With limited info on the packaging we weren't able to tell right away when this was from. It had that really nice warm and not too polished sound of reggae's golden age, some nice dub elements that came to the forefront in the late 70's, but we were also sort of hoping this was actually new, so we'd have some nice reggae to get behind, unlike the usual slick sunsplash style of most modern reggae. But lo and behold we found out this is indeed a reissue from the early 80's. With a heavy roots sound and really nice vocal delivery it came as no surprise when we found out that Jezzreel's frontmen had spent many years in the background adding vocal harmonies for the likes of Sugar Minott. With all six songs coming in around the six minute mark they all start with strong vocals and some righteous praising of Jah before extending into some really tasty dubs.
This is the first in a planned series of 3" dvd-r's from the folks at Jyrk. This first installment comes from Jamie Potter of experimental drone ensemble Bonus, whose cd-r on Root Strata we reviewed a while back (don't ask, it's out of print) and dug pretty heavily.
This dvd features more of that deep rich Bonus buzz, a whirring rich warm chordal drone that subtly shifts over the course of this 25 minute film and the film is as strangely mesmerizing as the music. At first it's hard to tell exactly what you're seeing, some sort of alien starscape, or some incredibly magnified view of atoms and molecules, tiny little colored lights, that soon grow into a big white blinding sun shape that swirls and spins and changes colors, like watching some sort of scientific representation of some cataclysmic cosmic event. It's totally hypnotic and it's easy to drift into some sort of trance, with the drones and the spinning shapes. The shapes are fascinating, looks like some sort of monitor, and the images on the screen shift and spin, transforming itself into weird spinning symbols, and pixelated glowing discs, like video feedback but more more 'designed'. Really striking and completely beautiful. To look at AND to listen to.
Packaged in a cool mini 3" jewel case with full color insert. LIMITED TO 90 COPIES! ALREADY SOLD OUT. WE HAVE ABOUT 20 COPIES, AND THAT'S ALL WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET!
A few years ago, before Kyle Thomas delved into the neo-acid folk of Feathers or the stoner metal of Witch, he began working on his first musical project King Tuff, a buzzy and bright concoction of glam punk and '70s power pop, casually playing out with his friends at parties and recording songs in his basement. Finally having more time to devote to the project after a couple exhaustive years touring with Feathers, playing in Witch, and keeping up a side career as a visual artist, the uber-limited cd-r label, Spirit of Oar has released these early recordings to precede King Tuff's upcoming Fall tour, and what a treat!!. Imagine Sweet, Zolar X, and Televison playing at your Sweet Sixteen. Fucking Rad! Did we say limited?? Only 100 made and we got a handful, and not really sure if we can ever get more.
As we may have mentioned in a review or two or five, RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK IS GOD!! We love us our Coltrane's and Ayler's and Sun Ra's sure, but Kirk holds a very special place in our heart. He's the ultimate outsider jazzbo, like the Moondog of jazz, blind since birth, later paralyzed from a stroke, could play sax, flute, you name it, eventually he even had to begin inventing his own instruments, often played three horns at once, an actual one man band, dressed in rags and carried around a huge wheeled staff with various musical instruments duct taped to it, was shunned for being a novelty act, live would spend half the set telling stories, interacting with the audience, playing back stuff he had recorded on his portable tape player, whooping, shouting, singing -- this man was possessed by jazz and exuded utter and absolute joy when he was playing. And the music reflected that, a dizzying mix of traditional and free, a complete disregard for genre, embracing bop, soul, gospel, whatever.
We can never get enough, and we're always excited when a new live record sees the light of day, because live, in front of an audience is where Kirk reigned supreme. This live set was recorded in Germany in 1972 and is a seriously aggressive, fiery and free set. Really intense and super kick ass. Kirk does his usual, depending on the track wielding the sax, the flute, the nose flute, the manzello, the stritch or the clarinet, sometimes more than one at a time. Not a whole lot of between song banter, but the songs speak volumes. A killer mix of Kirk classics, standards and some unlikely covers including a killer version of Bread's "Make It With You".
Really funny and bitter liner notes from long time Kirk confidante Joel Dorn, relaying a conversation between Dorn and his partner, talking shit about Dorn's always amusing liner notes, and how after years of ranting about Kirk's brilliance, he decided to just fuck the serious liner notes, since it isn't liner notes that would convince someone to dig Kirk, it's the music. And the music on Brotherman In The Fatherland should be enough to convince anyone.
Now available on vinyl for a super limited time. Only 500 copies made so act fast (and be aware that the vinyl contains 2 less tracks than the cd)!
Everyone wants a glimpse into the blackened Leviathan vaults, containing the legendary 20 or so cd-r's and cassettes recorded and released during the years 2000-2002, early demos that played more like full-on proper albums, hell they WERE full-on albums, highlights of which were released as the two disc Verrater (soon to be repressed!) on tUMULt a few years back. But Wrest from Leviathan has made it clear that those were then, and averaging a new release every few months, including full lengths and splits, is now. Well, that is, except for this. Probably your only chance, outside Verrater, to hear where it all began. Howl Mockery At The Cross is an essential shard of the mysterious obscured blackened history of Leviathan, and while sonically a bit rougher than the more recent records, it's still a dark and twisting, buzzing and howling serpentine trip through the black, bleak and brutal sonic world of Wrest and Leviathan. Some of these tracks were actually first choices to be included on Verrater, but at the time Wrest had planned on re-recording them. But with each new record, and after a few aborted attempts, the idea of going back to old songs seemed less and less appealing. So this is now the only place to hear those amazing tracks. Lots of that blackened buzz we love so much, but as with all Leviathan records, there are plenty of distinctly un-BM parts all over the place: dense mathrockisms, blissed out droning breakdowns, sludgy doom, bizarre times signatures, impossibly complex drumming, mournful minor key melodies, that immediately recognizable heavily affected demonic howl, all twisted into a gorgeously dark and demented, moody and murky blackened squall. Even includes a Death In June cover, properly drenched in buzz and blackness, so much so that it sounds like it could have been penned by Wrest himself. Striking metallic silver cover with the Leviathan upside down cross and dripping moon logo.
Oh, Senor Coconut we can never get enough of you and all your sneaky alter egos. He just unleashed his homage to Yellow Magic Orchestra a couple lists back and when summertime rolls around his effervescent fun party sounds always hit the spot. Los Negritos is supposedly the work of Los Sampler's, a Chilean percussion group that Atom Heart aka Senor Coconut claims to have discovered. But we are still betting that at the end of the day this is all the work of the imaginative, playful mind of Senor Coconut himself. His frantic choppity-chop arrangements of electronics and abundant samples are pretty unmistakable... and pretty darn irresistible. Tweaked horns and synth sounds jump about the itchy-glitchy and yes verrry speedy merengue beats as highly processed vocals make often indecipherable exclamations. Never fails to delight in the most heart-racing and spastic way!
This new series of 7"s from the Type label looks to be pretty amazing. Even just based on the first two releases. A new single from Paavohaarju reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this here single from former AQ Record of the Week honoree Machinefabriek. The Machinefabriek cd was released on a label called Lampse, who we have decided is our perfect label. Every release is somehow in some way distressed, whether it's electronic, or lilting pop, everything is buried in hiss, or record crackle, the sound is murky or blurry, everything has that foggy distant sepia toned vibe that we can never get enough of, like Jeck or Basinski or Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek creates a mysterious sound world that hovers like a dear memory or a hard to recall dream.
This 7" is a strange one, as each side is split into 4 distinct fragments, each dark and dreamy in their own way, but also quite brief and way too fleeting. It's almost like a sonic slideshow, with just a few moments to glimpse each image, each sound. Side A starts off with some sort of wheezing harmonium, a music box like melody, with a haunting low end lullaby lurking beneath, the next movement begins with chiming bell like melody, lilting and dreamlike, under a glaze of static and crackle, all beneath a warm swirl of synth buzz and disembodied spoken word, part three is all strummed steel string guitar swathed in rumbling melodic grit, quite sweet and sad, and finally a sort of redux of the first track with a warm wash of forced air, a whirring mournful melody. The second side begins with a jaunty ice cream truck melody bathed in gentle chimes, all over a gently buzzing drone, part two is a swirl of shimmering guitars and chirping birds, the guitar sounding quite a bit like the intro to the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now" only stretched way out, while above drifts more buzzing steel strings and random found sounds. This slowly gives way to a murky soundscape with distant percussion, all crumbling and dark, drifty and dreamy but strangely ominous, and finally a mysterious little coda of chiming acoustic guitar, simple percussive thud and barely there glitch. So nice.
Elsewhere on this list we're reviewing the vinyl reissue of a long out off print cd-r featuring an AQ wet dream collaboration between Australia's Grey Daturas and Portland's (formerly SF's) Yellow Swans. Here we have a similar match up, but instead of those two bands butting heads in a dense noisy free for all, Maggoted is the secret rendezvous of just two like minded souls. Rob Mayson from the Grey Daturas and Pete Swanson of the Yellow Swans. You can almost picture the scene. Two guitarists, a bassist, drummer, keyboards, lots of noise, a big glorious ear splitting drone drenched racket, when Pete leans over and whispers in Rob's ear "Psst. You wanna go somewhere, umm, a little less crowded, you know, just you and me?" So the two secret off, and whip up their own private din. 30 minutes of droning grinding industrial free noise ambience, that ends up being as good as anything either one has done on their own.
