutonic vocals, gypsy violin and distorted guitar. But even within this industrial doom rock framework, DB manage to inject all sorts of really unexpected twists and turns, one track sounds like some hellish take on a Morricone spaghetti western with little bits of blackened twang, and another even sounds like a lost track from some sixties girl group, albeit in this case, swathed in dark sonic swirls and all sorts of rhythmic interference. So amazing and strange and totally mesmerizing. It's sad to think this is the last we'll hear from Der Blutharsch.
Packaged in a gorgeous all black, letter pressed sleeve, with a little sprig of edelweiss in full color, black text on a black background. Quite striking.
Don't wanna sound corny, but... awww to hell with it, we've gotta say that this Vancouver band must've plucked their Rubies from the Wicked Witch Of The West's ruby red slippers cause there's some magic happening here. Wow! Bandleader Dan Bejar's eccentric blend of folk, glam, psych and pop reaches new heights and depths on this, their sixth album. Destroyer's Rubies positively overflows with confidence, ambition and grandeur. Over the years, Bejar's music has drawn comparisons (by us and other folks) to the elder likes of Robyn Hitchcock, Harry Nilsson, David Bowie and Cat Stevens. This kinship has primarily resided in the lilting warbly vocal department, but there's also a good deal of similar shading in each of the songwriters' often cryptic and deeply personal tales. Ever the nomadic troubadour traversing the wilds of Canada at whim, Bejar's lyrical storytelling takes a similar roaming, stream of consciousness path. And it's such a pleasure to be able to join him for this ten song spell. Check out the album's centerpiece, and definitely one of its highlights "Looter's Follies". Fantastic in every sense of the word!
Damn, this has been in stock for a little while now -- some months now, in fact! -- but for some reason we didn't get around to checking it out 'til just the other day (even though we liked this band's previous ep, Once We Were Diamonds, reviewed here last year). Like we've said before, it's hard to keep up with everything... But better late than never. Everything that was cool about that ep is even cooler here on the full-length, which actually includes the two best songs from the ep, would-be/should-be hits "That Girl's Attractive" and "Destination Diamonds". If the latter track were the only thing you ever heard by Diamond Nghts you'd think they were fully trying to emulate both The Fucking Champs (and/or Thin Lizzy) and The Darkness. But DN have more tricks up their sleeves than just that -- the rest of Popsicle isn't all (ironic?) metal like that... though the adrenalized "It's A Shokka" definitely demonstrates a maybe tongue-in-cheek Judas Priest influence, and also sounds a heckuva lot like Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy". But other tracks here show that besides the Thin Lizzy and Queen albums that these guys undoubtedly love (there's no denying it), they have other influences too that aren't classic rock/metal. On tracks like "Drip Drip" (not the Comus song!) they've got a dancey '80s new wavey thing (hmm, also like Queen got into) going on. And at other moments the hooks and the vocals remind us of the White Stripes, and the chops underlying the pop make us think of 31 Knots... So while Diamond Nights can't lay claim to being the most original band ever, they're definitely talented and have managed to meld their collective influences together in some unexpected ways. Basically, this is everything that we wished the second, disappointing Darkness album would have been.
We've gone on and on in the past about Ukranian black metallers Nokturnal Mortum and the NM side project Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra. Bands that perfecty straddle the line between true grim blackness and total what-the-fuck weirdness. But the Ukraine has a load of other bands who are just as buzzy and brilliantly black and fucked up. And it just so happens that they all seem to share at least one (the same?) member. Astrofaes, Hate Forest, Lucifugum, and of course Drudkh. All of these projects traffic in the same sort of buzzed out atmospheric blackness that we can't get enough of. Loping stumbling midtempo folk flecked blasts of Burzumic fuzz, long LONG tracks, melancholy melodies swathed in buzzing guitars and anguished vocals, with brief bursts of blast beats and mosquito buzz riffing. Very droney and atmospheric as well as fiercely fuzzy blackly brutal. Fans of Burzum (obviously) and bands like Graveland, Woodtemple and the like definitely need everything by any of these bands they can get their hands on. This is the first Drudkh record from a few years back, we'll be listing the others soon (inlcuding a brand new album for 2006) but we figured we might as well start at the beginning. Forgotten Legends (and all the Drudkh records for that matter) is so good. Dark and bleak and depressive, droney and dirgey and black, but weirdly lovely as well.
Unfortunately, no discussion of any of these bands is complete without a brief look at their politics, always a troublesome sore spot with most black metal. Drudkh focus on 'Slavonic pride, culture and mythology', an ideology only slightly removed from the full on racism of Nastional Socialist black metal bands. Their name in fact means wood in Sanskrit, "the first language of the Aryan race." Oof. We've been through this before with Burzum and Graveland and umpteen others, we love the music, but abhor the message. In some cases, like with Drudkh, it's easy to just enjoy the music and ignore the problematic politics, there are no printed lyrics, no fucked up song titles, just images of forests and sky and rain and darkness, a mysterious booklet with no information but for the words: "sadness, bitterness, pain, despair, loss, agony, solitude, betrayal, melancholy, sorrow," all very mysterious and evocative. For some though, there is no ignoring the message, no matter how subtle or indirect, and the thought of giving any sort of support is unacceptable. That's perfectly fine. But for us, the music -can- transcend the message, and does at least in this case, and the sound of Forgotten Legends is nebulous enough that each listener can take whatever they want from this music, a series of totally mesmerizing, gorgeously depressive black buzzing drone metal epics.
The cool thing about metal bands is that you can usually tell a lot about them before you even throw on the record. Take The Dying Light. They're on Willowtip, home to Watchmaker, Necrophagist, Crowpath, Cephallic Carnage, Gorod and more. Their record was recorded in Death Metal USA: Tampa, Florida! Produced by Eric Rutan from Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal. So now we're thinking death metal, but with some grind elements maybe, technical but still dense and aggressive. Fast but appropriately chugging. Let's go a little further and check out the band photo, four guys, three with short hair, one with really long hair, some tattoos, even a few hand tattoos(!), but it's the t-shirts that tell the real story, one Morbid Angel, one Dimmu Borgir, and one Wetnurse, who as you might remember are a weird East coast tech-post-rock-detah-metal outfit. A quick listen, proves that we weren't all that far off, with The Dying Light you've got a serious downtuned slab of chugging, thrashing, blackened death metal grind, awesomely intricate, bizzare complex rhtyhms, with some amazingly fucked up drumming, howled almost BM vocals, and leads! Solos! Squiggly, melodic tangles of shred, that almost sound out of place, but do a lot to add to the songs as most bands like this forgo the guitar solo completely. But as always it's the riffs. Always the riffs, that drive this record, a series of thick, dense, heavy twisting and buzzing riffs that make your head spin. Someone else listening to this just said "those riffs are killer but those guys don't own any of 'em" which is fair maybe, you can hear lots of Carcass, the Accused, Necrophagist, Slayer, Morbid Angel and a good heaping of NWOSDM, but the Dying Light manage to infuse each song with just enough of their own ideas to keep it interesting. They're certainly not the weirdest or heaviest or the most extreme, but if you're in the mood for any of the above mentioned groups, or especially some weird mix of ALL of 'em, then this is well worth checking out.
Another stunning album from this formidable Cape Verdean vocalist! On her tenth album Cesaria Evora's voice, so timeless and effortless, will send wonderful shivers down your spine... at least it did ours! She's backed up by a stellar ensemble lead by Fernando Andrade who not only played piano and sang backup vocals, but also masterfully handled the orchestral direction and arrangements. Rogamar is the aural equivalent of the most passionate embrace. So welcoming and irresistible.
Wow, there's a surprisingly punchy new arrival making its presence felt on the Absolutely Kosher roster. They are retro-edged power popsters Ex-Boyfriends, and their debut album is a shot of adrenaline amid the predominantly wistful indie rock/pop (Sparrow, Dudley Corporation, Get Him Eat Him, Jim Yoshii Pile-Up) and gloomy fevered dramatics (Dead Science, Frog Eyes) of the label's recent releases. When we've played it in the store, Dear John has already drawn comparisons to Generation X, Misfits and more recent upstarts Maximo Park. As well, their male vocals teeter between Robert Smith and Andy Partridge. Sound good? Lots of snap in the drumming, not to mention some well placed handclaps keep the joint jumpin'.
