Another new jam from New Zealand's 1/3 Octave Band, courtesy of Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel, Black Boned Angel, etc.) Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label. Packaged as always in the immediately recognizable wallpaper sleeve, this is some serious soft focus, gauzy and dreamy and free floating minimal bliss for sure.
Four tracks, 49 minutes, each track a lengthy drift through delicate worlds of subtle sound. From a barely audible whir, flecked with distant high end melodies and crystalline glimmering, to creaking cavernous murmurs, to almost industrial dronescapes, to haunting cinematic soundscapes, but with all the jagged edges worn away into smooth soft shapes. This is the music of dreams. Music from another world. The sound of wandering somnambulant through some soft space, eyes closed, mind open, and drifting heavenward.
Y'know, if we somehow kept EVERY Acid Mothers Temple (or AMT related) release in stock, we'd have to move to a bigger store! Perhaps we'd be forced to annex the bead shop next door (that would be cool) and then somehow fit several miles of additional shelving in there. One could peruse the endless aisles of this expanded, comprehensive Acid Mothers Temple section on foot, but that would be tiring. Probably it would be a better idea if we installed a moving sidewalk, or invested in a fleet of those motorized, up-right Segway scooters for customers to use. Each equipped with a very large basket, of course. But that's not going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, we'll have to be realistic and simply maintain a small selection of our AMT faves, and of course stock their new releases as they (ahem) trickle in. Such as this one!
Have You Seen The Other Side Of The Sky? is Ace Fu's follow-up to AMT's excellent Gong-tribute Iao Chant From The Cosmic Inferno, but unlike that fairly focused record this is more of a psychedelic smorgasbord of all the usual, unusual AMT ingredients -- spacey shortwave transmissions, one-legged flute freakery, acoustic folk balladry a la Ghost, goofy song titles, droning fake ragas, throat singing, heavy fuzzed-out mayhem, and more... all good stuff we like! Well, except for the goofy song titles ("Asimo's Naked Breakfast: Rice and Shrine"? "I Wanna Be Your Bicycle Saddle"?).
There's six diverse tracks here, including a killer half-hour epic, that all really deliver on the established AMT aesthetic. Fans will be pleased. And even though our building plans for an Acid Mothers Temple dedicated wing of Aquarius Records remain a pipe dream, we'll certainly make space for this particular AMT release in our crowded racks for the foreseeable future, it's a good one!
While we have in the past been fans of Adamson's soundtrack without a movie vibe, (most notably, the all time classic Moss Side Story) this more song-oriented and vocal heavy affair feels a bit late in the lounge. It still gives off a soundtrack sort of feel, but with synth-stabs, slap bass, as well as strange narrative elements from Anne Chancellor, which creates a soundtrack that seems to be from an eighties B-movie now shown only on the Spanish channel late at night. Perhaps its because Adamson plays all the instruments himself, which is a commendable feat in itself, but we wish that all that effort made for a more rewarding listen.
As you probably well know by now, we here at AQ have long been fans of manipulated found sounds and field recordings -- dogs barking, ice melting, whatever -- either on their own, captured just as they were heard, or better yet, twisted and smeared into drones and soundscapes, reimagined as completely alien worlds of sound. And while the source material may not be obvious, just knowing where the sounds come from, can make the listening just that much more thrilling. And the creepier and more unlikely the source sound the better. And it sure doesn't get any creepier than this. Sure Matmos used the sounds of rhinoplasty and various other procedures to concoct their abstract electronica, but Aesthetic Meat Front used only the sounds of a corpse being embalmed for Embalmer Tapes. Every single sound, whether it's the casual whistling of the embalmer, the slow rumble of processed suction sounds or the clang of metal instruments dropped in bloody metal trays, each and every sound was captured deep in the sublevels of a funeral home, while an embalmer removed all the fluids from a corpse. Euuuw. But sonically, WOW!
Sometimes the sounds are instantly recognizable, the above mentioned whistling and clatter of surgical instruments, snippets of conversation heavy with the reverb of a small tiled room, small motorized pumps, footsteps, but more often, the sounds of suction, and the sounds of the machines pumping, are stretched out into warm whirring rumbles, or chopped up and reassembled into hissing blasts of fuzz and grrr. But mostly this is a weird warped world of drones, from dreamy and shimmery, to harsh and jagged, all imbued with the specter of mortality, life most fleeting, the great abyss, the sounds already sonically ominous and foreboding enough, but even more so on a psychological level, knowing the source of every sound, engendering a creepy dark ambient atmosphere thick with the heavy hanging shroud of death. So awesome.
SUPER LIMITED!!! WE GOT THE LAST 20 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD!
Glad tidings for Turkish psych freaks, or those soon to become Turkish psych freaks (just give this a listen!): here's a new must-have collection crammed full of swirling, fuzzed-out electric saz, impassioned vocals, and traditional Turkish folk gone funk! If you are indeed into the groovy East-meets-West psychedelia that flourished in Istanbul back in the '60s and '70s, artists like Mogollar, 3 Hur-el, Baris Manco, and Erkin Koray, chances are you may already be familiar with Edip Akbayram and his band Dostlar (formed in '73), as a while back we reviewed a compact disc reissue of Edip's circa '76 album Nedir Ne Decildir and gave it a hearty recommendation. This new Edip Akbayram double disc on the Shadoks label contains 24 tracks, including ten of the 14 cuts found on that previous reissue (meaning, if you already have that cd, you still will want this for the whole disc and then some of songs you don't have... and you can't get rid of the Nedir reissue either if you want those four songs that don't overlap). So this is definitely the Edip set to get at any rate.
The colorful music of Edip Akbayram and Dostlar is pretty much the hardest-rockin' all the Turkish psych acts of the era we've heard... darn heavy in spots. The Anatolian folk-rock of the sixties is blended with a polyester '70s wah-wah funked-up progginess here. It's vibrant and colorful music to make you feel like you're in some smoky, swinging nightclub on one of the warren of narrow, twisting side-streets off of the hip main drag Istiklal in the Beyoglu neighborhood of Istanbul, back in the day, sweating on the dance floor or sitting back, sucking on a hookah.
The cd booklet is full of cool photos, and a page of liner notes, giving Edip's bio but no info on the tracks themselves, we're just told that they're from his first two albums and singles. However, they do include English translations of the song titles, which should give some idea of Edip's seemingly dire outlook on life (or the outlook shared by his Turkish folk sources), with such songs as "Sorrow And More Sorrow", "Miserable", "In Vain", "Our Village Is Full Of Smoke", "Don't Touch My Sad Soul", "Tyrant", "Gallows Pole" and even "My Car Broke Down"! Sounds like a bummer, yet many of these tracks are amazingly upbeat musically!
Edip definitely belongs high up in the reissued ranks of all the incredible, obscure, groovy sixties/seventies psych sounds from all around the world that we can't get enough of here at AQ: Os Mutantes, San Ul Lim, Mogollar, Blo, Bango, Brincos, Krysztof Klenzon, Juan de la Cruz, Los Dug Dugs, He 6, the stuff on comps like Cherrystones Rocks, Welsh Rare Beat, Prog Is Not A Four Letter Word, Studio One Funk, etc. etc. etc.
It goes without saying that the Sun City Girls often exhibit splashes of hallucinatory brilliance throughout their pseudo-eastern psychedelia mashed with cinematic grandeur and way-fucking-far-out esoterica, but at the same time, the Girls have a bad habit of releasing way too much meanderingly psychotic material that definitely tries the patience of even the most die-hard SCG fan. Curiously enough, the smattering of solo recordings from the Bishop brothers, Sir Richard Bishop and Alvarius B (aka Alan Bishop), have managed to avoid the failings of some of the SCG recordings. The reissue of the first Alvarius B record clearly demonstrates this (as well as the 2005 vinyl-only record Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset). Recorded between 1981-1989, many of Alan's severely mangled folk-songs are curiously prescient of the current flourishing of acid folk fingerpicking. At the same time, these fucked-up lo-fi indie-spluttering instrumentals sound like an excessively complex Sebadoh tune played by one guy with a tuneless guitar. Either way you look at it, here's one of the great recordings from one of the Bishop brothers. It went out of print quickly the first time it was released on vinyl back in 1994. We hope it won't happen again.