There's definitely a like-minded approach to sound making shared by the Swans and the Daturas, obvious on their collaboration, and even more evident here when it's just one on one. Huge slabs of corrosive distorted whir, are separated by stretches of haunting tranquility, peppered with strange little sonar like tones, sort of industrial, a definite creeped out dark ambience, grinding and lumbering like Godflesh with all the metal removed, leaving nothing but a huge dense amorphous heaviness. By the end of the first 15 minute tracks, all the subtle dynamics and mysterious industrialism has been swallowed up completely by sheets of white noise and squalls of brutal hiss. The second 15 minute track follows a similar pattern. A dreamy muted drift, with boiling teapot high end skree way in the background, a moaning minimal drone right underneath, wavering and warbling below, with soft fluttering notes and lower register melodies drifting and swirling like whisps of black smoke. As the two meander darkly through this subtle sound world, a distant wave of white noise and damaged electronics threatens to overtake them, building into a frothing fury, before completely burying them in a thick swirl of cracked glitch and buzz and wild whipping streaks of grinding guitarnoise. Woah!
Packaged in a cool blue on black handscreened sleeve with photocopied insert.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, OF WHICH WE GOT ABOUT 40!!
- MPEG stream: One
- MPEG stream: Two
It's very rare that a band name cuts so succinctly to the heart of what a band is all about. So perfectly encapsulating the hate and misery and blackness of the music. Thus we have Make A Change Kill... Yourself, certainly doesn't trip off the tongue, but it's not supposed to, like the music, and the sentiments behind it, nothing here is supposed to be easy, or happy or joyful. It's meant to be hard, brutal, sad, dismal, hopeless, miserable. And it is, but on such a massively grand and epic scale it's sort of breathtaking. Huge mournful minor key swirls of buzzing guitars, ultra depressive and and strangely melancholy. Mostly midtempo, often trudging into downright doom, occasionally bursting into brief blasts of furious thrashing, but never for long, always settling back into a seething lurching blackened lament. Massive stretched out epics, the shortest track clocking in at 14 minutes, the longest pushing 30. Relentless double kicks beneath a black flow of downtuned Burzumic buzz, thick and rich and dense and dark, so emotional and intense, fuzz atop buzz atop blur atop whir, swaying and loping hypnotically. This takes the very best parts of Burzum and Xasthur and other blackened depressives to the next level, introducing a massive and majestic Godspeed element, as well as some incredibly catchy melodies, albeit still appropriately raw and black and grim, but they manage to float wraithlike, endlessly in your ears, in your brain, in your soul, like the ghost of a memory, a weird feeling of sadness and loss, that sticks in your head just as much as the bleak and somber melodies. Very rare for any music, let alone buzzy blurry black metal. Incredibly poignant, ambient interludes, ghostly female vocals, strange drone-y breakdowns, mysterious chimes and swells, brief glimpses of desolate soundscapes, all serving, along with the almighty BUZZ, to lead us even further down that dark path to nothingness.
BLACK METAL RECORD OF THE YEAR for sure!
It's kind of a dinosaur move, isn't it, releasing a live version of one of your classic albums later in your career? Didn't B.O.C. or Journey or somebody pull that one recently? But of course, this is the Melvins, the lords of surreal sludge grunge weirdness, who've ruled for years and shall never stop ruling. Which means they can do whatever the heck they want to do. So a live album devoted entirely to songs from their 1993 major label debut Houdini (a fan fave, if you ask this fan), recorded last year with Trevor Dunn (Fantomas/Mr. Bungle) on bass, why the heck not? And it delivers the Houdini live experience quite nicely, changing up some things a bit (song lengths, tempos, arrangements, track sequence) but not much really. "Night Goat" is even dirgier, "Going Blind" still the heaviest Kiss cover ever, and "Spread Eagle Beagle" remains a mindbending finale, undergoing further electronic mutations this time around. Overall though, these versions are nothing too radical, just a visit by Melvins circa 2005 to the material of Melvins circa 1993. It is a nice way to get reacquainted with an old fave. Guaranteed after hearing this you'll want to pull out Houdini and take it for a spin again too, feeling all fresh and new (or pick it up for the first time if you have never heard it before!!). So fans will want to check this out for sure, but we're of course more excited to hear whatever's upcoming from the even newer Melvins lineup featuring the two dudes from Big Business...
AS we mentioned elsewhere on this list, we were a bit put off by a rather blah live performance from these two Brooklyn based noise makers, but on record we're definitely digging them more and more. Two side-long epic noise jams, some transcendental long form psychsludge ur-drone of the highest order. Think Skullfower, Total, a definite Bower-ish wall of droning sound vibe, but with a thicker, grittier heaviness, that just sort of churns and roils like it's about to spill over and burn everyone alive. Not sure if guitars are the main musical implement but it sure does sound like guitar after guitar after guitar, thicker and heavier and noisier. Pretty dang great.
Hand screened covers. LIMITED TO 350 COPIES. Each copy is hand numbered as well and includes an insert.
Muse are probably best know for sounding EXACTLY like Radiohead, which is most definitely a shame, cuz they really are awesome. Unfortunately, the fact is they really DO sound exactly like Radiohead. What can you do though? The vocalist has a voice like Thom Yorke's and they have a thing for epic indieprog bombast, you do the math. BUT, and this is a very big but, where Radiohead have veered into mopey introspective misunderstood inward looking stadium rock, tortured geniuses who are exhausted by fame and who now find making music as painful as having teeth pulled or birthing a baby, Muse just fucking love to rock. The have big guitars, HUGE choruses, incredible harmonies and they write killer songs. Imagine the most rocking Radiohead tunes of old, maybe off of OK Computer or Pablo Honey, but even more supercharged and rocked up, then give the vocals a serious Queen-ing, and mix in a little new wave electronica, and you'll end up with something almost as badass as Muse. This new record finds them incorporating all sorts of various elements, Depeche Mode-ish new wave, Silver Sun / Supergrass style power pop, some proggy metal (check out the track "Assassin", WOAH!) all seamlessly blended into their kick ass, head banging, fist in the air superrock. They do have their sensitive side, they can craft some seriously moody mellowness (and in the process manage to sound even MORE like Queen) but their hearts are solid ROCK. Not sure why there guys aren't huge here, they sure are in the UK. Might be the Radiohead thing, could be the fact that they actually are pretty weird, maybe too weird for a lot of folks, like Radiohead's geeky new wave little brother, the one with spikey hair and a punk rock band. Either way, don't let any of that discourage you. If you're in the mood for some epic rocking electronic tinged super dramatic stadium rock majesty, check this out!
While supplies last, there's a bonus DVD, featuring their whole set at Glastonbury, playing in front off what looks like 100,000 freaking out fans! As well as a bunch of extra live and backstage footage including some pretty funny getting to the stage Spinal Tap silliness.
We listed the Graham Nash record Songs For Beginners a few weeks back, having only just heard it for the first time recently. Not soon after we decided to check out this one as well and were just as blown away. Our introduction to Graham Nash came not via Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but by the soundtrack to Rob Zombie's Devil's Rejects movie. You can read all about it in our review of Nash's Songs For Beginners record elsewhere on the AQ site. But in a nutshell, no, Graham Nash wasn't on the soundtrack, but Terry Reid was, and the three Terry Reid tracks on the soundtrack were taken from his best record, Seed Of Memory. And while all the Terry Reid records rule, Seed Of Memory is the most beautiful, the most country, the most haunting, due in no small part to Graham Nash's arrangement and production work, which, along with a recommendation from AQ pal Shayde, was enough to get us to check out some Nash records. Those in the know, tell us that Songs For Beginners and this one, Wild Tales are his best, and are both essential, and we'd have to agree.
Don't be expecting any far out weirdness. Nope this is just gorgeous, dreamy, sunny, singer songwriter soft rock, but with a definite dark, minor key and melancholy dreaminess running through it.
If you're familiar with the Devil's Rejects soundtrack, and for chrissakes you should be, any of these songs would have fit on there perfectly alongside tracks by the Allman Brothers, Terry Reid, the James Gang, Elvin Bishop, Joe Walsh and Lynrd Skynyrd. Perfect seventies FM radio rock, you can just imagine sitting in the backseat, on the way to Death Valley or the Grand Canyon with your folks, watching the desert fly by outside, just sort of daydreaming and drifting off. Sun dappled and windblown and sweetly fuzzy and totally evocative of lost childhood. Each song somehow carries the listener off to a world of starry skies, grassy fields, dusty roads, broken down cars, slow moving trains, long highways, all conveyed through a deft arrangement of soft jangling riffs, slippery lap steel, tinkling piano, Dylan-esque harmonica, totally dreamy harmonies, plenty of twang, but some serious rocking mixed in there too. The Eagles obviously comes to mind (as Nash's voice is often a dead ringer for Joe Walsh), as does Elton John, but it IS weird and dark enough to make us think of more esoteric folk troubadours as well.
But the bottom line is this is just a perfect pop record. The songs are totally catchy, sweetly melancholy, they sort of lope and drift, occasionally rocking out, but for the most part, Wild Tales is hot summer day, back porch, radio playing through the open window music. Or music for driving aimlessly along rainslicked streets, the radio on low, the streetlights casting strange shadows, driving all night, no particular place to go. There is a definite sadness about all of these songs, even when they're wrapped in the sunniest of pop. And a lot of it has to do with the idea of this as 'radio' music. Reminiscent of a time where the radio was where we went to hear new music, to be emotionally moved, to rock out, to listen to while parked and making out, to feel sad about a breakup or get pumped for a rock show, and because most of us experienced most of our radio listening in a car, the music seems to have evolved into a sound that inherently evokes feelings of displacement, travel, wandering and being lost as much as it does a loose and free rock and roll world of hooks and drums and guitars. The perfect soundtrack to any sort of journey, physical or metaphorical. Which is what makes Wild Tales so appealing. A musical look back, that sounds as fresh coming out of this computer, or your stereo at home as it did blasting out of the radio with the blown speakers in that crappy old car you got when you turned sixteen, just you and your friends driving around, windows down without a care in the world, thinking that there is no place in the world you'd rather be than right there. Nothing you'd rather be listening to. Than this.