If you have been digging the recent Kaleidoscope (UK) reissues, then here is another treat: This re-issue of Fairfield Parlour's debut album on the Vertigo label, From Home to Home. The story behind this album and band name have never been fully made clear, as Kaleidoscope and Fairfield Parlour were the same band. Perhaps tired of being confused with the American band Kaleidoscope, who were better known; or sensing that the candy-coated psychedelia they had been dabbling in for two albums was waning fast, Kaleidoscope decided to adopt the new band moniker, Fairfield Parlour, and change their look from colorful twee paisley folksters to Old Tyme country-psych balladeers. So what is the music like? Well, while there is definitely a more haunting, lushly orchestrated sound evoking a darkly antique and mystical psych-pop vibe full of harpsichord, mellotrons, flutes and 12-string guitars, and the songwriting is more serious, it's not too far from a type of sound Kaleidoscope would have naturally progressed toward had they kept the same name. Lots of bands of the era from the Kinks to the Byrds had similar stylistic evolutions from psych pop to roots rock, but perhaps the band (or the label) felt that audiences somehow wouldn't make the transition. We can't help but think the confusion over the name change only made things worse for the band (they disbanded the following year after making one more album which was never released), it's a shame too because this album is really really great! This re-issue features the original album plus eight bonus tracks of singles demos, and alternate tracks. For fans of Euphoria, The Byrds, the Incredible String band and Muswell Hillbillies-era Kinks.
Where the long, amazing and intense road that is Mariane Faithfull's music career began. This is her debut (actually one of two simultaneous debuts) she released in 1965. This was the darker companion to the more cheerful pop of her self titled release of that same year. The record gives a sneak peak at the darker side of Faithfull, that would unravel in the decades to come. She takes on many folk standards and with her immaculate voice and charismatic touch and makes them very much her own. Relevant as ever, as these days you can hear her influence all over the recent great underground folk scene through the voices and stylings of folks like Marissa Nadler and Josephine Foster amongst many. With her own great release last year Before the Poison it's really nice to get a listen back to her roots and marvel at the trajectory of an amazing artist's career. The record ends perfectly with "Sister Morphine" which she penned with one time lover Mick and his cohort Keith, which predated their rendition on Sticky Fingers. When you can love what someone made in 1965 as much as you love what they came out with in 2005 you know you are dealing with someone so totally special. While those boys Mick and Keith, we haven't cared about them for decades.
There's just something about music that is slow and mysterious, foggy and indistinct, fuzzy and dreamlike that just gets us everytime. Any sort of music sounds better to us, once it's buried in record crackle, or wrapped in thick swirls of fuzzy distortion, or smeared with a gauzy ambient haze. But the music of Faunts is so perfectly suited to being goergeously obfuscated that it's hard to imagine this music any other way. High Expectations doesn't sound like some crystal clear recording that was later treated with all sort of foggy filters, no this record sounds like it was created like this, birthed from some mysterious ether, a ghostlike sonic wraith, dreamy droney slow motion rock drifting skyward like some disembodied slowcore spectre. Blissy and incandescent, with a candelit churchlike warmth, a glow suffusing the air all around. Like a druggier more fuzzy Low. Each track a lugubrious creep, romantic and melancholy, hushed vocals, brushed drums and swoonsome lapsteel. Occasionally the songs build to a ferocious climax, the sound like a wall of blown out shoegaze guitars, with big distorted drums, beneath squiggly white hot traces of incendiary psychedelic skree, before drifting back to earth, a slow simmer, fuzzy melodies drifitng over and around ethereal vocals and muted mood rock minimalism. Imagine a late night slowcore band, viewed through fogged up glass, thick with running rainwater, everything wavery and blisssfully unfocused, every once in a while the headlights of a passing car flare brilliantly, spinning wild prisms of color and white hot sparkles before fading back to a muted dusky drift.
High Expectations has lots of varied elements, even if they only surface briefly her and there, some jazzy shuffle, some jangly indie rock, some Flaming Lips-ish big beat drug pop, some epic Godspeed-ish even a bit of near-new wave, but those disparate elements all manage to get woven deftly and beautifully into Faunts' delicate and drowsy sonic world.
We know you've been waiting for this: the sequel to the Early Fifth Column cd, which was a collection issued back in 2001 on the Alchemy label (run by former Fifth Columnist Jojo Hiroshige) documenting the career of this extremely underground Japanese avant-garde collective circa 1976 to 1980. Now, The Middle Fifth Column is here to deal with the years 1981-1990, and anyone familiar with the intriguing weirdness found on the previous disc will find this to be just as weird and interesting if not more so! Fifteen tracks of noisy experiments, freaked out jazz improv, synth boppiness, disturbing tape loops, bizarre vocals, drum machines and electronics... it's eclectic strange DIY madness that takes a definite inspiration from Faust (note the "It's A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl" quote in track two) and assuredly also other NWW-list worthy outfits. This comes with extensive, English-language (as well as Japanese) liner notes that give details on each track, from interviews with the band members (there was a core group that formed various "bands" who released tapes -- about 50 of them -- in the Fifth Column cassette series). About "It's A Rainy Day" they say: "There are times in life that, whatever you play, it turns into that song, and this was one such occasion."
Very cool. Whatever the weirdest stuff you have in your record collection is, this disc will no doubt make friends with it!!
[sorry, this disc didn't agree with our sound sample making software, so no clips to click...]
As much as we always loved Godflesh and Techno Animal and most everything else Justin Broadrick was involved in, by the end there, a few years back, a lot of that stuff began to sound just a little bit tired and dated and sometimes even just plain not good. But now! Holy shit! Not sure what it was, but -something- happened during those few years in between. First there was Jesu, a total revelation, everything we loved about Godflesh, but swathed in thick swirls of My Bloody Valentine guitars and warm fuzzy M83-isms. A gloriously blissed out, but still impossibly heavy, sunkissed drone drenched chunk of dreamlike heaviness. And now we have the long overdue resurrection of Broadrick's ambient project Final. And something strange has happened to the music of Final as well. What was once bleak, dark, barren and clinical isolationism, has grown into something warm and alive, a series of blurry and buzzy and blissy miniature soundscapes. Warm and warped and warbly, very much like the sonic worlds created by Tim Hecker. Final now explore a musical world gauzy and sepia toned, dreamlike melodies obfuscated by warm rich layers of crackle and hum, chimes ring out, drifting delicately on a sea of sonic swirl, bits of glitch and grit surface occasionally, as does the occasional almost-rhythms, the whole record like a dusty old scrapbook of small faded snaphots capturing some lost time or some forgotten place. An abstruse drone music, viewed through a window dense with rain coursing down it's surface, giving everything a soft focus, a warped otherworldliness. The mood can occasionally still be ominous and creepy, even sort of menacing at times, but even then, it's diffused, washed out and grey, or blown out and dappled with winter sunlight, or smeared into an indistinct blur of pale moonlight, dreamy and droney and so beautiful.
The Scottish quartet Fire Engines only released one album back in 1981 along with a couple of singles. In the British Isles, the band developed a considerable following amongst the Brit-Pop nobility of Alan McGee (the one-time king of the Creation empire), The Jesus & Mary Chain, and more recently Franz Ferdinand. For better of for worse, Codex Teenage Premontion is not a compendium of that one album (entitled Lubricate Your Living Room) and those singles; for that, you need the Fond anthology released by Rev-Ola / Creation. Rather, this is a collection of super-raw live recordings and home-recorded demos. The Fire Engines' sound is driven by a punk jangle, reflecting the ramshackle energy of The Fall and even Captain Beefheart (e.g. Shiny Beast); but there's a maniacal repetitiveness to their incessantly shrill chords that can be downright toxic. There's numerous variations of their track "Discord" showing how fucked-up they could get during their live sets, and a Peel Session track of "Candyskin" which was their most well known single at the time. Curiously enough, they decided to round out the record with a 2004 recording of Franz Ferdinand's "Jacqueline."
Unfortunately (?) B. Fleischmann's new album is not titled 'The Thumbsucking Coil' as one of us initially thought... and unfortunately (on a completely different but not unrelated topic) Mr. Fleischmann has chosen to sing more on it. Now if you're at all familiar with us here at AQ, you probably know that we've totally dug his past recordings (both Welcome Tourist and Pop Loops For Breakfast have always received a warm bear hug reception around these parts), and we haven't had an aversion to his drowsy speak-singing in the past. However each time we've put The Humbucking Coil on for a spin, it has definitely been his vocals and lyrics that have been bringing us dooown. Maybe your ears won't have a problem with 'em, but we'll just say that we're happy he doesn't sing on all of the tracks. We've been without a Fleischmann fix for too long already... we'll take what we can get! Fortunately the vocal-less tracks are of his gently lulling, blissful fare. Soft'n'soooothing.
