Lots of bands can 'rock' live, performing their record, their set, a little bit louder, a little bit wilder, a little more shambolic, feeding off the energy of the crowd, but rare is the band who can create a mood, evoke emotions, make standing in a smoky club feel like standing knee deep in the mud, in a swamp, watching the black night sky, thinking back over your life and just waiting' around to die. The music of 16 Horsepower is like that, a swampy backwoods bluegrass, hellfire and brimstone, Biblical damnation and spiritual salvation. A creepy campfire blues steeped in haunting late night misery and rainy day malaise. Banjos, and double basses, accordions and brushed drums, and the haunting soulful vocals of David Eugene Edwards. On record, closed eyes and open ears reveal a world long gone, preachers in tents set up in muddy fields, beat up old pick ups, the open road, the wrath of God and the loneliness of existence, all revealed through the slow slinky crawl of 16HP's funeral folk dirge, a murky gloomy beauty that is hard to describe. Live it's like watching a band possessed. Edwards grimaces and grits, strains and clenches, the accordion, banjo or bowed guitar like a serpent in his hands as he testifies, and tries to save our souls. This dvd conveys all the power and mystery of 16HP live. Disc one features a live show from 2002 in its entirety, recorded at Le Cirque Royal in Belgium, the sound is dark and dolorous, the stage set up is the same, dark and muted, Edwards up front bathed in a halo of muted yellow light, with soft blue light on the rest of the players, each in their own little corner, all summoning personal demons and exorcising them right there on stage. SO totally amazing.
Disc two features a handful of odds and ends. A live performance on German television show Rockpalast, complete with cheesy intro music and eighties neon logo, but a fiery and super intense set, the band possessed and inspired. Also a cool six minute montage of footage from their last tour, live performances, radio interviews, backstage, in the van, etc. as well as some footage of the band in their practice space rehearsing for their final tour. And maybe the most moving, live footage from a show in Antwerp, Belgium, intended for a documentary, but never used as that ended up being the band's last show ever. A handful of songs played in a cool dome-like outdoor amphitheater, with a strange fountain, right in front of the stage that sends up a tiny jets of water. A handful of songs, including a cover of "Heart And Soul" by Joy Division, which is the last song 16 Horsepower ever perform.
Comes with a big booklet of liner notes/photos. This disc is NTSC and region free.
A Bay Area super group of sorts featuring Rob Fisk (ex-Deerhoof, Badgerlore), Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu), Kelly Goodefisk (ex-Deerhoof), Chest Smith (superstar drummer, he's played with Tom Waits, John Zorn, Mr. Bungle, Nels Cline, Fred Frith, etc.) and George Chen (k.i.t., man about town). Ok now that we've got that out of the way on to the music. This is lovely and dark folk rock. You can for sure hear the remnants of the Deerhoof past that some of the members share, and a collective art-punk past that recalls moments of Saccharine Trust / the weirder side of SST, all delivered in a much more dusky, dusty woods kind of way. With one foot planted in improv free rock and another in darkwoods folk, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle hold tight to their punk roots with one hand while their other runs it fingers through dirt, leaves and soil.
This Philip K. Dick obsessed band's debut offers six tracks of heavy, raging, artful metalcore. Named after one of PKD's paranoid sci-fi novels (soon to be a major motion picture directed by Richard Linklater!) these guys specialize in unleashed terror in the form of low-end dirge, screaming vocals and guitars, and battering drums. It's kinda like a post-rock band that's REALLY REALLY UPSET about something, combining the atmosphere of an imaginary, scary sci-fi soundtrack ('specially on the mostly ambient track six) with loud, fast, crushing 'core. For fans of Coalesce, Neurosis, Old Man Gloom, Discordance Axis, Isis, Knut and the whole Hydra Head scene.
Hard to believe that Ilyas Ahmed was just an AQ customer until recently. We were totally blown away the first time we heard his music, and ever since have been unable to keep his cd-r's in stock. All way too limited, all totally gorgeous. Dreamy and drifty, gently played acoustic guitar, wraithlike, lilting soft focus falsetto vocals, sometimes the songs sound like snippets of some long lost mysterious pastoral folk epic, sometimes all the elements get blurred into sparkling shimmery sun drenched streaks of sound dotted with bits of random electronic interference and strange high end drones. Warm and languorous, each track wrapped in a gauzey late afternoon porch production, minor key melodies hover and fade, vocals ebb and flow, the guitar, buzzes and drones, but mostly shimmers and floats. Such lovely lovely music. Truly a shame that his releases are so limited.
Thus, this is LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. We got 30. Each hand numbered. You do the math.
Arastoo is another one of those outfits (persons, actually) who has loads of releases out, but all of them are ultra limited and thus seemingly impossible to get. The last (and only) thing we had from Arastoo was a gorgeous cd-r released on Dielectric records, and now of course out of print. So we were super excited when AQ pal Brandon decided to release a brand new Arastoo on his label Isounderscore. it's still limited of course, but we managed to get a bunch, although we imagine these won't last long.
Arastoo is Arastoo Darakhshan, and is another in the brotherhood of the drone, deftly exploring a warm and wonderful drone drenched ambience. Three is a series of deep cavernous drones, warm and rich, not so much rumbling and sort of washing over you like the sun drenched surf. But this is NOT sunny, this is like a sky devoid of sun, a blanket of rich blackness, permanent nighttime. Occasionally punctuated by haunting reverbed tones, presumably the sound of struck metal. Creepy buzzing alien melodies drift by like a broken trumpet or some sort of shortwave guitar. The heart of the record is a massive, slow building ultra dense drone, layers of low-end get thicker and thicker, while additional layers are added slowly and subtly, each of those new layers, slightly higher in pitch, the result is a rich swirl of strange overtones and hunting ghostlike melodies. Gorgeous.
Housed in an amazing gloss black on matte black sleeve.
It's no surprise to learn that this album developed a strong underground following among Brazilian youth when it came out in 1973. With its forward thinking arrangements, perfectly played Moog and a merging of samba, afro-funk and American rock and folk, it was for sure a record that hinted at what smart weird pop music would sound like in the decades to come. Twenty years later in a different part of the globe groups like Olivia Tremor Control and the whole Elephant Six collective were playing this same brand of eclectic and oh-so-smart pop. But these guys were doing it way back in the seventies! You might remember Paulo Bagunca E A Tropa Maldita for their appearance on the Brazilian version of the Love Peace and Poetry series. Another nice reissue from Discos Mariposa. Good stuff.
This is not a Bardo Pond record proper (although this disc does include one lengthy Bardo Pond track), but instead is a cd collecting some Bardo Pond related outings by various members and offshoots of this Philly psych rock combo, released as a special limited edition to celebrate the recent Terrastock 6 festival held in April in Rhode Island. Sublimation features all new music from Bardo Pond and Bardo satellites 500mg, Dechemia and Takeda.
We can't get enough of fuzzy soft focus druggy spacescapes and Bardo Pond as always deliver just that with the epic 17 minute long "Dual States", a slow burn, blissed out meander, shuffling rhythms, and all sorts of tangled effects-drenched guitars, a warm wash of tripped out loveliness. 500mg, who you might remember from a super limited 12" we carried a while back, is Michael Gibbons on guitars and effects, and explores a much more abstract world of sound, here it's a thick wall of crumbling distorted guitars, fuzzy intercepted radio broadcasts that drifts and breaks apart into soft tendrils of dreamy sunbaked guitar sparkle and warm warbly low end, a washed out shimmery swirl of Sonny Sharrock, Kyuss and Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain". Dechemia is Isobel Sollenberger and John Gibbons and their 4 minute track is a brief gypsy raga, shuffling percussion, simple Eastern guitars, and droning Tony Conrad like violins (played impressively by Sollenberger who usually handles the flute in BP!). So lovely. Finally, a twenty minute track from BP guitarist Clint Takeda, a massive, lumbering, rumbling slow burn, thick distorted guitar, spread out in a thick layer of barely shifting, resonating shimmer, peppered with brief stretches of soft melodic whisper, but for the most part a thick flow of throb and crunch, rumble and keen, mumbled vocals and murky riffs surface, but are quickly dismantled, and stretched out to become more layers, in Takeda's tarpit symphony. Awesome.
Limited to 500 copies, most of which were sold at Terrastock, but we managed to get a bunch for the store, although it's unlikely we'll be able to get more.
Another under the bed find from Campbell Kneale. We should get this guy to clean house more often. Not only did he unearth a handful of the long out of print debut Birchville Cat Motel cd on Insample (see elsewhere on this list) he also managed to scrape up the last 20 of these EVER. Released way back at the beginning of this century, Jewelled Wings was lp only, and features an all acoustic, no overdubs, no effects Birchville Cat Motel. You might be thinking BCM Unplugged or something, but even sans electronics, Kneale can kick up a serious fuss. A dense swirl of Dead C style free rock clatter with chimes and bells and various percussive bits all mixed into the thick sonic stew that is the BCM wall of droning sound, each and every bit constructed from an unusual array of non instruments, household implements, bits of this, some of that. You can almost imagine Kneale spending weeks placing microphones all over his house, in the garage, the bathroom, the office, outside on the roof, by the kids' swingset, in the shower, all over the kitchen, and then just going apeshit and essentially playing his whole house. And we're pretty sure that's not all that far off the mark.
LONG OUT OF PRINT. ROUTINELY SELLS FOR WAY TOO MUCH ON eBAY!!! We have 20 copies and then they are gone for good. And try to be a sport and not buy these to just re-sell on eBay. Let folks who actually enjoy listening to music give these lps nice homes! One per customer, naturally.