The Pitchfork blurb on the sticker proclaims this record to be "the trippiest record in the history of the world". While that might be a wee bit of an exaggeration, this most certainly is one of the weirdest wildest psychedelic spazz prog grind pop records EVER (C'mon, Pitchfork, at least when we spew some ridiculous hyperbole, it's absolutely true!! Haha)!! Not that there have been a whole lot of psychedelic spazz prog grind pop records, but there's a reason for that. This shit is NUTS. So freaked out and dense and complex and hard to pull of. Anyone can crank their keyboards and channel an inferior version of the Locust, but An Albatross seem to have some real link to classic prog, although it's filtered through some impossibly skewed, cracked and demented postpunk, grindcore sensibility. 18 songs, 26 minutes. One's even a three part epic clocking in at a whopping 4 minutes. Keyboards wiggle and slither, whipping wildly like a garden hose turned on full blast and let loose to swing like a mad cobra dosed with angel dust, striking at everyone within reach, drums are spastic, and hyperkinetic, like BB's fired from a cannon, a dizzying splatter, guitars grind and churn, melodic one second, harsh and screeching the next. ALl of these elements tangled up into hyper complex, ultra obtuse knots of super complicated, multi part mini grindprog epics, stop / starts, blazing bursts of hyper blast, brief stretches of serene acoustic dreaminess, warm washes of thick synth whir, blissed out drones and crunchy bouncy blasts of new wave, even some horns find their way into the chaos. Above it all, the vocalist screeches and growls, diving and twisting and turning, dodging and ducking, offering shrieked unintelligible platitudes tucked between jagged shards of post punk stutter and epic convoluted prog. This is like a spazzy, grindy, confusional 21st century Magma, mixed up with bits of Locusts and Lightning Bolts maybe, but with a truly unique sound, due perhaps to their prog rock heart of gold. One of our favorite new records. Furious and freaked out, fast and fucked up but still so goddamn catchy and listenable. And so so so great!!!
Sludge is like a drug. Those of us who are hooked, can never get enough. And the heavier or weirder it gets, the more we need every fix to be just a little bit slower, a little bit heavier, a little bit more fucked up and freaked out. This stuff is already pushing the limits of how slow and heavy it can go, you can only get so slow and heavy before notes and melody and any sort of tonal color disappear completely resulting in what is essentially a super dense drone (and lord knows we love those too!!) so most of the bands that have been supplying us with our sludge fix of late have pushed the limits of slow and heavy obviously, but have mostly managed to twist their particular take on the sludge and the doom and the drone into seriously creepy and contorted shapes.
Thus we have Atavist. On first listen, they seem to be trudging down the same black and glacial path as Khanate, plodding Neanderthal drums, crumbling downtuned grit caked guitar rumble, and of course super processed demonically gurgled growls and shrieks. A horrifying and harrowing slow motion journey through the blackest pits of hell for sure. That along would be enough to have us jonesing. But then Atavist mix in some super unlikely elements. First, they actually rock. Not the whole time, but sometimes, they slip into an actual stonery doomic riff, and the tempo picks up, not too much, more like moving from steamroller tempo to runaway dumptruck tempo, but it definitely rocks, heavily and furiously, but never strays from the sludge too long, always slowing back down like said dumptruck plunging into a stretch of road where the tar has melted into black quicksand. The other unlikely element is a certain strange melodic flair, which seems unlikely, but somehow fits perfectly nestled amongst the surrounding doom. From the dreamy, propulsive post rock buried within the first track, gorgeous minor key guitar arpeggios, and shuffling loping almost krautlike rhythms (sounding at moments like a more dirge-y Katatonia) to the delicate intro to the second track, a glistening framework of soft melancholy melody and subtle simple bass lines, all drifting in a swirl of ambient haze (complete with a super creepy sample from the movie Session 9). There are even some blasts of full on freenoise freakout.
But Atavist at their core, are sludge pure and not so simple. Mighty hellbeasts wielding impossibly heavy slabs of ultrasludge, hurling dense chunks of black sound, moving in slow motion, but laying waste to all who cower before them. Neverending Eyehategod-ish high end feedback, dirge-y superdistorted bass grooves slowed waaaaaay down, until they're almost just big muddy smears of low end, guitars so low they sound like they're being dragged behind a truck through a tarpit. Those of you who have been fiending for more Khanate, Eyehategod, Moss, Bunkur, Monarch or who just need your head dunked in hot tar and beaten with feeding back guitars once in a while, may have just found the perfect prescription for your deathdoomdronedirgesludge fix.
Some vinyl tag team action from these two Bay area based frenzies heavyweights. Axolotl offer up three lengthy tracks, a warped warbly hiss drenched ambient drift with distant singsongy vocals, a soft shimmery cinematic soundscapes, all soft edges, sparkling and glistening, and a crunchy super distorted blown out bliss out. All different but with a distinct certain something that ties them all together and makes them uniquely Axolotl. The Skaters counter with a side long epic, weird birdlike electronics trill and flutter, affected guitar jangles and floats dreamlike, hypnotic vocal loops, lurch and shimmy and eventually blend into a single smeary sound, the whole track dense and murky and warbly and lo-fi but as always so totally soft on the ears.
Gorgeously packaged as are all things on Catsup Plate, this time, metallic textured gold ink on a black sleeve, hand screened with a photocopied insert. SUPER LIMITED. Already out of print at the label, so we might not be able to get more unless they press more!
For those well acquainted with the prose of Aquarius Records, the German duo Troum should be a familiar reference to any one keen on dark dronescapes; but Martyn Bates is something of an enigma to us despite being a stalwart of neo-romantic British art-rock thanks to wealth of recordings with his group Eyeless In Gaza. Blessed with the angelic voice of a classic crooner, Bates certainly fits in with the theatrically inclined singers such as David Sylvian, Scott Walker, and Gordon Sharp. Even when Eyeless In Gaza began under the banner of post-punk, Bates' impassioned delivery enveloped the anti-pop sensibilities with a majestic aura that probably repelled just as many potential fans that might be swayed by his rapturous clarion. To be completely honest, we've never been entirely convinced by Bates or Eyeless In Gaza, despite numerous attempts by lifelong fan and AQ pal Loren Chasse to convince us otherwise. In working with Troum on To A Child Dancing In The Wind, Bates has presented himself again as the occultish troubadour, but with Troum's dark elegance wrapped around his voice, we may need to reconsider. Nocturnal for sure, but hardly as overwhelmingly dark as some of the other Troum records (i.e. Tjurkurppa 2 or Sigqan); To A Child Dancing In The Wind has Troum wrapping shadowy drones and their slow motion churn of heavily processed guitar, accordion, harmonica, and bass as the tapestry for the celestial hymns scribed by Bates. For those transfixed by David Sylvian's collaborative efforts with Fennesz on Blemish, we would hazard to guess that you'll find this album equally as emotive and beautiful.
Are you sad that the Yeah Yeah Yeah's seem to have gone all '80s pop? Still looking for that blistering loud, fast and fun rock sound with some strong commanding female vocals at its helm? Then Be Your Own Pet have got your fix for sure. Creating quite a buzz in the last couple years with their full throttle rock sound planted firmly in punk rock as well as in the garage. This definitely had us thinking a bit of the glory of The Gits, a young PJ Harvey doing Stooges covers, and yeah, the urgency of the YYY's on their first ep and full length. They've won the heart of Thurston Moore whose Ecstatic Peace has been putting out their records and this is one of those rare instances where the hype seems to make sense as this is some great rockin' fun.
