Monno are definitely a noise rock band. In fact, we're not even sure if they are a band, so maybe they're just noise rock. But actually, this doesn't really rock in the traditional sense, so maybe it's just noise. But the thing is, it's NOT. Monno ARE a band. And they DO rock. And they are about as noisy as a rock band can get. They produce a dense sonic squall that sounds like someone took Merzbow, Total, Skullflower and SUNNO))), chopped em all up, sprayed them out of thousand watt speakers, at a drummer who head down, resolutely pounds his way through a dense cloud of caustic, skin peeling, ear shredding noise. Rock. There are occasional riffs, and they totally slay, like a way more blown out Scratch Acid, and there are massive slithering low end bass grooves, but then the vocals, holy fuck, it's like some feral howls being run through a million distortion pedals with dying batteries and broadcast through a wall of tweeters with broken speaker cones. All wrapped in barbed wire-like swirls of shrieking tangled feedback. So harsh and heavy and so fucking great. Fans of Violent Students, Butthole Surfers, Clockcleaner and just loud fucking rocknoise in general will dig this in a big way!
Packaged in an oversized black on metallic silver booklet, with original artwork from Dennis Tyfus (who runs the Ultra Eczema label!).
Dronologist and sometime string plucker Geoff Mullen, whose fantastic thrtysxtrllnmnfstns we so recently highlighted, is back already with his 2nd full-length compact disc, this time on the Last Visible Dog label, which makes perfect sense. Maybe murkier and even more abstract (we're pretty sure he's playing guitar, but we don't hear any back-porch banjo here) than his debut, The Air In Pieces features eight tracks, each one for the most part a gentle, slowly unfolding ballet of dense, deep drones and whispering vibrations from below. It's the music of subterranean behemoths, Lustmord-like whale calls, sleeping, dreaming, but very physically present. Material that could perhaps be spooky, but in Mullen's hands all this low-register distortion is bent towards light-filled blissfulness. We're very pleased. Two for two for Mr. Mullen, and neither record really sounds entirely like the other.
We sure do love Slim Cessna's Auto Club. One of our favorite shit kicking, country punk creepy folk ensembles ever. Hailing from the lovely land of Colorado, which also of course gave us Sixteen Horsepower, Woven Hand and Boyd Rice, Slim and his crew are like some wandering band of wild testifyin' redneck gypsies. Slim's mainman and musical sidekick is one Jay Munly, who when not helping create the freaked out end of the world apocalyptic country rock of the Auto Club, spends some quality time on his own making his own music much more personal and somehow WAY weirder. The vibe is certainly similar, but Munly on his own is way more of a loose canon. Mixing fifties rock, with bouncy pop, indie rock jangle, mumbled country blues, his voice swooping from Buddy Holly croon to weird falsetto and back again.
On this, the recently reissued debut from 1996, Munly seems to still be feeling his way around. Or alternately, and maybe much more likely, he just doesn't give a fuck and we just can't get it unless we climb into his head, which we probably won't do cuz it's scary in there. Shambolic and gloriously indifferent to any overreaching sonic theme, Blurry is a series of tweaked pop vignettes. The country twang that would define so much of Munly's later output is hardly present at all, instead this is some sort of damaged indie pop. Fans of Ariel Pink might really dig this, as it is sort of the same ultra personal cracked musical universe. Super lo-fi but surprisingly catchy. We like!
Remastered. Limited to 100 copies.
We sure do love Slim Cessna's Auto Club. One of our favorite shit kicking, country punk creepy folk ensembles ever. Hailing from the lovely land of Colorado, which also of course gave us Sixteen Horsepower, Woven Hand and Boyd Rice, Slim and his crew are like some wandering band of wild testifyin' redneck gypsies. Slim's mainman and musical sidekick is one Jay Munly, who when not helping create the freaked out end of the world apocalyptic country rock of the Auto Club, spends some quality time on his own making his own music much more personal and somehow WAY weirder. The vibe is certainly similar, but Munly on his own is way more of a loose canon. Mixing fifties rock, with bouncy pop, indie rock jangle, mumbled country blues, his voice swooping from Buddy Holly croon to weird falsetto and back again.
De Dar He is record number two, originally released in 1997 and what a difference a year makes. The twang is now in full effect. You can hear the sound that would later blossom into Munly & The Lee Lewis Harlots as well as Slim Cessna. It's still lo-fi and a little bit scattershot, but the framework is now much more distinctly country. Accordions, harmonicas, steel string twang, the whole deal, but Munly's tweaked pop sensibilities are still plenty present giving these tracks the sort of twisted humor that made us dig him in the first place. While the debut was much more of a random damaged pop gem, this is definitely more of a cool country hoedown, wild and wooly, foot stomping, fiddle sawin', definitely the first step on Munly's path to his future as a swoonsome dark and twisted country folk troubadour. Awesome.