It's a bit hard to believe that Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel has been around for almost a decade, although when you take a look at just how many releases the man has produced over the last nine and a half years, it becomes a little bit easier. This here self titled cd (yeah, it's a cd, just packaged in a weird 7" style sleeve) is the very first Birchville recording from way back in 1997. So, what's it doing on the AQ list circa 2006 you ask? Well, it hasn't been re-pressed, nope this is still stone cold out of print, but Mr. Kneale just happened to be doing a little house cleaning when he discovered a long forgotten stash of these gems and offered them to us. We took all of 'em. which only amounted to 20 or 25 so there will be gone for good in no time, so act fast.
We're not really sure what Kneale did before BCM, but this caustic blast of NZ noise announced loud and clear that it didn't matter one bit. Kneale has taken BCM sonically from one end of the spectrum to the other, soft shimmery ambience, massive metallic drones, blissed out free rock weirdness, but when he was just starting out, Birchville was a seriously mean machine. Hard and harsh and not a little bit scary! There are hints of the deft crafter of droney sonic worlds that Kneale would become, but here, Kneale is a warrior of noise, head down, hunkered behind his laptop ready to do battle, bathed in a halo of white hot fury, exploring a world of caustic industrial grind, walls of shrieking feedback and thick swells of buzz and hiss, bells and clattery percussion, simple melodies and subtle sonic sparkles are all drenched in a viscous shower of coruscating crunch. There are bits of tranquility here and there, but they are fraught with peril, like there is always some noisy beast just out of earshot ready to pounce. A gorgeously chaotic caterwaul!
Packaged in an oversized 7" sleeve with a little cd pocket. And again, this is already OUT OF PRINT, has been for years. These last 20 or so copies are the last ever!
We talk about stuff being heavy all the time. Stuff being crushing. Pummeling. Sludgy. We describe slow heavy music with words like tarpit, and lumbering, and plodding. Deep. Cavernous. Subterranean. We try desperately to evoke the sort of abject brutality that this music makes us feel, lets us hear. But the truth is, while all of those words do describe Black Boned Angel, they barely manage to capture just how slow and low, heavy and completely skullcrushing this new record is. In huge letters, printed on the inside of the sleeve, are the words "Transcendence Can Only Be Reached At Maximum Volume" and truer words were never spoken.
Black Boned Angel is the darkside of Mr. Campbell Kneale, better know for his long running blissdrone outfit Birchville Cat Motel. A fascination with metal, and a desire to reach the depths of utter heaviness, led Campbell from the droning path of BCM and into a world of black terror and skull peeling ferocity, a harrowing path of ear shredding, heart stopping, brain melting brutality. And it seems he has acclimated quite well thank you.
Bliss And Void Inseparable is the third installment in Kneale's insidious plan to create a record so massive, that it collapses all of time and space, sucking the entire solar system into an alternate universe the size of a pea. And he's almost succeeded. We will perpetually live in fear knowing that the next BBA record could be the one that destroys the world as we know it. For now, we will luxuriate in the massive soul shearing metallic doooooom that is BAVI. The record begins with massive plods, each one the footfall of a beast so large we can barely comprehend its mass, instead, when it steps down, shockwaves roll out in all directions, like a sonic boom caused by a million downtuned guitars, leaving an fifty foot deep impression in the earth, the compacted ground littered with skeletons and corpses, the dirt wet with blood. Over this occasional black hole plod is laid a white hot streak of upper echelon feedback, an endless stretch of high end reverberation. It's like some sort of Moss / Whitehouse mashup. But even then, the guitars grow, feeding off the darkness, the feedback fades and the strange plodding coheres into some sort of prehistoric riff, a groove so slow and low that it's like a black glacier sliding in slow motion across the desiccated earth. But BBA's hellish pit is not with out hope, not without light, or melody, chanting vocals hover right below the surface, barely audible under a gauzy veil of guitar crumble and amp rooooaaaarrr. At about the halfway point, ghostly piano is introduced, offering up minor key, slightly atonal melodies, adding color to BBA's black world. But also adding a creepy ominous edge. Like the soundtrack to thee sort of horror movie that leaves half the audience frightened to death. This funeral plod continues on until very near the end, where the low end drops out, leaving nothing but a snarled tangled web of feedback, a shimmering lattice of high end, which eventually fades into nothingness.
It's a bit hard to absorb, best to just lay back and let this snarling black beast have its way with you. You might survive, halo tarnished and soul a bit blackened, and if for some reason you don't this angel will carry you lovingly down into the depths.
SO RECOMMENDED!
This Montreal quartet gets its inspiration from traditional European Jewish music. But this is not schlocky watered down bar-mitzvah klezmer. Instead, it's a really nice melding of Jewish folk music, klezmer, and an appropriate amount of darkness in its solemn delivery. With touches of free jazz and post rock up their sleeves they tastefully bring the sounds of traditional Jewish music to a modern place without resorting to cliched samples or overtly electronic cop outs that scream 'hey we're so modern'. At times they almost sound like if The Dirty Three were from the old world and had a direct line to a vast and varied Jewish heritage. Black Ox Orchestar stay true to the roots they're paying homage to while also breathing new life into an old sound. Very nice.
It takes a LOT for a joke band to impress us. First, the joke has to be really funny. Second, the music STILL has to rule. Or at least be good enough to make the joke worthwhile. Nothing worse than a joke band that relies totally on their gimmick.
No need to worry about the mighty Bloodhag, the very heavy masters of all things Edu-Core. For those new to the 'Hag, imagine four nerds, white collared shirts (tucked in of course), totally obsessed with science fiction, so much so that each song is the name of an author, and of course the lyrics discuss the authors and their finest works, live the band hurls sci-fi paperbacks into the audience, and they even did an entire tour playing only in libraries!! It stops being a joke when it's this well researched and executed. Check out the cover too, a headless demon, laying atop a pile of books, the band dead with an 'overdue' notice stuck to one of their corpses, a warrior librarian, wielding a sword, clutching the demon's head, wearing sexy librarian glasses and of course with her library ID still around her neck. Awesome. Plus it's called Hell Bent For Letters! Fuck yeah! Check the Cavalar review elsewhere on the list for a rant on punny band names.
What do they sound like? Sort of like a thrash metal Karp, sludgy guitars, galloping drums, shouted vocals, sometimes thrashy and noisy, sometimes gloriously epic, sometimes sort of grunt and death metally. But pay close attention, you might learn something. The tracks this time around (and Andee's take on the books by the authors referenced):
"Gene Wolfe" (you must read his Book Of The New Sun series, so massive and dense and epic. One of the weirdest worlds ever written)
"Robert Silverberg" (just read Book Of Skulls on the recommendation of AQ pal Barbara D., disturbingly racist and misogynistic and homophobic (like many books written in the seventies) but if you can get past that, it's really intense and fucked up and so strangely mysterious. Being made into a movie which seems like a bad move)
"Douglas Adams" (recently re-read the Hitchhikers Guide 'trilogy' and it's still pretty darn funny. The movie was pretty good too)
"Orson Scott Card" (the Enders series is the series that made me love science fiction, just don't read any of the introductions or you'll realize what a Mormon kook he is and it might ruin it for you)
"Greg Bear" (The Forge Of God and Anvil Of Stars: one of the best sci-fi one-two punches ever. So epic and amazing!)
Okay, we could go on and on, the rest of the tracks / authors: "James Blish", "Anne M. Caffrey", "Iain M. banks", "Edgar Allen Poe", "Philip Jose Farmer", "Michael Swanwick", "Frederik Pohl", "Thomas M. Disch", "Franz Kafka", "Madeline L'Engle" and "Jack Womack".
If you like metal, you'll like Bloodhag. If you like science fiction, you -might- like Bloodhag. But if you love metal AND love science fiction, then pick up this slab of crushing edu-core, you just might learn something!
A two barrel blast from these slow motion sludge merchants. A double dose of dead cops. The Body dump their sludgy doom all over "Cop Killer" by Body Count and "Dead Cops" by M.D.C.! The originals are barely recognizable, the original riffs, transformed into cesspools of filthy sludge. If you love Khanate and Moss and other masters of the ultra slow doom, The Body is more of what you need.
Cool packaging, transparent silkscreened sleeve with machine guns obi insert.
There's all sorts of metal. Death metal, speed metal, doom metal, power metal, thrash metal, grind metal, tech metal, umm... emo metal, grunge metal, peat metal. Woah! Hold on there. What the fuck is 'peat metal'? Well to be honest, we're not entirely sure. But very much like the 'brown metal' of Lugubrum, there is only one true practitioner of the mysterious black art of 'peat metal' and that would be the strangely named Dutch black metal outfit Botulistum. And while 'peat metal' seems to be some strange subset of black metal, it definitely falls squarely into that batch of black metal we often describe as damaged, demented, bizarre, freaked out, fucked up, definite 'outsider'. You know, Dead Reptile Shrine, Benighted Leams, Furze, Rehtaf Ruo, Spektr, Urfaust and all their black brethren. Strangely enough, one of the fellas in Botulistum also does time in aQ faves Urfaust and he and his partner are also in bizarre black metal outfit Fluisterwoud. And it sounds like it. This re-release features one live 30 minute track recorded at their last show in Belgium in 2004 and originally released as a super limited (to 200) edition and also includes a bonus track called "Mergzuigende Veenpulker", from Acts Of Excrement Terrorism”On The Holy Trinity a split with more of their black metal countrymen, Domini Inferni. The sound is definitely black, but it's so murky and psychedelic and confusional, it almost sounds like a black metal Butthole Surfers. Processed vocals, howls and grunts and squeals and shrieks, echo and careen wildly from speaker to speaker, weird riffs, angular and jagged, everything drenched in reverb and room sound, the drums a tribal splatter, the sound of the crowd almost as loud as the band. It's like if Abruptum were from Texas and smoked tons of weed. Or maybe it's actually peat these guys are smoking. The bonus track is like the live track only a little more structured, a huge slab of druggy delirium minus the crowd sounds and with the addition of a ridiculous drum machine, the snares programmed so fast it almost sounds like a mosquito buzzing, but still a glorious blackened sludgy swirl of fucked up guitars and bizarre vocals. This is truly some seriously noisy and fucked up drugged out weirdness. As much for black metalheads as it is for folks into the the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, Violent Students, and other sludgy drug drenched mayhem. Awesome.