With this latest issue of our favorite new magazine, The Believer, we're wondering, is it a music magazine? Or is it the hipster Harper's? Or is it somewhere in between? Regardless, it's a great read, and this one IS their music issue which is always amazing, and always sells out quick, so don't dawdle. Juana Molina is the cover star, rendered lounging in her bedroom listening to music, surrounded by posters of Elvis, Sinatra, and Stephen O'Malley (!) drawn by the brilliant Charles Burns. As always, the music issue comes with a cd, this time featuring Juana Molina, Neung Phak, Calexico, Six Organs Of Admittance, Destroyer, Feist, Marissa Nadler, Blood On The Wall, and ATTENTION SUNN 0))) NERDS, an exclusive Stephen O'Malley track!!! And a bunch more. Inside the magazine you'll find a bizarre analysis of Paul Anka's "My Way" incorporating Sinatra, Elvis, Sid Vicious and more, a piece about the Eurovision Song Contest (the most watched television show everywhere but in the US, and recently won by Finnish heavy metal monsters Lordi), Interpretations of various breakup duets: the Pogues' "Fairytale Of New York", the Human League's " Don't You Want Me?", the Jesus & Mary Chain's "Sometimes Always" and a handful of others, Nick Hornby's favorite recent reads, Hornby on Lurie and the Lounge Lizards and the best show he's ever seen, saxophonist David S. Ware, Douglas Wolk writes about an online musical phenomenon, a handful of book reviews, a conversation between the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard, Argentinean singer songwriter Juana Molina, a brief history of rock music, Southern rapper Bun B from UGK, this months advice column featuring NPR mainstay Sarah Vowell, a conversation between novelist Don DeLillo and rock critic Greil Marcus, and finally an interview with one half of the SUNNO))) drone metal duo, Stephen O'Malley.
As always the whole thing beautifully laid out and eminently readable!
The Sun City Girls' Sir Richard Bishop, recorded live in 2005, tackling two prime Sun City Girls tracks, solo on steel string acoustic guitar, and the results are quite lovely. Gorgeous, stripped down acoustic versions of "Space Prophet Dogon" (maybe our favorite Sun City Girls song ever) and "Esoterica Of Abyssynia", both retain some of their Eastern flair, but sound more like some lost Basho or Fahey track. So cool.
Packaged in a plain brown cardstock jukebox style sleeve. Not sure how limited this is, probably very, we have about a dozen.
We won't go into too much detail with this one as it was limited to only 71 copies of which we got the last 20.
This Norwegian duo have a pretty lengthy discography, but somehow this is the first disc we've gotten enough of to list (and unfortunately we only got 20 so they'll be gone before you know it). Utilizing a wide array of electronics and amplified objects, Bjerga and Iverson craft a rich world of pulsing and pulsating sound, crackles and squelches, snippets of conversations, shortwave interference and all sorts of random electronic filigree are embedded in warm rivers of rumbling drone and glistening streaks of keening high end shimmer. Glitch and grit pepper huge washes of murky ambience, while multiple layers of sounds slowly shift and drift. Dark and mysterious, droney and lovely.
Limited to 71 copies, each one hand numbered, in a cool heavy fabric sleeve, -most- but not all of 'em packaged with a gorgeous see through leaf, and tied shut with a little piece of twine.
Germany, circa 1984. A gaggle of krautrock diehards were (we imagine) locked in a room with a plethora of instruments, toys and objects and not allowed to come out until they'd done some sort of justice to the communal freak-out legacy of such early '70s kosmische bands like Amon Duul I and Siloah. They might still be happily locked in that room, for all we know, but the disjointed, damaged, distorted recording they made was pressed up and privately released on vinyl in a limited edition of 100 copies in 1986. That LP, Karawane der Mystiks, has apparently become an extremely sought-after (or at least very hard to find) latter-day krautrock rarity, and has now been officially reissued on compact disc for the limited edition acid-folk cd-r lovin' / Arthur magazine readin' / "new weird America" who dig old weird Germany crowd to freak on.
This disc consists of sixteen tracks (including three "bonus-titel") of lo-fi, chaotic krautrock jamming that at its best achieves a sort of fucked-up raga-like trance state, like a retarded Franciscan Hobbies or a more raw and hippy Axolotl, perhaps. A few parts are a bit too peppy for us, or cacophonously annoying if you're not in the mood, but mostly this is a weird, wailing pow-wow that we're glad has been dug up from obscurity. Of course, it's still pretty darn obscure! And by the way, about the only thing in English on the packaging is the term "Camelshithippies" found in one of the song titles.
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!
Third (but first we've had) in a new series of ULTRA LIMITED hand made drone / ambient cd-r's (we'll try to list the other two soon) from this new boutique label specializing in short form 3" cd-r's of dark drone drenched ambience.
This disc, Easter Invocation, features guitar, theremin (courtesy of Kris Thompson of The Lothars), and processed cello, all stretched and twisted, tangled and warped into a single 21 minute soundscape of gauzy creep and haunting shimmer. Simple, heavily reverbed martial percussion, muted and murky, more of a pulse or a throb than a pound, underpinning a landscape of distant low-end swells, slow building waves of creak and moan, soft swirls of hiss and fuzz, languorous stretches of slow motion rumble. Dreamy but also quite dark and ominous.
ULTRA LIMITED and painstakingly hand assembled. Tiny 3" black fold over sleeves, with a glossy full color image affixed to the front, sealed at the bottom with two rivets, tied with a ribbon, with a little circular badge. Inside the disc nestles between two sheets of gorgeously textured paper, hand printed and so lovely.
VERY RECOMMENDED!
Goodness! Between this new Camera Obscura album and the latest ones by Essex Green and Mojave 3, we're floating up up 'n' away to the dreamy pop heavens. These days these Scots seem to have more of a skip in their step. They're sounding sorta like a frisky kid sister of Broadcast! If we take their album title literally we're going to do so on a magic carpet ride through swirling clouds of warm vintage keyboards and organs graced with the sweetest vanilla custard female vocals. Yum!!!
Imagine the sweeping epic grandeur of Godspeed You Black Emperor, the glistening frosted filigree of Sigur Ros and the dark folk gravity of Steve Von Till of Neurosis' solo work all combined within one album. Sound good to you? It sure does to us! Such is the case with Catlandgrey's self-titled album. Utter sprawling gorgeousness. Simple spare drumming spread out over swoonsome dreaminess and moody melancholia, horns moan, bells chime, guitars shimmer and drift, vocals whisper and croon, everything wrapped in a glistening mist of reverb, flecked with tiny glimmers of electronica glitchery. So nice.
Packaged in a hand numbered black digipak with a tiny flying cat photo affixed to the front and a googly eye!
There was a time where all you had to do was add umlauts to every vowel (heck how about a few consonants too?) to make your band name more evil. More mysterious. For glam rockers it simply meant changing s's to z's, BOYZ, TOYZ, NOYZE... oh and changing i's to y's, and double o's always helped... Bad Noose. But recently, there have been several examples of grim black and doom metal bands adding an extra 'i' for no apparent reason. When it was just French black metallers Mutiilation, we thought, okay, they're just French and little bit strange, or maybe it was a typo but they thought it was cool. We can dig that. But now with Minnesotan funereal doom lords Celestiial jumping on the double 'i' bandwagon, we're beginning to think something is going on. Something sinister. Er... siiniister we mean.
Anyway, we'll just have to keep our eyes peeled for more of the evil double 'i' but in the meantime, Celestiial has more than just the 2 i's going for them. They also have a gaggle of o's. that's right. Celestiial are definitely one of those bands who have earned the multiple o'd doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. They're in the tradition of bands like Skepticism, Thergothon, Disembowelment, Evoken, Winter and more modern practitioners of the ultradoom like Catacombs, Esoteric and the like, but Celestiial are no ordinary doom band, sure their songs are lengthy and glacial, guitars are nothing but black smears in a starless sky, the plodding drums are dropped reverently amidst a bleak and barren sonic landscape. Vocals growl and gurgle and float weightless like some dark wind. Celestiial's doom is even more spacey and blissed out than any of their influences. The guitars are thick and dense and tuned impossibly low, but they sound soft, like someone shaking out a huge black blanket and letting it settle over you, blocking out all light. The programmed drums are so dense with reverb, and the cymbals seem to sizzle endlessly, the percussion just turns into a wash of hiss and whir, that adds a strange fuzzy glow to the already murky and blissy sound. The other thing you can't help but notice, is the sound of nature, everywhere, in every song, crickets, wind blowing through the trees, frogs, whippoorwills, thunder, rain falling on leaves. You know how Skepticism sounds like it was recorded in a forest? This is like that too but it's not metaphorical, it really has forest sounds. It's almost like their is some black doom funeral procession, trudging through the forest, lit only by torchlight, the creatures of the night, gathered just outside the circle of fire. So intense and strangely serene, especially for a 'doom metal' record.
