It's been almost a year since we heard anything from instru-metal rockers 5ive, and even then it was just a weird remix thing with Kid 606. The last proper record they did was way back in 2002! So what the heck have those guys been up to for the last 4 years? Not recording a whole lot of new music that's for sure, as this new release is also a sort of remix ep. But we're not gonna complain. We've been dying for new material from this heavy as hell drums and guitar duo, so we'll take what we can get. And what you get here is 4 tracks, 25 minutes, of epic and spacious, almost cinematic doom bliss. Two 5ive tracks and two "remixes" of 5ive tracks by Justin Broadrick of Jesu. The opening track, one of the two remixes sounds like some metallicized Morricone / Goblin hybrid. Swirling sound fx, and a simple plodding rhythm. You can definitely hear some Jesu in there. The second track is WAY more classic 5ive, a groovy loping post rock workout, that builds and builds into huge lurching staggering stoner rock. Part way through everything sort of blisses-out into a keening tribal drum, guitar jangle drift, that slowly grows in intensity into a huge wall of massive churning guitar, which becomes a super tense stop start doom thing, before exploding back into full on metal groove. The second track "Soma" is the original from which the two Broadrick remixes are culled. A convoluted doomic dirge, grinding and slithering, thrashing and grooving, equal parts Dazzling Killmen, Isis, Lightning Bolt and Laddio Bolocko, a relentless chaotic dirge thrash, swirling and pounding, dense and ultra heavy. For the final track, Broadrick removes most of the heavy guitars, leaving just the simple clean guitar melody and a hypnotic looped drum line. Over that he drapes sheets of sonic shimmer and clouds of fuzzy ambience, an epic ambient plodding doom soundtrack to the end of the world, like a more metallic Mogwai / Brian Eno mashup. Totally gorgeous. But not enough!! Now we're completely jonesing for more 5ive AND more Jesu! C'MON! WE NEED IT!!!
Not sure what it is about the number 9 but it somehow figures heavily into the mythos of these mysterious grindlords from Australia. Their first release was a super limited 9". This latest disc, another blown out blast of pummeling technical grind, is 9 songs packed into 9 ultradense minutes. Hmmm. 9. 9. 9. Upside down is... 6. 6. 6. Ahem, anyway... As with all great grind, these guys pack more riffs and parts into 9 minutes than most bands can manage in an hour! 9 mini epics, each a dizzying squall of whirlwind riffs, shrieking vocals, chaotic drum splatter and a wall of low end that hits you like a block of concrete to the sternum. The guys in Whitehorse hipped us to these guys so you can get an idea of the sort of heaviness we're talking here. But where Whitehorse destroy with glacial malevolence, AoA annihilate with frenzied fury! Awesome.
Cool little 3" cd-r packaged in a deluxe oversized slim DVD case, with full color insert.
So nice to hear a master of their craft! Even nicer when it's new material from someone who has been releasing records since the '70s and it still ranks close to the top of anything he's put out. While he will always get mentioned in the same breath as Fela Kuti (he was part of Fela's band back in the day) Tony Allen should certainly be looked upon as one of the leaders of the Afro-beat movement, not just a kick ass sideman (although he was that too!) What's so impressive is that even after all these years he still sounds passionate and filled with fire and the music totally reflects that. When we put this on for the first time we thought for sure it had to be a reissue as the sounds were as captivating and groovy as all the great '70s Afro-beat records he and Fela recorded together. But closer examination revealed it to be a brand new release and he again demonstrates that just because so many others burn out, fade, that doesn't mean he's gonna... 'cause this album is still a totally funky kick ass outing... and be sure to hang in for the closer 'cause it's the album's sole instrumental and it's totally on fire!
This long time AQ fave now available on vinyl. A deluxe gatefold double lp, limited to 1000 copies, a handful of which are on purple vinyl, cross your fingers if you care and you might get lucky...
Here's what we had to say about this amazing work:
The notion of musicians hunkered over their laptops, sitting still in the glow of the screen, not moving at all except for their fingers, paints a rather dull performance picture of what is often sonically quite exciting. So when organic/real/live instruments are brought into the mix, it makes the whole thing that much more alive and approachable and personal. Especially when the computer is left out of the equation COMPLETELY. Thus our appreciation of guitar-wielding electronicists (and fellow Touch label recording artists) Christian Fennesz and especially Oren Ambarchi. Fennesz with his sun dappled, "Venice" California sunshine-y shimmer, and Oren Ambarchi with his less-is-more, minimalist pointalism. Both use the guitar, Fennesz to interact with the computer, Ambarchi just to SOUND like it's being run through a computer, whihc is what makes this disc so amazing. Where Fennesz paints lush dense soundscapes, of thick harmonies and dreamy buzz, Ambarchi takes a way more minimal approach on Grapes From The Estate, spreading notes out into lazy barely there melodies, and loose frameworks of subtle glitchery and gentle strum. Occasionally, drums enter the mix, but only as a shuffling afterthought, lending the sound a definite jazzy post rock vibe. Imagine Oval's glitchy and muffled underwater murmer, but played on a guitar instead of being assembled from skipping cds. There is that sort of hiccupping rhythmic element present, but it's much more an innate part of the song, and these are most definitely -songs-. Instead of long 'pieces', these tracks are structured like actual songs, melodies appear and disappear, recur and subtly shift throughout, there are almost-choruses, and some of the motifs are quite catchy (although subtly so). Most of the record is dark and glacial, stepping carefully through a vast expanse of space, except for the album's centerpiece "Remidios The Beauty", where the pace picks up just a bit, and Ambarchi's guitar / effects interface produces an almost bouncy melody, that while being slightly more upbeat, still retains all of its dreamy sleepiness. This is the perfect mix of Kompakt style pop ambient, minimalist post rock, and those dark and rumbling drones we all love so much.
We described Anenzephalia's 2004 release Noehaem, as "quite possibly one of the scariest records we have ever heard", and it really was. Some sort of a imaginary soundtrack to a movie so scary no one could see it without dying of fright. Drones, and strings, and creaking ambience, some impossible mix of Ligeti and Lustmord. We'd been anxiously awaiting a new full length when we discovered this live cd-r. We ordered as many as we could, but only managed to get 10 copies. Which of course means these will be gone in a flash, but at least ten of you will get to partake in this dark and dangerous live action.
Live Anenzephalia is a much different beast. A much noisier beast. A glowing red eyed, hunchbacked black shape, hunkered down beneath a pile of electronics, unfurling coruscating clouds of noxious black fog and processed megaphone vocals. Streaks of white hot feedback, snippets of old speeches, grinding rhythmic distortion, disembodied voices, old folk songs, white noise, shortwave interference, buzzing glitched out electronics and super distorted buzz, all ground into one huge lumbering abstract blacknoisebeast.
Still pretty damn scary, but now extra noisy to boot!
Packaged in a weird shaped booklet, containing all kinds of creepy images, drawings and diagrams. Each disc is hand numbered on the cd.
SUPER LIMITED. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. WE HAVE THE LAST 10 COPIES, SO ACT FAST...
We only got 10 of these, and some have sold already... So quickest draw wins. ULTRA LIMITED white label 7" from everyone's favorite stumbling psychfolk collective. One side is an alternate version of the song "Purple" from Feels, twisted into some weirdly Stevie Wonder like jam. The other side is a damaged cover of Nirvana's "Polly". Cool.
We listed Area C's debut release on Last Visible Dog a few lists back (and we're relisting it on this list for those of you who missed out), so we were psyched to discover this amazing hand made quadruple 3" cd-r set, which is limited to FORTY COPIES a bunch of which we managed to get direct from the band himself. That's right, HIMself. This is all the work of one man, but it sure doesn't sound like it, instead, it sounds like the work of some strange rock band, a band concerned more with texture and mood than actual rocking, guitars are looped and smeared, rhythms pulse and lope, a dreamy ambient post rock world of darkness and mystery. Crafted almost entirely from guitars, chopped and looped and processed, these 4 discs are each a puzzle piece, a tiny part of a grander, expansive, rich sonic soundworld. Looped guitars slither and sway, constructing dark melodies and simple propulsive rhythms, almost like a more minimal abstract Tortoise, but beneath THOSE guitars, are still more guitars, weaving elaborate backdrops of sparkling shimmer and barely audible clouds of sound. Elsewhere, tracks explode into super distorted blown out krautrockscapes, others meander lazily, slow moving and strange almost mechanical sounding melodies, over abstract industrial frameworks. But at the heart of it all, is the guitar, and a dreamy moodiness that suffuses every sound on all four discs.
And as if the sounds here weren't captivating enough, the packaging is completely gorgeous and deluxe. All hand made and assembled, the four discs are housed in an oversized thick cardboard sleeve, held shut with a Japanese style obi. Inside, each disc comes in its own elaborate sleeve, housed in its own little plastic pouch affixed to the inside of the sleeve. Disc one comes in a sleeve like a folded map, with part of it cut away to reveal the disc inside, the second and third disc are each wrapped in a transparent full color vellum sleeve, alongside a tiny square of actual wood, and the fourth disc is also a vellum sleeve, but printed with an austere winter landscape over a folded square of thick textured paper. So completely amazing.