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Ok so this record doesn't officially come out until June but because they have already launched their tour, Matador has let a few copies out into the world and we were lucky enough to get our hands on this early batch. With its custom packaging which includes amazing "tripping" rainbow glasses that you can wear and see stars and colors all summer long, this is a record you are gonna want to get your hands on as soon as you can. You often hear people talking about a record that has warmth. But you don't always really melt in that supposed warmth. With their new full length and first outing for Matador. Brightblack Morning Light (we think they might slightly change their name on everything they put out) have made a record that makes you melt in all the best possible ways. With the morning light added to their moniker, Brightblack have made one of the most perfect morning records we've heard in ages. This is the kind of record you put on right when you get up, sun is shining through the windows, slight breeze caressing your neck as Brightblack's Rabob and Nabob let their laid back, trance inducing southern charm seep deep into your pores. There is an overall ambiance to this recording that allows their soothing vocals and rich instrumentation to come together so perfectly as one. You can hear the influence of South American psychedelia, all warm and seductive, you can also hear bits of Americana transmitted with all the right haze and glaze. This is THE summer record, to serenade you as you while away the long warm days in bed all summer long. Highly recommended!
We're more and more convinced that Burmese are San Francisco's greatest band. So fucking heavy, and so intensely aggressive, so totally unlike any other bands in the scene. Live they destroy, and somehow on record, their vitreous violence comes through loud and clear. For those new to Burmese, this is grinding low end ultra pummel, sludge and speed mixed into an impossible sonic stew, a little like Whitehouse crossed with Drop Dead, which makes no sense, but which is why Burmese are so fucking awesome. This set of songs was recorded live on WFMU and is so blown out. the recording so hot, that it's essentially just impenetrable walls of bass guitar growl, huge pounding sonic boom drums and inhuman shrieks. Scary stuff.
Teamed up with Burmese are 16 Bitch Pile Up, who traffic in abstract free noise, noxious clouds of ambient murk, with distant feral vocals and percussion that sounds like someone moving filing cabinets. Harsh and creepy, but what would you expect when one of the band members is credited with playing a bag of glass.
Part of Not Not Fun's Bored Fortress series of limited 7"s, packaged in a cool red and metallic gold silkscreened cover complete with little stick on pink leaves!
This is the sound of burnt hills, the smell of burnt hair, the black musical smoke from a burning methlab in an abandoned trailer park, a glorious blown out, burnt out, drug addled freak rock free for all. Imagine the Dead C if they had grown up in Modesto, skipping school and doing lots of speed in the 7-11 parking lot, or if they had spent their formative years in Texas in the early eighties smoking pot and huffing glue. Or imagine a Hawkwind practice space jam session moments after each band member received a partial frontal lobotomy. How about a playground fight between Liquorball and Faxed Head, the 'Ball armed with flaming wadded up balls of black aluminum foil and the 'Head flinging guitar picks dipped in lighter fluid and an rusty guitar strings. Weird and wonderfully fucked up. Fans of freaked out psychedelic punch ups, dizzying clattery outsider free rock and getting super high and diving head first into a huge pile of drums and guitars will feel right at home.
One of the things we like to do with records (especially cd-r's) from all these new freenoise forest folk abstract tribal space whateveryoucallit folks is to list the vast array of instruments utilized in the making of their records. Sometimes it's an impossible long list of everything and the kitchen sink and we have to wonder why it took a bathtub and an umbrella and an electric toothbrush and 17 different kinds of guitars and at least a few things like a boot or a lamp that don't really make any useful noise at all to make a soft barely audible drone. Or we marvel at how the heck a spatula and six pairs of unwashed socks could produce one of the most gorgeous ambient records ever (we just made that up so don't get all excited). One instrument though that we rarely see is the trumpet. We're sure someone has used a trumpet at one time or another, but probably never to as great affect as Stuart Busby, who some of you might remember from the Gold Leaf Branches compilation we reviewed a while back. This latest release from Mr. Busby is a double 3" cd-r and features two twenty minute suites for trumpet, the equally underutilized glockenspiel, ukulele (ditto!) and voice.
Disc one, North, is the softer and more abstract of the two, warm woozy streaks of muted tonal color, like staring at the sky moments after the sun sets, everything blue and purple, stars barely visible through the soft haze of the dusky not yet night sky. The trumpet is transformed into something entirely un-trumpet like, a soft billowy bed of drone and drift above which the glockenspiel tinkles soft serene melodies.
Disc two, South, is much more active, the trumpet becoming the focal point, warm weary melodies are repeated and layered into dense but still airy washes of sound, sometimes sounding almost Western, like some long lost super abstract Morricone score, other times sounding ominous and haunting, like the music that would accompany a character's flashback in a grainy black and white film from the fifties. So gorgeous.
Packaged in a cool mini-gatefold designed by Mr. Busby himself.
We often talk about the pun as title, or the pun as name of your store. And how it's important that it is actually clever, and makes sense. There's a laundromat down the street from AQ called the Wash Quarters. We get it, headquarters, but you do your wash there, but it doesn't work. There's another laundromat in the neighborhood called the Washing Well! Now, that works, washing sounds like wishing. Same thing with local eyeglass emporium the Frame And Eye. Also sort of clever, I spelled eye, the whole thing like the King And I, but it just doesn't work. Now if they sold jewelry and were called The RING and I, or if they sold random crap and were called the THING and I... maybe it has something to do with rhyming. Anyway, this brings us to the debut from Portugal's Cavalar, titled As A Metal Of Fact. Well, you see what we're talking about. Remember the band TT Quick from the '80s and their record METAL Of Honor? Right. Exactly. Anyway, let's forgive these guys since English is not their first language, and besides, apparently most English speakers seem to enjoy names like the Wash Quarters and The Frame And Eye anyway. But the intent is clear. This is METAL, and the sort of true metal that is played with honor and pride. Actually, Cavalar fall a little more (heck, a lot more) on the Sabbath worshipping stoner rock side of things, which is no bad thing at all. We love Sabbath, and we love bands who sound like Sabbath. But Cavalar sound so much like the Sabs it's downright uncanny. A lot of it has to do with the vocals. in the pantheon of Ozzy-a-like vocalists, this guy's right up there with Steve Hennessey from sHeavy, sounding more like Ozzy than Wino, Magus of Witchcraft and Bobby Liebling of Pentagram all. We often wonder if these vocalists purposefully try to sound like Ozzy, but if that's the case, why do they end up in bands that sound so much like Sabbath? Probably the more likely scenario is that those kind of vocals work best in a heavy stoner Sabbathy rock band, thus they are quickly snapped up by bands looking for the perfect vocalist. So as long as you're not put off by some blatant Sabbath worship, then hell this record is a killer. Huge riffs, amazing drumming, groovy and doomy and catchy, and the vocals, a soaring Ozzy-like whine that fits like a glove. The one negative, bands like this should NEVER actually cover a Sabbath song (Cavalar cover "Hole In the Sky") because then it becomes painfully obvious just how much you owe to Sabbath, that your singer really isn't Ozzy, and demonstrates a little too clearly how fucking untouchable Black Sabbath really are. Regardless, fans of sHeavy, Witchcraft, Burning Saviours and the rest of the Sabbath minions will most definitely want to add this to their stoner doom arsenal.
God Bless the Coachwhips! The terminal primal garage rock psychotics of John Dwyer (Pink and Brown, OCS, and now Yikes!) receive a final epitaph in this double dose of unreleased songs and b-sides with a DVD of live house party insanity. The Coachwhips as a concept were a live fast die young kind of band (Dwyer's got many hands in many pots to keep Coachwhips going full time), but they were best experienced live. We still have fond memories of seeing Dwyer dance on the fire pit at the Eagle while nonchalantly ripping out some hellish Bo-Diddly style guitar licks and looking at us like "what, this? it ain't no thang". Alas that footage isn't on the DVD, but you do get to see an awesome bar brawl where a dude gets brained by Dwyer's guitar before he gets the Coachwhips beating of his life. If this was on YouTube, we'd watch it a million times. RIP Coachwhips!
SORRY -- we have only 5 copies of this left in stock, and that's probably gonna be it... so act fast, five of you.
Awesome split lp of free jazz / drone folk / modern musical mystery from two different but similar in sonic spirit angles. Side one features underground free jazz wunderkind Chris Corsano (drummer for Sunburned Hand Of The Man, as well as sometime music partner of Paul Flaherty, Joe McPhee and more) teaming up with Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny again (Corsano has drummed for Six Organs in the past) for a skittery, scattery guitar versus drums duel. Guitars slither and skitter, shimmer and scrape, matching Corsano's bursts of jazzy percussive scribble almost note for note, occasionally Chasny unleashes thick swoops of chordal hum, or spray his opponent with little squalls of psychedelic freakout. It's all very mumbly and murky and very very free, Six Organs fans might be a little taken aback, but it's an awesome sixteen minutes if you can handle it.