Remastered. Limited to 100 copies.
A quick look at the Aidan Baker / Nadja website reveals 100 or more recordings, most super limited cd-r's and almost all of them out of print. With that much recorded output, and of what we've heard all amazing, you'd think Baker and Nadja would be household names, at least among the drone-doom-death-dirge set. That day might fast be approaching with so many new, much more readily available releases. This list alone features THREE new Baker releases (two of course incredibly limited, DOH!): two separate Nadja's as well as a solo record.
This Nadja, released on the Utech cd-r label, is limited to 200 copies and comes in a cool stamped and numbered cardstock sleeve and is, guess what? Totally beautiful. The reason we love Nadja so much is that your every day run of the mill doomy sludge is somehow rendered, lovely, pretty, gorgeous even. The sound is thick and heavy and low, but it's suffused with some ineffable warmth, something that makes the sludge sound impossibly sun dappled. Could be the lilting melodies, the drifting disembodied vocals, the fuzzy blissed out production. Regardless, the sound of Nadja almost has more in common with My Bloody Valentine and M83 than SUNNO))) or Boris. It is definitely dirgey, but it's also subtly poppy and just so pretty. Nadja are so good at crafting that perfect otherworldly, drifting away, sinking to the bottom of a fuzz filled sea sort of sound, that we can never ever ever get enough of.
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Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get more (or even subscribe to the series) from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
We couldn't have asked for a more mighty meeting of the drones. Nadja, a long time AQ fave who traffic in SUNNO)))-like dirge, but manage to infuse their glacial soundscapes with surprising warmth as well as all sorts of unlikely glisten and shimmer. Teamed up with Fear Falls Burning, who recently gave us a super limited lp called The Amplifier Drone, which was, as the title suggests, a disc of amp drone and rumble, distorted guitar smeared into dark ambient whir. So what happens when the two team up? Hard to explain exactly. It's definitely, dark and dirgey and droney. But it's also soft focused and moody, dreamy and dense, with strange melodies and drifting percussive elements hovering below the downtuned trudge. In fact, this isn't sludgey so much as it is dark and slow and lovely. Ominous and melancholy, the music here is a lugubrious, abstract, thoughtful journey, guitars distort and crumble, drift and flutter, the drums are a constant pound, but not heavy, just a sort of rhythmic demarcation off in the distance, and through the foggy murk, one can hear all sorts of sonic subtleties. The coolest part is that the main riff is constantly being shuffled and jogged, a skipping loping loop like quality, a hiccup that gives the rhythm and vibe a strange tweak, almost like the doom sludge version of a DJ rewind, the affect is just further disorientation, like someone keeps walking by and bumping the turntable, but somehow perfectly in time with the music. So dark and creepy and perfect.
Original artwork on deluxe hand silkscreened sleeves. The LP's are pressed on super thick 180 gram vinyl and housed in thick plastic sleeves.
The Necks are one of those rare bands that we could literally listen to forever. Their sound is just so perfectly hypnotic and so well suited to extended listening. If they invented a new format, where a band could release say, a 24 hour long song, the Necks are the first band we would think of. In fact they actually have played a 24 hour show. We keep hoping it will get released, although the epic scope might be lost split up over 24 discs.
This here is the Necks 13th release in about 20 years. And for a band to stay true to their sound for that long, while remaining viable and listenable and exciting is testament to the Necks' unbelievable skill. For those new to the Necks, imagine a three piece jazz ensemble, bass, drums and piano (although, on Chemist, for the first time ever, guitar is introduced, played, oddly enough by drummer Tony Buck), who specialize in extended longform pieces. Ultra minimal, slowly shifting epics, a single riff, a single motif, repeated and looped and subtly colored over the span of ten minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes even 24 hours. Totally mesmerizing and hypnotic.
Chemist is the most rocking Necks record we can remember. At least the opening 20 minute track. The groove is much more upfront, driving, propulsive, like a stripped down jazzed up Can or Faust. Loping, groovy, mesmeric, small flurries of piano drift and flutter over a super solid bass and drums groove. In fact, this almost sounds like a jazzier version of Finnish drone rockers Circle. The same sort of endless riffing and perfectly propulsive rhythm. The second track is much more spare and straight up jazzy, a soft shimmery shuffle, the final track while not quite as aggressive as the opener, does have a similarly relentless rhythm that turns the jazzy drift into something almost 'rocking'. Hard to say this is our favorite Necks record, as we pretty much love them all, but this is definitely the most aggressive and thus pushes a different set of buttons. Necks fans obviously need this. But some of you Circle / Salvatore fans who are up for something a little more dark and jazzy and moody might just dig this A LOT.