And as we already mentioned these won't last, because of the labor and time involved in assembling these sets, it is limited to 40 COPIES!!!
Another one we first heard on that massive Invisible Pyramid: Elegy box set that Last Visible Dog put out a few months ago (Mudboy was the other Providence, RI drone artist that we discovered via the IP box). And now, like Mudboy, Area C has their own cd release on LVD. Actually a one-man guitar loops and effects (and other things besides, like farfisa organ) effort, Traffics + Discoveries starts out very blissful and calm, ambient like Eno perhaps...and as the disc goes along it stays quite beautiful but gets edgier and darker and more nervous-making. We like it quite a bit. Chalk another one up for both Providence and LVD, in the everybody-wins competition for who's got the best drones around!
The amazing Drone Records label, run by Stefan Knappe of Maeror Tri / Troum, has been quietly releasing super limited, hand made slabs of gorgeous drone music for years now. Mostly 7", always vinyl (although there will soon be a 2cd collection of early out of print singles on Andee's tUMULt label), each disc an ultra personal exploration of the drone, sometimes soft and dreamlike, sometimes harsh and noisy, but always beautiful. Recently, Drone has launched a new series, 10"s this time, with a very complicated premise: "A concept that embraces the prospect of infinite possibilities for artists to create music about the intangible such as: the unnameable, the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unidentifiable, etc. Various aspects related to "The Unknown". Sound artists and artwork designers were invited to work on the theme of the "grey matter" / the "dark continent" surrounding us & within us. Transforming this paradoxical idea into acoustic and visual objectifications." Phew. Pretty heady stuff. But these first three installments are up to the task, creating dark and disturbing and truly though provoking dronemusic. We can hardly weight for the rest of the series.
The second in the series is from Asia Nova, who hail from California, and offer up slow shifting instrumental swells, like an orchestra tuning up in outer space, crumbling waves of deconstructed melody slowly stretched into a vast ocean of hiss and static and tiny sonic events that gradually dissipate into the surrounding sounds. In the background hovers ominous gurgling rumbles and far away melodic sparkles. The other side is barely there, an ultra minimal drone, more space than sound, like drifting through some darkened undersea cavern, a barren abstract sonic landscape. Incredibly spare but strangely alluring.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Pressed on pink and white swirled vinyl.
There was a time not too long ago, when Aidan Baker and his various projects (Nadja, Arc) were an underground secret. Loads of super limited releases, a small but loyal following. But that is slowly beginning to change. It was unavoidable really. A quick look at Baker's website reveals the fact that there are over sixty releases, as well as a bunch of compilation appearances. And all of the ones we've heard display a deft hand at dark minimal drones, slow crushing sludge and krautrock flecked psychedelic drift (solo, Nadja and Arc respectively). Often some delirious mix of the three. On Oneiromancer, Baker flies solo, managing a small one man ensemble of electric guitar, bass guitar, tapeloops, piano, percussion, drum machine, vocals all recorded on recorded on 4-track, and woven into rumbling, cavernous dronescapes, filled with all manner of little sonic imperfections, haunting fragments of melody, noisy clatter, and ambient hiss and whir. Each track is a murky musical journey through thick washes of lowercase sound. Whether it's the subaquatic drift of the album's opener, floating weightless through a dark but sun dappled undersea world, or the conversation filled cavern of the second track, voices shimmer and echo, surrounded by soft billowing low end, and haunting footstep like click and thump. The whole record continues in the same vein, exploring lost worlds, at its darkest, Oneiromancer invokes a sense of dread, a feeling of claustrophobia, incorporating elements of industrial noise, processed vocals, creaking groaning metal and thick heavily effected guitar, at its dreamiest, it's a tranquil spacescape of soft shapes and liquid atmospheres, an eyes closed out of body sonic experience. So lovely.
Limited to 600 copies. The first 300 contain a bonus live disc, recorded live in 2005. We'll have the double disc version as long as they last. The live set, recorded using only the sound of processed guitars, is just as lovely as Oneiromancer, but a lot more shimmery and dreamlike, muted and mumbled, a truly lovely exploration into the guitar, revealing a mysterious stringed soundworld far removed from strumming and picking, a distant land of abstract beauty.
Wow! Somehow Bardo Pond just keep getting better and better and with Ticket Crystals we're pretty dang sure they've made their best record yet! Everything we love about Bardo Pond all wrapped up in one surprisingly coherent album. Expansive guitars, dusty clouds of sonic whir, grungy outbursts, spaced out jams, metallic undertones, deep in the woods folk wanderings (yes, of course there's ultra warm flute on display!), and some mysterious pop sensibility to boot! Ticket Crystals is to Bardo Pond what Feathers was to Dead Meadow, the perfect culmination of years of songcraft and sonic experimentation resulting in both bands best records ever. Fans of Dead Meadow will indeed eat this up (some folks here think this record might even top all time AQ fave Feathers) as will long time BP fans. And any one into the whole blown out psych rock thing, a la Loop, Spacemen 3, Telescopes, etc, NEED THIS. How the heck you missed out on Bardo Pond in the first place we'll never know but c'mon, dig in!!
Ticket Crystals is the kind of record that you can get completely lost in, a wild dreamlike psychedelia that pulls you in deeper and deeper as it unravels. A slow burning spacerock equal parts drone and drift. A record that manages to be totally heavy, beautifully abstract, completely catchy and so so lovely all at the same time. SO RECOMMENDED!
If we didn't know better, we'd think that Australia and New Zealand were both made up of nothing but experimental musicians and dudes who run cd-r labels. How else to explain the seemingly endless supply of weird and wonderful music coming to us from those two places. Here's another new name to add to the rapidly expanding roster of enigmatic soundmakers from down under, Blarke Bayer. Sharing a label with US noisemakers Yellow Swans and Aussie powerviolence outfit Agents Of Abhorrence, Bayer aligns himself more with the processed guitar soundscape school of folks like Fennesz, Ambarchi, and the like. Gauzy strips of sound, layered into drifting waves of gentle feedback, warm fuzzy swells of muted guitar growl, distant keening melodic fragments, occasionally disrupted by cavernous resonant rumbles or tiny glitchy squalls, but for the most part, The End Of You is one long languorous sea of tranquility, a washed out dream world of layered guitar warmth and shimmery ambience. Quite beautiful.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! Packaged in a cool mini 3" printed gatefold sleeve.
If you haven't already picked up this great record, now's the time, 'cause it's been re-released as a "special edition" with a bonus DVD disc featuring live footage...
Be ready to be blown away by absolute total beauty! Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya is one of the best slide guitar players on the planet. He creates his own guitars which he plays ragas on. He is credited as the first person to put resonating strings on a slide guitar back in the 1970's and also the first to put chickaree (drone) strings on the front. His three-finger picking technique allows him the ability to have lightning speed and most importantly create the hypnotic patterns that radiate throughout this record. While the technical aspect of what he does is so spectacular, it's the fact that he transcends his instrument, which is what truly makes Bhattacharya a special artist. You can't help but just get lost in the hypnotic quality of his playing and the ability of the music to take you off the ground. It's almost like hearing Ravi Shankar and John Fahey combining forces to see how breathtaking a record they could make together. While Debashish Bhattacharya's name might not be on the tip of people's tongues like the aforementioned are, here's hoping once this record is heard that he will be. Highly recommended!
We like to think we have pretty good taste in music, but lately we've discovered something pretty strange. Many of our favorite records we discovered, even pursued, after being told that they were terrible. Not sure what it is, but when a review of some record is so completely harsh, sometimes we think the reviewer just missed the point, or that the work being reviewed was just too strange to be properly described by the average review. In one instance, we read a review of a record by a black metal band we already really liked, and the reviewer gave it a ONE out of a possible TEN, going on at great length about why the record was so bad. But strangely, all of his complaints about the songs and sounds did nothing but make us more and more intrigued. After months of trying to track this record down (the label had folded and it was never properly released) we did finally get our hands on a cd-r copy, and you know what? It was absolutely amazing. Fucked up, sure. Retarded? Maybe. But by now, you know that's the sort of stuff we love (it was Old Forest if you must know, but we have had no luck tracking down the band or the label, and we'd be more than willing to put it out ourselves! Old Forest, if you're reading this get in touch!).
A similar thing happened with this, the latest from USBM outfit Black Funeral. A review we read complained that their otherwise kick ass grim and cult black metal, had morphed into a noisy, almost industrial sound, a buzzy blurry blast that was apparently too weird and not really 'black metal' enough. We were immediately envisioning a band that sounded like Spektr or Blut Aus Nord. Which would be a very good thing for sure. Other reviews described Ordog as "tuneful white noise", "Nargaroth or Graveland combined with Einsturzende Neubaten", another compared them to Benighted Leams (!!!). But it was the review that described Ordog as sounding like an untuned AM radio that really pushed us over the edge.
And you know what? It sounds a little like ALL of those things!!