We love the mashed up million beats per minute ragga jungle drum 'n bass spazzcore as much as the next guy. Breakbeats chopped to bits and re-assembled into unplayable-by-humans hyperspeed electronic grind. Can't get enough. But anyone with a computer can whip up a earsplitting storm of beats and NOISE. There are of course a select few who approach their beats and samples and fist-to-the-face aggression as if they were, well, WRITING SONGS. Obviously this stuff is not for the dance floor, and as much as we love a huge slab of all out white hot sonic mayhem, a deft touch and some strange ideas applied to the very same ingredients can result in something truly amazing. The most recent Venetian Snares is a perfect example, dizzyingly complex drill and bass perfectly placed amidst gorgeous strings and melancholy melodies. And now Mr. Jason Forrest, formerly known in electronic music circles as Donna Summer, has decided to take his own personal splattery drumfuck brutality and temper it with songs, pop songs, vocalists, guitars, some serious HOOKS. Every track on here is still an amazing piece of masterful slicing and dicing, a busy blur of sample upon sample, beats careening wildly into other beats, getting all tangled up into gnarled chunks of dense rhythm and strange lumps of rock guitars and clipped vocals. Each track sounds like it was assembled from someone with ADD whipping through the classic rock stations on the radio dial, lots of wild guitar leads, wailing rock vocalists, throbbing rock bass, groovy pianos, shuffling jazzy interludes, full on rock freakouts, snippets of Steely Dan, Blondie and about a million more almost recognizable samples and of course lots of incredibly dense and un-funky and completely unhinged drum programming. Country chantuese Laura Cantrell sings on one of the prettiest tracks, her gorgeous croon, laid atop a smeary blur of glitchy beats and hiccupping grooves, purloined from seventies AM radio. But that's merely the calm before, and after, and between the storms! Soon you're back on a bucking bronco made from every song you loved in highschool tossed in a blender, careening wildly through dense thickets of heavy metal guitar, prickly drum and bass, walls of guitar solos, cheezy synth jams, and old school funk grooves, creepy childlike vocals, and of course the kitchen sink. This is one of those records that seems too busy and too overwhelmingly jampacked to be at all listenable, but somehow Forrest manages to take all those parts and tie 'em up with a big red bow. Shamelessly Exciting indeed!
Hmmm... This band should be an easy sell, really. Start with this: DOOM. A la Hellhammer (Tom G. Warrior's adolescent pre-Celtic Frost outfit that helped pioneer death/doom metal from a basement in Switzerland back in the early eighties), Eyehategod, and maybe Corrupted too. They're Japanese (so we can make more Corrupted comparisons). And this trio consists entirely of girls. One of our distros described Gallhammer thusly: "All female Japanese Hellhammer worship Band. Not ugly girls doing ugly, ugly music!". The high-contrast black and white photo on the back cover of band members Mika Penetrator (guitar/vocals), Vivian Slaughter (bass/vocals), and Risa Reaper (drums) reveals that "not ugly" comment apparently to be correct, with some vaguely corpse-paint-like mascara adding to their sex appeal. Not that that should be the selling point. After all, listening to this, you'd have *no idea* they were female. Throaty, demonic screams belch forth amidst pummelling drum battery and distorted, feedbacking guitar. Female? Male? They don't even sound human, really. Though the emotions expressed are all too human. Nihilistic bleak hateful depressive stuff. It's raw, primitive doom that captures that Hellhammer vibe by following a similar learning curve as those guys did back in the '80s -- Gallhammer's offical bio on their website states: "Feburary 2003: We start Gallhammer" followed by "Feburary 2003: Each member start to play instrument." And then Gloomy Lights was recorded in 2004. Yep, what Gallhammer does is simple and effective: heavy, plodding music and rough, croaking vocals, with plenty of ominous ambience in the breaks and build-ups. There's eight grim and spooky tracks here culminating in the 10-minute "Color Of Coma", which features a great deal of atmospheric drone. Think Hellhammer meets Angelblood, perhaps.
Look out for a new Gallhammer album this year to be released by Peaceville.
Originally released in Russia only, in 1982, the master duduk sounds of Djivan Gasparyan began to finally hit the ears of listeners in the west thanks in part to folks like Brian Eno who had been fans for years. In '89 this, his first solo record after years of ensemble and orchestra playing, was released on Opa, and it's finally been repressed once again. Without a doubt Gasparyan is a master of his instrument, the duduk, a woodwind instrument traditional to his homeland of Armenia. I Will Not Be Sad In This World is a beautiful record filled with reworkings of several traditional Armenian songs re-imagined by Gasparyan along with the drone backing duduk playing of Vachagan Avakian. The result is a meditative and ethereal wind of calm sound after the storm. Such the perfect record to play when you need to wash everything away, collect your composure, regain your thoughts, reach for a moment of peacefulness. We were recently playing this in the store when a customer was in with her dog who apparently was acting crazy and wild all day. She said it wasn't until the moment this came on that her dog settled down and began to relax. We have to admit it always has that same effect on us. Hypnotizing and cleansing sounds that you can trust. So very nice.
By now everyone should be familiar with SF black metal legends Weakling. A brief existence, a handful of shows, and a single amazing record (released on Andee's tUMULt label, we should mention). Members of Weakling played in and/or went on to play in Amber Asylum, the Champs, Drunk Horse, Asunder, Sangre Amado, Saros and the short lived but now totally cult blackened gothic doom outfit The Gault. Recorded way back in 1999 by Tim Green, The Gault's Even As All Before Us languished for years before the band finally agreed on a mix and a label, and now five years later this mighty slab of depressive doom finally sees the light of day. Some of you may be wondering why we're only getting around to reviewing this now, since it was released a few months ago... and, the entire first pressing is already sold out. So what's the deal? Well, bad news for any of you who already picked up a copy somewhere else. The ENTIRE first pressing was, in fact, defective. But not defective enough apparently for the label to care, as they refused to repress it and continued to sell the defective copies anyway. To our ears though, the harsh digital glitches inadvertently inserted between every track totally detracted from the gorgeously bleak and harrowing ambience. So the band took it upon themselves to have corrected copies pressed themselves, and thus we finally have the Gault record the way it was meant to be heard. Imagine those Weakling riffs, slowed down and wrapped in dense '80s-ish reverb, smeared and stretched into serpentine minor key melodies, throbbing and pulsing and slithering through midtempo dronescapes of shimmering guitar buzz, creeping basslines, ghostlike female vocals, crashing steady drumming all cloaked in a rich blackened haze, suffocating and claustrophobic, but somehow completely epic at the same time. Think a black metal Joy Division and you might be close, due in no small part to vocalist Ed Kunakemakorn's distinctive wail. Equal parts Ian Curtis, Interpol's Paul Banks and weirdly enough, Dutch weirdo black metallers Urfaust, a soaring mournful croon, rich and velvety and quite haunting. Each track is a twisting complex doomscape of fuzzed out drones, pounding downtuned riffage, swirling psychedelic ambience, slow motion crawl and creep, building and building into massive black swells. A gorgeously creepy collection of heaving, lurching, dark and delicate, doomy and dense epics. So emotional and so totally and completely intense!
It's a downright pleasure to hear (and see) the enthusiasm this band still has for their music and their fans (really, so much more than many artists these days can even seem to muster a fraction of!). They've been making wonderful music individually and as a group for over a quarter of a decade! Nowhere is it currently more on display than on this live Go-Betweens dvd/cd set! The dvd features a fantastic performance of theirs in Brisbane last August as well as a batch of stories as told by band leaders Grant McLennan and Robert Forster themselves the day after. As an added convenience, the cd features a 70 minute long audio recording of the show. needless to say, an awesome fan pleaser! Hats off to the Go-Betweens!
*Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert*
Spacey, swirling, not-un-heavy trip-out rock jamming from some dudes who really know how to do that sort of thing, since some of 'em are members of Japan's Acid Mothers Temple, including the bearded one himself, guitar guru Kawabata Makoto! Higashi Hiroshi from AMT is on hand as well on electronics. Hence the alert sounding from your computers loudspeakers right now (what, it's not working? well, you can read the alert above). The other three musicans (guitar, bass, drums) here all appear to come from another Japanese psych band called Mandog, who we weren't familiar with before but maybe should investigate! Together, this AMT-Mandog collab called Godman has conjured up two long tracks ("God>><><
Golden Birds have offered up not one but two fine releases for our indie rock lovin' ears (one on Paranoid Records and the other self-released). The band aligns itself well with the likes of early-mid period Wedding Present as well as Bright Eyes and Interpol (particular in the emotive vocal department).
This is their energetic debut full length which expands on an earlier ep that the band released when they went by the name Carrier. You might recall that back in 2002 we carried Home Movies which was another of their self-released eps. They're quite a different sounding band these days, distancing themselves considerably from their more postrock-ish and atmospheric beginnings in favor of poppy punch. Note: one song is shared by both releases "Sioux Falls South Dakota".
Golden Birds have offered up not one but two fine releases for our indie rock lovin' ears (one on Paranoid Records and the other self-released). The band aligns itself well with the likes of early-mid period Wedding Present as well as Bright Eyes and Interpol (particular in the emotive vocal department).
This is a special cdep of acoustic numbers that the band self-released to coincide with a tour this past summer. Wistful, sensitive pop without drums, but with warm guitar strumming, pretty glockenspiel and some dreamy boy/girl vocals. Note: one song is shared by both releases "Sioux Falls".
The more we listen to the Grey Daturas, the more we see them play live, the more times we hear and their records and the more they perform and interact with other musicians and performers, the more we realize the Daturas aren't really a band. Or more specifically aren't -just- a band. They are music makers certainly, but they seem to approach music from a distinctly non rock band perspective. There are drums and synths and bass and guitars, oh! are there guitars, but the sounds they make and the 'songs' they craft have as much in common with the Dead C or SUNNO))) as they do with the drone of Sunroof! or Jonathan Coleclough or the abstract minimalism of Morton Feldman or Steve Reich. This two song live ep demonstrates that yet again. The first track is a swirling snarling tangle of slowly shifting guitar feedback, distorted waves of sonic rumble and squeal unfurl and just sort of drift and sway, slipping under and over and around each other, dense and active, but subtly so, almost tranquil, a dreamy drift of electric guitar thrum. The drums begin as just some sort of sonic garnish, a little splash here or there, before kicking into a fully rocking, totally propulsive pounding spacerock groove, the guitar and bass following suit, the track now a distorted prickly static throb, wrapped in squalls of Hendrixian guitar freakout and huge slabs of bass, lumbering skyward like a more minimal and more metal Hawkwind. The second track follows a similar path, but this time the drums are more of a chaotic presence, spitting fills in every direction, cymbal sizzle drenching everything within earshot, the guitars whipped into an impossible frenzy, so loud and recorded so hot, that the sound itself begins to crumble, a blown out blast of space rock psych fuzz sludge.
Two 14 minute tracks. Hand numbered and limited to 150 copies (of which we took almost 1/3 of the pressing!). Packaged in a cool hand painted faux blood splattered digipak.
And as much as we hate to belabor the point, this is SUPER LIMITED! Once these are gone they are gone gone gone.
It's weird to think about the world before the Internet. Little pockets of bands in out of the way places, producing wild and wonderful music, that outside of a few tape traders and cool record stores just didn't get heard. In some ways the advent of immediate world wide communication has been a wellspring of amazing music, since now, some kid who records in his bedroom in Finland, can now be heard by anyone in the world. Anywhere. Any time. The downside is of course the proliferation of bands whose material maybe didn't need worldwide exposure, music that was just fine where it was, in the bedroom or the basement. Thankfully this particular release is a definite example of the former. Australia has produced some killer rock over the years, from AC/DC to Radio Birdman to Lubricated Goat (one of Allan and Andee's favorites) to the Dirty Three to more obscure noiserock bands like Budd or the Dumb And The Ugly or Primitive Calculators. A few lists back we reviewed an awesome disc by the band Whitehorse, whose epic sludge-y, drone-y dirge definitely hit the Sunn 0))) / Earth / Corrupted / Khanate spot. The guys in Whitehorse suggested we check out another Aussie outift (also from Melbourne) a two guys and a gal trio called the Grey Daturas, who only a few weeks later just showed up in our store with a box full of cds, about to embark on their first US tour (some of the dates with Sunn 0))), see elsewhere on this list for tour dates). And while the Daturas are indeed heavy and droney, their sound is less slow motion sludge and more blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. The Daturas' sound is all over the map, from churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah. When they kick out the jams, it's fierce and mesmerizing, pounding and relentless, with simple propulsive percussion and spaced out swirl. Often stretching out into head nodding Krautrock jams, spacious and hypnotic. When the storms calm and the band drifts off and just sort of meanders, we're reminded of Codeine and other like minded practitioners of drowsy, druggy slow core. Still noisy, but mellow and intense, brooding and subtly aggressive.
The Grey Daturas are all instrumental which as you probably know we tend to dig, since there's nothing like a bad singer to ruin a perfectly good band, but there's always the risk of bands with no vocalists to be really really boring. But because a lot of the Daturas' tunes are improvised, and the band is willing to take all kinds of musical chances (they often switch instruments, sometimes perform as a duo with no drummer, etc...) it never gets boring, instead it becomes the perfect mix of droning free rock, kick ass instrumental post rock, buzzing druggy psych and even occasional blasts of full on metal. Mix in some cool song titles: "The Hanging Man Is No Peacock", "Force Is A Weapon Of The Weak", as well as some oddly political song titles (but more sort of Sixties politics): "For Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale", "Night Of The Barricade: Paris 1968", a gorgeous washed out black, brown and grey cardboard sleeve, and a totally kick ass live show (they performed admirably with a handful of fill-in drummers here, even teaming up with art noise outfit the Yellow Swans for one show), and you've got one of our favorite new bands / releases. AND they're recording a new record right here in SF when they get back from tour...yay!
Okay, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. The always amazing Ethiopiques series continues on past volume 20 with no end in sight. We were wrongly led to believe that volume 20 was to be the last in this, one of our all time favorite series, and we were heartbroken. On top of that, the final installment was quite surprisingly a live recording of modern day American musicians jamming with an Ethiopian band. It was still cool, but it was a bit tough to figure out why the curaters of this series would choose to go out on that kind of admittedly anticlimactic note, when there were certainly hundreds of buried treasures from the golden age of Ethiopian music that most definitely deserved to be unearthed. This newst volume quickly sets everything right, being entirely the solo piano of a woman named Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou. Her playing is devastatingly lovely and haunting. A curious hybrid of old time jazz and classical, but still truly Ethiopian. Dark and contemplative, moody but subtly playful as well. Culled mainly from recordings from the late 40's early 50's, a period during which Guebrou had recently left the convent due to illness, and then continued to compose and perform as a way of raising money for charity. And THAT's on the heels of having moved to Egypt and then returned to Ethiopia a figure of high society, her dream of playing piano dashed by the Emperor, which led her to sickness and then near death, she even received the last rites, survived and then joined the Imperial Guard, went back to school to study business finally fleeing to join a convent and become a nun. All the while continuing to play music, in fact she continues to perform to this day, in Ethiopia where she still lives, four of her most recent recordings (from 1996) are included here as well.
Her story is amazing, the liner notes go into great detail about her fantastic and adventurous life, but her music is equally as remarkable, the sound and feel is so dense with memory and imagery, musical but somehow quite visual, warm and woozy, a fuzzy, sepia toned old timey feel, due in no small part to the recording, which is quite reminiscent of old 78's, the soundtrack to movie Crumb, that sort of thing, dark rumbling low notes underpin sweet swirls and delicate flurries of minor key melody, sweet and lowdown for sure, warm evenings, back porches, big beautifully appointed parlors, huge empty fields, grass waving in the breeze, long late night wanders, moonlight strolls, so completely dreamy and lovely. Definitely one of out favorites so far in the series. We hope it never ends!