And the thing is it's not just for effect. Celestiial are from Minnesota and are quite possibly the first reflective, isolationist, naturist doom band ever. From the band's website: "Celestiial was created to mirror mysticism in nature. Its heart lies not in its medium but in its dreams. It is a reflection of astral light shown upon the earth--sinking into its soil--waiting and dreaming. It wishes to be the pulse of woodlands and water. Nothing more? Understand that funeral doom isn't always slow for the sake of being slow. It is slower than the beat of the human heart. Its pulse is dead. The pulse of CELESTIIAL aims at being completely parallel to continual motion in everything of this earth. From the seasonal changes to representations of myth."
Woah. But if you really listen, Celestiial's slow motion doom does sound perfectly at home amidst the sounds of nature. Like some living breathing shadowy doomic creature living among the insects and wild birds, lurking in tree tops and curled up upon soft piles of wet leaves. It's almost like a doom metal version of recent record of the week Osmose, by Ariel Kalma, but instead of synths and rainforests, it's doom and dark forests. And as if to further tie the music to the land, and the peoples of the land, Celestiial incorporate an unlikely selection of traditional instruments into their slow motion dirges, such as Celtic harp and Native American flutes.
All of that, strange instrumentation, nature sounds, the two i's, combine to make this wonderfully weird, hauntingly mysterious and quite possibly one of the dreamiest and most blissed out doom records ever!
It's been *how many* years that Celtic Frost fans have been waiting for this??? Well here it is! The first new album from Switzerland's extreme avant-garde metal pioneers since 1989's Vanity/Nemesis. We don't want to make you wait any longer, so we'll keep this review brief. What you want to know is, is this a disgrace to the hallowed CF brand name or did they manage to live up to their idiosyncratic and influential legacy?? Well, we think they have done the latter, and boldly too. (Besides, how can you disgrace the legacy when you've already made glam mistake Cold Lake like 20 years ago? though we hasten to add, Cold Lake is actually one of our FAVORITE Celtic Frost albums, perversely enough.)
Spinning Monotheist makes us think that CF mainman Thomas Gabriel Fischer has been listening to a lot of old Godflesh lately, not a bad thing! This has that uber-doomy industrial vibe to it, complete with feedback squeals and shuddering beats. Not dancey industrial, but factory/machine industrial. All that heaviness is accompanied by a large dose of melancholic melody. Add Tom's dramatic, almost Bowie-like spoken-sung vocals (and more than one instance of his famous death-grunt "uhh!"), and you've got a Teutonic, twisted, Type-O gothy, doom/industrial/prog/classical/black metal, non-rehashed return from Celtic Frost that's no disappointment at all. Uhh!!!
While supplies last, we've got the import slipcase digipack version with bonus track.
Sometime back in 2005, Andrew Chalk manufactured a tiny edition of what had been rumored to be the soundtrack to a self-produced film entitled Vega. When several journalists published their findings about the magnificent drones housed within that instantly out-of-print cd-r on Brainwashed.com and in The Wire, many of Chalk's die-hard fans were left disappointed at the existence of what might have been one of their favorite Andrew Chalk recordings had they ever had the opportunity to actually hear it.
While Mr. Chalk maintains a very quiet demeanor and hardly ventures into the public eye these days, he's been hard at work ensuring that his recently formed Faraway Press actually keeps up with the orders for the records that he's been recording. Vega is one such record that he so dearly wanted to re-release sooner, had it not been for the inevitability of delays. It's clear to see why delays would have been incurred on the packaging for Vega, as the original cd-r was housed in a filigree of black lace surrounding a paper sleeve, which amounted to a delicate and frustratingly time-consuming process in terms of putting together each cd-r. Hence, with the second edition of Vega, this time a proper CD, Chalk has expedited the hand-assembly process with an elaborately printed piece of heavy cardstock, sporting a similarly elegant lace pattern.
As for the music within, Vega is simply stunning. Far more vaporous and free-floating than the previous solo outing The River That Flows Into The Sand and certainly more so than any of the Mirror recordings, Vega acts as an aural narcotic, sedating the listener through a constantly shifting, slow motion churn of chiming guitar drones, almost resembling the kosmische-tinged melancholia heard in the Aeolian String Ensemble's dronescaping. As bleary and amorphous as Chalk's drone-clusters are, he's always had the knack for keeping them just dissonant enough so that they do not fall into the ambient trap of background music. Sublime as ever. Recommended just like all of his other work.
We've had these for a while now, meant to list this ages ago, not sure what happened, but regardless, here you go, the latest, greatest blast of grinding death metal brutality from the brilliantly named Circle Of Dead Children. A furiously fast, ultra downtuned selection of brief blasting bursts of death metal drenched ultragrind, most clocking in at under a minute, but even the briefest blasts pack in a million parts and a billion notes. Head spinning, ear splitting, mind meltingly technical grind, think Discordance Axis, Creation Is Crucifixion, Cephalic Carnage, you know the sort of blazing destruction we're talking about. Plus awesome cover art and killer song titles like "No Tears Fall Through Hollow Eye Sockets", "Chemical Goat". Just what you need for that next gore soaked, techgrind, mathmetal fix for sure!
Not any black metal band can share a split with the mighty and mighty bizarre Urfaust, with their blustery buzz and crazy crooning. But Finland's Circle Of Ouroborus were well up to the task. In fact they actually sound quite bit like Urfaust, albeit in a way more damaged way, which is saying a lot.
On the split with Urfaust we reviewed recently, Circle Of Ouroborus offered up their own cracked take on buzzing black metal, murky almost punky, super lo-fi, practice space production, mumble warbly guitars, drums tinny and buried in the mix, and a totally demented vocalist wailing in a growling cracked croon, WAY up in the mix, shouting and howling. We thought they sounded a bit like a grim black metal Fall.
On Shores, the band stretch out a bit, but still hew close to the sound they share with their sonic brethren in Urfaust, a loping lurching, midtempo buzz, sing songy melodies, a murky black swirl, downtuned and droney, but stumblingly propulsive. Seasick and swaying drunkenly, these tracks sound more like blackened versions of some eighties British post punk band than some cult black metal band. And when the vocals kick in it pretty much seals the deal. When Mark E. Smith dies, and the Fall are no more, he'll strike a deal with the devil, come back from the dead, and this is where he'll end up. Crooning, in that nasally whine, sing/speaking for some mysterious jangly black metal post punk rock band. And if there was any doubt, Circle Of Ouroborus cover "She's Lost Control" by Joy Division. It's not particularly black either, it's gloomy and gothy and propulsively punky, guitars slide and slither, the vocals a dark croon. It almost sounds like a lo-fi live recording of Interpol or some long lost Damned track. Which is a very good thing for sure. It's just weird that these guys exist as a underground, grim and cult black metal band, when sonically, they owe as much to punk rock, and goth rock, and new wave as they do Darkthrone or Mayhem. Sure there's plenty of buzz and suffocating black atmosphere, but to truly dig this you'll definitely need either a love of totally bizarre and not entirely black metal, or a soft spot for classic newwavepostpunk (Fall, Wire, Gang Of Four, Joy Division) or preferably BOTH! And we definitely have both in spades, so as you might imagine this is WAY recommended!
Circle Of Ouroborus recently shared a split with AQ faves, weirdo black metal crooners Urfaust and nearly stole the show. Not heavier really, and maybe not weirder, just so completely different. Like a black metal Jandek maybe. A new genre born, Jandekian black metal. Detuned guitars, acoustic strumming and picking, atonal clean vocals, all very minor key and mournful. We just can't get enough. You can read about CoO's new full length elsewhere on the list, but we also managed to get just a handful of this ultra limited single, where on which Circle Of Ouroborus go even further into the indie jangle doom left field. Woozy seasick guitars underpin strange sung / spoken vocals, not really metal at all, more like a fuzzed out Joy Division or a black metal Velvet Underground. Indie jangle, muted buzz, loping rhythms, minor key melodies, slightly processed vocals, a little gothy, doomy, depressive, less heavy than just haunting and creepy.
Limited to 400 copies, each copy is hand numbered and comes with a lyric sheet. We only got a dozen so act fast!