A couple people asked us/told us about this before we got it... apparently word-of-mouth among cult black metal mavens was strong early on! And all their hushed queries and whispered expressions of awed enthusiasm are well deserved, we discovered, once we heard it ourselves. This is definitely NOT just another run of the mill black metal album. Negative Plane somehow have captured something more ancient and strange than usual in their music. They have a real "old school" mystique about them, that Venom / Celtic Frost / Bathory feel, yet at the same time this is infused and infested further with an especially alien weirdness, a bit of the same vibe as Nordic avant-gardists Ved Buens Ende. The album is drenched in effects, rendering the rasping vocals into an internal, infernal dialogue with themselves due to the amount of reverb, echoing in collusion with the music to make extra-effective what's otherwise indecipherable.
And though so seemingly raw and olden, there's a lot more "going on" here than with some of the dronier black metal efforts we've heard -- these tracks are full of complex runs, twisting turns, sudden changes. And sheer atmosphere is not neglected. Neg Plane's doomy vibe, their church organ tones and eerie melodies, are one important aspect of this record -- lashed with tons of FX to their other aspect, raging riffage, you've got an underground cult already established, the duo of Nameless Void (guitar/vocals) and Bestial Devotion (drums) requiring servitors rather than mere fans. Very special.
Oh boy, is this one absolutely beautiful record. The UK's Rameses III, who we've raved about in the past (and whose previous releases are now all sadly unavailable) team up with Digitalis head honcho Brad Rose aka The North Sea, for a total dream drenched blissout. There's nothing really ominous or dark or creepy about this at all. Instead this is warm and thick and so so pretty. Long lazy drifts of muted melody float weightless beneath soft cotton candy clouds of gauzy ambience, fingerpicked guitars surface here and there, just long enough to release a few notes, melodic fragments that just hover in the air before gently settling and drifting away, floating lazily like leaves in a mountain stream. Elsewhere, slow swells of chordal shimmer are woven into fuzzy soundscapes, while strings swoon over the top of everything, just another subtly sweet layer in a truly divine sonic tapestry.
So totally gorgeous.
Packaged in a beautiful Touch-like digipak, a single flowered field on one side, a lone dandelion clock, most of it's puffy white seeds lost to the wind.
OM....OM... OM . . . O M . . . .
Their debut last year, Variations On A Theme, was heralded by many as the second coming of Sabbathy stoner/doom legends Sleep. No surprise, considering that Om consists of two thirds of Sleep, and pretty much sounds like two thirds of Sleep too. Same low-end bass (Al Cisneros), thundering drums (Chris Hakius), and druggy, chant-like vocals (Al again, stepping up to the mic). All that's missing is the guitar (Sleep guitarist Matt Pike is busy with High On Fire right now). We gave that album the thumbs up, won over by the psychedelic trance-like heaviness of their jams and their mantrically soothing yet (to us) unintentionally amusing singing, which made us giggle 'cause it just never let up, delivering endless deadpan lyrics of cosmic hippy nonsense in a zoned-out monotone. We don't want to say it was so bad it was good, 'cause it really wasn't bad, but there was some of that kind of bad/good alchemy going on. And we ended up lovin' it.
And of course, the resemblance to old faves Sleep helped too.
Now Al and Chris are back with the second Om opus. It's simultaneously a heckuva lot like their debut but even better somehow. Productionwise, yes. And also perhaps 'cause while the two-piece line-up on Variations sounded like Sleep without the guitar, and maybe (heck, definitely) would have been even better with a guitarist, now they've made that lack of guitar seem more the ways things should be, by getting more and more hushed and spacious and mimimal here, thereby making it seem like just bass and drums is enough, not like something's missing. They've made a virtue out of a necessity, realizing that by really adopting a "less is more" aesthetic they'd be playing to their strength. And it works. Listen to it straight through (you'll want to... it's two tracks, about 33 minutes) and you'll find it quite floatational, even without chemical assistance. This riff-repetitive spaceout drone dirge drug is all you need. And Al's lyrics remain occultic, obtuse and slightly absurd, giving this the effect of a hypnosis tape meant to help build your vocabulary (along with heightening your conciousness). He uses such everyday words as "clesiast", "epison", "aurican", "tunnement", and "agurate". It's heavy rock that requires a heavy dictionary to decipher!
So if you liked the first OM, you'll love this. And if you weren't sure before, definitely check this one out. As with their first album, file with Sleep's Jerusalem, Electric Wizard's Supercoven, and UFOmammut's Godlike Snake.
OM....OM... OM . . . O M . . . .
Former Pitchfork scribe tackles this definitive gloom classic. A glimpse into the darkness behind the darkness.