We'd venture a guess that Guitar aka Michael Luckner is not a man of many words. He chose the name of the common musical instrument as his moniker, and makes uncommonly dreamy instrumental music from a broad palette of processed guitar sounds that offer a healthy nod to My Bloody Valentine. On his latest album which he's titled simply with the name of a major Japanese city, he's got Japanese vocalist Ayako Akashiba adding some honey-sweet murmurred vocals to three of the tracks. The music has a hazy translucence as if each track (vocals included) were painted in watercolor with a smattering of heavier brushstrokes applied with koto and programmed beats. Lovely!
Japanese laptop jockey Chihei Hatakeyama has flattened the source material of guitar and vibraphone into the tasteful ambient construction found on Minima Moralia, dreamy drones dotted with fizzing digital pixelations. There's none of the attack and rhythm that might pinpoint Hatakeyama's source material; instead he produces warm, dreamy drifts of ringing tones and velvety buzzings that locate the album in the realm of Eno's ambience (in terms of composition) and Kompakt's beloved Pop Ambient series (in terms of warmth via use of analogue / digital dialoguing). Very pleasant listening.
We love our metal here at aQ. A LOT. But there a two distinct strains that tend to drive us wild. There is of course the ultra precise, super heavy, complex and punishing perfectly crafted metal. Be it black, or thrash, stoner or doom. But then there's its bastard offspring, its deformed sibling, the one kept locked in the cellar, the damaged, demented, completely bizarre, totally unhinged and utterly and beautifully impossibly fucked metal. Total outsider metal. It may be doom or sludge or black metal, but composed and played and recorded with total disregard for anything but the personal vison, no matter how skewed or off kilter. In the past we have worshipped before the likes of Benighted Leams, Urfaust, Striborg, Wold, Rehtaf Ruo, Spektr, Necrofrost, Furze and all of a similarly demented nature. And now we have Hidden. A sort of doom / thrash hybrid, pre-occupied with some impossibly ridiculous science (fiction), the record is called Aleisstar Morphalite, some of the song titles: "Hydrodynamic Physics", "Interplanetary Space Physics And Climatology", "Planets Of Metal", "The Search For Where Life May Have Existed", you get the drift. And their sound is equally as scientifically and musically obtuse. Buzzing downtuned thrash metal, lighting fast riffs buried WAY down in the mix, the gutteral inhuman vocals way UP in the mix, spitting out impossibly complicated lyrics, you can catch a word here and there, 'radiation' gets mentioned a lot, as does the 'universe', 'carbon dioxide' does too, each line containing just a few too many words to fit in the designated space, so it comes out all gargled and jumbled together, a bit like old Slayer actually at least in terms of cadence, the sound though is like nothing you've ever heard, a sort of deathmetalized alien shriek. Then there's the songs, the riffs and the song structures are super convoluted, lots of stops and starts, pauses where there will be no sound but a weird wheezing synthesizer, or some random droning rumble, creepy synths and almost Cradle Of Filth keyboards surface all over the record, sometimes in a thick sheet draped over everything, there are some weird trashcan sounding electronic cymbals that hover in weird spaces when the music sort of hiccups and skips a beat, sometimes just a haunting background, occasionally a black thrash attack will slowly peter out and turn into a strangley gorgeous melancholic doom dirge, but still peppered with haunting piano and all sorts of random sound effects and sonic weirdness, and of course the vocals slithering and shrieking out some strange alien scientific propaganda over the top. But weird and bizzare and damaged and demented are not enough (well, almost), there has to be songs, you know actually songs, riffs and hooks and parts that stick in your head. And well, as impossible as it may seem, this record is full of 'em. Completely and impossibly catchy parts. The first song in fact, "Interferometer", has to be the catchiest damaged-alien-doom-black-thrash-sci-fi song EVER! Even the weird double kick / warbly space synth battle part way through gets stuck in our heads. Holy crap! This record is so completely nuts, but so completely heavy and kick ass. These guys should totally have a crazy metal science show on PBS, where kids learn about gravity and time travel and wormholes, but each lecture is delivered as a sludgy buzzing convoluted blast of demented space metal! In our dreams!
A new album from this Portland, OR combo who just swung through town and played right around the corner from us at the Make-Out Room. Although they define themselves as "North Mississippi-Style Punk Blues", we'd venture to say that they've much more traditional sounding Appalachian folk than that. Definitely for you if you've dug the recent offerings from Mercury Dimes, Crooked Jades, etc. Hillstomp are sorta like those considerably more mild-mannered, refined bands' rowdy, raucous cousins.
Yet another blast of sweet sonic skree from Mr. Matthew Bower and Ms. Marcia Bassett otherwise known as Hototogisu, which in case you didn't know is a type of Japanese Cuckoo. But by now, as we should all well know, the sound of -this- Hototogisu is a far cry from the sweet lilting birdsongs one might hear in the woods, that is unless of course you normally stroll through forests populated by ninety foot high armored bird monsters spewing fire and laying flat huge swaths of trees with it's crushing unstoppable stomp and melting skulls with its brutally screeching song!
This time around we've got another one of the super limited cd-r type releases, so act fast if you want one of these!! Sardonic Wooden Moonlight is a massive, seriously noisy two part epic, two half hour chunks of thick prickly fuzzy brrrrrrroooaaaaaarrr. You know what we're talking about, the sort of din Bower used to kick up in Total, like an orchestra of tuned vacuum cleaners spitting out thick sheets of soothing sonic sandpaper, a smoothed out industrial whir, like listening over the telephone to a massive metal forest collapsing in on itself, creaking and shrieking and howling, punctuated by jagged shards of guitar squeal, like pieces of sonic shrapnel floating across a thick black sea.
SUPER LIMITED. Cool poster style cover with transparent insert!
It has taken us awhile to list this, because we've had some difficulty getting it in (for those that don't know Jay Dee recently passed away, and you know when that happens, everyone suddenly wants to hear what the fuss was all about, so the records have been sold out everywhere). Finally we have enough to list, and here is what we say about it:
Man, we're suckers for a good sample inventively used, and this one keeps 'em coming! Chock full of soulful vocal snippets, sloppy edits and stony melodic breaks. This is like a worn mix-tape of short buttery sonic collages culled from the cream of bad thrift store records: trashy R&B, mid-70s jazz, and easy listening, and peppered with more pedigreed takes from the likes of the Three Degrees, Esther Philips and Raymond Scott. The beauty of Jay Dee's production is the unconventional way he pulls the sounds together, exposing instead of polishing the rough edits and scratchy recordings. Delicious and catchy, these "donuts" will keep you humming all day long. This sublime record of hip hop instrumentals is made sadder by Jay Dee's recent untimely death at the age of 32. For DJ's, fans of Jay Dee and Stones Throw records, purchasing this is a no-brainer: It's essential! For those of you who may not know the mad production skills of J Dilla, there is no better introduction than this. Totally Recommended!
Finally available on cd, the one-two punch that proves Jackie O Motherfucker just may well edge out their more hyped contemporaries, the No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand Of The Man, in the bid to rule the world of US-underground-free-psych-folk-weirdness.
There certainly is a rustic Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn aspect to this Portland ensemble's sound, but there is much less of the expected jazz element. Instead, Jackie-O Motherfucker have carved out a sound that is emotively quite similar to the post-rock melancholia of Godspeed / Sigur Ros but with none of their overly dramatic orchestrations.
The album opens with a buried collage of heterodyning shortwave radio and disconnected voices, but emphatically steps forward with a guitar duet between a sad David Pajo-esque riff and an intertwining effects-laden chimed tone. After the clunky twang of Jew's harps on "Bone Saw," Jackie-O returns to the evocative, spacious, and cinematically Western riffs (especially on the breathtakingly melancholy "The Cage"), as an effective means of transcribing sound into a psychic landscape that is strangely similar to the aforementioned Godspeed. While Godspeed bracket their tight orchestrations around a social pessimism that eventually leads to cathartic enlightenment about how shitty the world is around us, Jackie-O Motherfucker shrug their shoulders and settle back into a drugged out, dreamy drawly musical stupor of oddly psychedelic grooves which somehow seems way more appealing.