Recorded way back in 2004, in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma, this is the latest from Digitalis mainman Brad Rose's solo psych folk project The North Sea. Utilizing a free folk arsenal of acoustic guitar, glockenspiel, melodica, kalimba, bouzouki, field recordings and a bunch of other stuff, Rose crafts glistening folkscapes of twang and drift. Less free and abstract than many of his sonic brethren, Rose often writes actual songs, with riffs and parts and lyrics, lovely lilting forest folk, that just seems to glow and shimmer. His soft falsetto drifting above lush steel string guitars and random sounds of nature, birds and wind and running water. But he can get loose and free with the best of them, offering up primal forest drones, rife with percussive clatter and steel string buzz, abstract ragas, plenty of soft shimmer and warm warble, but even those tracks are infused with a certain lyricism that ties them to his more song oriented side. So lovely. Definitely another essential addition to your already bursting at the seams modern free folk collection.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Packaged in a swank white digipak, with full color insert and pasted-on front cover artwork by George Parsons of Dream Magazine.
The last we heard from Loren Chasse's Of project (not to be confused with the similarly monickered duo Ov, featuring Chasse and his wife, our very own Christine) was on a cd and a cd-r released about the same time way back in the beginning of 2005. This latest disc is sort of similar to those two Of releases, in that they are a bit noisier, a bit more aggressive than Chasse's usual nature based ethereality. But on The Awful Cloud, Chasse has mixed up his darkest and heaviest and most active material to date, pushing even the boundaries of the already more belligerent Of. The opening track is like some sort of abstract free jazz being performed by black eyed demons in some fiery pit, filled with broken old drum kits and random bits of metal, a clanging, clattering, shuffling primitive percussive ritual, while all around these rhythmic freakouts hover Awful Clouds of corrosive feedback, warm whirls of fuzzy organ, a thick miasma of drones and whirs, incredibly dark and ominous and fierce. Who knew Mr. Chasse had it in him! The rest of the record is not nearly so prickly and abrasive, but the darkness and dread is equally as pervasive, just more subtly so. A dense roiling mix of organs and bells and vibrating strings and collaged found sounds, from shimmery soundscapes of keening hiss, simple melodies buzzing into reedy drones, to the cavernous dark ambience of the near 20 minute third track, some sort of slowed down guitar crumble, trudging glacially forward like some slithery black beast, surrounded by wreaths of warm pulsing chords and disembodied musicbox melodies, to the dreamlike expanse of the final track, gently picked guitar suspended in a thick gauzy lattice of muted organ and distant subterranean rumble. So lovely, but so so dark. Highly recommended!!
Packaged in a handscreened sleeve with a photocopied insert.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. WE GOT ABOUT 30 (we ordered 50!)!!
No doubt about it, Mr. John Dwyer is one prolific man. His currently most active endeavor is The Ohsees (aka OCS), and whether intentionally or not, it is very of the moment, and one of Dwyer's best. His partner in crime is local artist and musician Patrick Mullins. At times The Cool Death Of Island Raiders sounds like a dronier and even more stoned Ariel Pink... which we've been diggin' heavily. The album's title reminds us of those afterschool adventures we made up when we were kids, and the music is a lot like children's songs in a demented playground complete with occasional birds chirping.
Lots of shimmery cymbal and tambourine washes, off-kilter strummed guitar and unexpected visits from occlusive noise clouds, while through those clouds emerges layers of tweaked falsetto vocals. The somewhat goofily menacing back cover photo capture the album's mood pretty accurately, slightly unsettling verging on creepy but with a sense of humor at work as well. Produced by Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio fame the album is paced really well and shows that Dwyer's still got plenty up his sleeves. Oh and like all the OCS records, put on your headphones for an optimal listening experience.
David Tibet is an obsessive man, amassing a huge collection of books, records, paintings, and ephemera from his favorite artists, religious leaders, and cultural icons; and he often incorporates bits and pieces from that collection into the apocalyptic hymns of his band Current 93. A couple years ago, Tibet found himself awestruck by Om's first album Variations On A Theme and approached the stoned-metal mesmerists about working together. Through their correspondence, Om's bassist Al Cisneros found himself a contributor to the Current 93 opus Black Ships Ate The Sky, and then the two projects decided to produce this split 10". What you get from Om is exactly what you would expect: heavy-as-fuck bass lines, lumbering drum propulsion, and tranced-out vocal incantations very much along the psychedelic vein of Sabbath and the druggy side of Hawkwind. Normally Tibet sources out the guitar work on his Current 93 records to the likes of Ben Chasny, Michael Cashmore, or Tony Wakeford, but here he's picked up the guitar, the bass, and a ton of distortion to match what Om does on the other side. He proves that he too can muster a heavy doom-drone riff laced with caustic waves of distortion and feedback. Of course, his revelatory vocals emerge from the cyclical riffs as does a caterwaul of droning bagpipes. There have been a couple of different pressings of this single; and what we have is the domestic, blue translucent vinyl version.
Most of you have already smashed the add to cart button to bits before even getting to reading the review, so we'll keep this brief. A monumental match up of modern psychedelic masters from the NorCal locale. On one side is the mighty post-Sleep behemoth known as Om, a bass and drums duo who churn out extended sludge mantras, and on this track it's no different. A super fuzzed out doomy plod and groove. When we first threw this one, we accidentally had it on 45 and it sounded pretty dang killer and super blown out and weird, until the vocals came in and went all doom chipmunk on us. But at 33 it was even slower and heavier and dirgier just the way it was meant to be. Note: the track on this 7" is the bonus track from the Japanese version of Conference Of The Birds that we listed recently, so a few of you may already have this song! On the other side we have Ben Chasny and his Six Organs Of Admittance, who seem to be upping their own personal dirge quotient in order to compete with the sheer heaviness of Om. There is still some lilting folk, but it's buried beneath wild squalls of psych guitar freakout that sounds VERY Japanese (High Rise, Mainliner, Fushitsusha).
Definitely essential.
Through his DeepSkin imprint, the hermetic New Zealander Clinton Williams has released dozens of cassettes as Omit, housed in his obtuse artwork of bizzare post-Dali monsterisms and awkward geometric shapes. Due to the absence of Williams' artwork on this CD-R production of "Rejector," SySecular doesn't apppear to be the CD-R extention of the Deep Skin cassette catalogue. As Omit's work for haunted synth / loop constructions are incredibly well-executed and sublimely creepy, it's a shame that "Rejector" has only received CD-R status; regardless it's a more accessible format than the nearly-obsolete cassette. Omit's work has clear predecessors in '70s Kraut synthesists like Conrad Schnitzler, Kluster, and early Tangerine Dream; yet his apparently sinister intentions and sci-fi isolationism push his productions closer to the sounds of mid '80s Nurse With Wound (i.e. "Homotopy To Marie") and Zoviet France (i.e. "Mohnomische"). His work uses some amazingly simple techniques of counterpointed tape loops (crackling wood, creaking doors, down-pitched tape splice clicks, etc.) that warble in and out of phase with each other, while dark synth drones swell in and out of the mix to form slowly developed two or three note melodies. As with all of the Omit recordings, "Rejector" comes highly recommended! Super limited too, so don't dawdle.
Dreamy rare psych-folk from Norway 1970. Gentle, lilting female and male vocals singing through gauzy Eastern-inflected arrangements of sitars and flutes. There is a nice transported quality to the songs as they seemingly take you through imagined mythic geographies. The perfect soundtrack to float down the Nile in a boat made of reeds, or to prepare virgins for tribal sacrifices to erupting volcanoes.
We love so much music coming out of Finland these days. Last year Paavoharju's debut Yha Hamaraa on Fonal Records charmed us silly. If you haven't heard it yet, by golly you'd better get with the program! So we were mighty excited to hear that the group has returned with a 2-song vinyl 7", allowing us another fleeting glimpse into their unique gloriously hazy dream world. Side A features an enchanting blurry folk number with male vocals, while Side B has a delicate, contemplative instrumental. It seems almost cruel to release this group's music in such a short format, for their music is so immersive it's utterly addictive. More please.
First things first, we were pleased to see that fortunately Peaches has shorn her last album's copious facial hair, opting instead for a gold sequined head covering (tho' on the back cover we were dismayed to discover her spandex cameltoe in full bloom!). Not one to sit on the sidelines nor one to hold her tongue, she's juiced up her funky party pants and sidled herself up alongside the hip-electro-hop likes M.I.A. and Lady Sovereign. Now she strikes a balance between those gals and Le Tigre. She's broadened her vocal range with the extremes spanning from her trademark flat-line speak-sing and a more fiery Kathleen Hanna-style scream. Thick buzzin' synths and ball-crunchin' guitars surround her from start to finish. She's sure come quite a ways from her barebones pre-set button pushing debut Teaches Of Peaches. Still as lasciviously potty-mouthed fun as ever but with a heckuva lot more craft and oomph and guest stars too (Josh Homme, Feist and Joan Jett!).