There is something so thrilling about Burmese instrumentation. The Nai Htaw Paing Ensemble are regarded as masters of traditional Mon music. Using instruments like the Kyam (known as the crocodile zither, a 3-string zither with frets shaped like a crocodile), the Batt Kine, a row of around fourteen pitched gongs, and the Mon violin, a three-string fiddle that's played upright. While this isn't as damaged or fucked up as some of the music from Burma we've gotten our hands on in recent times (like the amazing Mandalay Marionette Music disc we listed at the end of last year), this is still pretty amazing. A really nice example of the more traditional yet still totally fascinating feel of Burmese music.
Warning: NOT FOR EPILEPTICS!!! What's probably the best-yet dvd release from the Load label brings together a bunch of animations from the Paper Rad comics/video/art collective, whose hyper-kinetic, colorful aesthetic relies heavily upon what must be a mega-collection of childhood pop-culture memorabilia, y'know, stickers and stuffed animals and those plastic trolls with the dayglo hair and Muppet Babies and so forth. Animated with intense strobe-effects and eyeball-searing hues, in constantly-moving symmetrical patterns reminiscent of Eastern mandalas, these graphics are some seriously psychedelic shit. LSD for your DVD player. So awesome, yet a bit overwhelming after a while, which is why it's nice that part way along the the viewer is offered a bit of a breather in the form of a very deadpan, nonsensical narrative, wherein things slow down to examine the lives of three very odd flatmates, living in what may or may not be the middle of nuclear Armageddon. In the context of the rest of this disc, this segment almost seems "normal." Stepping up the pace again, other highlights include music vids for The Usaisamonster and Lightning Bolt side project Wizardzz, both bands whose spazzed music fits perfectly with this stuff. Highly recommended for those who'd like to try a potent dose of ocular insanity, but again, bewarned, potentially seizure-inducing!
If there was ever a band suited to the double lp format it would be Pelt. Their massive drone raga epics can fill a cd in a blink of an eye. Theirs is the sort of transcendental inner space music that you want to drift on for ever and ever. So four side long slabs of glacial buzz and dreamlike drift is just about perfect. Each side a slow shifting swirl of buzz and whir, thick layers of shimmering swaying creakling crumbling colossal sound. Epic expanses of grinding bombinating active ambience. On Heraldic Beats maybe more than any other Pelt record, the band get seriously fierce, kicking up super caustic walls of gritty guitar and harsh feedback, huge Total like dins that often (but not always) settle down into more familiar moody murkiness. Neo Appalachian guitar hero Jack Rose is in there somewhere, as Pelt is his musical day job, but he's not channeling Fahey here, instead, he's possessed by the spirit of Haino, spitting out huge surges of molten guitar skree which the band then twists into dronelike shapes. Most of this disc occupies the dreamlike raga space we've come to associate with Pelt, but there is most definitely plenty of supercharged blown out psychedelic freakout scrabble and skree, that fans of SUNN, Skullflower, Fushitsusha and the like will find well worth checking out.
Packaged in an ultra deluxe full color gatefold and pressed on super thick vinyl!
The label describes The Phantom Family Halo as sounding like Alice Copper, Black Sabbath, Tangerine Dream and Marc Bolan, or Scott Walker fronting Roxy Music. Phew, it's hard not to think this might be the best record EVER given that description. And while this is pretty darn good, it's not quite all that.
The first thing we actually thought when we heard this was Black Mountain. The same sort of seventies hard rocking hippy groove thing going on. Drawled vocals, fuzzy guitars, lazy and laid back, stoned and wasted. But PFH add a healthy dose of spacey synths, drifting new wave ambience, and a bit of a glam swagger to their seventies groove.
It never gets all that HEAVY, and we hear very little Black Sabbath if any at all, but we DO in fact hear PLENTY of T-Rex and Roxy Music, dramatic crooning over swirling glammy grooves and shuffling in the pocket percussion. Definitely the perfect fix for your seventies glittery hard rock stoned groove addiction.
The weirdest thing about this group is definitely the membership/pedigree though. One member is also in a Venom style metal band called Dead Child along with Dave Pajo, as well as drumming for an outfit with a forthcoming Siltbreeze release. While another member was a touring member of the reunited Slint and just happens to be Brian McMahan's (of Slint) little brother.
Super limited. Hand silkscreened. Vinyl-only first edition.
You always gotta have a kick ass summer pop record. Even better if it's totally insanely glammy and catchy and bouncy and just a little snotty. And this latest blast of pink and black clad teenage kix hits the spot in a big way. We first heard the Pink Spiders on the internet as seems to be the trend these days. Their WAY big budget video for the insanely catchy Weezer-esqe "Little Razorblade" was making the rounds. Hard to resist for sure, not only was it a killer slab of synth drenched BIG guitar power pop, but the video featured a bevy of scantily clad ladies on roller skates. Summer indeed!