The other side is taken up by "jazz" guitarist Paul Metzger, who plays a modified axe, cobbled together from bits of music boxes and an electric tanpura (like a fretless sitar, sort of) and the result is divine. A long slow burning raga woven from buzzing steel string drones, dense and deftly interwoven, over the top, simple Eastern melodies, that also buzz and rumble, and above it all soft crystalline chimes from the modified music boxes, adding a bit of subtle sparkle and dreamy melody to the dark and moody minor key raga-scape beneath. Really cool. Definitely for fans of Jack Rose, Pelt, James Blackshaw, Greg Malcolm, Matt Valentine and the like.
Limited to 766 copies, with silkscreened wood covers. Beautiful!
Well then! After countless recordings as Anla Courtis, the former sonic technician of the Argentinean avant/savant-art ensemble Reynols has now returned to his birth name, as opposed to the malapropist spelling given to him by Reynols frontman Miguel Tomasin. Perhaps, Courtis is trying to move beyond the scope of Reynols' magical absurdity and develop something of a career as a 'serious' composer; if that is indeed the case, Antiguos Dolmenes Del Paleolitico doesn't help the cause as it's a metanymic exercise in giving a voice to dolmen -- megalithic stone structures thought to be the earliest tombs crafted by primitive man. Courtis constructed this homage to those weighty stones through the no-input mixing board tricks which had previously been employed by the likes of Arcane Device, Sachiko M, and Toshimaru Nakamura. The first of the four lengthy tracks tumbles into pure standing wave form low frequency feedback. Each of the following tracks gradually increases the frequencies of the feedback, moving through gossamer networks of intertwining sinewaves and glassine feedback tones into piercingly sharp tones that are almost too intense to listen to. Altogether, its easy to imagine that Courtis was attempting to commune with the dolmen by reducing music down to its more pure form: the harmonic ur-drone. If so, he's done a remarkable job.
Sure, there's lots of great grind bands, but how many can grind like it's 1989? A whole bunch you say. Well, yeah, maybe, but NONE of them can pull it off as well as Cretin, a crushing, grinding ultra-brutal blast from the past. Been hankering for some Scum-era Napalm Death, howabout some early Carcass? Do the names Terrorizer, Extreme Noise Terror and Repulsion send all sort of blastbeats and downtuned riffage careening around your caveman skull? Well then, Cretin is just what you've been waiting for. Fast and filthy buzzing grind metal brutality that does nothing but pound and blast, like a giant metal fist grabbing a handful of your hair and repeatedly smashing your face into the pavement. You know you love it. We sure as hell do. Features ex-members of death thrashers Exhumed and there's even some guest guitar action from one of the Repulsion guys just so you know this shit is for real!
Current 93's David Tibet is an apocalyptic poet in the truest definition, as his work hinges upon his obsessive desire to transcribe and translate the revelations, visions, nightmares, and dreams that have come to him over the past two decades. The apocalyptic genres of art have come to define the possibilities of how the world as we know it might come to an end (e.g. astrophysical disasters, nuclear war, zombies, fire-ants, etc.); however, in the earliest manifestations of apocalyptic art, it was simply the chronicling of revelations given from the heavens to man below. Throughout his numerous recordings in Current 93, Tibet has embodied the whole apocalyptic tradition, all the while strengthening his admittedly heretical belief in a Patripassianist Christ, who suffers beyond the crucifixion of Jesus throughout the aeons until his second coming (NB. this is but a brief synopsis of Tibet's complicated, Gnostic, and poetic theology).
Black Ships Ate The Sky has been in the works for almost four years, with Tibet's great friend and long-time collaborator Steven Stapleton proclaiming this to be a fantastic recording. Lo and behold, Black Ships Ate The Sky *is* a magnificent album, returning to the somber acid folk stylings haunted by the shadows and smoke last heard on the earlier masterpieces Thunder Perfect Mind and Earth Covers Earth. As on all of the Current 93 albums, Tibet surrounds himself with an impressive battery of musicians that reads like a who's who of alt-folk-avant-rock greats: Will Oldham, Ben Chasny, Antony (as in .. And The Johnsons), Shirley Collins, Cosey Fanni Tutti, William Basinski, Al Cisneros (from Om), and the aforementioned Steven Stapleton. Black Ships Ate The Sky is thematically based upon Tibet's vision aptly described in the title as it relates to a Christian hymn by Charles Wesley called "Idumae" which repeats itself seven times (eight if you count "Black Ships Were Sinking Into Idumae" sung by Cosey Fanni Tutti), as sung by Tibet's numerous guest vocalists. As strong as many of the versions of "Idumae" are, Tibet and his peculiar voice are central to Black Ships. He's impassioned throughout, occasionally possessed with an infernal rage as on the second version of the title track, and elsewhere adopting a gentle delicacy. The music swirls around simple guitar arrangements, laced with Chasny's acidic guitar leads and Stapleton's sidereal productions... and it's stunningly good together. Time will tell if this will be the greatest Current 93 record Tibet has produced (as many have already claimed); but it's clearly in the running.
CX, former DJ for Antipop Consortium, with his first solo joint, extolling the virtues not of the drug, but of everyone else's OTHER favorite crack, the booty! Yep, this is raunchy, nasty, bootylicious hip hop electro rap punk whathafuck for sure. A who's who of guest emcees including Rammellzee, Zion from Zion I, Otto Von Schirach, High Priest and a bunch more all flowing wildly and inventively about 'the krak'. Bouncy Miami bass beats collide with cheesy synths, video game samples over super lowrider 808's, bumping bass bins, handclaps, weird sonic squiggles, and some seriously deranged and demented rhyming. At first, we were sort of confused and confounded, but the more we play this, the more we find it completely irresistible. This is demented dance party sexmusic! Fans of Rio Baile Funk, Fannypack, Miami Bass, Kool Keith's Sex Style, MF Doom, and all things weird, dance-y, sexy and goofy will LOVE this!
Super raunchy cover art featuring some grafitti style artwork over a dizzying collage of low-slung jeans and lots and lots of krak!
Daedelus has such great taste! From the cover art (a frame borrowed from Winsor McCay's classic Little Nemo In Slumberland comic strip) to the wide range of influences, you can these all shape his amazing and eclectic blend of uber smart and sharp post modern electronica/hip-hop. While some folks like Scott Herren (Prefuse 73, Savath & Savalas, etc) need many side projects to fit the needs of a particular sound & style they want to explore, Daedelus has mastered bringing it all together under one colorful umbrella. Brazilian mamba meets warped out glitches meets post rock momentum meets anything and everything. From start to finish this album has lifted us into the air and into a world where you keep moving and the colors keep changing and somehow it always makes perfect sense. This is for sure the most assured and coherent album in an already impressive back catalog. Daedelus has proven with this release that he is a creative musical mind fresh in his prime.
The cult is alive indeed. However, now more than any time over their 15+ year career, the cult sounds less black than ever, and instead like the heaviest, most kick ass eighties hardcore band you've never heard. Darkthrone have always had a punky edge, but this time the riffage is so straight up hardcore it's hard to even classify this as black metal. Sure the artwork looks like a Darkthrone records, and the vocals for the most part are appropriately grim, but there is no disguising the white hot boot stomping spiked and leathered streak of hardcore energy running through every track on The Cult Is Alive. Song titles like "Graveyard Slut", "Atomic Coming", "Shut Up", "Whisky Funeral", the riffs more than anything, and there are still blast beats, but when they do happen, they don't really blast as much as they sort of gallop, a reckless careening hardcore/fastcore, wild and almost out of control. Think Discharge, the Meatmen, GBH, but WAY heavier, and with a bit more evil atmosphere. And take away those blackened vocals, and you'd definitely be hard pressed to pick this out as a record by one of the founders of Norwegian black metal. And even the vocals, while mostly demonic black metal growls, just as often veer into a weird grunty hardcore shout a la Tesco Vee. There are still some very black moments, the strange slippery blackened main riff of "Whisky Funeral", long stretches of buzzing guitar that sort of swirl and drone, some Burzumy midtempo dirges, but those are just brief black flashes, cuz no matter how deep you delve into this dark forest, this is punk rock my friend, too old and too cold!
Wheeeeeeeee! It's a totally sunny blue sky day, and we're kicking up our heels to the sweet sweet sounds of the new Ditty Bops album. Musically the two gals have captured a super old tymey swing feel with some brisk ragtime piano courtesy of Mitchell Froom and some furiously strummed guitar, but their lyrics give the songs' contemporariness away. Above all, Amanda Barrett and Abby DeWald seem very influenced by the sugary vocal stylings of '40s/'50s female vocal trio the Andrews Sisters, but they're far more rough'n'tumble than those highly coiffed ladies. The album's baker's dozen is packed with dizzyingly jaw-breaking cheeriness that conjures toothsome nuggets like 'let a smile be your umbrella' and 'laugh your cares away' and 'you'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent'. Well, maybe not that last one! Give this a spin when you're in need a sparkling tonic. You will be 'right as rain' and 'fit as a fiddle' in no time.