Wow! We haven't been this excited about a new project in quite a while. Citay is a new band created by Ezra Feinberg (Piano Magic) along with Tim Green (The Fucking Champs, and about a million other projects). What an amazing exercise in how you can take from influences that have been exhausted by so many in all the wrong ways yet somehow find a way to discover the gold that's never been mined before. According to Feinberg, Citay is influenced by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Queen, and Heart...but wait don't think this is about irony or played-out 70's rock worship. Citay get to the blissed out acoustic moments of the above mentioned bands (think Queen II, Sabbath Vol.4) to create something that sounds so fresh, breezy and full of the right kind of dirt and sunlight. With an onslaught of guitars (mostly acoustic and including some 12 strings), nice textural sounds created by mandolin, flute, organ, piano, vibes and a an overall sound that is hard to talk about without using really over the top words like..perfect! They nailed how this kind of record should sound. The guitars are so sweeping yet intimate, the vocals seep into your skin and all of a sudden it feels like the longest summer day ever, the kind that you never want to end. We can't stop listening to this and each time we do, all we can think about is finding our old huffy and riding through dirt lots as the sun shimmers down on us and we pedal through twilight. So totally recommended!
Like all Sunburned Hand Of The Man releases, this is another fleeting glimpse into the mad, sonic abstract sound world of these psych rock ne'er do wells. And like all SHOTM releases, we grabbed as many of these as we could from the band when they were drifting through, probably never to get more. And we got about 15 copies which is all they had left, so if you want one of these, act fast and be prepared to be disappointed.
Not a SHOTM record proper, this is some sort of Sunburned offshoot, featuring mainman John Moloney and a few other folks, using mostly voices and electronics, a bit or percussive clatter and some grinding guitar fuzz, to cobble together a bizarre growling, grumbling, squeaking, skronking, belching, squeaking, swirling soundscape of abstract vocalizations, mysterious buzz, kitchen sink clang, and instrument buzz and whir. Pretty far out even by already damaged SHOTM standards.
Packaged in that instantly recognizable brown cardstock sleeve with color artwork affixed to the front, and two inserts, one xeroxed and one a little transparency.
And again, we only got about 15 of these, probably never to get more so don't dawdle!!
A bird of a different feather has joined the formerly very electrono-art-brat-centric label Tigerbeat6. Now based in Oakland, CA these former Minnesotans' sound is one of molasses-thick, raw, churning goth-industrial and post-punk. On this their second release (their first on Tigerbeat6), Clipd Beaks are heavy on the dank gloom and murk, leaving little room for breath. A full length is promised soon. Cool stuff.
Quite happy in releasing sporadic productions in painfully small pressings, Jonathan Coleclough has been one of Aquarius' favorite dronologist / deep listening composers and one who deserves a place in the experimental ambient pantheon that glorifies the work
Another blast of modern free jazz from this dynamic duo. A drums and sax duel to the death, but what a way to go! Corsano's jazzy splatter, shuffling skitter and pummeling pound up against Flaherty's wild and wooly world of skronk and skree. They've been playing together so long, it's almost like listening to one four armed, four legged, two mouthed man single handedly (um... you know what we mean) deconstructing the history of jazz over the course of 12"s of vinyl. Highlight has to be another Corsano drum detour, a long stretch of dream like ambience that turns into a drums only jam, not so much a drum solo as an eminently listenable exploration of every part of the drum kit. Awesome.
Limited to 400 copies and we only got FIVE COPIES, and it's already out of print. DRAT! So act fast.
Usually, you pretty much know what you're in for when a band proclaims boldly right there on the sleeve, that they perform "Pagan Black Metal Art Exclusively!" And then when you take into account the fact that Darkestrah just so happens to include the drummer from Nargaroth, well then you know for sure you're in for some glorious buzzing, stumbling, midtempo blackness. And indeed, Embrace Of Memory is rife with fuzzy tranced out riffs, super repetitive drone-y arrangements, pounding drums, subtle layers of synth, and howled vocals. Definitely plenty of nods to Nargaroth, but you can also hear hints of avant black metallers Forgotten Woods and early Enslaved. Incredibly catcy melodies are somehow snuck into super buzzy black riffs, the tempos shift from sea sick waltzes, to not quite blasting blastbeats, to pouding dirges, but always mesmerizing and hypnotic, droned out and almost blissy, while managing to still be heavy and brutal.
Two other interesting things that make Darkestrah stand out: one, the vocalist is a woman, although she looks just like one of the guys in the heavily coprsepainted photo, and her harsh demonic howl does not sound all that feminine, but for an almost exclusively male genre, it's pretty dang exciting, and she does have one serious set of glass gargling, bile spewing pipes. And two, Darkestrah just might be the only band we've ever heard who hail from Kyrgyzstan!
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Oooh. Nice one here for fans of Mogwai and Mono and the like... Germany's Daturah are quite adept at that style of dynamic soft-loud mesmerization, being both gently melodic and heavy too. It's easy to lose oneself in this lulling but loud set of really pretty post-rock.
Daturah bring the depresso-drone hammer of melancholy down with some force on these three stretched-out, mostly-instrumental epics. Some half-buried voices are to be heard, tranmissions lost in shortwave ether, drifting in the mix, a la Godspeed or Nadja. But the focus is on the magnificent oceanic swells of guitar. On "Warmachines" they really manage to rock out, whereas other parts of this are suffused with light, lightness.
If you like Mogwai, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, Pelican, Growing, Cult Of Luna, Isis, etc., this is 45 minutes of music you'll also like, we're pretty sure!
Ultra limited lp only reissue of long lost seventies analog synthesizer music from mysterious Belgian musical recluse Edmond De Dyster. These tracks were recovered from unmarked tapes recently discovered, recorded sometime in the early to mid seventies. De Dyster had been recording for years, not to release, just for himself, before his family even realized he was making music nearly a decade later. A sort of lo-fi, bedroom Conrad Schnitzler, De Deyster created dense and rich fuzzed out synthscapes, buzzy and fuzzy, with psychedelic outer space FX swooping all over the place, lots of tape hiss, instrument buzz, creepy alien melodies, like a much more abstract and damaged Tangerine Dream. Crumbling rumble, grimy grit, whirring distortion, birdlike trills, strange minor key melody fragments, long passages of dreamlike bloop and bleep. So cool.
Packaged in a beautiful full color sleeve, featuring washed out family photos of the artist as a young man. Also includes liner notes and a full sized insert.
Limited to 400 copies, already out of print, and we only managed to get about 20 so act fast!
We kind of wish distros and labels would do house cleaning more often. A few lists ago we got copies of a couple super rare long out of print Birchville Cat Motel releases, then a few weeks ago one of our distributors found a secret stash of the long out of print Skullflower cd IIIrd Gatekeeper (Allan and Andee's favorite btw) and this week Tom, the mighty overlord of the Siltbreeze empire, cleaned out his basement and found a dusty little pile of this legenday NZ freenoisepop gem from the godlike Dead C, Trapdoor Fucking Exit. We pounced on them immediately as this is most definitely one of our all time favorite records, and a record so subtly influential, that without it, you could pretty much wipe the entire modern noise rock slate squeaky clean. Sure, the Skaters and Wolf Eyes and The Grey Daturas and the Yellow Swans would all be around, but they'd probably sound more like jangly indie pop the grinding free noise weirdness. For if anyone deserves the credit/blame for launching a thousand bands that perform sitting on the floor twiddling knobs, it's the Dead C. But wait! The Dead C were no knob twiddlers, no they were a goddamn bonafide rock band. Bass, drums, guitar, but with the most basic of instrumentation, they were able to conjure up totally inhuman and unholy squalls of sound. And this was not just noise, the Dead C, at least in the beginning, crafted soft focus, ultra personal pop songs stripped to the bone, the musical flesh peeled off, leaving a rickety percussive framework, draped with mumbled crooned sad boy vocals, all totally wrapped in dense billowy clouds of guitar swirl and thick streaks of fluttering feedback. The ultimate corrosive, deconstructed, detuned, angular, abstract, noise / pop / rock hybrid.