What's the scariest and creepiest of instruments? Could it be the downtuned electric guitar, that sound that marks all things dark and heavy and brutal and grim? Or could it be the cello with its soaring keening deep throated moan? Well we might posit, especially in light of this Jacula record, that the creepiest of all instruments is most certainly the church organ. Surprising that an instrument used chiefly to inspire and praise can illicit such utter unease and create such a pervasively creepy ambience. And that's pretty much what Jacula is all about, creepy ambience. Thick and haunting washes of warm rich church organ drone, resonant and reverberant, sometimes accompanied by simple pounding drums or mournful folky guitar melodies or wild psychedelic freakouts or soaring female operatic vocals or even occasional lyrics spoken ominously in Italian, but more often than not it's just the massive and ominous swells of a church organ. So effectively and utterly evil sounding. Jacula are sort of like a doom metal soundtrack to a Dario Argento movie. Goblin meets Skepticism! A Krautrock Thergothon? But is's not all mellow murky moodiness, tracks three and four, "Triumpratus Sad" and "Veneficium", both feature seriously fuzzed out, almost punk rock riffs, that sound about a decade before their time, insistent and completely heavy, even more so when they're eventually joined by a pounding one-drum beat or strident atonal piano or wild swirling progrock keyboards. Amazing! It's no wonder we sold the first couple of copies we got in of this to members of local black metal bands Ludicra and Leviathan!
In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum (literally "The Poison Is Always At The End"), which was supposedly recorded in an English castle, was originally released in an edition of only 300 copies in the late sixties and has been completely unavailable until just recently (this reissue cd is not entirely new, but it took us until now to get enough copies to list). Formed in 1968, Jacula even counted a medium as a member of their band who we assume was critical to the process of creating this record, considering that In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum was "Composed By Spiritualist Seance (1966-1969)" Woah! And for those of you well versed in sixties and seventies prog, be aware that this reissue is NOT the same as the Jacula record released in the early seventies (1972's Tardo Pede In Magiam Versus), even though for some strange reason Black Widow has given it pretty much the exact same cover.
After a whole slew of recent releases, this is the first new record in a while from Mr. Kneale presented under his given name. Not sure what makes this a Campbell Kneale record and not a Birchville Cat Motel record, but who cares, fans of either will dig this heavily. Seems like Kneale's focus lately has been almost exclusively on his black sludge doom project Black Boned Angel, and we're not complaining, we definitely can't get enough of that stuff. But Kneale has quite a deft hand when it comes to free ambient drone as well, and oddly enough we can't seem to get enough of that stuff either. So here we have the new Kneale record, which could have just as easily been a Birchville record, based on the sounds within, and is shot through with plenty of Black Boned Angel-isms, delicate drones are thicker, heavier, more dense and volatile, sludge metal blissed out into expansive stretches of shimmer and swirl. Four lengthy tracks, each a barely moving slab of molten sonic grrrrwwwwrrrrrrrrvvvvvmmmmmm. Layers atop layers, delicate melodies buried beneath, rumbling churning slow shifting sound, keening high end skree all tangled up with subsonic reverberations, the whole thing a slow moving vibrational flow, a massive abstract multiphonic spaced out downtuned tranced our Ur-drone.
Final black and bleak missive from metal misanthrope Imperial and his black metal horde Krieg. Practically an institution, Krieg spew a particularly hateful and depressive strain of black metal, falling somewhere between the old school (Judas Isacriot) and the new school (Xasthur) of US black metal. A buzzing chaotic blur, mostly plodding midtempos, guitars a droning hypnotic whir, the drums a splattery framework way down in the murky swirl, the vocals squirming tentacles of howl and shriek, tangled amidst the buzzing riffs and the careening rhythms. Not nearly as harsh as past efforts, this final album is downright melodic at times, some classic sounding thrash riffs surface here and there, huge expanses of droning doom metal share the spotlight with the grim black thrash, the melodies minor key and truly sorrowful sounding, some tracks trail off into ambient stretches of white noise guitar, sounding a bit like Total or Hototogisu here and there. Blue Miasma is hate fueled and harrowing, harsh but weirdly mournful and melancholy, even the ultra fast parts end up sort of blissing out into droning doomy miserablism. Fucking Awesome.
Word of warning, Krieg and Imperial have been know to espouse truly abhorrent views, political, racial and otherwise, sort of comes with the black metal territory a lot of the time. It's a personal choice, whether you can enjoy the music and ignore the politics of its creator. You have been warned.
Rob Crow has been paying much more attention to his metallic leanings as of late. With his Goblin Cock release a few months back he was finally able to unleash a side of himself that the smooth sounds of Pinback don't really allow. Being HUGE fans of Mr. Crow back from his beginnings in Heavy Vegetable (-especially- in HM!) there is no doubt that Crow has always had a scrappy / scizophrenic / ADD element to his aesthetic, which definitely showed on those Heavy Vegetable records and even his records with Thingy. Being able to go from bursts of guitar and drums to the sweetest melody all at the drop of a coin. The Ladies find him re-exploring that chaotioc split personality, hard meets soft side of his song writing skills. The Ladies are two fellas, the abovementioned Mr. Crow and Mr. Zach Hill (of Hella). Sounds promising, doesn't it?
The two bring their totally recognizable and seemingly incompatible sounds together to create a record that's choppy, rocking, proggy, noisy, poppy, sweet and satisfying all at the same time. There are moments when Zach's Hella sounds comes to the front with intense drumming and noisy outbursts, but underneath it all Rob Crow shows again how no matter what elements he's working with, he has the ability to bring out whatever great pop song or hidden hook that lives underneath it all. Another exciting chapter in the always ongoing and prolific world of Rob Crow. And quite possibly our favorite batch of Crow tunes since Heavy Vegetable or the first Pinback record!
We discovered Lamp Of The Universe, aka New Zealander Craig Williamson, via his recent cd-r on Barl Fire, a gorgeously blissed out drone rock space raga that we just couldn't get enough of. And you all apparently agreed as those puppies flew out of here (don't order them now though! they are gone). So we got in touch with Williamson and managed to get a few more of his releases. A couple cds which we'll review in upcoming lists, but we figure we should list this lp first as we only got a handful and it's super limited.
More of that warm Eastern raga tinged space rock, dreamy and drifting and drowsy. Sitar strings buzz and vibrate, tablas sputter rhythmically beneath layers of swooshing fuzz, vocals are soft and lilitng, drifting lazily above the dizzying psych swirl, each track a slow growing soundscape that starts as a drone, becomes a sort of droney raga, and in some cases morphs into a propulsive Krautrocky /post rock groove. Sounds a bit like an Eastern Spacemen 3 most of the time, guitars are druggy and psychedelic, rhythms are simple but hypnotic, making each track, even the 'rockers', totally meditative and mesmerizing.
Packaged in hand made sleeves, with a metallic silkscreened image on cardstock affixed to the front. Limited to 320 copies, each one hand numbered.
Lanaya are a trio from Mali, all three members of so called griot castes, groups who pass on the traditions and musics of their culture from generation to generation, responsible for protecting the legacy of their people and allowing it to live on forever. That's quite a responsibility for a young African three piece still in their early twenties, but their music is wise beyond their years, most certainly an indication that for this generation at least, the sounds of Mali will live on, a sweetly melodic, liltingly hypnotic take on traditional Malian folk music that is at once musically complex but also soft and simple. The instrumentation consists of the kora, a 21-string luteharp (played by Djibril Diabate, who you might remember from a past aQ list, and whose gorgeous album Hawa, also on Terp, we raved about a few years back), the balafon, a sort of African xylophone a bit like a marimba, and the ngoni, a small sized 7-string African guitar.
The sound Lanaya conjure up with these instruments is truly sublime, a multilayered late evening soundscape of dense and dexterous melodies, dreamy and hypnotic, and so well crafted it's easy to forget how complex they actually are.
The background is a rich tapestry of warm muted percussion and repetive melodic figures, played so fast and so smoothly that they sort of bleed into each other, each note drifting subtly into the notes beside it, the result is a slowly shifting warm and warbly dreamlike smear, while in the foreground, each instrument takes its turn with one extended improvisation after another, sometimes drifting and meditative, but just as often nimble and lively. The perfect blend of tranced out Eastern ragas and soft focus African folk music. Sweetly swoonsome and delicately dreamy. Perfect early morning, twilit evening, rainy day, drifting off music.
So totally lovely.
Hmmm, Desert Ocean... yes, exactly. The title of Lanterna's fifth full length hits the nail on the head for what this instrumental music evokes. If this were a film there'd be plenty of gradually panning shots of drifting dunes and undulating waves - in black and white of course and probably some in slow motion too. Sand and water as far as the eye can see. The glint of sunlight in the ripples. The haze of heat rising off in the distance. The mystery of what lurks beneath the surface of the ever-changing landscapes. Translation: Spartan guitarwork effected with long reverb, gently swaying tempos, a soft tap on a woodblock. Haunting and beautiful.