Perhaps it's the most unlikely place to see a performance or an art installation, but the Chapel Of The Chimes in Oakland is a columbarium (an institution that houses cremated remains) that has developed a reputation for hosting artist's installations and sound art events within the dignified, if Byzantine architecture of the space. On the 2005 winter solstice, a handful of Bay Area sound artists performed at the Chapel Of The Chimes dedicated to the "friends in New Orleans," presumably in rememberance of Hurricane Katrina victims. Jim Kaiser (aka Petit Mal) was one of the participants at that winter solstice event, presenting a semi-improvised droned-out atmosphere to meander through the numerous rooms of the Chapel Of The Chimes. Using an array of bowed metals, broken electronics, and effects, Kaiser (who has also recorded extensively as French Radio and NFOrchest) accumulated a variety of fluttered vibrations and scraped tones into a spectral minimalism which parallels the eccentric drone extravangazas of the Taj Mahal Travellers and the obscurant British post-industrial ritualists Metgumbnerbone. Kaiser's drones manage a wraithlike quality without appearing ghastly or terrifying, rather they solemnly hang as a poignant if bleak rememberence to one of the great disasters witnessed by this generation.
Not sure what happened to Pink Mountaintops since their last record, but whatever it is, we're sure glad it did, because as much as we hated the first PM record, this new one, Axis Of Evol, is one grimy filthy bluesy drone folk garage dirge gem. Whether they're burning across lazy drawled sunbaked folk, equal parts Jandek, Dylan, Iron & Wine or muscling through a slowed down fuzzy growling garage blues, like a slowmotion Stooges, a more skeletal Green River, or a way druggier Velvet Underground, Pink Mountaintops have their mad sixties drug rock mojo going on BIG TIME. This sounds like it could be some unearthed East Village / ESP records / drug drenched drone-folk combo, the sort of band that would have opened for the Godz back in the day. Maybe it's frontman Stephen McBean's dayjob in the Sabbath worshipping Black Mountain that's rubbed off on his Pink Mountaintops, since this does actually sound like some sort of introspective Black Mountain morning after, stumbling, still hungover, bleary eyed and so elegantly wasted sounding. One track incorporates some drum machine, that at first sounds a bit jarring, but quickly settles comfortably into the murk and mire, a dreamy jam that sounds like some super lo-fi folkified Neu! Elsewhere, the jams occasionally build into epic swells of fuzzed out sound, reminding us of Spacemen 3, Loop, Black Angels, that sort of thing.
But at it's wild and wasted heart, Axis Of Evol is a slow burning, doomy, late night, garage folk, psychrock bender, guitars are dirty and jangly, steel string strum that emits a smoky haze of minor key bliss, vocals that strain and crack, warble and croon, not unlike Mudhoney's Mark Arm, over darkly skeletal acoustic guitar melodies, complete with squeaks and buzz, blasts of jagged distorted fuzz, creepy washes of synthesizer drone, all tangled up in thick swirls of shimmer and buzz. A gloriously doped up, laid back, stoned and blown-out drug rock sprawl.
Oh man. Seeing that immediately recognizable Sub Pop single logo/design bring us right back to the glory days. That black strip across the top, with the Sub Pop logo in the upper right hand corner. The white text, the songs split up by the 'b/w'. We totally remember collecting singles by Mudhoney and Tad and Love Battery and Nirvana. Joining the singles club and anxiously awaiting the next single to show up in the mail. Checking the mailbox every day. Seeing the little upcoming releases announcement panel in the single you just got telling you about all of the killer singles you would spend the next 6 months anxiously awaiting. Man, those were the days. That Sub Pop singles club was pretty fucking excellent. Sure there were a few lame entries, but even those were at least weird. And some of the best songs of the last twenty years were first heard via those 7"s.
Not sure if the club is still an ongoing concern, or if it's just a sporadic sort of thing, but how awesome is it to get a Sub Pop Pissed Jeans 7"!!! It just seems to fit. Pissed Jeans are like OUR Black Flag. Sort of. But c'mon, snotty and punk and super rocking. Perfect for a Sub Pop single. And it almost sounds like they purposefully made their sound MORE Sub Poppy for this release. The A side is a creepy dirge with moaning bass and keening high end feedback, with super tortured vocals, a feral crooned howl, the whole thing sexy and slithery and dangerous. It almost sounds like a bluesier, punkier Green River! The B side is a short blast of pounding sludgy garage rock scuzz, with buried vocals, simple punk rock drums, and a wildly grinding crunchy guitar sound that just kills!
The return of ex-Pentagram axemaster Victor Griffin's born again stoner doom outfit Place Of Skulls, and damn if this ain't the best one yet! In the past we've always been a little bit wishy washy about Place Of Skulls. Sure, they sounded great, whether Griffin handled the vocals himself, or even better when he handed the mic over to Wino (Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan), but the songs just weren't that memorable. If we needed our Christian stoner doom fix, we could always turn to the almighty Trouble, but there was still something about Griffin and his band that kept us coming back, hoping that maybe suddenly, one day it would make sense and we'd be knocked out cold. Well, it never really happened. That is, until now. The sound is still perfect, if anything, fuzzier and more stone-y, heavy and super rocking, but the songs this time around are killer. The second track "Sense Of Divinity" might be one of the best stoner rock tracks ever. Sounding like some lost Acid Bath recording, dark and droning, a huge Trouble-some riff, with awesome psychedelic leads, and Griffin's voice, wow! We never would have guessed this was the same vocalist, a killer croon that sounds stronger than ever, still raspy and raw, but with way more emotion. There are plenty of slow songs too, all jangly strum and warm laid back groove, that sound quite a bit like Alice In Chains, which we don't mind one bit! In fact this whole record sounds like a gloriously perfect mash up of Trouble, Acid Bath and Alice In Chains, with some of the sludgier parts reminding us of other NOLA heavyweights like Down, Superjoint Ritual, Crowbar, etc.
Fans of all things Pentagram, Wino, stoner rock, Sabbath worship, NOLA sludge-groove as well as all you Christian doomsters who have worn your Trouble records to bits should be all over this.
Highly Recommended!
Most of us here at AQ are avid cyclists, in fact Andee's ladyfriend even owns her own bike shop. San Francisco is a great place to ride bikes. But apparently Portland is even better. And not only do they ride bikes, but they play them as well. The Portland Bike Ensemble, flip their bikes upside down, attach contact mics, plug into amps and go to town! A strange and wonderful world of clicks and scrapes, moans and creaks, a percussive wonderland, metal bits are struck and rubbed, bowed and plucked, spokes are played like a metal harp, frames are rung like bells, a gorgeously abstract junkyard percussion cyclescape.
This lp collects the Ensemble's first two performances, as well as a side long track originally released on a super limited Jyrk cd-r (so limited in fact that we never got any). LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one is hand painted and includes a photocopied insert with liner notes and stuff.
There are times when lengthy reviews are warranted, necessary to make the correlative argument that the record really must be that good for us to slave away at such a monumentally long review; but then there are times when we really can't go on too much, because the available stock of the album in question is so small as to make a long review overkill for a release that will be gone in no time. For better or for worse, this Colin Potter double cd-r falls in the latter category as It Was Like This... was originally available for sale at the June 2006 Nurse With Wound shows in a tiny pressing of 100 copies. Of course, the bulk of the stock was sold during the feeding frenzy at the merch table at those two performances; but a few copies remained, and Colin didn't have any desire to lug 'em back to England, so Aquarius had the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time... Of those 100, we've only got a dozen or so. But what you'll get are two discs of exceptional live sets from the Nurse With Wound engineer par-excellence focusing upon his mutant electronics, rhythm box experiments, and glacial drones. As good as it is limited.
NOW AVAILABLE AGAIN AS A REPRODUCTION OF THE ORIGINAL DELUXE 3LP METAL FILM CANISTER SET WHICH EARNED THE ALBUM'S NAME!!!
Here's what we wrote about this earlier:
It's a piece of history that none of the current staff were old enough to remember, yet nostalgic fragments about the initial arrival of Nevermind The Bollocks at Aquarius Records back in 1977 occasionally emerge from conversations with our old school customers. By now it's probably as factual as any urban mythology; but as it makes for such a great story, I'm much more inclined to believe it than what may have really happened. With record distribution back in 1977 even less streamlined than it is today, Aquarius resorted to using an importer to ship copies of Nevermind The Bollocks from England. The import company in question did not have a direct route into San Francisco from London, and thus had to drive the boxes up from Los Angeles. This shipping detour gave Aquarius the opportunity to throw a big party in anticipation of the album's arrival, with attendants rumored to include Crime and the Residents (in full Eyeball costumes squeezing within the confines of Aquarius' then Castro Street location). To heighten the suspense, Aquarius had arranged with the driver of the truck to call up the store every 30 minutes or so to let everybody know his progress up the I-5: "Just passed Bakersfield." "Made it through Coalinga." "Yup, I'm in Tracy."
Yet, I feel the story could end with the truck crashing somewhere near Pleasanton, as I've never felt that The Sex Pistols' music lived up to their massive cultural cache and spectacular publicity stunts. John Lydon's uncomfortable fixed stare, sneered cultural heresies, and theatrical madness (which, in fact, was lifted from Richard Burton's performances as King Lear) always appeared to be destined for greater things than the Pistol's musically thuggish simplicity. Within The Sex Pistols, John Lydon had control over the Pistol's syntax, spewing threats against royalty and decent society at large; but there was little room (and even less ability) to explore the far more challenging proposition of igniting the sound of Lee Perry and Can with the powderkeg of punk. Internal politics and Malcolm McLaren aside, Rotten needed to form Public Image Limited.