A bit like other bedroom NZ bands of the time, but with that fey 4-track dreaminess completely drenched in lo-fi hiss and grit. Song structures totally subverted, almost like the Chills with a full frontal lobotomy and a airplane hanger full of amps or a clan of cavemen attempting to play the Clean's greatest hits. Elsewhere, the crooning vocals are replaced by distant Gregorian style chanting, serene and ghostlike, but still buried under luxuriously lo-fi washes of ultra murk. Trapdoor Fucking Exit is a confusional crawl of machine gun snares, grinding guitars, slow burn instrument rumble, careening, stumbling rhythms, chaotic ambience, claws-on-concrete guitar scrabble, drum splatter, feedback freakout, but all seemingly effortlessly harnassed into some strange, haunting, detuned and damaged indie noise pop. The Dead C would eventually ditch the pop element almost altogether, concentrating more on texture and sound, but for a brief moment, way back in 1990, the diametrically opposed sound worlds of lo-fi bedroom pop and corrosive free noise freakout collided and formed a brilliant and briefly blinding burst of glorious pop flecked free noise beauty. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
And remember this is waaaay out of print, we got a handful from the Siltbasement and we're not sure how many more there are lurking in corners or in old boxes, so we figure once these are gone they are probably gone for good.
Ultra limited, vinyl-only 10" record collecting tracks from various sources as remixed by legendary producer and dark ambient dronelord Deathprod. It sounds like the idea here was to take the already impossibly dark and doomy originals and attempt to make them even more gloomy, murky and black. And the results are quite gloriously grim. Tracks from Nils Petter Molvaer, Murcof, Larsen and Deathprod himself get reworked into utterly bleak and dismal doomscapes, still warm and thick but equally oppressive and desolate. Cavernous slow motion rumbles, smeary black ambience, all suffused with black hole desolation and utter sonic abjection. Two of the tracks do manage to reach out from the murk, but just barely. The first, by Cloroform, is still minimal and murky but it's wrapped around a muted percussive soundscape, like an underwater slow motion pipe fight. Soft shimmery clank and clatter beneath an ocean of dark ambience. The other, another track from Nils Petter Molvaer, is dreamy and slightly more melodic with slowed down rhythms, and distant keening melodies drifting gently a slowly shifting ocean of subsonic rumbles and whispery whirs. Quite beautiful.
Minimally packaged in an all black gatefold sleeve and with an oversized 10" booklet with liner notes and lots more blackness.
Special one sided, vinyl-only single featuring the 10 minute long "White Reggae Troll". This half-reggae / half punk disco jam, often performed live as an encore, shows Banhart stretching the freak-folk genre down a few different rollicking avenues. We believe this is a one time only pressing, so once they're gone we're not sure we can get them in again! Plus it's called WHITE REGGAE TROLL!!!
Just the sight of that immediately recognizable underlined, lower case 'd' logo sends shivers up our spine. Some of you already know exactly what we're talking about, and just reading this far has probably got you all in a tizzy as well. For those of you who are new to the lower case 'd', prepare yourself for diSEMBOWELMENT!! Even the name, replete with mandatory case change, conjures up all sorts of bleak lifeforce snuffing, soul crushing sensations, at least for fans of mysterious otherworldly doom and bizarre slow motion grind!!
diSEMBOWELMENT were but a brief flash in the underground doom metal scene, existing for a scant three years in the early nineties, but in that time, they recorded one of the all time classic HEAVY records ever, Transcendence Into The Peripheral. A mind blowing record that somehow melded extreme brutality with delicate beauty, a record that totally changed the way some of us listened to heavy music. Referring to the music of diSEMBOWELMENT as doom might give folks the wrong impression. This is not regular old doom like Black Sabbath or My Dying Bride, it's not even funereal doom like Skepticism or Esoteric, although it definitely spends most of its time a lot closer to the slow motion sludge end of the spectrum. diSEMBOWELMENT most definitely inhabit their own unique sonic space. It's slow, sure, but not always, bursts of pounding blast beats will erupt from a bleak tranquil soundscape, gutteral inhuman grunts, machine like percussion, buzzing riffs, all intertwined into a blazing near-death metal onslaught, but it's not long before big reverb drenched guitar melodies begin to fall like some sort of black rain, the metallic pummel sort of stumbling to a seasick lumber, turning the whole thing into a creepy crawl, lurching, plodding, downtuned guitars and spare, simple rhythms, a crushing slow motion dirge, with haunting atonal clean guitar parts and moaning melodies. And even during these vast expanses of atmospheric tranquility, you can never rule out sudden blast beat, or a throat shredding vocal part, or a sudden crushing riff. The magic of diSEMBOWELMENT though is that somehow the metallic crush and the melancholic ambience are perfectly balanced. The whole thing is a dark and depressive, minor key and mournful masterpiece. But it's all so fucking heavy! Even the not-so-heavy parts manage to sound completely massive and totally crushing! So intense and emotional and just absolutely beautiful. Yep, beautiful. Lovely even. Like few records we can remember, and certainly one of the only records this heavy and brutal that manages to be absolutely beautiful. Sonically it's a bit like Napalm Death's Scum, and Carcass's Reek of Putrifaction, that classic Earache sound, a bit lo-fi, lots of reverb, big drums, buzzing guitars, all boiled down into a viscous blackened sludge, sprinkled throughout with brief melodic flares and occasional glistening guitars, like rays of sunlight just barely penetrating the suffocating atmosphere of thick low hanging riffs and bleak, brutal ambience.
Disc one contains all of Transcendence Into the Peripheral, and hell, we would have been happy with just that, a long overdue reissue of one of our all time favorite discs. But disc two contains the quite rare Dusk ep, as well as a rare compilation track and the five track Mourning September demo, all of it suitably genius! And, for a very limited time, we have managed to get a hold of the "mailorder only" version of this diSEMBOWELMENT reissue (limited to 1000 copies worldwide) that comes with a whole extra, third, disc! Disc three contains an unreleased version of "The Spirit Of The Tall Hills" (from Transcendence Into the Peripheral), as well as rehearsal versions of The Spirit Of The Tall Hills and Your Prophetic Throne Of Ivory (also from Transcendence Into the Peripheral). These versions are a lot weirder than the album versions, faster, with way more deranged and damaged vocals! Also includes a Necrovore (who we'd never heard of) cover, a murky, fuzzy, droned-out thrash workout! Wow.
Obviously totally and completely essential. Like we mentioned before, the three disc version is super limited so we're not sure how long we'll have those. Packaged in an oversized 3cd jewel case, with a booklet of photos and liner notes, including lyrics and a history of the band from drummer Paul Mazziotta. When the 3cd version is gone we will have the 2cd version, which is cheaper and comes packaged in an embossed double digipak.
Long overdue, super deluxe double disc reissue of this long-time Aquarius favorite / black metal classic. After a not-so-great past few years for Dissection, including a lengthy jail sentence for frontman Jon Nodtveidt, and a recent disappointing 'comeback/reunion' record (not yet reviewed here), this black classic returns to remind us just how mindblowingly kick ass Dissection really were. And while of course this is a fave of all the metalheads around here, and our metal-lovin' customers, it's also loved by the less metal inclined -- for instance, former AQ staffer Byram, not normally a big metal consumer, ranks this as one of his favorites amongst the Nordic hordes. In fact, it's one of the few metal cds in his collection. It's that great. It came out originally in '94, reissued as a digipak a few years back, and now sees a super duper double disc re-release with a whole disc of bonus tracks (more on those later).
With Storm of the Light's Bane, Dissection perfected their melodic, blackened Swedish death metal approach -- that means TRUE, original metal, with elements of everything from Morbid Angel to Mayhem to Iron Maiden, suped-up and super-grim, with raspy vocals, wicked drumming (the guy is AMAZING), truly memorable, majestic melodies, and tons of cold winter atmosphere. They take long breaks to let their acoustic guitars gently weep, then tear back into the brutal, razor-edged rifferama. Serious stuff, seriously great. This was to be their last album, a mighty swan song, as Dissection called it quits soon after when their frontman ended up in jail as accessory to murder -- but their -very- tangential role in any of that over-sensationalized Scandinavian black metal true crime stuff has nothing to do with why you should be interested in this band. Like we said, the band reformed last year when Nodtveidt got out of jail, and just recently released a mediocre new record, but it couldn't hold a candle to Storm Of The Light's Bane, nor could most metal records actually. Dissection was a brilliant band, and Storm of the Light's Bane is an all time classic that belongs in every metal collection. If you haven't already gotten this album, here's your chance. And even if you already have one of the previous versions, the extra disc might make it a necessary repeat purchase.