Nursery rhymes have always had a twisted quality about them. Their stories revel in floral descriptions of magic, talking animals, and other transgressions against the laws of nature all the while articulating some morality tale or another. It's almost too perfect a medium for a surrealist sound sculptor like Andrew Liles, who has decontextualized many a nursery rhyme on Mother Goose's Melody Or Sonnets For The Cradle. With plenty of Victorian declarations from any number of nursery rhymes sprinkled between odd sound collages, creaky samples, and somnabulant drones, allusions to Nurse With Wound (whom Liles has worked with on occasion) become quite obvious.
The strangely monikered Logh are a Swedish outfit who traffic in slightly dissonant indie post rock a la Sonic Youth. In fact they sound quite a bit like Sonic Youth at times. Not sure how they ended up on Hydra Head, but what the heck, we all have our soft side, and we know the guys at HH love more than just metal, so now they're finally opening up and showing us their secret sensitive side. But Logh are not -soft- really, just softer than their Hydra Head labelmates. A lot of the Sonic Youthisms are due to frontman Matthias Friberg's very Thurston-like laconic drawl, vocals almost spoken, in that immediately recognizable indie sing-song, but where Sonic Youth veer into atonal guitar skree, Logh sort of drift through various stages of jangle and lilt, at their most propulsive and rocking, they could be mistaken for Blonde Redhead, but they spend way more time droning dreamily along, warm washes of guitar over shuffling simple rhythms, guitars chime and ring out. At times Logh sound like an indie doom band, with lots of plodding tempos beneath blissed out guitarscapes, vocals sprawled lazily over the top. Really dark and shimmery, moody and angular. A Sunset Panorama is a haunting late night soundscape of dark indie jangle and lazy post rock guitar scrawl, sunny on the outside, but the songs reveal their ominous and creepy darksides a little bit more on each listen. Which is definitely what makes Logh so appealing and presumably what makes them feel right at home on Hydra Head, nestled firmly between Oxbow, Old Man Gloom, Pelican, Discordance Axis, Cave In and Jesu, which, the more we listen, doesn't seem like such an odd thing after all.
This is some truly dark and depressive doom, from the name of the band, Loss, to the cover image, a headshot of a man being hung, to the song titles like "Cut-up, Depressed And Alone" and "Conceptual Funerealism Into The FInal Act (Of Being)", to the inner sleeve image, a huge razor blade, to the lyrics: "And these wounds of mine will never fucking heal, all that's left is loneliness, there's nothing left to feel". Woah, really bleak and harsh and lonely and miserable, which is what makes the music such a strange surprise. You might expect some impossibly downtuned slow motion sludge, or some blackened midtempo buzz, but instead, what you get is closer to bands like Katatonia or Paramecium or My Dying Bride than Esoteric or Moss. Sure it's slow, and heavy, but it's also strangely melodic. VERY melodic in fact, melancholy and minor key, a plodding, miserable prettiness. Distorted melodies swirl and swoop and keen mournfully beside vocals so low and demonic they almost sound like snarling wild animal. Long stretches of clean guitar moodiness, slow and sorrowful, before the guitars creep up and launch into another melodic dirge. That's what makes Loss so compelling, the musical tug of war between the pretty sad melodies and the buzzy black sludge. The last two tracks are live, one is a 10 minute version of Katatonia's "Brave" which sounds perfect, like it could be a Loss original, and demonstrates the huge sonic influence Katatonia has obviously had on these guys, they're joined by Imperial from Krieg on vocals (with a really funny intro, in a thick Tennessee drawl, the vocalist from Loss announces: "We've got our guest vocalist, he drove all the way down here from fuckin' New Jersey, welcome to the stage, Imperial from the fucking black metal cult Krieg..."). The last track is also live (and comes complete with another goofy song introduction) and is the fastest and blackest track here, pummeling double kick, and buzzing riffs swirl into full on black metal before slowing down and spreading back out out into more of that depressive melodic doom. So fucking good...
We could go on and on about how this is some awesome, super blown out and distorted Rallizes-like Japanese psych here but let's mention the important stuff first: this nicely-packaged live disc is limited to 500 copies, and is already sold out at the label and thus out of print! So the few copies we have now are the last ones we're gonna see. Maybe Archive (same folks who've brought us equally precious live documents by the likes of Boris, Khanate, Growing, and Keiji Haino, some of which went so fast we never even listed 'em) ought to up their press runs?
If you've never heard LSD-march before, we'd direct you to investigate their not-so-limited album Suddenly, Like Flames -- if only so as to leave more of these Live discs for all the fans who're sure to be elbowing each other aside to grab one of these.
But to fulfill our descriptive duties, we'll go on... Bookended by two different versions of "Black Bouquet" done by different lineups, this disc captures performances that were distorted to begin with, but whose clangor is only enhanced by the "recorded-in-a-concrete-garbage-can" atmosphere. And that's PERFECT for them, making this sound even more like of of those rare Les Rallizes Denudes boots... so we're not complaining at all! Lotsa flaming wreckage of wailing guitar, feedback and murk. Headnodding, driving beats. Slowing down for stretches of gentle balladry before kicking in again with the jams and cranking the VU meter...well actually their "VU" (as in Velvet Underground) meter is always cranked, isn't it?
Five of the eight tracks here were recorded in 2002 by guitarist/vocalist Shinsuke Michishita, bassist Masami Kawaguchi, and drummer Ikuro Takahashi (ex-Fushitsusha). The other three date from 1997 and thus feature an earlier LSD-march lineup with Shinsuke Michishita joined by Makoto Inoue on bass, and Eddie and Bill from the band COA on guitar and drums!
This local band of brooding lads have finally completed their very long-in-the-works self-released self-titled debut cd. You might already be familiar with them via the handful of cdrs they've released prior to this. Since those shoestring budget cdr recordings on which they wore their musical influences readily on their sleeves (the '80s post-punk of Gang Of Four and Echo and The Bunnymen, the early '90s shoegazerness of Slowdive and Ride, the late '90s grandeur of Radiohead), there's been some radical transformations. The band has matured and tightened up ship considerably, honing their own lush, dark pop/rock sound into something more tumultuous. A major factor in their development is that they recorded and mixed this in a top notch SF studio with professionals at the helm. The proof's in the pudding -- the recordings sound big and defined. Sure lo-fi home/rehearsal space recordings work just fine for less lavish artists, but for the ideas sprouting from the mind of Madelia's frontman and central creative force Bryan Bindloss, clearly more resources are required than a lone room microphone capturing the proceedings. Each of the nine songs are ambitiously composed with layers of guitars and synths, but the defining elements that really lock things in are the ornate piano embellishments. Also vastly improved (in both performance and production) are the vocals which in the past were strained with over-the-top melodramatic angst (and perhaps straining to be heard above the rest of the band). Now, the range of expressiveness is still there, but the delivery is much more controlled and effective with a bit more bite. Quite an impressive cd debut!
If you dug the recent album by fellow SFers The Very Hush Hush, definitely check out Madelia... and vice versa.
The Make Up were so much of what was great about indie rock in the '90s. Their commitment to all-ages shows, putting on a totally spirited and performative show, their release of a multitude of 7" singles, their aim at infusing some soul and propaganda into an all too stiff scene was such a welcome respite. Those of us who remember seeing them live know what an amazing spectacle their live shows were. Ian Svenonius channeled his inner preacher meets James Brown meets RFTC's John Reis for a concoction that oozed with charisma and infectious presence. Several years before bands like The Hives and White Stripes were coordinating their outfits and creating mystique with their presence, The Make Up were doing that with a brilliantly uniform vision and execution while keeping their hearts and principles deeply rooted in the underground, by always playing all-ages shows and keeping those door prices low. Taking their Nation Of Ulysses Dischord roots and adding some much needed ass shaking and soul sounding spirit into the equation.