This is definitely black metal. Appropriately harsh and buzzy. But from there all bets are off. A disturbing exploration of some mysterious fog enshrouded pit of despair. The vocals are harsh and way up in the mix, over weirdly atonal riffing and machinelike programmed drums. The melodies drift and drone, some almost sound like the most melancholy Depeche Mode song bits transplanted into a way more creepy and harrowing black metal wasteland. But the path through each track is a meandering circuitous journey, one fraught with peril. Wide expanses of fuzzy haunted mansion keyboard, jagged shards of metallic what-the-fuck laid over monster like growls and thick drones, rippling sheets of warped black noise, and a gritty and dense wall of fuzz draped over EVERYTHING. You can definitely here Spektr, Blut Aus Nord, Benighted Leams, but the twisted and looped buzzdrone aspect really reminds us of Wold, but where Wold were more spacey and ambient, Black Funeral apply the same sonic approach to a more blackened buzz. So fucking awesome!
The whole record is thematically based on the occult, Persian mythology, Satanism and especially vampirism, two tracks actually feature lyrics written by convicted serial killer / cannibal Nico Claur, to whom the record is also dedicated. Weird.
And non-music related tidbit. Black Funeral is in fact 2/3 female, which is most definitely an anomaly in black metal (and the band photos inside definitely had the AQ metal boys swooning. Black Funeral's Lux Ferro and Dana Dark are some seriously ultrafoxy, gloomy, gothy raven haired black metal queens of the underworld!)
We don't care what anyone tells us, you're never too old for emo. Especially emo made by guys our age! We were pretty bummed when the Get Up Kids called it a day a recently. They were responsible for one of our favorite records ever, Something To Write Home About, a totally kick ass collection of catchy, heavy raucous poprock emo anthems. Later GUK records didn't pack the same wallop, although a recent live record was pretty kick ass. Various band members moved on, starting other bands, side projects, solo records, all that, but none of them had the same sort of magic. This Town's Disaster is the debut release from Get Up Kids' guitarist Jim Suptic and is about as close as I think we're ever gonna get. And it's good enough for us. This is like a modern emo version of classic nineties college rock. You can hear the Replacements A LOT, jangly guitars, rough raspy melodic vocals, simple steady drumming. Killer hooks, lots of instantly catchy choruses, perfect headphone rock / mixtape material / breakup tuneage for sure. Been listening to this nonstop!
Comes in a cool six panel digipack with killer cover art that looks like it was done by the same guy who did the equally cool art on Something To Write Home About.
Some of us are still reeling from the mighty ass kicking delivered by Boris on their recent US tour. And before our ears have even stopped ringing, it's time for yet another new blast of ultra hyper space psych sludge rock n' roll in the form of Pink. Continuing to hone their rock chops, having shed their doom sludge past for the most part now, Boris continue to sound like some MC5 / Hendrix hybrid, albeit supercharged and drenched in LSD and lit on fire and launched into space. Big old fuzzy riffs, churning basslines, and wild spastic drumming underneath Wata's wailing sixties styled leads. You can almost imagine these strange Japanese rockers wandering into the Fillmore in the sixties, like some bell bottomed aliens and proceeding to melt the minds and eard drums of everyone in attendance. Pink starts off with some fuzzed out ultra distorted post rock (reminiscent of some of the stuff on Mabuta No Ura) wrapped in a spacy psychedelic haze, but then it's immediately back to the full on, overblown distorto RAWK that has become THE SOUND of Boris. This is easily their most lo-fi, most blown out recording yet, almost like Boris is channelling Guitar Wolf or something. The drums and cymbals sizzle as the needle goes into the red on almost every track, and the guitars are so drenched in distortion they become huge squirming smears of fuzz. A couple tracks harken back to the slow motion sludge of Flood or Amplifier Worship, and there is the dreamy ambient drift of the second to last track "My Machine", but those are just brief respites, time to catch your breath before hurling yourself back into the fray, an endless maelstrom of head banging, fist pumping, guitar smashing, drumset destroying, hair swirling, sweating, bouncing, pounding pummeling ROCK AND ROLL.
The packaging is amazing too, with a tray card that's transparent, with clear pink printing, and a booklet that is actually a three panel fold out perforated sheet of Boris Pink acid tabs (with one already missing, presumably already ingested!) wrapped in a thick pink transparent sleeve. Wow!
Be forewarned that Pink will also be available as an ultra limited double lp (due out next month), with a slightly different track listing so you Boris obsessives are once again have to get both!
Not only do the Grey Daturas kick up a serious noiserock ruckus, they also run their own cd-r label, the mysteriously titled Diagnosis... Don't! There are three new releases, and we managed to get a handful of each.
These guys have a soft spot in their little black hearts for NOISE with a capital N, as do we, and here comes Brutal Snake to give it to us. BUT, this isn't shrieking hissing facemelting noise, no, this is dark and ominous, creepy crawly, rumbling dronelike noise, which just happens to be our favorite. Lengthy expanses of black ambience, slow burning swells of muted guitar fuzz, deep cavernous tremors rumbling in the background, like watching black clouds drift by, each a gauzy wisp of low end shimmer, slowly changing shapes and spreading out across the sky. Totally and gorgeous and foreboding.
SUPER LIMITED cd-r (aren't they all?) ONLY 50 COPIES!!! Packaged in a cool stiff textured paper sleeve, with a complicated folded over Japanese style obi holding the disc in place, with the liner notes printed on the inside.
What is wrong with the world today? The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, babies are coo-ing, breezes are blowing, waves are lapping, clouds are drifting happily across a bright blue sky, but all everybody wants to listen to is hateful evil grim brutal downtuned miserable soul crushing anguished slow motion funereal death drone ultra doom. Not that we're complaining, but it is curious. There's been recent renewed interest in slow motion metal masters Earth, as well as a growing obsession with self-admitted Earth worshippers Sunn 0))), the massive ambient-metal explorations of Japan's Corrupted, the stomping garage psych meets doom drone of the mighty Boris, and a constantly growing roster of similar sonic sickos: Esoteric, Khanate, Asva, Fleshpress, Dot [.], Marzuraan, Ox, Rigor Sardonicus, Sons Of Otis, UFOmammut, Skepticism, Whitehorse, Planet Aids and now Bunkur. We've been trying to track down this cd for ages, and somehow ended up listing and reviewing the Planet Aids cd, a Bunkur side project, before we had even received the Bunkur discs. Well, now they're here and you won't be sorry. This Dutch outfit traffics in massive, miserable, impossibly lugubrious doom metal. This is a single 65 minute track, drenched in reverb and crackling amp buzz, crumbling distorted guitars howled vocals, very loose and spread out, the riffs exist in huge expanses of SPACE, a blackened vacuum of buzz and echo and the occasional trailing off of a vocal growl or a slowly dissipating feedback vapor trial. The kicker here though, and the thing that makes Bunkur so weird (and cool) is the drumming, stumbling lo-fi tripped out rhythms, that drift from plodding caveman pound, to spacious barely there accents, but most surprisingly hover in some strange alternate world of dub. Yep, you heard us, DUB. The drums often demarcate wide open spaces with a strange dubbed out, instantly recognizable: BAP BAP Bap bap bap bp bp bp bp .... a single snare hit that repeats, stuttering into oblivion. Giving the whole thing a weird hellish doom-dub vibe. Like Khanate recording with Lee Perry maybe? Okay, maybe not quite as extreme as that, but the dub is definitely there, whether purposeful or not. And it's really cool. Fans of dismal doom death drone and all things slow and sick will find this absolutely essential. Packaged in super cryptic metallic grey and black packaging with extensive liner notes in a completely unreadable rune font!
All right, we'll admit that we were a bit doubtful about this at first, just from reading the hypesheet/liner notes, which claim, in part, that this is one of the "last great Kraut secrets" and because of its discovery, "the history of Krautrock has to be rewritten". And we're still not entirely sure if the person who wrote that was actually joking or not. But, while this is definitely not some undiscovered classic on the order of a Can, Faust or Neu! (or even the more obscure likes of Siloah, Kalacakra, Necronomicon, etc.) it IS pretty cool. And weird. Especially weird. Imagine Reynols or Yahowha 13 gone lounge, trying to entertain a bunch of jet-setters at some hip, swinging '60s party... It's called Fantastic Party after all and that's what it was meant as, a party record! Some cheesy German record label in 1970 put this together, presumably paying (with drugs?) a bunch of studio musicians to create a one-off psychedelic exploitation album by a nonexistent "band". A dime a dozen back then, maybe, but these guys really really went for it. It is pretty darn tripped out. Groovy but really off kilter and demented. Maybe we'd compare it to the children's songbook funk of Stark Reality, if you've heard the reissue of that. Or some totally dosed jazz combo doing porno music. Good times. Yup, it's got stinging fuzz guitar solos, flute warbling, hiccuping percussion, damaged "singing", bizarro titles... this has LSD written all over it. If you went to this "fantastic party" you'd know that Peter Fonda would be there for sure. And go-go dancers with dayglo body paint. And Timothy Leary, and midgets, and people who look like extras from a Terry Southern penned movie too.
A track from this appeared on the Kraut! Demons! Kraut compilation from a few years back, and if you have that, well rest assured, the entirety of this album is of the same high quality of fucked-upedness. So, true krautrock classic or not, we're glad it's been reissued, we're digging it! We only have to wonder, why did the reissuers hate the original cover so much that they felt the need to provide a new, totally ugly one?? Fortunately the LP's real (and actually quite rad, despite what they thought) cover is reproduced on the tray card, featuring a bevy of good-looking, polyester-clad partygoers truly having a FANTASTIC time.