Teenage Graffiti may be heavy, with crunchy, slightly new wave guitars n' lots of fuzzy squelchy synths, and glammy too, with lots of snotty swagger, references to Hollywood and hairspray (and the band has a goofy over the top fashion sense, sort of bubblegum Melrose, always clad in black and pink), but at it's heart this is POP. Big bouncy super catchy POWER pop. Definitely shades of AQ faves the Stereo and post Stereo outfit the Let Go. And like most power pop the 'Spiders owe quite a bit to Big Star, Queen, the Posies, Weezer, Jellyfish, Sloan. But the Pink Spiders take all that classic pop and filter it through their own distinctly teenage vibe. Lots of playful melodies, handclaps, harmonies, jangle guitar, lyrics about girls and crushes and girls and Hollywood and girls, oh and girls and most importantly, big crunchy riffs and killer hooks. Fun and carfree and super rocking. If we had a big pink convertible Cadillac you know we'd be cruising Valencia street blasting Teenage Graffiti at full volume!! Pop record of the summer!!
I can tell you this about Priestess: they're one kick ass live rock n' roll band. I saw 'em on a bill not long ago with heavy metal revivalists The Sword -and- Early Man (both of those bands hotly tipped, and by us too!), and y'know what? Priestess simply DESTROYED both The Sword and Early Man, good as they were. Priestess were just the better live performers, working the crowd and wowing with musicianship and showmanship both. They had rock star swagger, and the skills to back it up -- guitar pyrotechnics, harmony vocals, and some darn catchy real riffy rock n' roll songs. Oh yeah, and a really frickin' good drummer, whose non-sucky *drum solo* definitely put Priestess over the top (in more ways than one) in competition with their tourmates that night.
I'd never heard of 'em before and was pretty darn impressed. Turns out they were from Montreal, and had an album out in Canada, not yet out in the States... well it's here now, this is it. I bought the Canadian version at the show, and didn't even listen to it for a long time 'cause I figured that they couldn't really live up to that live experience. And it's true to some extent, the album doesn't blow away Early Man's album, for instance, the way they did to the band in person. But it's definitely a good, honest-to-God hard rock album that you'd want to blare loudly from your (hypothetical, in all likelihood) Camaro as you put the pedal to the metal.
And having said that, get this: it's non-ironic too, near as we can tell, which also might explain why they had the advantage over those other two bands at that show (and by the way, it wasn't just that show, I saw 'em again opening for Dinosaur Jr. and Comets On Fire, and they were pretty good too, though suffering from the usual opener's lack of energetic crowd response, specifically due to the lack of a crowd at that early hour). Now how can a band like this be non-ironic, you ask? A band so partial to the cowbell, and clearly with visions of stadium-sized showmanship already hard-wired into their songwriting? Maybe 'cause they're Canadian? For whatever reason, their punchy and emotional three-minute pop hard rockin' songs are presented with more authentic feeling (to these ears) than, say, obvious comparison Wolfmother does it.
More about their sound: despite their name (which, unfortunately, conjures the image of an all-female Judas Priest cover band, doesn't it?) they're far from being an '80s retro metal band. More bluesy '70s, and less metal than that. The stoner/grunge thing is closer to the mark. Yeah, a bit White Stripesy at times like Wolfmother, also all AC/DC and QOTSA at others. Can't wait to see 'em again! In the meantime, we'll be spinning this...
The latest album from this Anacortes art pop one-man band is quite a departure from his previous full length, last year's decidedly more conventional pop Carousel Waltz. You might say Good World is a very Deerhoofian affair, if perhaps less adventurous, more wistful and with the added ample squeaky quirk of woodwinds. Think: more of a docile merry-go-round than a loopy rollercoaster ride. Band leader Ryan Bouchard's high pitched twee vocals coo up close to the winky clarinet and wheezy accordion while slightly haphazard percussion and other found sounds loosely populate the rest of each mildly eccentric tune. This fleetingly short album (it's only 22 minutes!) may very well please the ears of those who luv the abovementioned Deerhoof and maybe Xiu Xiu and Frog Eyes too. Gentle, tweaked pop prettiness.
The madcap post-modern musical quartet from SF have returned! They bring with them their trademark bulging grab bag of homespun instruments and styles such as zydeco, vaudeville, exotica, swing jazz, Appalachian folk, swamp blues... the list is endless. Musically they're often quite reminiscent of the eccentric'n'eclectic Captain Beefheart, Ween and Frank Zappa. Vocally, they possess the disgruntled yet endearing gruffness commonly associated with the likes of Tom Waits. The big picture is usually quite loosey goosey in mood, razor-sharp irreverently witty lyric-wise, but always expertly and imaginatively performed. Really, who can resist a song about one of the Mission District's icons -- the late night saviour of three-sheets-to-the-wind growling bellies, the Tamale Lady!! Note: Greatest Hits is actually an album of all brand new songs, not a best of per se... 'though we guess time will tell if the album's title rings true. Nonetheless, always a wacky good time!