A glorious, massive, free noise love-in / freak out / jam session, the 5th in a series. This volume, an ultra deluxe super limited double lp, features three of the scene's biggest movers and shakers, The Double Leopards, Sunroof! and Mouthus. Each band gets a side of vinyl and delivers just what you might expect and exactly what you want. Sunroof! offer up two tracks, each a towering wall of guitar drones, dense and blossoming with blinding light, guest guitarists include Marcia Bassett (which makes that track pretty much a Hototogisu track) and Mick Flower of the Vibracathedral Orchestra on a track called "Cortez The Killer" and no we can't tell if it's actually a Neil Young cover or not. Mouthus spend their side making lots and lots of noise, grinding industrial soundscapes of electronics and tortured guitars, the hardest of the bunch for sure. And the Double Leopards invoke mysterious gods and ancient civilizations with their murky abstract drone derived ambience, channelling Taj Mahal Travellers, Angus Maclise and Henry Flynt through their transcendental blown out otherworldly glow. But wait, that's only 3 sides, what the heck is up with side 4? Glad you asked. Side 4 features all three outfits, seven musicians, jamming together, a gloriously confusional cacophony, equal parts soft droning flutter and furious free form freakout. Awesome! The only way out of this record... is through it...
Packaged in a super deluxe full color gatefold sleeve!
Although the aQ site doesn't necessarily reflect it, we were HUGE fans of Cincinnati rockers the Afghan Whigs. The unfortunate thing about the list and our site, is we started posting reviews about 11 years ago, so many of our favorite records that were released before then haven't made it on to the site, or have with barely any review, or sometimes with no review at all. We each have huge lists of records we want to get reviewed and up on the site, because while a record may have been one of -our- all time favorites, there's probably loads of people who haven't heard it and NEED to. BUT, there's so much goshdang new music all the time, that it makes it really tough to go back and start reviewing records that came out almost twenty years ago. Anyway, way near the top of that list are the early records from the Afghan Whigs. 1990's Up In it is a gorgeously ramshackle jangly grunge, shot through with all sorts of existential angst and sexual confusion. The follow up, 1992's Congregation was more of the same, but darker and a bit more moody and sultry. Finally, Gentlemen, released in 1993, one of the greatest and most disturbing slabs of dark and moody, sexed up mope rock EVER. The first hints of AW frontman Greg Dulli's newfound obsession with soul music found it's way into the Whigs' angular garage jangle on that disc, but it was subtle enough that it just managed to infuse the music with a sexiness not found in most indie rock. Two more records followed, both pretty lackluster until the band decided to hang it up.
Dulli resurfaced a few years back with his new band the Twilight Singers, a very Whigs sounding outfit, who sort of took up where Gentlemen left off, which needless to say was exactly what we were waiting for. Moody and melancholy, creepy and haunting, like an American indie rock version of Arab Strap, lots of guitar jangle, rhythmic shuffle and seriously fucked up tales of sexual conquest and sexual dysfunction laid bare. Those records were so good it had us re-listening to all our old Whigs records and wanting to review them more than ever, and then suddenly we received this Greg Dulli record, Amber Headlights. We thought it was a new solo record, when in fact what it was actually, was a shelved recording from way back in 2001, recorded right after the end of the Afghan Whigs and right before the birth of the Twilight Singers. Thankfully, while sonically it does sound a bit like those last two Whigs record, it mostly sounds like a new band channelling the spirit of Gentlemen with a heaping dose of Up In it. Hard to explain -that- sound, the sort of ineffable thing we liked so much about prime Whigs, and what we like so much about Amber Headlights, big drums that sometimes shift into jazzy shuffles, jangly brittle high end guitars, supported by thick washes of downtuned chords, huge dizzying swirls of melody and guitar freak out. Sometimes it sounds like there are 3 or 4 guitars all tangled up and wrestling, sweaty and naked and flushed, those burst of impassioned psych-swirl is balanced by lots of gorgeous background harmony vocals. And then there's Dulli's voice, a reedy, plaintive wail, that soars and croons, the perfect vessel for his inner turmoil, full of anguish and passion. And the songs are so weirdly emotional and dramatic. A certain something we only hear in Dulli's songs, specific melodies, certain hooks, that make you feel so sad, and so depressed, and just so creeped out. So strangely moving. It's like a musical Rear Window. The ultra personal becoming public. Watching other folks' lives implode, passions flaming out, new loves born, violence perpetrated, primal urges explored, love, hate, loneliness, all rendered in killer slabs of super emotional indie slash and scrawl. So good.
(For some reason we never listed this before, so rather than just adding it quietly to the website we thought we'd put it on our email, timely since we're also listing the reissue of Earth's "Sunn Amps..." cd.)
Earth. The band that launched a thousand drones. The band that started it all. The heaviest band ever (maybe). Earth was the singular vision of only-permanent-member Dylan Carlson, the long haired guy pictured on the back cover wearing the Morbid Angel longsleeve (whom you might remember from the Kurt & Courtney movie). For 1993's Earth 2, Dylan's guitar was joined by the bass of Dave Harwell, who is pictured holding a cup of coffee on the back cover (and who would go on to disappear completely).
All you kids who thrive on an unhealthy diet of the Corrupted, Boris (who even borrowed the Earth 2 tagline "Special Low Frequency Version" for the Southern Lord version of their "Absolutego" album), the Melvins, Thrones, and sludge like that, as well as you avant-art rockers who enjoy 'dronology' and stuff like Mirror and Jonathan Coleclough and even those of you who sit at home in front of your dream machines and wallow in the historical drones of Angus Maclise and Tony Conrad, need look no further than Earth 2 to experience the drone the way it was meant to be heard: huge downtuned guitars playing riffs so slow that each one lasts forever, LOW END that slides and lurches like a blackened glacier of fuzz and hiss, slow motion notes stretched so far that they become a single note washing over you like a sticky wave of tar and molasses, melodies that are indistinguishable because the notes are pulled so far apart they threaten to come apart completely. When we tell someone that a record is heavy, Earth 2 is the barometer by which all other supposedly 'heavy' music is measured. Even recent AQ faves Sunn 0))) are an Earth tribute band (they will even say as much) named for Earth's amp of choice. There are very few records that are 'classics', that stand the test of time, that remain as vital now, as when they originally came out, ten, twenty, or even thirty years earlier, that have influenced so many bands so much, or that have been unequalled, even with so many people trying so hard to be the heaviest or most extreme. The drug addled, accidental brilliance that is Earth 2, to this day remains a complete and utter classic.
Kind of a holy grail for those who didn't pick up the long-out-of-print original version of this when it was first released, the 1991 debut cd by the Pacific Northwest's late great drone/doom masters Earth. Originals sell for big $$$ on eBay. And those who DO
Earth on this disc consisted of mastermind Dylan Carlson (guitar/vocals) plus Dave Harwell (bass) and Joe Preston (bass/percussion). Joe of course later went on to fame and fortune in the Melvins, and later, his one man band Thrones.
Oh, and this is the Earth record that one Kurt Cobain plays on as well, which I know confused and dismayed a lot of frat/jock guys back in the day!
Y'know, we've never ever listed this Earth album before. It's the last one they recorded for Sub Pop, back in 1996, and until pretty recently seemed likely to be this seminal sludge-drone band's swansong. One that wasn't even all that well-regarded at the time when it came out, either. (Not that any of Earth's albums were all that popular back in the day -- they're definitely much more appreciated now!) And so perhaps it's time to re-evaluate Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons.
Especially since we just sold a ton of the recent Earth remixes album on both cd and vinyl, and chances are a few of you'll also want/need this, seeing as how one of those remixes (Autechre's) was of a song from this here record. Silly to have the remix but not the original, eh? Plus we figure a lot of you Earth fans might have overlooked this one, or simply thought it was out of print or something.
Back in '96, Pentastar was kinda regarded as Earth's "sell-out" album, the one where Earth mainman Dylan Carlson got himself a real band and attempted to make some honest to goodness rock n' roll music, with, y'know, vocals and melodies and songs and everything. They even do a Hendrix cover! But of course being Earth this was still (kinda) super heavy and (mostly) droned-out. Let's take a closer look, track-by-track...
"Introduction" certainly sounds like Earth of olde, a doomful commencement to the proceedings that could just as easily be the work of Boris. But then track two, "High Command", is more like some sort of slowed-down psych-grunge with the haunted by the ghosts of the Velvet Underground. A real nod scene, sure, but not exactly the Earth we knew and loved. Listening to it now, though, it's not bad at all. Sounds a bit like Steel Pole Bathtub. Then there's "Crooked Axis For String Quartet" that takes us into spaced-out krautrock territory... not heavy, but nice! The blown-out rumble of "Tallahassee" returns us to the realm of heaviness but again rocks more than Earth is or was "supposed" to. That's then followed by the rather lovely interlude of "Charioteer (Temple Song)", before the heavy Hendrix worship of Earth's take on Jimi's "Peace In Mississippi" stomps into view. Seems pretty cool now. The experimental side of Earth then surfaces with a seven-minute minimalist piece for *piano* entitled "Sonar And Depth Charge". The many moods of Dylan Carlson, eh? Lastly, the album closes with the epic instrumental "Coda Maestoso In F (flat) Minor" that finds what we might term Earth-y riffage (same as the "Introduction") graced with an honest-to-God heavy metal style melodic guitar solo!!