Right up to the time of his death Johnny Cash was still very much alive, thinking, breathing and making amazing music. The partnership he forged with Rick Rubin was incredibly special, not the normal artist producer relationship as is evidenced in the five albums they made together. These records, in many ways, gave Cash a new lease on life and helped to introduce his music to a whole new generation. You can't escape the feeling that Cash knew his last days were near as he was recording his vocals for this record. Almost like he knew if he stopped making music he would die. There is a vulnerability and hurt in his words yet his undying spirit remained fully intact. While past entries in the American series featured many contemporary and surprising covers (Bonnie Prince Billy, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, etc) this final disc found Cash covering more traditional sorts of tunes by songwriters like Larry Gatlin, Gordon Lightfoot, Hank Williams, Bruce Springsteen, etc. As always Cash always makes the songs very much his own with his timeless crooning and undeniable charisma. There were rumors that Cash had heard a Black Heart Procession record that he fell in love with and was going to cover one of their songs, it never happened but listening to "God's Gonna Cut You Down" you can hear that some of their sound still seeped into his delivery and into Rubin's production. So great how someone who was a legend, and with a clearly defined sound, was always still soaking in so much from the world around him. A heartbreaking, but amazing swansong. A final classic recording in an amazing musical career.
Earlier this year, North Carolina tech/doom metal cult act Confessor emerged from "retirement" with an ep called Sour Times, the teaser to this here full-length -- the band's second ever album and first since 1991! We were pretty excited that Confessor was back, so we gave that ep a big write-up. Here's a bit of a recap of what we wrote for those that missed it:
"A fucked up mix of Trouble and Watchtower" is how Arch Enemy/Spiritual Beggars guitarist Michael Amott characterizes Confessor, who were Earache labelmates with Amott back in his days in Carcass in the early '90s. That is indeed a very accurate and -- if you know who Trouble and Watchtower both are -- useful description of cult metal act Confessor's sound. Definitely one of the more idiosyncratic pioneers of absurdly technical metal. Not death, not doom, not grind, not thrash... but all of the above, somehow. Confessor's main ingredients are uber-insane drumming (Stephen Shelton is a god), complex song structures being navigated by two guitars and bass, and high-pitched love 'em or hate 'em vocals that seem to follow their own wailing logic, as if the singer isn't even listening to the same music as the rest of the band. Yet it works. Though perhaps not to everyone's taste. Well, after making one amazing album, 1991's Condemned, and an ep that included a Trouble cover, Confessor disappeared into even deeper obscurity, seemingly gone but not forgotten by hardcore fans of tech-metal madness (I recall our pal Josh Smith, formerly of The Fucking Champs, telling me that the Champs used to have a rule of ONLY listening to Confessor when on their way to play a show). Recently, Shelton re-surfaced in the band Loincloth, but even cooler than that, now Confessor themselves are back! Yes!"
We went on to say that the new Confessor material as heard on the ep was definitely in their old style of proggy doom mastery, with the vocals now somewhat deeper and grungier. Unraveled pretty much follows suit, with two of the ep's tracks appearing again. The lugubrious tempos, downer riffs and sorrowful vocal wailings make this sound something like a mix of Solitude Aeturnus and Alice In Chains, but way more technical (with lots of "parts" and shifting rhythms). And the drumming is as godly as ever. The way this flows, we'd say maybe this will be a little bit easier on most folks' ears than some of their old stuff, and yet it's still unmistakably Confessor and definitely worthy of their cult status.
Cosmic psych-folk from the mountainous coastal regions of Chile. We originally got this in last year but only now have finally gotten enough to list. In the same vein as the acid acoustic vibes of Satwa and the solo outings of Satwa member Lulu Cortes from Brazil, Congregacion's sole LP from 1972 was the brainchild of Antonio Smith, a mystical figure whose progressive songwriting and hopeful lyrics earned the contempt of the Chilean military dictatorship and forced him to flee the country. Swathed in the natural sounds of birds and wind with dreamy acoustic textures, flutes, strings and gorgeous romantic harmonies, we can just imagine the band levitating on mountaintops as they commune with the universe. Viene is a masterpiece of Latin psych-folk. Recommended!
This is IT. One of the most perfect slabs of abstract free rock ever set to tape. Yes, noise rockers, this is where it all started. Originally released way back in 1992, about five years into their recorded career. Long out of print and finally available again. We're of the mind that the Dead C never made a bad record, but of their entire recorded output, Harsh 70's Reality continues to be our all time favorite. Most of the vestiges of pop that showed up in their past records, the legacy of their NZ pop heritage, were jettisoned or at least transformed into something much harder, much weirder. The pop remained, but drastically altered, more often twisted and tangled, buried or burned, a soft glowing core barely visible through the Dead C's abstruse ambient noise. Truly hard to describe, there are guitars and drums, but Harsh 70s Reality never really rocks, it does however manage to be heavy and psychedelic and dense and droney all at once. Blissful, tranquil, harsh, jagged, dreamy, dark, atonal, an impossible collision of sounds and emotions. This may be noise rock, but it's not precisely noisy, nor rock. By this point, the Dead C were channeling Cale and Conrad and Maclise and the Taj Mahal Travellers as much as any rock or noise outfits.
This is immediately evident on the opening track here, the 22 minute "Driver U.F.O.", a massive dirgescapes of angular guitar, clanging and keening, a sound that hinted at the noise to come, their future trajectory, headed for sonic worlds even further out. A world first visited here, of strange little abstract chordal figures, not riffs per se, just strange smears of sound repeated over and over, totally mesmerizing, but completely alien, sheets of guitar noise, big slabs of metal percussive clang, creepy wheedly little melodies, lots of drone and drawn out streaks of feedback. Sounds almost like the first musicians ever, musical cavemen, suddenly stumbling upon a stage full of amps and drums, and curiously exploring, discovering all the strange ways the different instruments can be poked and prodded and struck to create an abstract and gorgeous primitive din. This is divine dronemusic. A clattery atonal dronescape. If you took this first track, stuck it on a crappy cd-r, made up some crazy name, Black Tomb Resurrect or something, added some xeroxed cover art, and sent out a handful to the Wire and Eclipse and Volcanic Tongue, made sure it was limited to 100 copies, you would have indie hipsters shitting themselves to get copies, buying copies on eBay for $100. It's that prescient. Either that or the current breed of noisemakers are not hiding their Dead C obsession AT ALL.
The shorter tracks here do actually 'rock'. Sort of. As much as a jagged smear of super distorted crumble and crunch can 'rock'. "Sky" sounds like the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" covered by Reynols, a stumbling rock drum beat beneath a white noise riff, all crumbly distortion and blown out fuzz, and some strange sort of crooned vocals drifting in and out. "Suffer Bomb Damage" is a haunting keyboard drone, all off key lo-fi casio wheeze and reverb spring percussion, very reminiscent of NZ legends Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos. "Love" sounds like the Velvet Underground fronted by Jandek, covering the MC5, lurching fuzzy garage stomp with damaged guitar and weary drawled vocals. "Constellation" is some long lost Velvet Monkeys joint, an East Village folkfuzz jam, throbbing and saturated in dense distortion and wrapped in thick sheets of druggy droney guitar swirl, all wrapped haphazardly around a cracked pop hook. The record ends on a truly strange note, a sort of fuzzy folk drift, warm acoustic guitars are picked and strummed, a mournful lament, crowd sounds and occasional bursts of distorted fuzz, as well as a brief stretch of wailed anguished vocals and a few splatters of snare drum, but for the majority of the nearly ten minutes of "Hope", we drift lazily through a murky world of soft muted guitars and sad, mumbled vocals. So lovely. A most perfect noisefolk elegy. It's hard to understand how the hell this record ended up here, drifting dreamlike and swathed in murky folk, especially after the 20+ minutes of face melting freaked out abstraction of "Driver U.F.O." Or the blown out deconstructed noiserock in between. But that's exactly what makes the Dead C so special. This is exactly where it had to end up. Where you were meant to emerge. It seems like an impossibly confusional journey, an improvised exploration. And it is. But taken as a whole, Harsh 70s Reality is exactly as it was meant to be. Perfect. Perfectly imperfect. A world of noise that slips from sound to sound, taking many forms, many guises, a world where letting fuzzy folk guitars and soft vocals wash over you is not all that different than letting a wall of crumbling guitar grind and feedback freakout collapse and bury you alive. Two different sides of the same glorious noise.
Okay Finnish music obsessives! We only got a handful of these, so don't be too bummed if we run out lickety split.
Super aggro Finnish tag team action. One side features Finnish Favorites Deep Turtle, spewing out a grinding tech punk blowout. Ultra weird and convoluted, impossibly complicated stop/start arrangements, like Melt-Banana mixed with the Ruins. Wacked and weird and wonderful. Super manic percussion, with strange little interludes, snippets of intercepted radio broadcasts splattered all over truly head spinning technical metallic madness. Oh except for the second track, a weird little shuffling Finnish calypso breakdown peppered with brief blasts of Iron Maiden-ish melodic shred. Woah.
The other side features Valse Triste who counter with multiple blasts of fuzzy, grungy crusty brutality, a fucked up take on Discharge / G.B.H. with some strangely glammy guitar and hoarse shouted vocals. Cool.