Not only are two of the band members brothers of a musical family (Dallas and Travis of the Good Family), but The Sadies as a whole are a formidable branch of a bigger musical family which includes the likes of Neko Case (whom they back up on her own live album The Tigers Have Spoken), Kelly Hogan, Blue Rodeo, Jon Langford, members of Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet and Rick White (of Eric's Trip, Elevator, etc.) not to mention many Bloodshot Records brethren. All of them along with Jon Spencer, Gary Louris (of Golden Smog and the Jayhawks), Steve Albini and a whole slew more got down to business on this live recording which took place over two nights at Lee's Palace in Toronto back in February. Whew! Whoa! As you might already be aware, the core Sadies all by their lonesome kick some serious wall to wall ass live each and every time. So entertaining. So lanky'n'loose and razor-sharp at the same time, effortlessly roaming from Morricone western soundtrack to frenetic surf guitar to murder balladry and back. Now with all the other folks in tow, hot damn, they very well cause a meltdown. 2 discs, 41 tracks, 110 minutes!
Who would have though that guys from Gorgoroth were capable of coming up with something like this? Sure it's dark and heavy. But it's not really that evil. It's more sort of spacey and groovy. Two words you never thought you'd hear in the same sentence as Gorgoroth. But here you go. This is the stoner doom side project of Gorgoroth's King Ov Hell, and it's pretty awesome actually. You just have to sort of pretend this has nothing to do with Gorgoroth, otherwise it just doesn't compute. Think Sabbath (the vocals get really Ozzy at some points) for sure, but the sound is more modern groovy stoner doom, huge riffs, lurching loping rhythms, killer leads and wailing vocals, definitely brought to mind late era, post-Messiah Candlemass (think From The 13th Sun) but the interesting thing is how much a lot of this sounds like dark grungy moperock a la Alice In Chains, or like a more metalized Agents Of Oblivion (but not so metal as to be Acid Bath). It's actually what makes this record so cool. It's definitely metal, but it's so dark and haunting and moody. Like some mad scientist took the genes of Deadboy And The Elephantmen, Black Sabbath, Alice In Chains and old Monster Magnet and created these four guys in some underground laboratory. Sounds good huh? Well, that's cuz it is. Heavy and groovy, dark and moody, sludgey and stonery. We like this more and more every time we listen to it.
Omnibus is a gorgeous collage of donated sound. Various contributors (Polmo Polpo, Tu'M, Hypo, Yuichiro Fujimoto, Birds in Tokyo and more) each presented various bits and pieces of sound: songs, found recordings, misplaced melodies, snippets of vocals, little chunks of rhythm, all of which were twisted and tangled and stretched and smeared into a gorgeous droney soundscape. The resulting pieces seemingly bear no relation to the original sounds. Instead, they managed to be pretty cohesive suite of soft shimmery sort-of-songs, all cobbled together from looped hiccupping warbles, damaged music box melodies, tape hiss, lo-fi recording detritus, detuned guitars, muted percussive thump, skittery shuffle, blooping bleeping video game sounds, skipping cds, little bursts of some disco-y techno chopped up and reassembled, and loads more impossible to pick out source sounds. But the final product really is more than the sum of its parts. A deliriously dreamy weird and wonderful world of sound.
This rare album (only 500 copies of the LP were originally issued in 1974) is now finally reissued on cd! "Blau" (Blue) is the second solo effort from legendary krautrock electronics pioneer Conrad Schnitzler, following his amazing debut "Rot" (Red) and his
"Gelb" is an unreleased 1974 album produced by the iconoclastic electronic musician Conrad Schnitzler, who sought to demystify the academic strangle hold on electronic music in reducing all of the avant garde techniques and ideas into a simple interplay of tonal color. Often realized as overlapping electronic patterns, cyclical rhythms, and synthetic swooshes, Schnitzler's early '70s compositions appear now as the prototypes of a lot of modern day electronica, especially IDM, ambient, and techno. "Gelb" does sound a little dated, due to the less than perfect recording conditions and the limited palette of electronic sounds, but the sweeping, space-age surfaces of Schnitzler's electronic tones and jittery drum machine arpeggiations are as good as anything he released during that time. Vinyl only.