Up until this album Bay Area pop couple Mates Of State have pretty much stuck to their trademark approach of portraying two sweethearts gazing gooily into each others' eyes singing heart-shaped pop songs to each other. Back in 2000 their first album My Solo Project, filled with terrific bright pop tunes, was a sugary shot in the arm for the jaded stone-faced indie crowd. With their subsequent albums Our Constant Concern and Team Boo, although Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner's mutual adoration remained unquestionable, their behavior became something of a one trick pony -- y'know when your best friend won't stop fawning over his/her honeypie in your presence. You roll your eyes and think, "there they go again!" You just wanna shout, "stop being so damn cute!" Their emotive boy/girl vocals atop organ and drums instrumentation could sometimes be somewhat one dimensional. But despite some of us having a tummyache from all the buttercream frosted earnestness, we held our tongue. Heck, clearly many folks haven't had a problem with their lovey-dovey-ness. Their fans are pretty diehard. But we've just felt that they had the potential for more, and would get around to it sooner or later. On Bring It Back we hear the duo blossoming! Instead of public displays of affection (with the exception of the back cover photo and the re-creation of an old ABBA photo inside), their personal bond makes itself felt in less obvious ways -- two tunesmiths on the same wavelength, not only exploring it together but also inviting their musician friends along on their refreshing hook'n'harmony filled adventures (adding other vocalists, horns, stringed instruments, even some kazoo and didgeridoo!). Old fans, don't you fret. We're not talking any radical changes... just a bit more going on, more polish, embellishments and such. Despite both the (in our opinion) somewhat misleading grainy cover photo that makes the couple look like some '60s Serge Gainsbourg pop duo and the abovementioned '70s ABBA photo replica, today's Mates Of State are far from retro Euro-pop sounding (specifically of the French or Swedish persuasion). No, it's simply sunny California emo pop filling up this their most deliciously composed and crafted, not to mention prettiest album to date!
We went apeshit for Maximo Park last year and we don't regret it at all. A testament to the kickassnes of the 'Park is how much they still get played in the store. ALL THE TIME! For those of you who don't know what the heck we're talking about, pick up Maximo Park's A Certain Trigger (one of Andee's top 10 records of last year and a unanimous store fave) and then we'll talk. Lumped in with the new breed of dance punk, Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand,the Killers, but for our money Maximo Park trump them all. Taking the influence of all -those- bands, Gang Of Four, Interpol, Ultravox, Joy Division, and most importantly XTC! And it's the XTC that really separates MP from the pack. The dance element is tempered by a huge swath of snarky intelligent pop, and it doesn't hurt that in the middle of a wildly propulsive dance punk rave up MP will unleash a hook straight out of XTC's classic pop songbook, taking everything to a whole 'nother level. Fun and funky, clever and quirky, angular new wave guitars, bouncy power pop rhythms and synths all over the place. The songs on Missing Songs, a collection of B sides, are slow growers, not as immediately catchy as ALL the tracks on A Certain Trigger, but they're the kind of songs that on repeated listens seep into your brain and end up superseding the 'hits' and becoming you new favorites. EXCEPT for two tracks from the first Maximo Park that were as immediately catchy as ANY song they'd written which were inexplicably left off the full length, "Fear Of Falling" and "I Want You To Leave", both bouncy and churning and choppy and punky and fucking perfect. With strange stop start arrangements, lush harmony vocals and impossibly off kilter and improbably catchy hooks. Even if this were a $15 single with JUST those two songs it would be SO worth it. But instead you get a whole batch of other songs destined to be you new favorites, as well as three demo versions of tracks from the full length!
Every time this band's name gets brought up (and even though it's not spelled the same way) we have to fight like crazy to stop ourselves from breaking out into that Sesame Street song, but trust us Menomena's music is something completely different. Under An Hour is comprised of wonderfully dramatic and richly evocative passages in which piano and horns take centerstage! In fact, we'd imagine that this would make a fine soundtrack for a Jan Svankmajer animated film (a sequel to Institute Benjamenta, maybe?). Each of the three nearly twenty minute tracks is a beautiful brooding post chamber rock excursion, slow building, moving forward in smooth glides and unexpected lurches, dynamic but subtly so. The first track "Water" sounds like some strange Penguin Cafe Orchetra and Godspeed You Black Emperor. Dark and glistening, vast sweeping moodiness, very cinematic, haunting pointalist pianos paint melancholy melodies over a thick background of warm swells and clouds of dense overtones, so luch and grand sounding. Strange little effects add all sorts of unexpected character, subtle but very bizarre studio trickery, little swoops of backwards acoustic strum, affected insturments that almost sound like a female chorus at times. Wow. The second track, while nearly as dramatic and intense as the first track, manages to incorporate just a touch of irreverence, little playful flourishes here and there, mostly it's the horns that drive the song, with a jaunty, almost jazzy feel, but as the track progresses, they begin to change shape and sound more and more ominous, helps that the whole thing is underpinned by a thick wash of blown out BIG sounding drums a la the Flaming Lips. In fact, at times this almost sounds like a chamber music ensemble version of the Lips. Which is not a bad thing at all. The final track starts off with a warm buzzy drone, that slowly thickens and expands as more and more strings join in, the low moan of cellos, the warm slither of a bass, guitars drifting through the lower registers, all slowly twisting and flowing like one of those stop motion movies of plants growing or flowers blooming and then dying, whole months compressed into minutes. Soon little tendrils of melody begin to peek out from beneath the dense blanket of sounds, until the drums kick in, and then suddenly the track is very Circle like, streaks and smears of sound, twisting in the air beneath a propulsive krautrock beat, super simple and hypnotic. A brief stretch of ambience perpares you for the last few minutes, super distorted drums pound out an almost trip-hop rhythm, sort of blissed out and laid back, but strangely haunting and moody, with a creepy near-Burzum synthesizer melody drifting wraith like above the cruchy propulsive framework below. Like the soundtrack to some thriller, the moment the main character realizes their whole life was a lie, and everyone they trusted was dead, and there's no way out. So cool.
Packaged in a slipcover with some strange cover art (a woman wearing goggles, sitting on some weird geometric shape, holding an orange contraption, everything splattered with flour) and no actual booklet or tray card. Mysterious, just like the music within.
Hoooo boy, what can we say about the latest Stephin Merritt release? This is a tough one. On the first day that we had this album in stock, it provoked some of the most immediate and strongest reactions. To put it mildly, we've got some pretty damn diehard Merritt supporters around here (we might add, some of them are card-carrying showtune lovers too!), but even they had to swiftly flee the scene of this album by the third song. Did we mention it's comprised of a whopping 26 opera-heavy compositions that he collaborated on with China's opera star Chen Shi-Zheng for three stage presentations (Orphan Of Zhao, Peach Blossom Fan and My Life As A Fairy Tale)? Yup, this modern day pop Pied Piper left his usual gang of merry pop pranksters at the rock club and trotted himself right down into high art theater row. We suspect those blinding Broadway lights might've shorted out a few of his good-sense-o-meters. Unquestionably, this is one of Merritt's most bizarre, ambitious and ballsy releases to date. As far from his Magnetic Fields, The Sixths, Future Bible Heroes, Gothic Archies et al as he (and you) can get! Be forewarned, 'tis an acquired taste.
Oh, Rhett Miller what're you doin' to us?! You, dear AQ reader, might recall that we had a gripe with his 2002 album's cover photo (a teen magazine worthy close-up shot of his peaches'n'cream face on a green background), and we didn't even bring up the appalling cover of his early solo offering Mythologies. Shudder. This time he's all dolled up and lounging in velvets. Doin' his best Rufus Wainwright impression. Weird, but unlike Wainwright who possesses an easy jaunty elegance, Miller looks posed and unnatural. Geeeez! Alright, that's enough harshing on Miller for one afternoon, but frankly it'd be less of an issue if any of his cover art or photos to date have suited their respective albums' music OR if his solo tunes kicked as much ass as those of his full band (Old 97s) do. Instead, his solo fare is much closer to that of loads of other folks. For instance the second tune could very well be a Goo Goo Dolls cast-off (which in itself isn't all that bad, is it?). Then the very next song "Meteor Shower" sounds like it could be a re-interpretation (or in less kind words, a knock-off) of David Bowie's song "Soul Love" from Ziggy Stardust. Later in the album "I Believe She's Lying" traces a melody and strummy guitar sound that Gin Blossoms put to better use on their song "Hey Jealousy". Not surprisingly, it all sound good -- really well played and produced -- but just comes across as faceless. That said, there's certainly enough heartstring-pulling here to guarantee that you'll be hearing some of these songs in teen movies this summer...