Flanked by Keith Levene on guitar and Jah Wobble on bass, Lydon began PiL with two perfectly complementary musicians to pursue his aesthetic goals, as Levene's spindly shards of metallic guitar splatter acted as the textural counterpoint to the rhythmic centrality of Wobble's low-slung dub basslines. While this line-up inevitably imploded (and with it the success of Public Image Limited), the Lydon / Levene / Wobble core for PiL reached its creative apex during their second album, originally released back in 1979 as a 3LP housed in a metal film container. PiL's second, more economical pressing of the self-evidently titled Metal Box garnered an equally self-evident title Second Edition. As a whole, this album hasn't easily been upstaged in its synthesis of dub production techniques, stealthy disco grooves, and punk antagonism bathed in Situationist critique. Second Edition opens with Wobble's huge rolling bass in Albatross which finds Lydon straining to sing with a swooping baritone to match the song's unwavering plod. Yet Lydon's viperous snarl returns for the rest of the album, which picks up the pace considerably in building their signature 'death disco' sound. All around Second Edition is an unnerving, complex album that was never the cultural force Nevermind The Bollocks was but is clearly the artistic masterpiece in Lydon's career and one of the quintessential post-punk albums.
These guys dropped into the store and left some records for us to check out and holy shit did we have our asses handed to us. It's very rare that we'll hear a split lp with two bands we've never heard of, that will knock us for a loop, BOTH bands kicking serious ass, but here you go. There seems to bee some sort of Colorado connection (Angel Hair, VSS, etc.) and you can hear it once in a while, but this is a lot darker and lot heavier. Both bands have a similar sound, so much so that you could be forgive for assuming they were the same band, but closer listening reveals lots of important differences. Rabbits are some sort of modern version of big ol' post punk sludge groove, hard not to hear some Scratch Acid in there. Ultra grimy downtuned guitars, super dense and mathy arrangements, woozy basslines, blown out fuzz guitar, growled/shouted Yow-like vocals. Almost like a way darker, way more punk pelican in a way. Which is most definitely a good thing.
Under Mountains counter with their own furiously dense and heavy, sort of sludgy post-math rock. Lots of angular guitars, some strangely Maiden-ish moments here and there, super complicated drumming, heavy and sludgy but also groovy and pretty dang catchy. They, like Rabbits, could definitely fit comfortably alongside the modern crop of instruMETAL rockers, but both bands, especially UM are a lot mathier and grimier. Reminded us a bit of the recent more rock releases on Rise Above, like Capricorns, Taint, etc.
Killer stuff!
We only just discovered this bizarrely named outfit, this being the third release in almost as many lists, but they continue to kick our asses, and ruin our hearing, and send our minds a spinnin'! This is tripped out, stumbling jazz-flecked psychedelic skree. The drums are the thing. Huge and heavy, complex but not overplayed, relentlessly hard hitting but somehow at the same time sort of jazzy as well. They form the massive framework that supports wild wah guitars, sheets of corrosive acid riffing, swooshing synths, garbled vocals, wild squiggly tangles of distorted melodies, and thick washes of squealing feedback. This is Hawkwind unhinged, er... MORE unhinged. A totally psychedelic freakout, that only occasionally blisses out into weird stumbly lo-fi shimmer, usually only to lurch back into a doped up frenzy moments later.
Cool silkscreened orange and green sleeves with a photocopied insert. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
It was a happy day at AQ when we saw that two of our favorite Steve Reich pieces of all time were now finally available again. Both recorded in 1970, one at the Guggenheim in NY and the other at the University Museum in Berkeley. This is electric organ overdrive! Four Organs not surprisingly is a piece played on four electric organs (with Reich playing one as well as his good friend Philip Glass... we hope that someday we can get a cd issue of Glass' "Music in 12 Parts" which is maybe his best ever and has a very similar feel to these two great Reich pieces), while beneath the organs is the repetitious shaking of maracas. The short pulsations of the organ gradually stretch out, lasting longer and longer, creating a totally dynamic tension that evokes standing in a massive and grand church that's empty except for the mesmerizing sounds of the organs lulling you into some sort of a trance. Phase Patterns manages to increase the tension with the four players using identical organs and playing to a precise strategy that Reich has calculated. These pieces predate and predict so much of the minimalist electronic and experimental music to come over the next three decades, and are well worth checking out again!
Okay 'new weird America' obsessives, drone nerds and limited vinyl fetishists... on your mark, get set, go! Vinyl only. Limited to 400 copies. Already sold out. We have the last 30 copies we could get. Features members of the Double Leopards and the Magic Markers. And to top it all off, it's actually also pretty darn great. Slowly drifting, warm murky ambience, the drone-y haze barely obscuring the moaning of distant feeding back guitars, simple atonal strumming, machine like creaks and simple muted percussion. All smeared into one fuzzy indistinct whole. Blurry guitars stretch into vast expanses of ambience and found sounds, eventually getting more active, scraping and squeaking, never enough to disrupt the droning dreaminess, while the original guitar seems to thicken and distort into a pulsing and throbbing slab of super thick drone. Nice!
Wow! This is the week for awesome band names, the Chord Fort, Flittermice Of Eld, Maggoted and now The Shitty Listener which might be one of the best band names EVER.
The Shitty Listener is Jason Honea from from the Jewelled Antler outfits The Child Readers and the Franciscan Hobbies, as well as the Chord Fort, the Knit Separates and Teenage Panzercorps, along with some guest guitar from our very own Kerry McLaughlin.
This is an ultra personal abstract ambient artifact, equal parts super intimate crooning vocal and whirring mysterious drone. Recorded on a shitty handheld minicassette recorder which gives all of the multi part, nine minute epic "The Cloud Fort" (not to be confused with Honea's other band the Chord Fort) a super murky, haunted lo-fi vibe. Each part is brief, but beautiful, a blown out shimmering ambience that is soon joined by Honea's way in the background falsetto, before the music drops out completely, and then it's ALL vocals, bare and alone, sweetly singing, lightly draped with reverb, but for the most part super naked and intimate. The next stretch sounds like it could have been lifted off some old Jewelled Antler release, a thick textured soundscape of field recordings, and subtle dronings. Then there's some downright indie rock riffing that seem like they would maybe sound out of place, but here they don't, a cool minor key jangle that gives way to another stretch of even MORE intimate vocals, with no reverb or any natural ambience, almost like one of those cassettes you find in a thrift store packed with some aspiring singer's solo vocals. So intense and weirdly voyeuristic. The disc winds down with a murky, whir drenched snatch of easy listening bliss out that just trails off into the hiss of the tape recorder. So nice.
A gorgeously packaged cd-r. Full color cover, with a dreamlike painting on the cover, a textured paper insert, and the disc is professionally printed and is quite striking.
Only 9 minutes long, but also only six bucks!
It seems like a lot of the black metal we've been digging lately has been of the 'tortured anguished vocals' variety. Sterbend from last list is probably the most obvious. But Marblebog too. Also Hekel elsewhere on this list. But go back a ways and you can find plenty of black hordes who not only buzz grimly, but howl and wail as if their souls were trying to escape from their bodies, Bethlehem, SF cult legends Weakling, and of course Silencer. This record isn't really new, and actually we have been trying to track down copies of this forever. Silencer are spoken of with hushed reverence, and for good reason. Death - Pierce Me is dark and damaged, grim and suicidal miserablist doom-drenched black metal of the highest order. Talk to any of the current crop of the black metal elite, Wrest from Leviathan, Malefic from Xasthur, and they will fawn unabashedly over Silencer. Thankfully, Autopsy Kitchen have stepped up and rescued this all time black classic from oblivion. And now you can finally experience one of the original black cults who expressed their blackened misery through impossibly anguished vocals. Hysterical shrieks, frenzied and overwrought howls of absolute terror. Never has a band captured grief and misery and loneliness so perfectly and in such an utterly frightening way.
But it's not just the vocals, the music is completely intense and seething as well, with an unrestrained turbulence, dense and buzzing and so emotional and personal and overwhelming. Heart rending minor key melodies emeshed in black swirls of buzz, the riffing so intense and totally manic, exposing a tortured inner world wrought with drama and tension, a dark soul exposed, a damaged personal hell expressed through shriek and buzz. The anguished blasts of blackness are separated by dark doomy ambient passages, from simple mournful acoustic guitar to droney piano fugues to simple melodic doom metal minimalism, but when the riffs and the vocals kick in, a huge brutal blackness dropping on you from above, it's the sort of musical moment that gives you chills, makes your hair stand up on end, and in the right frame of mind makes you want to just break down. Which is precisely why Silencer and Death - Pierce Me are so revered, this record set the template for ALL depressive suicidal black metal to follow, and while some have come close, Xasthur and Nortt certainly, there is just something so special, and so utterly frightening about this record that keeps anyone from ever capturing the same black musical world of abject fear and unmitigated misery.
We've pretty much totally fallen for these guys. Big time! Initially we were lead completely astray by a friend who described them as a classical pianist / grindcore drummer duo. We were expecting something like that weird Dave Lombardo record where he drums along to Vivaldi. What we got was much different but no less satisfying. A demented dark grind band with a pianist who added all sorts of unlikely tonal color, and weird melodic flourishes. On their second ep, they ditched the grind completely and replaced it with some sort of damaged cabaret, with super dramatic vocals, insane piano, and all sorts of swirling jazzisms. Well, here we are at ep #3 (what is it with the ep's guys?) and they've gone and done it again. It's almost like they're a different band each time. But there's always something that links all their disparate musical personalities no matter how tenuous. On House On The Hill, Silentist are some sort of doomy, gothy slowcore band. The opening track is a loping dirge, simple shuffling drums over a rumbling bass drone and drawled sung spoken vocals, with occasional bursts of anguished howls and extra-pounding drums, almost like a much more malevolent Codeine with some distinct Swans influence. The second track is equally as dark, but is a super dramatic sort-of-industrial version of the first song, music box melodies, weird distorted electric piano, grinding fuzz synths, pounding drums and moaned baritone vocals, that also occasionally shift into black metal screams. Imagine some neo-classical, black metal Birthday Party and you might be close. Very dark, and very creepy and strangely psychedelic. Heavy too, but not like metal heavy, more sort of dense and disturbing. This record is almost like the perfect mix of the first two, wild whiplash grind and super glammy cabaret, a blackened glam grind maybe? Some tracks are sweeping and epic, some are blasting and chaotic, but always the interplay between the drums and piano manage to hold it all together. Dreamy minor key melodicism jammed up against lightning fast blast beats, howled tortured vocals draped over sweetly melancholy ambience, dizzying and confusing, but so fucking great.