The last of the five 'color' releases is the Green one. The original LP consisted of two very long, elegantly minimal environmental pieces. "Der Reise Und Seine Frau" from 1976 features an endlessly wandering synth solo, meandering over a very distorted & churning drum machine loop without much development for 32 minutes. The synth patch is a very modest one, but pretty enough: Schnitzler for Mother. There's a lot more going on in 1980's "Bis Die Blaue Blume Bluht": interlocking, circular melodies looping endlessly over a percolating Wurlitzer rhythm for 20 minutes. A very tropical mood: imagine Kraftwerk's "Ananas Symphonie" without the Hawaiian slide guitar left looping for the night and you're halfway there. The original vinyl encouraged playback at both 33 and 45 rpm, so unsurprisingly the 14 minute bonus track is "Bis Die Blaue Blume Bluht / 45" -- although, surprisingly, the piece isn't simply pitched up, it's digitally time compressed to a faster tempo without actually changing its pitch, so you basically get a 35 minute version of the piece that picks up the pace about halfway through. Grun might seem a bit modest compared to the untamed worlds of Schwartz and Rot, but I have to admit that this pleasantly relentless album won me over by the end. (guest review by AQ pal Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker)
Here's an unexpected set of reissues: vinyl versions of two classic krautrock albums by electronica pioneer Conrad Schnitzler. They're legit, done from master tapes we're told.
"Rot" (Red) was Con's amazing 1973 solo debut. Intense science-fictional bleep-drone, with ironic titles like (side one) "Meditation" and even "Krautrock" (side two). It's totally dark (but a little silly too). The Plate Lunch cd reissue of this we used to stock is now out of print, so that makes this new LP version even more essential. Of course, this vinyl reissue is pressed on red wax, in a red sleeve.
Ten thousand cheers to Captain Trip Records for reissuing all five of Conrad Schnitzler's Color Albums. Originally available only in private pressings, and only sporadically available since then, this cycle included his first solo albums and his first forays into purely electronic music. Before these, Schnitzler had already been a founding member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster (who renamed themselves Cluster after Schnitzler's departure).
His first 'solo' album, Schwartz, is technically the third Kluster album, a trio improvisation by Schnitzler, Moebius and Roedelius -- and was actually reissued as such on cd in the '90s as Eruption. Similar in sound to the first two albums, we hear a variety of traditional instruments (cellos, drums, guitars, organs) played in the most rudimentary manner possible, treating them as raw sources that are then filtered, delayed, and otherwise processed into a bizarre and barely recognizable cavern of pure sound. There actually aren't any synthesizers on this record -- the sounds are all vaguely acoustic in nature, though transformed into something very alien. Whereas their first two albums were commissioned by a Church on the condition that the records also contain strangely religious spoken word texts, this album is purely instrumental -- but more than that, they just get much further out this time -- this is the best of their three records. Though not as compositionally refined as the astonishing Cluster '71 that Moebius and Roedelius would go on to create with Conny Plank, this gains points for audibly being a live performance. A very ahead of its time one at that -- bands are beginning to sound like these records again now, 35 years later -- if you've been spending quality time with Yellow Swans and Skaters cdr-rs recently, you will definitely dig this record from out of their mind Germans playing in a basement 35 years ago, and hitting the source.
This new edition adds a four minute soundcheck from a different trio -- Schnitzler, Freudigmann & Seidel. Otherwise it's identical to the 1997 CD reissue. (guest review by AQ pal Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker)
Wow! We are so excited that this has been put back into print. Klaus Schulze has an extremely extensive back catalog, and sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming as to how to navigate it and where you should begin. With Irrlicht once again available we say that answer becomes a little easier. This was his very first solo album which he recorded in 1972 shortly after he left his stint drumming for legendary Krautrockers Ash Ra Tempel (he was also was the drummer in the earliest and maybe greatest incarnation of Tangerine Dream.) After stepping away from the drum-kit Schulze found where he really was most comfortable, and that was behind his elaborate setup of keyboards. With the advent of the Moog, and his mastery of the organ, Schulze was interested in making a new kind of music. Electronic music that was oozing with atmosphere, tension and sensuality. When Schulze was making this record he was heavily under the influence of Musique Concrete along with some other things we are sure! He had a damaged amplifier at the time which would break out into internal feedback when he turned up its volume control. He also went to a large classical orchestra in Berlin where we was allowed to attend a rehearsal that he recorded and then played backwards throughout Irrlicht. For an artists who would go one to make so many more records this still stands as one of, if not his greatest (even though it actually pre-dates his adoption of the Moog synth as instrument of choice!). Along with Cluster, Eno and Kraftwerk, Schulze stands as one of the fathers of electronic music as we know it. What's also so amazing about this record is how you could imagine so many of our favorite black metal bands hearing this and it seeping its way into the more moody/damaged elements of their records. The eerie ambiance of many Burzum and Striborg records can be heard in the totally intense undertones of Irrlicht. Thanks in part to many of the limitations that he was facing back then, there is an eerie and majestic presence to this album. Sometimes beat up organs, messed up amplifiers, and youthful enthusiasm stand the test of time. Especially when the person behind the controls had this amazing knack for creating eerie, haunting otherworldly sounds.