The second disc is crammed with bonus tracks and unreleased material. First up, the Storm Of The Light's Bane unreleased alternative mix '95, which might have been for completist nerds only, but a closer look reveals an extra track not on the album proper. Then there's two tracks from an unreleased 1994 demo. And finally the Where Dead Angels Lie ep, also remastered. Lots of liner notes and packaged in a spiffy slipcover. SO RECOMMENDED!
A reissue of these long-defunct Swedish black/death metallers' debut long-player, recorded in 1993 at Dan Swano's studio. It's melodic, with majestic riffs and folky acoustic interludes, but also quite fast, heavy and brutal. Here Dissection established their "blackened" style of Swedish Melodic Death Metal, a sound that they perfected on their next album, the classic Storm Of The Light's Bane. That's the one to get first, and then when you're hooked on 'em, you'll want this one as well. Why is Storm Of The Light's Bane better? It's just the subjective choice of the AQ-staff. Superior songs, we feel. But this is a fine effort too. (By the way, unlike the Nuke Blast reish of Storm, there's no bonus tracks to be found here.)
Another super limited cd-r release of underground noisiness, this time from Dreams, a Skaters side project. We only managed to get a handful of these, so act fast, they'll be gone in no time.
Those of you familiar with the Skaters, already know they are masters of the free floating murk, a clattery chaos harnessed into dense smears of sound. A while back we reviewed a 7" by the Pan Dolphinic Dawn which definitely hints at what you can expect from Dreams, mostly because it's the same person, James Ferraro, one half of the Skaters, and Dreams is another example of the leaf not falling very far from the tree (and again begs the question, why make a solo record that sounds exactly like your band), but that's definitely okay, since we love basking in the murky muted shade of the Skaters' sound. If anything, Dreams is a bit murkier, less active, more of a drifting murmur. There's definitely lots going on sonically, but Ferraro renders all that action in subtle shades of grey and greyer, melodies, and voices, and riffs and whatever might be part of the overall sound, enter a whole new world once they're captured by Ferraro's four track. It's a bit like sitting at the foot of an empty well, watching storm clouds drift back and forth way above, constantly altering the ambient light, dusky, to dark, to darker, to pitch black and back again. Creepy and haunting and ominous but also strangely beautiful.
SUPER LIMITED. WE ONLY GOT A HANDFUL OF THESE, AND AS ALWAYS WE'RE NOT SURE IF WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE.
Here comes another lost gem from Brazil. This time it's from 1970 by a group led by the thrilling piano playing of Luiz Eca (who was in Tamba Trio / Tamba 4). This is dazzling and bright dynamic pop swimming in samba, African rhythms, and an undying pep that radiates throughout the recording. Joining Eca is a cast of 13 adding an onslaught of sounds and voices to the affair. The seven minute opener "Homen Da Sucurasal /Barravento" is one of the best lead off tracks we've ever heard! Catchy, bizarre and all the right and unexpected twists and turns. As the record plays out its samba roots are explored. On it, and throughout the album you can hear hints of the sounds of many bands that would came decades later like Stereolab and White Magic, of course all drenched in a samba vibe that would make Sergio Mendes proud.
Everyone went nuts for Bifrost, the latest release from Norwegian black metallers Elite that we reviewed a few lists back, so while we're waiting to get retocked on that we figured we oughta list the ep that came out right before Bifrost. Elite have definitely earned their highly problematic monicker as they are indeed musically elite, the new wave of TRUE Norwegian black metal. Following in the black festering footprints of their BM forefathers, Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Darkthrone, Ulver and the like, Elite buzz and blast brilliantly and blackly. Each of these four tracks is a dizzying black swirl, thrashing and chaotic, wild spiked blurs, epic melodic riffing wrapped in thick dark swirls of harsh ambience, the drums a relentless pound and blast, vocals harsh and hateful, and is the case with the best black metal, strange haunting and hook filled melodies lurk just beneath the black buzzing surface. So good. Elite indeed.
Last year, in our never ending quest for the weirdest black metal ever, we discovered the mysterious and perplexing Emit. And while technically they may in fact be black metal, realistically, they are more of some sort of ambient, ethereal, damaged drone outfit, spewing a deconstructed, abstract whatthefuck crash, clang and creep. Definitely black, but more in mood than sound. Either way, we were totally taken and were super psyched to discover a new record from these freaks, a split with Vrolok, more on them later. On their half of this split, Emit start off the proceedings with all vocals, the first track a soft shimmery swirl of ghostly reverbed vocals, floating and drifting, the second track is more vocals, this time some sort of monkish chant, low and liturgical, over a whirring distant drone. It's only by track three, that any sort of 'metal' becomes evident, but even then, it's metal of the most abstract fucked up kind. A buzzing blasting burst of lo-fi blackness, that starts of blazing but as it forges forward it falls apart more and more, each separate element becoming more distorted and more twisted and tweaked, until it's like listening to Darkthrone on a transistor radio through an endless series of funhouse mirrors. Woah! The rest of the tracks delve deeply into a dark realm of medieval ambient drones, a sort of more damaged Abruptum, with haunting atonal detuned guitars, and creepy tiny monster vocals, occasional bursts of super distorted black buzz and sonic shrapnel, but for the most part, a dizzying onslaught of chaotic creepiness and bizarre blackness.
Vrolok while not nearly as weird as Emit, are definitely a bit more overtly black metal, but are the perfect match for Emit with their furious and fucked up black buzz. From the tumultuous blast of blazing lo-fi blackness of the first track "Hellchoir (Pestilence 1440)", a snarling, squirming riff, tangled up with lightspeed blast beats and buried under all sorts of suffocating sonic sludge, to the weird martial soundscape of "Black Chemical Waltz", a super blown out simple drum beat, amidst swirls of subsonic drones and buzzing weirdness peppered with creepy distorted snatches of found sound and bits of conversation, to the epic blackness of "Inverse Devotion" sounding like a glorious collision between Xasthur and Immortal, albeit recorded on a busted 4-track, to the epic closer "Between The Astral Shades", which starts off as a shimmering creeped out ambient soundscape, turns into what sounds like Bathory recorded in a high school gymnasium, and finally morphs into an ultra distorted seasick black dirge, replete with anguished howls and washed out black drone guitars, the whole thing blurring into a glorious blackened dronedrenched waltz.
More absolutely essential bizarre blackness for sure!
Some years back, a new album from Norway's Enslaved was an occasion for pagan celebration only among those few who honestly appreciated "Viking" black metal of EPIC quality... people like AQ's Allan for whom a band in tunics and tights was indeed "cool". But more and more folks came around to this band's undeniable if eccentric brilliance (and their stage clothes have become less archaic). Now they're one of the biggest acts in the world of "extreme metal" and the release of a new album like this one (Ruun being their ninth full-length in a 13 year career) is a big deal. As it should be. We've always made a big deal about Enslaved's albums here at AQ, as you may know, going so far as to make 2000's Mardraum a Record Of The Week. So as always, excitement ran high here for this new disc. And our reaction to it is similar to how we felt about their last one, Isa -- it's obvious immediately that Ruun is another proud entry in the Enslaved discography, and one that promises to be a grower too. The carefully crafted, complex collision of aggro black metal and '70s inspired prog rock (a la Rush, Genesis, King Crimson) that Enslaved have been perfecting (or, at this point, could be said to have perfected!) is in full effect, each composition holding hidden secrets to be revealed only on repeat listens, while not for a second stinting on the venemous METAL that you want right of the gate. Already there's certain tracks that we just want to keep hitting "repeat" on.
Grutle's vocals still alternate between vicious rasping growls and "clean" Viking vox, the music similarly incorporating both jagged metallic riffing (stormwracked seas, longboats tossing) and spacier, more melodic symphonic passages (astral travels to ancestral lands beyond the stars)... the classic Enslaved dynamic at work! Though maybe there's something smoother about such transistions nowadays as Enslaved have matured (if not mellowed). Or maybe we're just used to it now. What we do know for sure is that Ruun's technical, emotional, majestic music for the discerning headbanger will earn Enslaved even more plaudits, not to mention the usual well warranted comparisons to Sweden's Opeth, who have been travelling a similarly progressive path from black metal roots. But we also hear traces of such Nordic BM bands as Emperor and Satyricon -- and of course Voivod, and psychedelic grandaddies Pink Floyd, on the album's dreamier moments.