Now here on cd! Here's What We Had To Say about the vinyl version a few years ago:
This 3 piece from Oakland CA play arty, chaotic, somewhat dark, noisy sort-of-punk-rock. The influence of electro, goth, darkwave, new wave and post-punk all do battle in a Sixteens song, and the outcome is inevitably a draw. Not surprisingly the trio are friends and musical allies of SF local scary ones The Vanishing, The Phantom Limbs, and Black Ice. Intense girl and boy vocals over hectic, deranged sludgy noise. 8 songs = 51 minutes.
The debut solo album from percussionist / vibraphonist about town (and beyond) Ches Smith! He's built quite a name for himself as both a studio and touring percussionist. Perhaps you've seen/heard him perform with the likes of Secret Chiefs 3, Marc Ribot, Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich or Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant? Congs For Brums is comprised of ten explorations in rhythmic and dynamic progressions incorporating a broad spectrum of percussion instruments, both the conventional and the less so. The works range from the absolutely stark single strike per instrument tour at the beginning of the second track "My Motherfuckin' Roda!" to the more fleshed out full kit rush of "Metal Vacation" to the resonant vibraphone tones of "The Clarinet In B Flat" (uh, there is no clarinet!) and "Mental Vacation". A particular fave is a repeating segment of track #5 "Homemade Posi" that brings to mind a drunken camel. While this disc may not find itself on regular rotation in your living room, it's so well recorded that we'd bet that pieces of it are going to resurface as prime sample material for many other musicmakers.
Rather Ripped is a rather right-on title for this new SY album. Stripped down and back to basics, the core group of SY is back (Jim O'Rourke is out) and have made a totally great rock record. Poppy and catchy, but without losing their knack for soundscapery skree. Kim Gordon sounds more present and commanding then she has in a while (and a lot less whiney and singsongy), and Thurston is at his dreamiest and most laidback. This is the first SY record in ages to immediately seep into your soul after only a few listens. The great thing about SY is how they truly are A BAND. The sum of their parts comes together to create something WAY more fully realized then any of them could make on their own. Lee Ranaldo sings his song with so much intensity and his guitar sound remains totally, unmistakably his. Steve Shelley continues to keep the beat simple and solid, letting the rest of the band stray and wander. And of course Kim & Thurston are right up front effortlessly demonstrating that it's totally possible to age with dignity and passion while continuing to seriously rock. While it seems like some folks stopped listening to SY at some point in the past, "their last good record" (Daydream Nation, Dirty, etc.), the truth is, that unlike almost any other band around, Sonic Youth have been making really great records for the last quarter-century (totally check out recent under appreciated outings like Murray Street and Sonic Nurse). There is an ethos and undying spirit in their songs that continues to thrive and grow, change and mature, and it still gives us goose-bumps and has us throwing our fists into the air!
Here's the second cd-r release from this fine Bay Area electronic artist. The eight instrumental tracks on Dead Things are somewhat darker and dreamier than those of his debut Black Top Wash from 2005. Sound Asleep aka Conor Vincent Ghilarducci does what he does exceptionally well, possessing an impressive grasp of layered textures and moody atmospheres. Check it out!
We were a little put off by the band name, quite a mouthful, but we were super psyched when we got an earful of these guys' super aggressive, epic, post metal crunch. Tough to stand out these days in the super saturated genre pool that is metallic post rock but these guys manage to pull it off big time, borrowing equally from nineties post rock, crusty sludge, epic instrumental chamber rock, and then adding in their own 2 cents. Obviously fans of Pelican and Mogwai and Isis and Snowblood and all that stuff will want this. But there's a whole lot more going on. Some Morricone-ish spaghetti western twang, complete with harmonica, some Krautrock-y groove, some bits of twangy slide guitar, thick swaths of fuzzy drifting guitar ambience, dizzying angular riffing, dense tribal drumming, buzzing almost new wave sounding synths, some long stretches of moody indie jangle. But it's the bands' deft hand with melody and songwriting and arrangement that makes this record so moving. The focus is way more on mood and texture than heaviness or brutality (although it is occasionally both heavy and brutal), with the epic slow builds often taking up the majority of a song, or a crushing dirge suddenly collapsing into the prettiest dang melody you've ever heard. And c'mon, let's mention the slide guitar again. We're such suckers for the slippery dreaminess of slide guitar. We sort of wish it was everywhere, on every song, but as it is, when it does kick in, we get goosebumps.
So yeah, there's always room for one more on the post rock epic metal sludge bandwagon, as long as they're doing something new and different with the sound, and thus working hard to knock someone else off.
It seems like there are a million bands these days doing their best Spoon impressions. And who can blame then? Spoon are awesome. It's no surprise bands want to sound like them. And who can complain really? We love their dour moody groove and propulsive indie jangle. So the more the merrier. As long as it is in some way acknowledged that they were the first, and remain probably the best at being, well, Spoon! But there was a time, when that dynamic was reversed, when Spoon were the ones cribbing their sound from another band. They weren't alone though. In fact some of your past and current faves were right there along with them. Crafting hauntingly oblique angular indie jangle, whispery loping verses and huge crunchy choruses. Sound familiar? You're thinking Nirvana maybe? Nope, but Nirvana were one of the those bands who also borrowed a critical element of their sound from one of the most influential indie rock bands of the nineties. We're of course talking about everyone's favorite outsider indie, loud/soft rockers the Pixies. The band who singlehandedly launched a million bands. And then of course tons of THOSE bands launched a million more.
Back in 1996/97, Spoon were offering up their own take on the Pixies sound. Sometimes it's uncanny actually, Spoon frontman Britt Daniel's crackly croon a dead ringer for Frank Black, the band's loping, muted guitar shuffle and bombastic choruses sounding like they could be some elusive Pixies B-side. In fact the Pixies worship on display here is almost too much for some. Even around here, a bastion of massive Spoon love, a few Spoon fans just can't handle how Pixie-ish these records sound. But heck, every band borrows, the key being to infuse the borrowed sounds with ideas and music that are distinctly your own. And in that respect these two discs are completely brilliant. The seeds of what would blossom into the Spoon we know and love, planted in the rich soil of all the Pixies bombast that came before. Personally, we didn't really notice the Pixies thing until it was pointed out to us. Instead, we dug these records, mostly because they happen to feature Spoon at their most rocking. Imagine Girls Can Tell or Kill The Moonlight supercharged, a little more chaotic and scrabbly, a bit more, dare we say, punk sounding. The guitars are more raw, Daniel's voice is a bit more scratchy and less croony, the arrangements are much more ROCK and a lot more dynamic. It's still Spoon, so there are hooks everywhere, but they're wrapped in big jagged guitars, the drums pound and the production is definitely a hint at Spoon's studio experimentation/mastery to come. On one of our favorite tracks, "All The Negatives Have Been Destroyed," voices and weird sounds careen all over the place in the background, while the band kick out the jams on a track with one of the catchiest choruses ever.
This double set collects the 1996 Telephono full length and the 1997 ep Soft Effects, which features one of our other favorite Spoon tracks "Waiting For The Kid To Come Out", a classic Spoon track for sure, but like the rest of the tunes here, much harder edged and just way more rocking. In fact a few of us here, if forced to pick, might just claim these discs as our favorite Spoon records ever.
Fans of Spoon who have yet to hear these discs will flip. And if there are somehow, inexplicably, some indie rockers out there who have yet to discover the glorious joy of Spoon's dark moody pop world, or for some reason, wish that Spoon would let loose a little more, well then, this here set should pretty much set you straight!
Packaged in cardboard gatefold, housed in a cool two sided slipcover.
To be totally honest, when we first heard the name Starving Weirdos, we definitely weren't expecting to like it. It was a strange name, that didn't seem to suit their strange abstract sound. The name seemed goofy, while the music was dark, and ominous, and fucked up. But then something strange happened, like it has so many times in the past, the Flaming Lips is a prime example, something just clicked and suddenly they couldn't bee called anything BUT the Starving Weirdos. And that music, could not have been made by anyone BUT those same Weirdos. We never had any sort of qualms about the music though. From the very first note, we realized these guys were on to something. Something pretty, and something really strange and unique. This latest missive comes to us from the Sound & Fury label in Australia and demonstrates the Weirdos' continual quest to explore and get lost in their music. It's hard to sound totally unique, especially when you're trafficking in the overpopulated world of abstract free noise or whatever, but the more we listen to these guys, the more distinctive their sound becomes and the more fascinating their approach to making it seems. These three lengthy tracks show three distinct sides of the band, each one drastically different, but still inexorably linked to the others. The first track sounds a bit like the Dead C setting up and tuning up in some giant airplane hanger. Clatter and clanks, crashes and thumps, reverberate into the ether, every sound wrapped in thick layers of natural reverb, while floating delicately around these strange percussive occurrences are keening streaks of high end, that just sort of shift an shimmer, while all around chimes and bells ring out. Like walking though some big empty building made entirely of metal, while all around you the bits and pieces of the building spontaneously ring and chime and resound. The second track is less clattery and abstract, instead, thick thread of warm vibration runs through the track, some sort of buzzing bombinating string, that stretches into forever, while all around it, various other instruments vibrate sympathetically, building to a frenzied ur-drone, before the vibrations begin to taper off until it's a barely there afterimage, hovering in some nether world before blinking out completely. The final track is a return to the metallic land of the first track, but now that huge metal structure is crumbling all around you, like the sound of metal raindrops, clang and clatter, a percussive free for all, while beneath, a gentle lilting minor key melody is stretched into a longform drone, that continues to drift dreamlike even after the metallic clatter has died down, eventually becoming shimmering sheets of singing metal, ringing out brightly and then slowly fading away.