We can understand how some folks (some of us!) were disappointed when this album first came out. The extremity of old Earth was tamed. A lot of this was at least twice as fast and/or half as heavy as we'd expected (or wanted) from them. But giving it another chance and taking it on its own terms, this is a fine album of stoner rock indeed, sounding not unliked AQ faves Los Natas at times. Or the "heavy rocks" side of Boris. Or the Melvins, who of course have made fucking with their fans expectations a big part of their career. And if we'd heard this *before* hearing Earth's previous albums, we'd probably have loved it right away! Indeed, if you got into this album first (as assuredly some folks did) and then went back to Earth 2 or Extra-Capsular Extraction, whew! that would be a interesting/confounding experience.
We're now convinced that the underrated Pentastar does indeed proudly belong in any Earth fan's collection! ...Now someone needs to start a letter writing campaign to get Sub Pop to bring Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions back into print (from which three of that remix album's tracks were taken)!
Used to be that Earth was best known for their appearance in the Kurt and Courtney documentary. But those days are long gone. Even your Mom probably knows who Earth is (okay, probably only if you have a super hip Mom, but still, you get the point). These are indeed the days of Earth. Reissues, reunions, remixes...and of course that great new album, Hex. Sub Pop has finally figured out that there's a demand for this stuff, so they've repressed all the Earth albums on vinyl and finally reissued the cd of Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions (the vinyl is actually delayed a bit on this one).
When Phase 3 first came out, we were already BIG Earth fans, totally obsessed with the godlike Earth 2, and were a trifle disappointed by Phase 3, shorter songs, cleaner guitar tone, riffs that were actual riffs and not just slow motion smears of distorted rumble. But more recently we were reminded that Phase 3 really was a pretty darn good record by that Legacy Of Dissolution remix album, when several of the best tracks on there turned out to be sourced from songs from this record!
This still has plenty in common with its predecessor, the lugubrious tempos, the sludgy riffage, the whole Melvins on Thorazine sound, but as mentioned above, the songs are shorter and there's a whole lot more variety in sound and texture and instrumentation. Which at the time, chomping at the bit for Earth 2.5, was a bit of a bummer, but returning to it now, it's really amazing. In fact we're beginning to think track two "Tibetan Quaaludes" is one of our all time favorite Earth songs.
It's easy to see how the band ended up with Pentastar, the record that followed Phase 3, a pretty straight ahead stoner rock record with drums and piano and songs, even a Hendrix cover. This is definitely the transition record, and as such, is a little awkward, but still weird and wonderful. With the riffs more fully formed, we sometimes find ourselves expecting the drums to kick in, we can almost picture the huge fill, BOOM, BAP, BUM BUM BUM BOOM BAP and then the killer metallicized krautrock rhythm that would perfectly fit some of these riffs, but without the drums, it adds all sorts of tension. It's still droney for sure, but it's more like a blissed out guitar experiment than full on sludge. The extra melody makes for some strange referents. The opening track "Harvey" sounds like someone took just the guitar track out of a Queen song, and then slowed it down a tiny bit. Strange but cool. Track three, "Lullaby" sounds like some alternative take on Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner". Song 6, appropriately entitled "Song 6" is acoustic guitar strum under electric guitar melody with twinkling chimes, a sort of folkdrone hoedown. It's the longer tracks that keep the drone dream of Earth 2 alive though, the aforementioned "Tibetan Quaaludes", the ambient windblown desolation of "Phase 3: Agni Detonating Over The Thar Desert..." the damaged psych drone guitar strangle of "Thrones And Dominions", it all makes for a killer slab of droning guitar weirdness and definitely qualifies as one of our favorite chunks of low end guitar grrr ever. While not as relentlessly monochromatic as 2, it's still pretty dang heavy and droney and sort of pretty too. So, to recap, Earth 2 and their debut, the amazing "Extra-Capsular Extraction are both way heavier. Pentastar is way groovier and more like a regular rock band, but Phase 3 is still kinda heavy but groovy as well which maybe makes it a good introduction for the Earth novice, depending on which way you lean, drone or groove, you can decide which Earth to get next. The rest of you weird rock obsessives just assume this is absolutely essential.
Too bad they didn't spring for the deluxe packaging of the original with its sheet of red transparent plastic and multiple inserts, on the reissue it's just replicated on the digipak, funny too as the original packaging must have been pretty pricey for a band who at the time probably wasn't selling a whole lot of records, but now with the world in a sludge drone frenzy, and Earth practically a household name (well, in our house hold at least) that sort of packaging would pay for itself in no time...
Ooooh. Some really nice, gentle Japanese acid-folk here, from this female duo, first heard (by us that is) on Alchemy's Night Gallery 2: 21st Century Psychedelic Underground compilation. If you like Nagisa Ni Te, or L's Holy Letters, or the ghostliest Ghost you'll certainly welcome the embrace of Eddie Marcon's dreamy, folky, psychedelic soundworld. As with Nagisa and L, you'll find here similarly drawn out and sparse compositions infused with strange and subtle atmospheres -- mostly acoustic/electric guitars with some snare and piano (cymbal drones, scrapes, gasps -- all acoustically hand-crafted). The record also has some haunting horn blasts and lots of rattling percussion, bells, etc., and the whole thing is sedated by ongoing mallet flourishes on drums and cymbals. Vocally, this could be Takako Minekawa or Tojiko Noriko stripped of the electronica element. There's all the seductive conventions of melancholy folk with just enough eccentricities to place this in a continuum of modern Japanese underground psychedelia, such as LSD-march (an early line-up of which apparently featured both Eddie Marcon's singer Eddie and guitarist Marcon -- aha, now you see how Eddie Marcon came up with their name!) and the female bass-drums duo of Coa (singer Eddie's other band). Eddie Marcon is quite a bit more quiet and mellow than either of those outfits tend to be, though! And outside of the Japanese comparisons, we'd think anyone into anything in the psych-folk vein from Vashti Bunyan to Islaja might quite find this to their liking...
Australia's Preservation label has stylishly packaged this disc in/with an intriguing minimalist graphic design fold out poster. Totally recommended!
This week brought us a gathering of sumptuous dark pop albums from around the globe which all fit together incredibly well! Sure to keep you completely soothed and enchanted: this Edison Woods album, Come Up For Air by the Norwegian trio known as The White Birch and Leaving Songs the soon-to-be-released solo album by Tindersticks' Stuart Staples (we got an advance listenin' copy, but rest assured it's comin' out June 6th).
A hushed hurrah! The very welcome third Edison Woods full length has arrived hot off the presses and direct to us from the group in New York. We're pleased as punch to find that Ms Julia Frodahl and co. continue to craft immensely moving artful music, and this time they're joined by members of Antony & The Johnsons and Elysian Fields. The album is yet another treasure trove of ornate luminous beauties with each track glimmering out of the velvety darkness with a light all its own. Once again the ensemble's approach is very cinematic, but perhaps growing a bit more song-oriented than it was on past releases. Almost imperceptibly the pieces flow from barely-there utterly minimal passages to sweeping grand orchestrations. Additionally in comparison to their previous two fine albums (self-titled and Seven Principles Of Leave No Trace), Nest Of Machines' soaring highs and lulling lows seem even much more pronounced, but remain anchored to the heart by central force and lead vocalist Frodahl's silken voice and resonant piano accompaniment. So lush and haunting are the tones and hues that it's like being enveloped in a dream state wandering by candlelight inside a giant antique music box. Sure many artists' music gets likened to that of music boxes primarily for their delicate chime-iness, but few so fully embody the genuine wonder of those meticulously crafted, timeless inventions as Edison Woods does. Supremely beguiling.
It takes a lot of balls to call your black metal band ELITE. It would lead everyone to believe, that your black metal horde is indeed significantly more elite than all others. In fact, it pretty much means that your band is the most elite. So elite in fact, that you are just simply, ELITE. That's like naming your band 'cult' or even 'grim', oh wait a second, there is a band called Grimm, with two 'm's though, which must make them way MORE grim than all the other grim black metallers out there. Anyway, Elite are in fact a truly elite black metal outfit hailing from the forests of Norway, and they sound like it. This is the new wave of TRUE (and of course ELITE) Norwegian black metal. And it rules. Fierce and fast and pounding and buzzing. Think just the most epic elements of Taake, Burzum, Gorgoroth, etc. woven into a pitch black tapestry of spikes and blood and upside down crosses. Growled guttural vocals, huge thick buzzing guitars, and some of the most epic sounding riffs EVER. Fast and fuzzy, but totally triumphant, melancholic, repeated riffs become totally hypnotic and mesmerizing and weirdly moving, sort of cinematic even, listen to the first track and it will all make sense. Pummeling and grim as fuck, but so totally hook filled. The half time parts sound almost like some sort of blackened Nirvana, or at least Khold channelling Nirvana, either way it's catchy as hell and totally magical sounding. One of our new favorite black metal records for sure.
Amazing record cover too, a foggy winter forest, with some sort of hairy fanged beast lurking and ready to pounce.
While they last we have the super limited digipak version, limited to 500 copies, each one hand numbered, once those are gone you'll just get the regular jewelcase version.
When we first heard about this record, a split release between some unknown band and ultradoom AQ crushworthy sludgelords Monarch, whose track was an hour long, we wondered how the heck that was fair to the other band. We then discovered that the other band was in fact French grinders Elysium, whose songs average around the one minute mark (one song here clocks in at a whopping 8 seconds) it started to make sense. And what an awesome idea, what a grat combo, the two extremes, blazing buzzing hyperspeed grindcore and slow motion sludge. Two great tastes... er, sounds... So here we have 4 tracks from Elysium, total time 5:55, and one track from the sadly now defunct Monarch, total time 58:27. Fucking awesome!