The strangely monickered Evolutionary Jass Band features two ex members of free noise abstract improvisors Jackie-O-Motherfucker, and while that pedigree definitely informs the sound of the EJB, their sound is much more aligned with traditional jazz, a mix of dark New Orleans funeral jazz and skittery post bop, but all sort of laid back and dreamy, dark and dolorous. Horns don't skronk so much as swoon and shimmer. Dark tones shift and slide, drifting thick and rich over dense tribal drumming, and simple slippery bass. There's even some sitar to add some droney buzz. The EJS are a pretty big ensemble, but it doesn't sound cluttery or crowded, each player contributes and deftly interacts with the rest of the group, but also knows when to let someone else step forward.
This will definitely hit the spot for modern jazz-heads, and might even appeal to the more traditionally inclined, but folks who dig the abstract clatter and free form drift of bands like JOMF, No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man and the like, might dig this too. It could be their gateway to a lifelong love of jazz, which is at least partially responsible for informing the new breed of improvised abstraction that is all the rage these days.
Great stuff.
We've referenced these drugged and ugly New Orleans masters of sludge-core in tons of reviews, as they're one of the ur-bands that established the rituals practiced by anyone heavy and feedback laden, like Moss, Bunkur, Boris, Dot [.], Cavity, Corrupted, Khanate, Iron Monkey, Grief, Wellington, Acid Bath, Garadama, etc.
So we were so psyched to discover that EHG's first three discs were getting the deluxe reissue treatment. Elsewhere on this list we review In The Name Of Suffering, most people's fave EHG record, their third, Take As Needed For Pain, Andee's favorite, and this, Dopesick, their third, and part three of final EHG's godlike sludge trilogy. They would continue to make records, great records in fact, but the first three remain untouchable to this day.
In The Name Of Suffering was a hateful, feedback drenched trawl through a world of sludge, creeping and slithering, uncompromisingly brutal and crushingly heavy. Pretty much defining the sound of ALL sludge to come. With record number 2, Take As Needed For Pain, they added a little bit of that NOLA groove (you know, Down, Superjoint Ritual, Acid Bath, Crowbar, Soilent Green, Goatwhore, etc.) to their sound, making their plodding shrieking sludge a tiny bit more melodic and dare we say, catchy at moments. But take that with a grain of salt, melodic and catchy for a band like Eyehategod is still about a million times more caustic and corrosive than almost any other -heavy- band.
So with Dopesick, the groove factor is cranked up a little bit more, making Eyehategod here sound like the scariest, heaviest, druggiest, sludgiest stoner rock band EVER. But again, EHG in stoner rock mode, still outsludges them all, a groove flecked avalanche of slow motion ultradoom, screeching feedback, shrieking throat ripping vocals, blackhole downtuned guitars, all churning in a black sea of sludgemetal tar, lurching, and trudging and so fucking awesome!
Three bonus tracks: two alternate versions and one the appropriately titled "Dopesick Jam", an epic, lengthy freaked out psychedelic slab of glorious drugsludgedoom! Includes revised artwork and new liner notes from EHG frontman Mike Williams.
We've referenced these drugged and ugly New Orleans masters of sludge-core in tons of reviews, as they're one of the ur-bands that established the rituals practiced by anything heavy and feedback laden, like Cavity, Corrupted, Khanate, Iron Monkey, Grief,
So it's about time we listed our favorite EHG album, their dark and dirgey debut "In The Name Of Suffering", first released in 1990 on the French Intellectual Convulsion label, later re-issued domestically by Century Media, with the original's gross medical cover pictures prudently tucked inside. When this came out, EHG immediately joined the Melvins, Skullflower, and Hellhammer in the pantheon of the heaviest, most fucked up bands ever. Misanthropic metallic misery, complete with samples of Charles Manson's wisdom. Later EHG albums are good too, but this one was never surpassed. If you are one of Aquarius' "doom" customers and you don't have this disc, we urge you, in the name of suffering, get it!
We've referenced these drugged and ugly New Orleans masters of sludge-core in tons of reviews, as they're one of the ur-bands that established the rituals practiced by anyone heavy and feedback laden, like Moss, Bunkur, Boris, Dot [.], Cavity, Corrupted, Khanate, Iron Monkey, Grief, Wellington, Acid Bath, Garadama, etc.
So we were so psyched to discover that EHG's first three discs were getting the deluxe reissue treatment. Elsewhere on this list we review In The Name Of Suffering, most people's fave EHG record, their third, Dopesick, and this one, Andee's favorite Eyehategod record, Take As Needed For Pain.
Their debut was a hateful, feedback drenched trawl through a world of sludge, creeping and slithering, uncompromisingly brutal and crushingly heavy. Pretty much defining the sound of ALL sludge to come. With Take As Needed For Pain, they added a little bit of that NOLA groove (you know, Down, Superjoint Ritual, Acid Bath, Crowbar, Soilent Green, Goatwhore, etc.) to their sound, making their plodding shrieking sludge, a tiny bit more melodic and dare we say, catchy at moments. But take that with a grain of salt, melodic and catchy for a band like Eyehategod is still about a million times more caustic and corrosive than almost any other -heavy- band. It's really strange to revisit these EHG records and realize how many bands these days sound EXACTLY LIKE EYEHATEGOD!!! It's almost criminal. Sort of similar to the way SUNNO))) were basically an Earth tribute band, it's almost like EVERY one of the new breed of sludge bands is in fact an Eyehategod tribute band. But hey, who's complaining, it's a dark and disturbing sound we can never seem to get enough of. And as long as EHG are getting the props they deserve, then hell, bring on the sludge!!! Fans of ANY of the above mentioned bands who do not own this, are required by ALL THAT IS UNHOLY to pick this up immediately!!!!!!
As far as bonus tracks, Take As Needed For Pain is probably the best of bunch, 3 tracks from the long out of print Ruptured Heart Theory 7", a track from the also long OOP split 7" with 13, and two tracks from another long gone 7", another split with fellow sludge mavens 13.
Includes revised artwork and new liner notes from EHG frontman Mike Williams.
From the same label that brought us discs by James Blackshaw, the Floating World, Robert Horton, Lamp Of The Universe and Rameses III comes this limited cd-r from Far Black Furlong. Recorded live, outdoors, in the barley fields on the Welsh / English border, Haidd is a half hour of moon lit free folk drones. The sound of pale moonlight washing over the landscape like a soft grey coat of paint. A squirming shuffling, scritchy scratchy crosshatched backdrop, over which slow foghorn like drones drift and hover, horns wheeze out long mournful melodies that float just above the whirling background ambience. Like floating on the ink black sea, slowly drifting, little swells lifting you up and letting you back down, gently and so barely rhythmically. It's the sea, or the forest, or the desert, the sound of space and sky and dark nighttime colors that go on forever and ever.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! Already sold out at the label. We got about 30 copies. Once those are gone, we won't be able to get more.
First of all -- remember what we hope your mom told you about judging a book by its cover or a record by its title. No doubt about it, this boasts a pretty terrible title... so much so that we were tempted to not even order any. But, ok we got that out of the way now, so on to the music...which is not terrible at all... in fact it's amazingly super good! We've been hearing bits and pieces from this young Canadian, Owen Pallett over the last couple years. His violin work with The Arcade Fire, touring duty with The Hidden Cameras, interesting live covers of Joanna Newsom songs, articles praising him in the NY Times. His debut album was pretty hard to come by so it's been this, his sophomore release that will be most people's introduction to his complex and grandiose approach to pop song writing. Like a more angsty Sufjan Stevens he arranges smart pop songs with multi-instruments and lots of peaks and valleys. Final Fantasy displays a bare emotional honesty that recalls Xiu Xiu and label mates Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, a dramatic flare that rivals Rufus Wainwright, a melancholy side similar to Stephin Merrit and a complex approach to song structure that would make Van Dyke Parks proud. If any of those aforementioned names get your attention then for sure this is a new kid on that smart emotional epic pop rock block that you're gonna want to get to know. Just stand back in case he does indeed poo clouds...