Packaged in a goofy AC/DC parody sleeve, the backside folds out and inside is a huge lyric sheet, and two full color postcards.
We've long been complaining about the dearth of "grime" in the States, so we were psyched to discover that the folks at Planet Mu decided to do something about it. They've been re-issuing UK grime releases for the states, but this latest batch of 12"s offers up some grime / jungle hybrids as well as their own twisted take on dubstep and grime. And it kills!
Distance is a big name in the dubstep/grime scene finally seeing some action stateside. This is weird and abstract, definitely dubstep but with heavy metal riffs, distorted beats spaced waaaaay out, ravey synth melodies, but mostly relentless and almost rocking. Sounds a bit like a grime Circle if you can imagine that. The flipside is even more minimal and stripped down, into a late night slow motion groove, so just begging for Virus Syndicate or Lady Sovereign to drop in and start flowing madly over the top.
The mysteriously monickered outfit, The Dreams Of M. Kourie, is actually the work of local dronelord Nathan Berlinguette, who manned the bass in techgrind outfit Creation Is Crucifixion, as well as exploring spaced out dronescapes with his partner Travis Ryan (of Cattle Decapitation) in the now defunct 5/5/2000. We listed the 5/5/2000 reissue recently, a collection of newly discovered tapes of old old recordings, a haunting world of dronelike nihilism and inner space exploration. With The Dreams Of M. Kourie, Berlinguette takes up where 5/5/2000 left off, setting a course for the heart of a black hole, and taking the scenic sonic route to get there. This is the sound of stargazing, a blackened landscape of warm shimmer, that almost imperceptibly shifts and contorts, each new shape even more abstract and more black than the shape before, tracing a minimal path that simultaneously drifts beneath the sea, through subterranean caverns, amidst the vacuum of space and through the impossibility of alternate universes, the pieces and parts and sounds and arrangements are not in and of themselves mysterious, there are soft rumbles, and warm chordal swells, glistening abstract melodies, drifting gauzy shimmer, but the way they are put together, the way the sounds fall into one another, subtly mix, or rest atop one another, these are the things that turn sound into emotion, these are the aspects that are impossible to explain but precisely what make this journey special. Eyes closed, laying in tall grass, atop a lonely hill, a night as clear as glass, the air warm and humid, watching a million years of starlight shift and shimmer. So nice.
Packaged in a simple two panel black sleeve, printed in metallic gold ink.
Occult symbols on the cover of this black digipack... song titles like "Asmodeus: The Destroyer, King Of Demons"... covers of Black Sabbath's "Into The Void", Sepultura's "Roots Bloody Roots", and Spinal Tap's classic "Big Bottom" as bonus tracks... what is this, some sort of metal album? Well... no. It's not. And Edmund Welles isn't a person either (in this context), it's a band. A bass clarinet quartet to be exact. That's right. Four bass clarinets, that's it. So rather than metal, the weirdly dark and proggy and oddly groovy music on here ends up sounding more like some kind of '30s cabaret jazz meets 20th century classical chamber music, with some cartoon-soundtrack Carl Stalling stylings too... like if Raymond Scott was possessed by some Cthulhoid demon and outfitted his whole ensemble with bass clarinets, to pipe and hoot in worship of the Great Old Ones, both stutteringly and sinuously (and surreptitiously enough to still get nightclub gigs, swingin' it but still taking a toll on listeners' sanity). And as a nice touch, the very first track features an authentic helping of sampled, mixed-in "record crackle" to give this more of an antique, period feel.
Of course, with all the metal signifiers present -- especially those aforementioned bonus tracks -- the easiest thing to do is to compare Edmund Welles to Apocalpytica, the Finnish cello quartet famed for their Metallica covers. (And they covered a Sepultura song too!) So, there is a slight resemblance of course. But we have to say that Edmund Welles really reminds us more maybe of some sort of John Zorn project, or chamber prog brainiacs Zs. Whereas Apocalyptica somehow seems -more- metal, maybe 'cause you're more likely to hear cellos than bass clarinets on metal records anyhow, and also 'cause their cellos are amplified and sometimes they even have a drummer. Bass clarinets are, indeed, bassy and droney -- but not as heavy as some amped up cellos sawing away.
So the Sabbath cover here is more like the Bad Plus's "Iron Man" than how it would sound if Apocalyptica did it.
Maybe it's just a cool gimmick, but we can't help but like it... and we can safely say this is the best bass clarinet quartet album we've ever heard!
Wow! While Brazil gets most of the attention in terms of creating some of the best South American psychedelic music, we've recently been checking out the left coast of the continent, namely Chile, and have been digging some amazing stuff. Perhaps it's the epic geographical relationship of mountains and coast in close proximity that inspires such transcendent music or perhaps it's the constant political unrest of the period that cultivated a longing for the more earthy populace-empowered past. Smooth romantic harmonies, ancient flutes and dreamy textures of jungle and nature sounds are all key variables in the sound of great Chilean psych bands El Congreso, Congregacion (also reviewed on this list), Kissing Spell (featured on the Love Peace and Poetry Latin America comp), and their later incarnation, Embrujo. While Kissing Spell was more of a mellow psych-pop confection singing songs in English as was the trend of Latin groups seeking to become more commercially viable, the decision to become Embrujo stemmed from a revolutionary stance possibly inspired by the Brazilian Tropicalia movement both politically and sonically, to write songs almost entirely in Spanish and create a dynamic sound on their own terms upping the ante on their songwriting craft and musicianship. What they add to the equation is Gr-ooo-ve, driven along by fuzzy organ, simmering guitar and funky drumming, building on the traditional Chilean sound with fluid changes, solid rhythms, and like Os Mutantes, occasional wackiness. Tight hook-laden arrangements, lyrical breaks and progressive interludes are what make this sole 1972 album fetch astronomical prices amongst collectors of private press recordings. This is its first CD reissue and seriously, we haven't stopped playing it since it arrived in the store a few weeks ago. Finally we have enough to share this with the rest of you. Embrujo means "bewitched" in Spanish, and we are positive you too will be captured by its spell! Recommended!
Most DJ mix cd's end up leaving us a bit cold. Either the selections are too obvious, or the need to scratch and make it "funky" kind of kills the mood and wastes the good tracks that might be there. But leave it to Kieren Hebden (aka Four Tet) to get it just right! We would kill to walk into a club to find him behind the decks. Especially if this is the stuff that was flowing from the speakers. His taste is pretty damn immaculate and refreshingly varied as well. Starting off with the avant pioneer David Behrman (cofounder of Sonic Arts Union) and along the way dipping into everything from Heldon, Curtis Mayfield, Gong, Madvillian, Cabaret Voltaire, Heiner Stadler, Stereolab and so much more. Like the best DJ's, Hebden is a master of timing, pacing and flow. Seamlessly spinning from an early '80s electro jam to a classic Nonesuch explorer series track from Zimbabwe like they were always meant to be side by side. Keeping your body twitching and your synapses firing... what else could you want from a DJ? Highly recommended!!!
Heavy psychedelic vibes from these '70s South African proggers, getting all, um, astral and spacey and downright spooky at times on this, their second album dating from 1971 (or maybe 1970?). A lost classic, this is, if you're a fan of Pink Floyd and/or cosmic Krautrock stuff of similar vintage. It's super trippy, with echoey vox singing weird conceptual lyrix over majestic acid rock meets church organ jams.
This was reissued on cd before, in '97, but what we've got here is a 2005 reish that adds a bunch of bonus tracks, yay. Recommended.
Another day, another rare sixties pop-psych reissue with quite a bit of collector cachet... that is also pretty darn great! First time on cd for this Eddie Vartan-produced 1969 LP, wonderfully dreamy and baroque and folky and orchestrated. Lots of languid, lazy-day la, la, la's here!
Talented, curly-haired singer-songwriter Nick Garrie was youthful, peripatetic, and quite cosmopolitan (you can tell from his lyrics, referencing all corners of Europe). He had a Scottish mother, a Russian father, and was raised in both France and England, calling Paris his home at the time this record came out. Though nowadays it gets compared to the work of Nick Drake, Billy Nichols, Peter Sarstedt, Bill Fay, and others of note, due to music biz circumstances beyond Nick's control, it immediately sank into obscurity upon initial release. But now thanks to Rev-ola it's been reissued, complete with extensive liner notes, track-by-track commentary by Nick himself, and seven bonus tracks including his fantastic and even harder to find than the LP 1968 single "Queen Of Spades" b/w "Close Your Eyes" (the B-side of which you may have already heard on the Nightmares at Toby's Shop compilation we listed last year). Great stuff for fans of UK popsike like Kaleidoscope.
You can't go wrong with a 'goat' band name. Goat Horn, Lubricated Goat, Floating Goat, Lost Goat, Goatsnake, Goatsnake, Goatsblood, Goatlord, Goat Fire and of course Goat Thrower, so what if you just got rid of all that extraneous stuff, the throwing and the blood and the lubrication and got right down to it, the goat. Thus we have simply Goat, a one man American noise band who . So what if this Goat teamed up with one of our favorite masters of the apocalyptic dark ambient drone, Nordvargr? Well, then of course you'd end up with a creature known simply as Goatvargr, that sonically straddles the mysterious martial darkworld of Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk and the harsh caustic brutality of Andy O' Sullivan (aka Goat).