So first up Elysium, fast and furious, guitars like squiggles of white hot lightning, the drums like rhythms being fired from a machine gun into your head at point blank range, vocals that screech and gurgle, everything a head spinning blur. Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Nasum, Rotten Sound, you might as well add Elysium to that elite list.
But they're just the warm up, the appetizer, Monarch's "Amplifire Death March" is why we're here, and they do not disappoint.
But let's talk briefly about how heartbroken we are about the demise of Monarch. Not sure why they called it quits, how often after all do you stumble across one of the slowest, heaviest bands in existence, whose artwork consists of weird Hello Kitty like crosses, skulls and burning churches, as is fronted by a very cute, non-tattooed, non-pierced, spikeless, leatherless, young lady in a sensible skirt and top, who howls like a banshee from the depths of hell and who write in the liner notes "Listen To Judas Priest"? How about never? NEVER EVER! And sure we'd be crushed out on Monarch just based on their lugubrious tarpit sonic sludge, we're just like that, but having an adorable frontperson just pushes it over the edge.
So yes, this is one of the two last recordings from Monarch (the other an lp which we should have soon) and is suitably funereal, appropriately slow and somber, so slow in fact it makes Khanate sound like speed metal. Okay, maybe that's stretching it a bit, but this is some seriously slow motion shit. The riffs stretch out for ages, the drum hits are MILES apart, the vocals a screech / howl / moan, a mouthful of dirt and broken glass, a voice so harsh and hatefilled it seems impossible that it could come from Monarch's diminutive sensibly dressed leader. There are huge stretches of near ambience where it's just the hum of the amplifier, some soft lilting chords, a pounding single drum rhythm, vocals screeched across wide expanses of space, draped across fading riffs like flayed skin before the next chunk of sludge drops. It's almost as if some leather winged demon was flying above, soaring through the black night sky, hurling huge hundred ton chunks of sludge at the ground every few seconds, or few minutes, where they splinter into a million pieces, filling our ears with shards of searing sludge. A pounding ultra-dirge, a tempo well below 16rpm, the sort of creepy crawl that were it to slow down any more would be just a single tone, albeit a crushing pummeling one. So heavy, and so slow it's almost stops being sludge and simply becomes some abstract heaviness. By now you should know what we're getting at. This is doom, ultramegadoom, doom with a page full of 'o's, wallowing in the same murk as Moss, Rigor Sardonicous, Stumm, Catacombs, Esoteric, and who bow before the power of dooooooooom.
This is a split release between TEN labels (count 'em: Shifty / Amanita / (((Parade))) / 213 / Throne / Amertume-Corruption #2 / Fidelio / Murder / Wee Wee / Solitude) which is kinda cool, but also kinda dumb, as each label only gets a handful of copies and therefore it goes out of print before you know it. We got 50 copies, but once they're gone they are most likely gone for good.
R.I.P Monarch. xoxo - aQ
The weird thing about this wonderfully weird collaboration, between NYC's premier avant free folk tribalists and legendary German progrock/krautrock combo Embryo, is that it doesn't sound all that different from what we might have expected a new NNCK record to sound like. Not sure what that says, either the two groups were absolutely perfectly in sync, or NNCK are masterful channellers of classic Krautrock jams, or NNCK stole everything they know from Embryo and their sonic brethren, or Embryo are the true masters, aligning themselves with the manic primal tribal sound of NNCK's percussive rituals. Hardly mattters, whichever way you slice it, this record is stunning. Dense and lush, and packed solid with strange and wonderfuls sounds, tribal rhythms, chimes, woodblocks, drum kit, hand drums, hand claps, all sorts of buzzing strings, what sounds like sitars and harpsichords and autoharps, woodwinds, flutes and recorders, and vocals, an impossible array of chanting and moaning, gargling, mumbling, humming, whistling and singing in tongues. Dreamy super melodic grooves give way to full on Wicker Man pagan insanity which further gives way to some clattery free jazz minimalism but always returning to that transcendental tribalism we just can't get enough of. If Embryo add anything to the mix, it's a warmth and melodicism that sometimes seems to be missing from a a lot of the more abstract NNNCK jams. Folks who dug NNCK's recent Qvaris will most certainly find this to their liking as it sounds like a much more dense, much more melodic, much more vibrant exploration and expansion of the songs on that record. And we LOVED that record, so that should tell you something! The more we listen to these songs, the more we think it might not be such a bad idea for this NNCK / Embryo hybrid to just BE the new NNCK, those No Neck guys ought to just ask those Embryo guys to join the band, what the hell, the more the merrier, and judging from this one time jam, the thought of these guys moving forward aas a single unit, and actively exploring the realms of inner and outer musical space, is almost too much for us to handle.
The mystical and romantic decay of powers past is a prevalent theme on Espers second full length outing. With titles like "Dead King, Dead Queen", "Widow's Weed" and "Children of Stone", the thwarting of innocence and nature are met by a beautifully ruinous demise. While the past Espers releases have been mostly acoustic affairs using dulcimers, autoharps and harpsichords, on II, we hear a more heavily spacious psychedelic sound underpinning the acoustic arrangements while still maintaining their traditional mostly female acid folk vocal styles. Like Pentangle by way of Blue Oyster Cult (they covered BOC's Flaming Telepaths on their last EP, the Weed Tree), this new release shows Espers in top form worthy of many repeated listenings. Recommended!
The Essex Green sail along on this Cannibal Sea fueled by candy colored musical treats. Really folks, this is pop with a capital P. Some other P-words that apply here are 'pretty', 'polished', 'perky' and 'poignant'. If you've even a passing penchant for retro-y indie pop, you'll surely be tickled pink (another P-word!) by each and every song on this album. A shake of a tambourine here, a simple keyboard line there, crunchy guitars and vanilla-frosting vocals everywhere. The trio have really pulled up their kneesocks for this one. Cannibal Sea is their most composed, craftily arranged and produced release to date. Think Belle & Sebastian having a tea party with the Beatles with an occasional detour into some very Stereolab territory ("Cardinal Points") and then into the deep woods for a beautiful somber folk tune ("Rabbit"). Singers Sasha Bell and Christopher Ziter deliver the dreamiest goods in the boy/girl harmony department. Absolutely scrumptious!
Since the beginning of the eighties, the strangely monickered F/i have been turning their amps up to 11, firing up the bongs, filling their space ship with all manner of effects and illicit mind altering substances and setting the controls for the heart of the sun. Here we are more than two decades later and F/i are still drifting in a dreamy and drug addled Hawkwind meets Loop meets Acid Mothers Temple meets Spacemen 3 meets way too many drugs sonic stupor and it still sounds so good. Music to take drugs to make music to take drugs by for sure! Huge streaks of reverb drenched distorted guitar, swirls of synthesizer swoop and sizzle, electronic beeps and bloops and burbles, throbbing, rumbling basslines, Hendrixian psych guitar freakouts and simple krautrock rhythms keeping the whole thing from floating off into the atmosphere. From full on Stooges-y psych stomp, to blissed out shimmering space trance, to smeary echoey ambience to almost Stereolab / Neu! style synth heavy krautrock, F/i manage to take whatever sonic course they're laid and make sure it also involves flying way too close to a black hole and thus being doused by white hot radioactive guitars or dense clouds of thick fuzzy synths or being bombarded by blown out cymbal sizzle, and burning up in a gloriously dreamy and druggy white hot space rock ball of flame!
Dawn McCarthy, the central force behind Faun Fables, takes a few more exploratory steps in expanding her neo-folk realm, and the results are an impressively composed and expansive album. Far less fey, timid woodland pixie and more self assured earth mother. If you've enjoyed her previous albums, The Transit Rider makes for a smooth transition with some intriguing developments, perhaps most notably in its being a concept album of the stage show she toured in 2002. The album's peak is definitely its fourth track "In Speed", and it's a perfect demonstration of her growth. The song's spiraling urgency stands in stark contrast to the album's slower more traditional folk numbers. On the latter, she could easily be mistaken for alternately the granddaughter of Vashti Bunyan or the kid sister of Chan Marshall. However on this song McCarthy's handwringing despair conjures much more stormy times (almost in a Jon Anderson Yes fashion) and is countered in an effectively foreboding manner by frequent FF collaborator Nils Frykdahl's deep Laibach or Swans-esque countenance. A set of particularly offbeat numbers come later in the album, the peculiarly stagey "The Questioning" and the subsequent spoken whispery "I No Longer Wish To" and then there's the very "The Cat Came Back"-ish eleventh tune "The Corwith Brothers". Although it stands solidly on its own merits, listening to this album certainly piques your curiosity with regards to the live theatrics. Hopefully they'll be dusting off their costumery for those of us who missed it a few years back!
Sometimes, punk rock just hits the spot. Especially when it's druggy and garagey and a little bit freaked out. So we have been seriously digging the Functional Blackouts. A fierce, thrashy slab of lo-fi garage rock Stooges style stomp from Chicago. Punk rock destruction unleashed, a handful of messed up, sloppy and slippery, drug fueled scuzzrock jams. Guitars are trashy and trebly, the drums sound like neighborhood kids throwing rocks at trash cans, garbled, affected sort of shouted vocals, all wound up into a white hot ball of Raw Power! This is old school hardcore filtered through new school garage rock. Plus there's plenty of spacey psychrock swoosh a la Hawkwind or Comets On Fire, adding a whole other layer of druggy delirium.
Packaged in a cool brain melting collage of a sleeve! Includes insert and a poster!