Packaged in a red textured paper sleeve, held shut with a black wax seal. The cd is housed in a printed inner sleeve, each disc with an individual piece of band made art. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, each disc is hand numbered.
While the world is definitely poised for a Sufjan backlash (what with all the effusive praise and overexposure), truth be told he is one damn fine songwriter and not many people would be able to have a record of leftovers as satisfying as their record proper. This is in fact leftovers and outtakes from the recording of his last album, Illinois. And well, if you liked what you heard there, here's even more pop goodness, a super satisfying second serving. More lush arrangements, catchy melodies, and smart delivery. But we don't really need to say too much to help sell Sufjan these days, the music speaks for itself. When we first got this in and put it on we sold three of them in about a minute. With nearly 80 minutes worth of outtakes this had the potential to be ALL filler and not enough killer but it turns out that even his cast offs are chock full of pop perfection. We wish everyone's left overs tasted this good!
This one's a bit puzzling, innit? The Bubblecore label's dipping their toes into the realm of Bulgarian gypsy music? Somehow it seems less odd when you discover that the band Storsveit Nix Noltes is from Iceland. The case being that unpredictability is certainly a strong point of many an Icelandic artist. Anyways, we'd by no means claim to be Bulgarian music experts, but to our relatively untrained ears this does sound pretty darn respectful and authentic... and pretty darn enjoyable too. Love the lively brass arrangements!
We sure do love Finland. And boy do we love slow motion sludgy doom. So it makes perfect sense that this here disc would find its way into our grubby gloomy doom loving mitts. Stumm are a glacial power trio that traffic in that sort of harsh ugly crusty death doom dirge sludge we've come to dig so heavily. We just can't seem to get enough. It's metal sure, heavy and downtuned, but a lot of the appeal, very much like the blurry buzz of black metal, is it's proximity to pure drone! As the guitars get lower, and the songs get slower (or conversely faster and blurrier) riffs become stretches of slow shifting sound, hypnotic and dare we say soothing. Not entierely like a doom metal Steve Reich or a sludge Terry Riley. Most of us would just as likely fall asleep listening to the most recent Moss record as we would a Coleclough or Chalk record. And Stumm are carrying on that fine tradition. A harsh raw nihilistic doom metal that drones and buzzes and pulses, slithers and lurches more than it rocks.
There's got to be a way to designate sheer impossible dooominess. In the past we've just added more 'o's to the word doom, 20 'o's, 40 'o's, but where does it end. Eventually there will be a band so slow and sludgy, the whole review will be a single word, doom, but with 11,342 'o's. We're tempted to give Stumm a rating based on the multiple 'o' doom scale, but this this disc is not just a single sludgy smear of sound, it's definitely doooooooooom (let's stick with 10 'o's for now), with most of the record, stumbling and staggering, all druggy and dizzy, a 16rpm creep through a thick forest of buzzing E strings and drumming that sounds like it's being dumped out of the back of a cement mixer. But here and there, the clouds part, revealing a bit of sky through the dense canopy of oppressive heaviness, be it a bit of clean guitar or some warm warbly bass... hell, who are we kidding, those moments are so brief and fleeting they're only there to lure you in and set you up for a massive pumelling, frozen like a deer in the headlights, looking skyward, eyes reflecting that tiny glimmer of sunlight, before moments later Stumm take your head clean off with a spiked and sludgy iron bar, as a million 'o's begin to rain down from the sky, like metallic black hail, burying you beneath a crushing, suffocating mound of doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.............
4 songs. 35 minutes. Mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, Phantomsmasher / Atomsmasher, Flux, OLD, etc.)
This record seems like it was made for AQ. A scientist, Bob Sturm, attaches microphones to buoys to record different oceanic events. These events translated into sound become gorgeous deep drones, and haunting alien soundscapes. Right up there with the singing telephone wires of Alan Lamb or the subtle vibrations recorded by Toshia Tsunoda. A natural phenomenon that can be studied and explored as sound. That would be enough right there, since the sounds speak for themselves. Gorgeous shimmery ripples, dark muted metallic buzz, if we didn't tell you, you'd probably believe this was some strange limited drone cd-r or a new release from Jonathan Coleclough or Andrew Chalk. But Sturm is a scientist, and these sounds are just one part of his study of the ocean, the atmosphere and their behaviors. So the booklet is packed with serious scientific data, graphs, measurements, algorithms and photos. Included is a research paper AND a Flash presentation on the "sonification of ocean buoy spectral data" originally presented at the 2002 International Conference On Auditory Display held in Kyoto, Japan. Holy crap. This is some dense stuff. But even if the science is way over your head, or all you want is some deep dark mysterious music, then dig in. The track lengths tend to be short, but they manage to blend into long stretches of drifting dreamy drone, very minimal and soft focus, many of the tracks have a strange metallic tang, that sounds more like some alien reverb, giving the drones a steel string like buzz, a few tracks are much more active, high end hiss, and prickly fuzz, but for the most part, the oceanic data translates into huge cavernous rumbles, delicate glistening murmurs, or soft billowing clouds of whirring vibration. So completely captivating. And for the drone obsessed among you, absolutely essential!
How can you not love a drone compilation whose tagline is "A musical journey that transports the listener into glacial and unexplored lands where icebergs collide and where everything is frozen?" If you're anything like us (and we think that you are) then the answer is YOU CAN'T!!! Can't NOT love it that is. This limited cd-r compilation is the first release on the Glacial Movements label, an entirely appropriate monicker if you hadn't figured that out for yourself. Some of the names are familiar, Troum, Aidan Baker, some aren't, Tho-So-Aa, Lightwave, Tuu, but they all explore similar barren landscapes of sound, some are frosty and desolate, some are more warm and dark, but this comp is an isolationist drone freak dream come true. Closing The Eternity (who recently released a 7" on Drone Records) start things off with a brooding and buzzing expanse of glistening dark ambience crafted from vibraphone, icewater sounds (!) and hundreds of bells and chimes. Those bells and chimes drift across wide stretches of rumbling shimmer, very evocative of some frozen wasteland. Northaunt are up next with a piece for processed piano, a whirring soundscape of fuzz and hiss and shhhhhhhhhhh, very warm and dreamy, a lot like a more ambient M83, super soft and billowy but with a slightly ominous undercurrent. Tho-So Aa's track is so quiet, it almost sounds like a field recording of a walk through some abandoned city, distant sounds drift in and out of earshot, subtle shuffles and various found sounds surface, about halfway through the music overtakes the natural ambience, deep cavernous rumbles, a softly beeping sonar like tone, all wrapped in delay and echo, like walking through a seaside town thick with nighttime fog. Lightwave chime in with a mix of electronics and "atmospherics" which ends up sounding like a drifting exploration of some murky undersea world, muted and darkly sparkling. Tuu give us seven minutes of slow shifting minimalism, a single note/tone that seems to twist and squirm until it breaks apart into glistening shards of high end shimmer. Next up is AQ faves Troum, with a 12 minute drift through some lost land, a soundscape rife with all sorts of non musical sounds, creaks and groans, clatter and thump, super dark and menacing, a little bit reminiscent of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste, a similar feeling of drifting lost across the sea. Up next is another AQ fave Aidan Baker (Nadja, Arc, etc.) whose track is maybe the dreamiest and warmest on the comp. His track almost should have been last as it sounds like the clouds parting, the sun finally breaking through, after a long and harrowing journey through darkness, a rich swirl of dreamy drones and softly shifting melodies. But it's right back into the pit with Netherworld, an ultra minimal soundscape constructed from field recordings, old gates (!), synths and samples. Like traveling through some mysterious cave, no light, only sound and touch to guide you, so pretty, but so haunting. Finally a long slow trudge to the end of the disc from Oophoi, a wash of rich rumbling synths, a lonely sorrowful sound, rife with darkness and isolation. A glacial expanse of frozen sound.
Essential for the drone inclines among you as well as fans of all things dark and ambient.
Under the curatorial vision of Phil Mouldycliff, 13 artists embarked on a sound-art exhibition at the Bolton Museum, Art Gallery and Aquarium, whereby (to the best of our understanding) the artists were given access to the Museum's collections of natural artifacts to use within the installations and as sound making devices. In turn these installations (which also involved paintings, drawings, prints, sound, and sculptures fabricated by the exhibiting artists) became something of what Mouldycliff qualified as an "accumulation of fragments." The participating artists included Colin Potter, Loren Chasse, Keith Rowe, Max Eastley, Russell Mills, Julian Lees, Peter Oakley, Tom Phillips, Colin Fallows, Hugh Davies, Glenda Lees, Paul Mason, and Phil Mouldycliff.