Huge expanses of industrial creak and groan, blown out beats buried under piles of sonic debris, face melting bursts of acidic distortion and crumbling walls of guitar grind, distant martial beats stretched out over smears of black sound and buried desiccated vocals, squealing sheets of feedback and layer after layer of Merzbowian murk. This is most definitely a noise record, but Nordvargr injects enough of his subtle darkness and penchant for strange beatscapes to keep the proceedings appropriately damaged, dreary and darkly demented. Recommended for the iron eared with hearts of noise! Great stuff!
Not only do the Grey Daturas kick up a serious noiserock ruckus, they also run their own cd-r label, the mysteriously titled Diagnosis... Don't! There are three new releases, and we managed to get a handful of each.
Gordon is an Oakland-based sound artist, who designs blankets with speakers sewn into them, each connected to some sound producing device, a toy or musical instrument, the listener is then encouraged to wrap themselves in the blanket, and luxuriate in the sounds produced by the listener's movement. Incredibly immersive and so goddamn cool! This disc captures a brief snippet of Gordon's installation. A warm fuzzy soundscape of distorted electronics, droning and growling, hissing and rumbling and whirls of haunting electronic glitches all woven into an undulating swirl of thick buzz and strange murky and mechanical melody.
SUPER LIMITED (of course!). Each disc comes packaged in two squares of one of Gordon's blankets, sewn together into an oven mitt like sleeve.
Released on Freak Animal (a Northern Heritage offshoot dedicated to noise and industrial and drone music) and Kult Of Nihilow (home to Fleshpress, Dot [.]. Marzuraan, Boris, Church Of Misery, Ox) this ULTRA LIMITED 7" (only 270 copies!!!) is a massive slab of "dronoise" (just made that up but it's the perfect genre for stuff like this): dense clouds of caustic feedback, murky and thick and heavy, a bit like Sunroof! on some seriously bad drugs, the blissful raga vibe twisted and distorted into a roiling pit of black guitars and crumbling buzz. Side A is relentless and like dunking your head into a black hole. By side B the sound smoothes out a bit (only a bit) into a super harsh low end dronescape, huge tectonic rumbles beneath a swirling swarm of high end feedback squeals and streaks of barbed fuzz. Like Total on PCP.
LIMITED To 270 COPIES, we got about a dozen so act fast.
Almost a year ago exactly, if you happened to glance at the calendar for San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, you might have spotted an upcoming performance by The Hafler Trio, marking the first time that The Hafler Trio played San Francisco since an infamous show featuring The Hafler Trio, Phauss, and Zbigniew Karkowski held at the Kennel Club way back in 1991. Plans had been drawn up for an entire US tour for The Hafler Trio, with Andrew McKenzie inviting Colin Potter (also of Nurse With Wound), Andrew Liles, and Matt Waldron (of irr. app. (ext.)) to join him as the supporting cast in the Trio; however, the logistics of the tour were doomed from the onset and the already scheduled dates had to be cancelled due to what the Hafler Trio called "extreme incompetence". Like pretty much every touring ensemble these days, The Hafler Trio planned on recording an album to be sold only at the performances. While the tour was cancelled, the recordings were fortunately not thrown out. McKenzie continued working with sound material provided by Liles and Potter (or at least that's what we assume), resulting in 3 Eggs.
The whistling drones modulating with an elegance and subtly indicative of the Hafler Trio's signature over the past six or seven years dominate the album; but McKenzie allows numerous instances for Liles and Potter to utter their own take on sonic sculpture, with deformed bits of vocalizations and samples of Victorian quirkiness appearing from the Liles camp, and deep throngs of gaping drones speaking to Potter's sensibility. The only question we have to ask is why Mr. Waldron was not invited to participate in this venture. Oh well. It's testament to the fact that the ill-fated 2005 tour would have been an amazing performance regardless of whatever that "extreme incompetence" actually consisted of.
Sorry, no MP3 samples of anything Hafler Trio related.
People have been waiting a long time for this, the third opus from SF's own Hammers Of Misfortune, one of the most ambitious, audacious, bodacious, bombastic, maybe even slightly ludicrous bands in the metal realm...and metal this is, through and through, even as it pushes the envelope right over the edge into, I don't know, musical theater... 2003's The August Engine was pretty amazing, as was (our favorite) their year 2000 debut, The Bastard (released by Andee's tUMULt label we should note). The Locust Years has a lot to live up to.
And live it up they do here. Just check out the band photos for evidence of that (funnier if you know these folks). There's a shocking formal portrait on the back cover, everybody dressed up in tuxedos and evening gowns, hair pulled back. And then inside the cd booklet, you see 'em letting their hair down in a glammy, rock n' roll fantasy shot. It's nice to see that they don't take themselves too seriously, that should keep people guessing about this band. Not so pretentious as some might think, joking but no joke.
Quick intro first for those just tuning in/turning on to this band: Hammers is a rock-operatic heavy metal juggernaut with harmonizing lead guitars, pounding Hammond organ (new!), and majestic male and female vocal lines. The band features members of The Lord Weird Slough Feg past and present, and mainman John Cobbett is busy too with his other band black metallers Ludicra (new ep elsewhere on this list) plus he's been playing with the likes of Amber Asylum and even Jarboe of late... As you might imagine from all of this, Hammers is an especially eclectic mix of '70s prog, '80s metal, black metal (without the black metal vocals), classical music, avant-chamber-rock, Mary Poppinsy musical showtuneage, Opethian loud/soft, fast/slow dynamics...
Basically, everything (and more) that already earned mucho plaudits for the Hammers' first two albums is present here: the sweeping melodic grandeur, metallic excitement, complex arrangements, virtuoso playing, intelligent lyrics, many moods, and attention to idiosyncratic detail -- which is evident from the packaging, with its Thomas Woodruff cover painting and aforementioned photography, to the music, for instance the track "War Anthem" that features a whole hired drum line arranged by Hammers drummer Chewy. Or it's actually Chewy multitracking his own one man drum line. Either way, it's pretty darn Tusk!!
And lyrically, while it's not a storytelling narrative like The Bastard, it's somewhat more of a cohesive "concept album" than was August Engine... the concept being, near as we can tell, a very allegorical, cryptic protest against the awful person and policies of our president, George W. Bush!! Or at least that's what we get from lyrics like "Death - death to the infidels / sons of our servants shall serve and serve us well / and gifted with endless war / flags and fanatics forevermore" (from "War Anthem") or, "If people wonder at the suffering you cause / and your massive avarice has left them at a loss / if by chance they notice your bloody, snapping jaws / the blood upon your claws / your shifty eyes and laws / the nauseating flaws in all you've said / trot out the dead" (from "Trot Out The Dead") -- no that's not Satan they're singing about, not exactly. We're pretty sure that makes The Locust Years the world's first POLITICAL epic fantasy prog power metal album!!
Recommended of course.
Wow! The wonderful, wonderful music of organist Merit Hemmingson combines a bunch of stuff we just simply LOVE but never heard quite like this before. The title of this "best of" collection boldly suggests as much to you too, right? Swedish Hammond Folk Groove, yeah!! We hadn't heard of her before we came across this, but now we know she made a handful of records in the '70s that brought together ancestral Swedish folk melodies, jazzy Hammond organ grooving, and some colorful psychedelic moves. Merit's Hammond is at the fore, playing her own swingin', riffin' take on these traditional tunes, but the arrangements also variously incorporate '70s funky wah-wah psych guitars, her lovely, wordless vocals, flutes and bongos and more... It's all so sunshiney and delightful, reminding us of everything from Hansson & Karlsson to Turid to The Free Design to a calmer, mellower version of Aavikko! And of course modern-day Swedish folk organ duo Sagor & Swing.
Merit's music is gentle, soulful, rhythmic -- so nice! It's total "grooving with trolls and flowers in the forest funk". Not your everyday organ jazz that's for sure, though Merit got her start in the '60s playing jazz -- she came over to the New York City to study, taking piano lessons from both Joe Zawinul and Lalo Schifrin and even getting to sit in with Miles Davis's band! But soon she went in a more pop/funk direction, and then became inspired by Scandinavia's rich history of olden folk music to create the sounds heard here.
The twenty tracks on this collection are all from albums originally released between 1971-1977 (Huvva, Trollskog, Bergtagen, Balsam, and Hoven Droven) except for a couple of recently-recorded tracks at the disc's end done in a similar style, featuring as sidemen members of currently happenin' Swedish retro-leaning rock bands (and big Merit fans) Dungen and The Ark! That's right, while obscure for years even in Sweden, she's undergone a bit of a hipster rediscovery lately and in fact this disc (the first time on cd for most of this music) is the prelude to a new album due out this year.
Queen Of Swedish Hammond Folk Groove is a nicely deluxe package, in a slipcovered jewelcase with a thick booklet full of photos, liner notes in both English and Swedish, and Merit's own track-by-track commentary. We had to go to a bit of trouble to import these from Sweden, but it was worth it!