We've been trying to track down music from this mysterious Norweigian black metal one man band for ages now and finally managed to get enough to list. We're constantly extolling the virtues of retarded / damaged / fucked / outsider black metal (see the Benighted Leams review elsewhere on this list) and we're always on the lookout for more. And Furze definitely fits the bill. In fact, we've been touting Benighted Leams as "perhaps the most retarded black metal band ever" for years now, but it seems like Furze might be just sneak in and steal that 'honor' for themselves. Let's talk about the packaging first. The cover is all black except for some weeds laid out next to each other. The back is all white (!) with a photo of what appears to be two young trick or treaters, one dressed like a witch, the other like a ghost. The Furze logo on the back is printed over three witches brooms. the back of the booklet has a very South Park-like painting of a white sign under a blood dripping sky, The sign reads: "Come, come sit listen to our cogent black metal necrosis". Inside the booklet, Mr Furze is carrying a lantern through a snowy forest.
While Necromanzee Cogent is black metal, sonically it sounds way more like a doom record, slow doomy riffs, one track even sounds exactly Black Sabbath, but played by a grade school music class. The whole record starts off with haunting Jandekian mumbling before erupting into clumsy, mid tempo doooooom. Totally random drumming, fuzzed out atonal organ melodies and anguished heavily reverbed moaning, not really metal so much as some strange Scott Walker / Jandek / Nick Cave caterwaul occasionally whispering ominously but more often gurgling and squealing and yelping. There are occasional blasts of -actual- black metal, but it's almost as if he can't manage to play that fast for that long and is forced to slow down and often abandon song structure all together, resulting in lots of creepy ambient bits, with scraping reverbed guitar strings and all sort of weird sounds. Most of the record is a sludgy doomy, plodding thud rock, almost like some long lost Amrep band, but filtered through the frosty blackened mind of some Norwegian black metal troll. Also, somewhat surprisingly there are some really gorgeous blissed out post-rocky guitar ambience, keening guitar melodies suspended in a massive blackened emptiness. Everything up until this point has only served to get you ready for the massive 20+ minute final track "Sathanas' Megalomania". From high end chiming shimmer, to slow building droning creepiness, to church-like organ and plodding drum with deep chanting and scary demonic screeches, to full on epic black metal with REALLY loud monster vocals, to haunting funereal doom until the end of the song where levels and song structure and vocals all seem to go haywire. As the metal maelstrom dissipates, the song becomes a chaotic swirl of weird sped up disembodied voices, snippets of crappy AM radio, snatches of distorted orchestra, squealing feedback and groaning downtuned guitars. Phew. Yikes. After listening to this record we feel like we've been dragged naked over rocks and thistles, through a snowy forest, into a fiery pit where we were quickly eaten by a huge demon, and promptly shat out. You know what we're talking about: tired, filthy, demoralized, violated, bruised and battered. But surprisingly really really good.
We haven't had these in ages, but since Furze is some of our favorite far out black metal EVER, we figured we oughta relist it since we just now managed to get some more copies (and we might not be able to get any more after this as the label is pretty much sold out!). Here's how much we love this stuff (from when we listed it the first time a few years back):
Everybody went so nuts for the newest Furze record we listed recently we figured we oughta track down the first one as well. And it's just as freaked out and damaged and totally brilliant. Unlike the weird droning doom of Necromanzee Cogent, Trident Autocrat is all black metal. But that doesn't mean it's not as bizarre, because it most definitely is. The song titles again are totally perplexing: "Zaredoo Knives Endows Thy Sight", "Devacamo Possessed Black", "Witchboundator", "Scolopendraarise" and the lyrics and imagery are quite ridiculous as well. The logo, which features three witches brooms and the slogan: "Trident Black Metal Feast", the back of the record that features a long exposure swirl of light in a spooky hallway, and lines like "The overall vibration of the preacher, The way of sneaking teeth and hypocrisy, It's the destruction ritual of the holy trinity" all combine to form the perfect framework for one of the coolest weirdest black metal records ever. All the BM hallmarks are present, buzzing riffs, growled vocals, chaotic lightning speed bast beats, but the black metal of Furze turns these seemingly typical elements into completely insane musical madness. The growling vocals squirm and morph from demonic growl, to howled distant anguish, heavily reverbed as if they were being recorded at the bottom of a well, to maniacal gremlin like chatter, and creepy cartoony chanting. The riffs, are super affected and sometimes sound totally heavy, sometimes completely brittle, lo-fi and tinny one minute, buzzing and snarling the next. The most surprising thing is how damn catchy some of these riffs are. The first song has been stuck in my head like crazy, and unlike most black metal, you'll no doubt find yourself humming along. Only a half hour long, but so much wonderful weirdness is crammed into those 30 minutes you definitely won't be left wanting.
The latest batch of exploratory post rock experimentalism from the Grails. And all we can say is wow. Having begun life as an outfit heavily indebted to their predecessors, the Grails have really forged their own sound, never hesitating to experiment, explore, or fuck around with songs and sound. This 12" ep, might just be the weirdest, most subtle, least rock set of songs they've ever produced. We were always fans, but when we heard their recent ep, on which they covered psychedelic songs from around the world, including Flower Travellin Band, well, we were suddenly WAY more than fans. The had us as Flower Travellin Band. Anyway, Black Tar Prophecies II (no, part I is NOT out yet) takes their obsession with psych rock, and their deft mastery of all things post rock, and turns it inward, into a darker, doomier, moodier place. And we love it. The first track is a super gloomy rhythmscape, jazzy piano, totally dubbed out drums, everything bathed in smoky atmospheric swirl. Reminds us a little of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore actually. The next track continues down that same dark alley, a haunting cinematic postrockscape, like a more rock DJ Shadow, all low slung bass and shuffling rhythms, very smoky and dreamlike. The second side changes gears a bit, beginning with a strange psychedelic guitarscape, strummed acoustic guitars, beneath fuzzed out moody psych leads, really seventies sounding, like a more abstract post rock Hendrix / Santana thing. But it's the final track that will have all you dronedirgedoom nerds frothing at the mouth, as if to prove they can throw down with the big boys (Boris, Corrupted, Isis, Pelican, Moss, etc...) the final track is a massive downtuned dirge. Slow sludge guitars woven into a tarpit riff of gargantuan proportion, distortion so blown out it crumbles like dirt clods stuffed in your ears, the recording strangely lo-fi, giving the proceedings a dreary droney, Hawkwind meets Gore sort of dirgedoom vibe. Epic and amazing.
SUPER LIMITED, ONLY 500 COPIES!!! 180 gram dayglow yellow/green Mountain Dew colored vinyl packaged in a super striking 2 color vellum sleeve, released on Aurora Borealis, the same folks who put out the Crebain picture disc and the Fungal Hex picture disc, so you know what that means, these will be gone in no time!
Listening to Grandaddy's latest album Just Like The Fambly Cat is so damn bittersweet 'cause it's also apparently their final one and they've done it up in grand style. It's an album that envelops all within earshot -- fans and newcomers alike! -- in a giant bearhug, respectfully and admirably wrapping up their recorded career. Apart from all that, it's simply a truly fine work of fuzzy pop magic. You get nuggets of all the different facets of this band. An expansive atmospheric trip dissolves into a hazy melancholic slow number which melts into bubblegummy boyish indie rock perkiness. A wildly raucous kick-in-the-pants bumps right up next to the sweetest, shimmeriest of dream pop. So darn good! Talk about grand finale, final curtain, last call, closing time, swan song... Grandaddy you will be missed, but the effects of this aural embrace (not to mention the rest of your recorded library) will long be cherished. Yes, very recommended.
Imagine the standard doom/dirge band to be a large rock, nestled solidly in the earth. Well, pry that rock up, tip it over, and see what slimy, wriggling, many-legged or legless creepy-crawlies squirm in the dark, damp dirt beneath -- that's the shuddering sludge sickness that Graves At Sea make sure you hear in their music.
We know a lot of AQ's sludge-doom lovin' customers are already into this band, judging from the number of copies of their split release with Asunder that we've sold. And if you live on the west coast, perhaps you've been a witness to one of their live shows, a bloody spectacle as we recall... LA's Graves At Sea (not to be confused with the equally doomy Buried At Sea from Chicago) take their doom way seriously. From the bulldozing, slowed down, headbanging riffage from the guitars/bass to the rasping, snarling, distorted, animal vokills of their singer Nathan (appropriately credited in this cd booklet with "hissing goblin tongue/evangelist of misery"), this is HEAVY nastiness for fans of Khanate, Corrupted, Eyehategod, Unearthly Trance, and all other heavy as hell, feedbacking freaks. Actually, let's look and see what else it says in the cd booklet about what some of the other Graves At Sea bandmembers are responsible for... we've got Nick on "sluggish wall of murky despair", Steve on "crushing storm of fire and brimstone" and Roger on "timbre of submarsh sludge". Heck they practically wrote their own review right there!
Four songs, half-an-hour. Originally a cd-r release from '03 (their debut recording), now at last on cd, adorned with much better cover art.
Split ep between Olympia, WA trio Growing and former Get Hustle member Mark Evan Burden with each contributing a 16 minute track. Growing's track "Firmament" begins as a bubbling analog synth warble, progressing to ever more dark and ominous waters, but stripped of the guitar and bass parts that made their full length works remind us of Sunn 0))) or Earth. Burden's piece, "10724/02", is a striking contrast. His electronics accompanied piano improvisation ranges between the maniacal pounding minimalism of Charlemagne Palestine and the atmospheric soundscapes of Harold Budd (sans the nuage tendancies). Quite nice!