As none of us had the good fortune of experiencing the exhibition, we can only comment on the catalogue (which artfully presents the numerous ideas behind all of the contributing artists) and the accompanying CD which features a mix of material produced for the catalogue by Colin Potter of various sounds produced by Rowe, Chasse, Mouldycliff and himself. As the disc begins, it's apparent who is the creator of those first sounds: AQ-fav sound artist Loren Chasse as he presents a delicate crackling of natural tactility above a rarified drone of accumulated environmental ambience (i.e. surf and wind), very much sounding like those heard on his The Air In The Sand release. The ominous shadows and oceanic rumbles which Potter has employed so successfully in Nurse With Wound, Monos, and Ora act as the glue holding the entire composition together, with Keith Rowe's small yet growling machines and vibrating strings only occasionally emerging from the din. Mouldycliff's contributions are a little harder to pinpoint, as we're honestly not all that familiar with his work (sorry Phil!). The disc itself is a wonderful listen, and certainly continues along what Mouldycliff intends, as "pathways through the assembled clutter as if exploring a debris field on the bottom of the sea."
The humble drum machine. It's had a tumultuous existence, equally loathed and loved, no more so than in metal (where for the most part it tends to be loathed). Without it, there's be no techno, or hip hop, or grime or industrial music. Or maybe there would be, but it would sound drastically different. It opened up a whole new world of sound, allowing musicians to program beats and sounds that they couldn't necessarily play or make themselves. So it was only a matter of time before extreme musicians discovered the sort of speed and brutality one could wring from that little box. It's nothing new, metal bands, grind bands and the like have been using drum machines for ages, but as extreme music gets more aggressive, more fucked up, more complex and more extreme, folks making this sort of music are pushing the limits of what a drum machine can do. Before, a band couldn't be any faster than their drummer could play. Now there is no limit, 100 bpm, 200 bpm, 300 bpm or more, speed is now no longer an issue. Nor is arrangement. Now a deft drum machine programmer can fit millions of beats and an insane number of different rhythms into a one minute song. Faster, more furious, more freaked out, we love it. From the murky blackened dizzyingly complex mechanical drums of black metal outfits like Draugar, to the pounding industrial grooves of Godflesh, to the lightning fast blasts of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, we can't get enough, we love the sputtering stuttering pounding skittering drum machine. Not as a replacement for real drums, and a real drummer (lord knows that usually the best part of seeing a band live is seeing a kick ass drummer totally destroy) but as another tool in the already formidable arsenal.
So here we have Drum>MachineGun, an audio report on the current state of grind. And metal. And more specifically, just what these grindmetal freaks are doing with their drum machines. And what they're doing is totally fucking mind blowing and face melting and completely confounding. Forget about music you think is fast, or heavy, or complicated, or freaked out, or fucked up. Because whatever you think, these songs, and these bands are more. Much more. 20 bands playing 67 songs in 73 minutes. Average song length about a minute. Average number of parts per song? More than our puny minds can handle. If you could imagine the most insane, most complicated, heaviest weirdest grindmetal band in the world, this comp is the record they would make. Each band linked in some ways, sometimes obviously, sometimes not so. But it makes for an incredibly cohesive listen. Which is rare for comps in general, especially one with 20 bands and almost 70 songs.
Probably our favorite discovery amongst the bunch is Noism, who might possible be our new favorite band. Imagine a group that sounded like a skipping Pig Destroyer cd. Or like multiple Agoraphobic Nosebleed cds playing at the same time. A totally mind blowing freaked out shredfest, impossibly convoluted rhythms, bizarre and brutal riffage, splattered all over the place, but sometimes lopping and skipping into bizarre industrial metal breakdowns, like a death metal Oval or something. Drum patters that are mind blowingly complex, and chugging squiggly guitars that somehow sync up perfectly. It's like a super scratched up, skipping grindcore 45, played at 90 rpm. We are dying for more than these 5 minutes. Then there's Jet Jaguar Kr3 Kill Spree, maybe the weirdest of the bunch. Imagine any of the other bands on this comp, having their blasting grind picked apart, chopped into tiny pieces and then flung haphazardly into a swirling black froth by V/VM or someone equally demented. An industrialized black metal music concrete. There are riffs and harsh vocals and all that but they are scattered amidst all sorts of bizarre sounds, damaged FX, and random looped samples. Some familiar AQ faves are present as well as a whole bunch of bands we'd never even heard of but were immediately blown away by. On the familiar side, BIG faves Black Mayonnaise, who we hadn't really expected to find on this comp, but they do indeed employ the machine made drums, although BM use them much differently. A sludgy ambient freaked out drug dirge world of fucked up home recorded doom. Noxious ambience, dense clouds of grinding guitar grrr and swooping FX drenched synths, all over a relentlessly pounding simple machine made beat. Like Hawkwind with a drum machine, or a super blissed out on-the-nod Butthole Surfers, a deliriously dark lugubrious creepy crawl. And no drum machine grind comp would be complete without Agoraphobic Nosebleed, the patron saints of mechanical grind, the lords of drum machine destruction. A technical grind metal juggernaut, who choose to instead indulge their industrial techno jones here, spewing forth a thick wash of pounding doom drenched gabber, with creepy vocal snippets, whirling clouds of synth fuzz and lo-fi hiss, all over a relentless 4/4 pound. Then there's Nemo, who we last heard from years ago on a split cd released by the now defunct Rage Of Achilles label. And we went absolutely apeshit for their new wave video game death metal grind. Wishing for a full length that never came. Thankfully not much has changed. If anything, they've gotten weirder and faster and more fucked up. It's like classic eighties metal chopped up and sped up, splattered with drum machines, run through some 16 bit video game system, and then performed by some grind metal super group. Yowza!
On the new to us side of things, there's Mecha Bongzilla, who we're tempted to believe is Bongzilla's faster, less stoned alterego, but it's a bit hard to tell. One track is downtuned buzzing blurry techgrind, but with INSANE vocals, like some alien gargling with a mouthful of kazoos and croaking frogs. Although their other track is downright sludgy and doomy so who knows? Also, Mad Cow who spit out weird echoey blast beats and spastic rhythmic splatter underneath thick sheets of low end guitar grind and super fucked black vomit vocals. Oh and a bunch of bird calls, monkey sounds, and a totally bizarre sped up super affected Elizabeth Clare Prophet sample right in the middle!!!! Woah!
Ok, it'll probably be easier to go through the rest of the bands in list form:
Artificial Intelligence Agency: more of a strange series of interludes, mostly weird sound effects, movie snippets, found sounds, bizarre FX, and only the occasional bit of music, and it's NOT metal, more some sort of weird ambient porno funk.
Voltron: chugging super fast gurgling vocalled death metal grind, with guitars and vocals so indistinct they are just blurs of low end sound and of course lightning fast drum machine blasts.
Submachine Drum: murky lo-fi industrial grind, so fast it's all a dizzying blur of hyperspeed drums and looped processed guitar riffs.
Slough: Not related to the similarly named Slough Feg... and take away the Feg and you've got a guttural grindmetal shred fest. Impossibly downtuned guitars, all a growing gurgling blur.
Scumfusion: some seriously shredding grind, but with plenty of wheedily lead guitars, grinding sludge metal riffs over ridiculously fast rhythms and super weird processed vocals, that sound like some underwater alien. Surprisingly melodic, but still furious and fierce, pounding and pummeling.
Prosthetic Cunt: We reviewed these guys' full length ages ago, a gleefully perverse and sick sick sick take on ultragrossoutgrind. Super blown out guitars and a drummachine cranked to 11 and programmed at about 300 BPM. And of course lots of goofy movie samples.
Ocrilim: No comp of insanely technical grind would be complete without some Mick Barr madness. Ocrilim is Barr (Orthrelm, Octis, Crom Tech) shredding wildly to sputtering spastic machine drums. SO insanely inspired but incredibly hard on the ears. In a good way.
Nerve Not Found: Prog gone grind. Keyboards swoop in and out of super complicated arrangements. Like the Locust covering Magma.
Hellz Army: Pounding DHR style industrial gabber. Big static repeating guitar riffs and pounding four on the floor drum machine pummel with bizarre samples of fifties rock, Space Ghost and tons of other random weirdness.
Genghis Tron: We sure do love these guys. Imagine Slayer sped up to impossible speeds, a grinding super technical satanic death metal, then mix in a bunch of fuzzed out new wave synths, hip hop breakbeats, samples and prepare to have your mind melt.
Decomposing Serenity: These guys represent the old school. Super blow out death metal gore grind. Downtuned riffing, chugging guitars, machine made blast beats, and a vast array of gurgling, strangled, alien, monster growls. Bits of this are almost even funky, making them sound at times like a gore grind Chili Peppers.
Data Clast: Another grind new wave hybrid, but with a bit of a prog bent. Heavy and super pummeling but with plenty of thick fuzzy synths, and convoluted song structures, complex arrangements, and processed guitars that skip and stutter as much as they riff. And of course some huge slow and low grumbling monster gurgle vocals.
Cocoon: Stretched out industrial black ambience, one of the few tracks whose drum machines are more a part of their whole vibe than the driving focal point. Crackling, rumbling drones, clouds of drifting glitch, and shuffling stuttering rhythms, an ominous dreamlike subtly drum machined drift.
This is the kind of record that leaves you bruised and bloody, beaten and exhausted. Like having the musical shit kicked out of you. This is a seriously intense bout of heavy listening. Hard listening. Nothing easy about this at all. Super furious, totally relentless, loud as fuck, faster than a speeding bullet, grinding and gurgling and bellowing and blasting and skipping and looping and crushing and pulverizing and pummeling and shrieking and shredding and so goddamn amazing.
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