HOLY SHIT! we can't get enough of this record...or overcome the urge to say HOLY SHIT every few seconds while talking about this new great collaboration between our favorite art-damaged pop songwriter Ariel Pink and his unlikely partner in musical crime, Matt Fishbeck formerly of the shiny happy LA power-pop band The Push Kings. But don't worry Ariel Pink hasn't gotten all normal and boring on us...in fact in lots of ways this is his most captivating and compelling release yet! With a fuzzy folk lo-fi sound that reminds us of the glory days of the great New Zealand label Flying Nun or like some amazing amalgamation of Daniel Johnston and Roky Erikson playing Orange Juice covers. This is what we wish AM radio really sounded like, fuzzy and warped, demented and all twisted up like some poprock funhouse mirror, while underneath it all lurk perfect and precious. Totally catchy pop hooks and great timeless sounding songs. Fishbeck actually tackles most of the vocal duties here, although you'd be forgiven for thinking it was indeed Mr. Pink, and his voice sounds so perfect amidst the dabs of tape hiss, staticky cracklings and WAY off-kilter production. But deep down inside we know, it's Ariel Pink's cracked pop sensibilities that really mold and create the overall sound, warm and lucid, dreamy and trippy, an album that unfolds revealing a deliriously damaged dreamland and takes you on a pop trip that's weird enough to get lost in but cool and catchy enough that you want to stay lost FOREVER. HOLY SHIT we're in love with this record!
Packaged in a cool shiny metallic gold and silver digipak. With a cute photo inside of the bandmates smooching out in a grassy field. Awww...
The final installment in the recent long overdue campaign of Immortal reissues (the rest of which we reviewed a few lists back).
The return of Immortal!!! These frosty warriors may have hung up their spiked gauntlets, but their legacy still looms large. Easily one of our favorite black metal hordes EVER, these records have been frustratingly tough to keep in stock over the years. Thankfully, they've all been reissued, in all their frostbitten black blurred glory!
As we've said before, you just can't go wrong with Immortal. It's like a big cold hug. For grim black metalheads that is! Everyone has their favorite Immortal. The raw early records, the slow more melodic later releases... and while we definitely love both, our hearts were originally captured by the brief two album black blizzard of buzz that was Blizzard Beasts (1997) and this here slab of frosty grimness Battles In The North. Originally released in 1995, BITN was the record that found Immortal finally unleashing their inner frost giant, from the album art, images of the band members crouching in the snow in full corpse paint with their instruments, to the much more explicit themes of winter and frost and blizzards and ice and snow, to the much frostier sound, a black metal white out, flurries of impossibly fast drumming, blinding swirls of buzzing riffage, the raspy winterdemon like vocals, Battles In The North is fastfastfast, a buzzy blinding blur, brief moments of folky guitar or droney ambience surface here and there, but for the most part this is a black metal avalanche, a huge white wall of black sound. Blizzard Beasts would up the fast and frosty ante a couple years later, but Battles In The North remains a pure and primal explosion of gloriously ultragrim Northern darkness!
Every year, in a remote part of Sweden, a group or artists and architects build a massive structure out of ice and snow, walls and arches and doorways and windows, a gorgeous glowing edifice that once completed becomes the famed Ice Hotel. A small complex of delicately crafted rooms, a bar, a chapel, every bit of which is made from ice. In some places the ice is extra thin, so light from the outside bursts through warm and brilliant, while elsewhere, the thick walls glow a burnished blue from the filtered sunlight or the soft pale moonlight. The beds are blocks of ice covered with animal pelts and arctic sleeping bags. The bar is ice, the glasses also ice, the only libations served are hard alcohol (vodka, etc.) due to the fact that they won't freeze. A totally amazing and overwhelming bit of adventurous lodging as well as being a piece of gorgeous conceptual art. In fact Andee and Heather had planned to have their wedding at the Ice Hotel, until both sides of the family refused, citing the idea of sleeping in a below zero room on a block of ice as a definite deal breaker.
Well, it gets even better: at the same time as the hotel is being planned and constructed, several of the same planners and ice artists are also designing and building musical instruments made entirely out of ice. Percussion, harps, and horns, all made from frozen water and little else. The sounds are muted and soft, strange and organic, haunting but imbued with a strange warmth totally unlike the cold and clinical sounds you might expect. All deftly intertwined with human voices, soft coos and trills, hushed and whispery, sounding not unlike a ghostlike gathering of disembodied, deconstructed Bjorks.
On Igloo, Isungset and and an assortment of performers, coax all manner of sounds from a strange phalanx of icy sound makers, ice harp, ice percussion, ice bass drum (!), iceofon, icehorn, all soft focused and dreamlike, all recorded live in the frosty interior of an igloo like ice-recording studio. From the icy scrape and shuffle of melted ice, to the deep resonant tones of the various frozen percussion instruments, sounding like vibes or chimes, sometimes even gongs, the overtones drifting and slowly fading. Dark dolorous melodies, warm and subdued, but impossibly resonant. After all, these are just chunks of ice! But obviously crafted with such care and precision to render them capable of making rich sonorous sound. Like some giant frosty thumb piano, a warm tumble of ghostlike notes, beneath the flittering flute-like sound of the icehorn, soft, delicate reedy melodies that sometimes morph into thick wheezes before dissipating back into gentle flutter. Beneath it all, thick and cavernous rumbles and whirs, deep and dense, layered with sonic subtleties, rich with tonal color, as if played on some giant cello made from ice (which we think is not far from the truth actually). Also present are a wide array of unobtrusive sonic events in and around each track, a tiny army of icicle percussion, clinking and clattering, chittering and scrabbling, a delicate crystalline backdrop for the warm wash and warble of the main ice instruments. And finally the vocals -- on first listen, at low volume, we almost didn't realize there were vocals at all, they tend toward the extremely abstract, strange little vocalizations as much about texture and timbre as tone and pitch, the sound perfectly blending into the icy landscape around them. Hints of Sigur Ros, Joan La Barbara, Sainkho Namchylak, but each voice unmoored, loosed from any sort of corporeal existence, left to flit and flicker ghostlike, almost like tiny droplets of water dripping delicately onto the already frozen landscape, allowed to seep into each and every melody, freezing into new and wonderful shapes.
At its most percussive, the music on Igloo sounds a bit like that breed of underground minimal free folk, sort of minimal and tribal, dreamy and slightly clattery, Finnish free folk ensembles Avarus and Anaksimandros definitely come to mind, while the strange underwater thumb piano sound reminds us of a much more minimal and abstract Konono No.1. For the most part though, Igloo is a dark dreamy drift, soft and meditative, warm and warbly, shimmering and sparkling and completely captivating.
And, it's mastered by AQ fave dronelord Deathprod!
Igloo also boasts some of the most amazing packaging we have ever seen. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of ice in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, the front with strips cut out like icicles, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth, and yes, we mean ACTUAL water, in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and played! WOW!
NOW ON VINYL!
Yes, along with the first blossoms of May the highly anticipated new Jolie Holland album has arrived! Definitely less mysterious than her previous two albums, but no less magical. There's not so much of the 'from where did this antique gramophone recording get unearthed?' kind of feel that characterized both Catalpa and Escondida. While Springtime Can Kill You still maintains a foundation of old country petticoats, the recordings sound quite contemporary. Very full, fleshed out and crisp... so much so in fact that the brushes played on the snare drum effectively conjure the crunch of frost beneath your boots or the first bite into a freshly picked apple. It might be a bit of an overstatement, but it seems Holland's evolved from porchswing peasant gal into more of a composed chanteuse. No complaints here tho'. This is a beautiful album with captivating songs and fine performances by all involved. Guest players include multi-instrumentalist Ara Anderson of Iron And The Albatross, and singer/songwriter David Dondero. Sure to cause extensive bouts of swooning.
We've said it before but it bears repeating, whenever we hear metal bands cover their teenage influences, especially Depeche Mode or the Cure (why do all metal bands LOVE those two bands?), we always secretly wish there would be a band who just actually sounded like that. Not a metal band being ironic or retro, but a heavy heavy band who made incredibly dark and depressing emotional music. Ultra personal and epically miserable. Thus we are massive fans of Katatonia.
Imagine a doom metal Cure, or a metallized Depeche Mode. Katatonia may have started life as a serious doom/death metal band, channeling Paradise Lost, with thick downtuned grinding buzzing guitars, and harsh black metal vocals, but with the release of their classic Discouraged Ones record, they switched to clean vocals and the sound of the band followed suit. A massive, gloomy and dreamy doompop. Exactly what we had been wishing for. Catchy as heck, heavy as hell, but totally morose and melancholy. Since then the band has continued to polish and hone their epic commercial doom, with each record finding them moving closer and closer to MTV rock, but without losing their edge, managing to stay creepy and heavy. But shit, their songs are so good and so catchy, and intense and emotional, it was only a matter of time before these guys blew up. It hasn't happened yet, but listening to The Great Cold Distance, it can't be long now. Lots of moody expanses of bass and drum groove, sprinkled with minor key guitar jangle, bookended by massive chugging metallic choruses, hooks everywhere, gorgeous crooned vocals, dark depressing lyrics, really moody and evocative and so so heavy. There is no reason these guys shouldn't be up there with Tool and the Deftones. They definitely travel the same sonic path, although Katatonia definitely display more of a true doom heritage. But c'mon, all that moody heavy rock that the oh-so-depressed generation Z lap up like Prozac, how have they not discovered Katatonia? If we were 15 again, and hated school and just broke up with our girlfriend, and were always fighting with our parents, we can guarantee you we'd be dressed all in black, wandering around our neighborhood late at night, after everyone was asleep, with The Great Cold Distance blasting in our headphones. And pretty much every track on here would sure as hell make it on all the mix tapes we ever made. But since we're not, we'll just have to make do, luxuriating in these lush depressive epics, wallowing in each glorious wash of miserable metallic doom pop!
Very recommended!!
So yeah, about time this was available on compact disc! We've got Inui 2 and Inui 3, but ol' Iuni 1 only came out as a limited-edition LP on the Siwa label back in 2000 ("roughly 100 releases ago, in Kawabata terms" as VHF themselves admit) and is of course long gone, a major prize on eBay or so we're told.
Kawabata (of Acid Mothers Temple, need we tell you?) is joined by guest vocalist Audrey Ginestet from French band Ueh for the first track on this dreamy, droning initial installment of the Inui series, Kawabata handling the rest of these three lengthy tracks all by himself using various and sundry ethnic stringed instruments from his collection (violin, sarangi, oud, bowed sitar, bouzouki, lyra, shou, and nei) plus his own vocals -- all very blissful and spacey and psychedelic as you'd expect. The last twenty+ minutes (the track "Son") is such an angelic ambient drift, shimmering, seeming like the magnified sound of a shaft of magic morning sunlight in the floating-dust filled air of an old empty room, awakening to the day.
AMT/Kawabata fans should thank VHF for reissuing this on cd, 'specially as it's so nicely presented in a hand-screened mini-gatefold sleeve done by the folks at Siwa, and guess what? It's also a limited edition!
Over his past few releases, Jacob Kirkegaard has exhibited a noticeable shift in his work away from the early experiments with the antiquated residue of Jeckian avant-turntablism towards a clinical conceptualism. His last release, Eldfjall, found Kirkegaard wandering Iceland and documenting the numerous geothermal vents for their tumultuous growlings and tectonic rumbles. On 4 Rooms, Kirkegaard is again wandering in a foreign land, as this Danish born / German resident took off to the "Zone of Exclusion" in the still irradiated town of Chernobyl! There, Kirkegaard employed the same techniques of recording and rebroadcasting sound that Alvin Lucier used on his groundbreaking piece I Am Sitting In A Room, but instead of introducing his own voice into the accumulated room ambience, Kirkegaard simply records the ghostly reverberations from a church, an auditorium, a swimming pool, and a gymnasium. Given the weight of the Chernobyl disaster, it's impossible not to hear these timbral vibrations as anything but radioactive shadows of those who died some 20 years ago; but on a phenomenological level, the sounds that Kirkegaard collects are eerily beautiful falling somewhere between the techgnostic work of recent Hafler Trio and the stoic vibrations of Toshiya Tsunoda.
From their very earliest audio documents and live performances, the Slovenian avant-industrial ensemble Laibach had developed an incredibly focused mythology around themselves as a provocative force acting upon the extremes of art and politics. Working particularly with the aesthetics of totalitarianism (which as a political institution had long been hammered into the psyche of the Slovenian people from the left, right, East, and West), Laibach reconstituted any number of myths which invoked both fear and fascination in their audience. They wrote manifestos calling for a depersonalization through their music; they cross-pollinated Stalinist and Nazi imagery (alongside occultish symbolism and increasingly absurdist pop-cultural references); and they qualified their concerts as presentations of "systematic psycho-physical terror as a principle of social organization." In 1985 when Laibach ventured out upon their Occupied Europe Tour, they were a truly scary band with nobody really knowing how to analyze what they were doing. Was it an ugly resurgence of fascism? Was it psychological warfare conducted in the public arena? Was it a post-modern strategy reconnecting signifiers of hollowed ideologies? It was probably all of those things and more.
In the live recordings from that tour that made their way onto Neu Konservatiw, Laibach's sound was a punishing collision of martial rhythms and megaphone vocal broadcasts, exhibiting none of the black humour found later in their Beatles covers or their take on Jesus Christ Superstar. With the insistent plod of the multiple drums and monochord bass thumps, Laibach paralleled the abject stomp that the Swans were producing at that time, even though both projects had vastly different artistic intentions. As their studio albums in the mid-'80s were mostly sample based and had a clipped rigidity that make some of their songs a little clumsy, the live setting forced Laibach to strip their music to the most essential stabs of anthemic bombast; and on Neu Konservatiw, Laibach pull it off with an executioner's cold stoicism. Forcefully blunt and uncompromisingly brilliant.
Just a brief word about this one as it was limited to 50 copies, is already out of print, and we only have about 10 copies left. The second in a series, Tarentel's Jefre Cantu Ledesma joins up with filmmaker Paul Clipson, to drift dreamlike through a dense visual latticework of plants, chainlink fences, branches, leaves, stoplights, neon signs, a delirious series of slow motion visual tangles and patterns. A bug's eye view of the world mysterious and wonderful, like cutting room floor super-8 plant studies and urban landscapes woven into soft focus home movies. All set to the warm glow of Ledesma's swelling dronescapes. So gorgeous.
Packaged in a lovely folded vellum sleeve printed with images of dried leaves.
Again, we only have about 10 of these, so prepare to be disappointed.
The Italian black metal horde Lorn specialize in COLD BLACK METAL. It says so right there on the record cover. And indeed, Towards The Abyss Of Disease, their second full length, is cold. Freezing cold. Frosty and grim as all good black metal should be. But Lorn offer up something unexpected. Ridiculously catchy songs. And yeah, we talk about black metal bands being catchy all the time. Weird hooks buried under vast swaths of black fuzz. But Lorn, whether purposeful or not, outdo them all, managing to inject some impossibly catchy melodies into the chorus (and sometimes the verses too) of each of these six black hymns. And we mean stuck in your head like crazy. Humming it for the next week. That sort of thing. It doesn't really take away from the band's grim evil atmosphere, but what it does do is add a weird haunting hooky melancholy that is not often found in COLD BLACK METAL bands. The opening salvo, the title track, is a buzzing midtempo burzumic blast, but when the chorus drops, the guitars lock into a haunting minor key sing song melody that is equal parts lullaby and long lost classic pop song. Granted, it's buried under a mile of buzzing prickly spike encrusted fuzz, but that's exactly what makes these songs stand out. The impossible alliance between hooky pop catchiness and cold grim blackness. The blackness rules of course, the surface of every track is a barren wasteland of black buzz, thrashing percussive pound and growled demonic screech, but the catchiness lurks just below the surface, barely audible through a storm of swirling blackness and ultra distorted blown out fuzz. But it informs all the sounds around it, giving Lorn a truly creepy (and catchy sound) that with close listening unfolds like some hellish black flower. So awesome!
Although Life Is Abuse is the name of the label, they want to make life easier on those of us who love the inner city black metal art of San Francisco's Ludicra by putting out this brand new EP, featuring three unreleased songs from the Billy Anderson-recorded Another Great Love Song sessions, to hold us over until the next full-length Ludicra album coming out on Alternative Tentacles in the fall. Yay! These three tracks are prime Ludicra insanity, majestic and dark and fucked up and brilliantly composed as only a band featuring members of Hammers Of Misfortune and Impaled (among others) could do it.
Actually, you get more than just those three new tracks here: the cd comes with Quicktime footage of Ludicra performing live & brutal on October 7th, 2005 (five tracks) plus a Ludicra photo slideshow!
We've long been complaining about the dearth of "grime" in the States, so we were psyched to discover that the folks at Planet Mu decided to do something about it. They've been reissuing UK grime releases for the states, but this latest batch of 12"s offers up some grime / jungle hybrids as well as their own twisted take on dubstep and grime. And it kills!
This is grime done commercial hiphop style, which is not a bad thing at all. We always talk about how grime should be all over the radio and MTV, well if that's gonna happen, it's probably gonna be M.R.K.1 aka Mark One. The first track on here is an absolute killer, like Kanye or the RZA with sped up soul samples over dizzying stuttery dubstep rhythms. The next track is slippery and slithery and grimy but weirdly convoluted and tangled up, super murky and dark, like Tricky or Portishead gone grime, and bass lines so low and heavy that even at low volume they threaten to blow your speakers.
The flipside features two groovy grimy instrumental shuffles, with alien synths, that speaker shredding low end, and wide open spaces just begging for some mad freestyle flows.
San Francisco's Yik Yak label is kindly trying to assure that nobody misses out on any goodness from Japan's Maher Shalal Hash Baz, hence this re-release of Maher's Faux Depart album, recorded at Olympia's Dub Narcotic studio in 2003 with members of Deerhoof sitting in. And fitting in, too, that's for sure! The wonderfully naive psych weirdness of Maher Shalal Hash Baz is well displayed here, with 22 great examples of their mix of woozy, gone-wrong cocktail jazz and soft lullaby indie-pop, the band's instrumentalists coloring outside the lines, their "paints" blurring like watercolors spilled across a canvas but still making such a pretty picture, the kind you'd be proud of if your child brought it home from school to brighten your day.
If you missed this before... you know the drill.
Note: ep price, full-length cd!