This reissue comes in a nice digipack with liner notes in both German and English, some in the form of an interview with KS himself. And, there's a 24 minute long bonus track called "Dungeon"! It's not necessarily from the Irrlicht sessions, in fact no-one seems to know exactly when or where it's from (other than somwhere in Europe, early '70s), but it's agreed that it's more early Klaus Schulze dronework that needs to be heard...
Everybody loves the Pixies, and while a lot of us lean toward Surfer Rosa as our favorite, Doolittle is the one that pushed the Pixies squarely into the mainstream. And the cool thing is, they didn't have to change their sound one bit to do it. Read all about the adventures of Black Francis and his gang as they record a record that will go on to shape all of indie rock to come.
Ooooh. The Story is a good one. Imagine if Elliott Smith was fey and British and made hippie music (that's what Pam calls this, and it's a pretty good description). The Story is the handiwork of the father-son duo of Martin and Tom Welham, Tale Spin being the full-length follow up to their side of the split LP they did last year with Santa Cruz psychfolk outfit Whysp. We know Whysp were excited to appear on the same piece of vinyl as these guys, since Welham the elder (Martin) was once an important member of legendary UK psychfolk band Forest, whose two all-too-obscure albums from the early '70s are both firm favorites among us here at Aquarius as well! We LOVE that band. And are very happy to report that Martin and his son Tom have kept the tradition alive and well. The Story's music is full of the same leafy forest glade melody and melancholy that made Martin's old band so amazing. Being a duo, this is more acoustic and less rock than Forest sometimes got, but is otherwise definitely reminiscent in terms of songwriting quality and style. For those of you who haven't heard Forest, we could offer comparisons as well to the Olivia Tremor Control, Yes, and the Hollies... sort of... think of those bands at their most gentle and acoustic and twee. A magical combination of sweet strum, mellow vocal harmonies, and poetic lyrics (one of our favorite lines, from "Winterborn" -- "It takes a lifetime, but in the end / You come to know what the fates intend"). Total hum along music. Recommended!!
Now on vinyl, as it should be! (This is the gatefold regular vinyl, not the been-and-gone picture disc version). Not to be confused with the sludgier Sword from Virginia or the '80s Sword from Canada, or indie rockers The Swords Project or Idyll Swords or any of the umpteen other bands metal and otherwise called Sword or something like Sword... THIS Sword hails from Austin TX, and is mightily hyped as the next big thing in the indie/metal crossover world, a la The Fucking Champs or Pelican. They're at the very least the next Early Man. And sound a bit like that Brooklyn retro-metal outfit (with the Ozzyish vox). They're also touring with 'em, playing here in San Francisco around the corner from Aquarius at 12 Galaxies next week, Tuesday the 21st of February. I (Allan) am for sure gonna go... 'cause this band (and Early Man too) have the potential to slay live, judging from the studio recorded evidence. Actually I've been curious about The Sword for a while, heard some good things about these guys first when our pals in Slough Feg (or was it Hammers Of Misfortune?) played with 'em in Texas. Then I guess they also got some good press at SXSW. So, here's their debut full length on the Kemado label (home also to Diamond Nights, Tarantula A.D. and Dungen among others). And, put briefly, it rocks.
Their pounding, uber-heavy, swords (duh) and sorcery stoner metal reminds us a bit of Zebulon Pike, and A LOT of High On Fire (and also, thus, Sleep). Those aforementioned vocals especially. Their lyrics and graphic imagery are all seemingly inspired by Norse mythology and the music, rather than being a black metal blur, is suitably heroic as well -- charging, triumphant, and almost wearying in its relentless bombast... which is why the mellow respite at the beginning of speedster "Iron Swan" is welcome, and the hills and valleys of the album's longest, proggiest, most epic tune "Lament For The Aurochs" give it staying power. The Sword sure sound serious, taking the weightiness of stoner/doom metal and putting it to old school, dual guitar, fantasy metal use. We imagine many fans of The Fucking Champs and Mastodon and some of the other bands mentioned above will indeed like this.
Swung is New Zealand musician Zoe Drayton, and as the title would suggest, these five tracks are pieces for voice and piano recorded over the last twn years. Super sweet and incredibly intimate. The first track is solo piano, dark and dreamy, the chords ringing out, a sweetly melancholy lullaby. Track two is just the between song utterances, breaths, lip smacks, all woven into a strange soundscape, that leads into a simple piano piece recorded in a big empty room. The third track is super lo-fi, a dreamy vocal line and a barely audible pump organ, a fragmented lowercase pop song. Track 4 is a warm rich organ drone over some sort of creaking machinery, really haunting and lovely. The final track is soundscape created from chopped and manipulated song parts, mostly backwards vocals, recontextualized into a beautiful but alien little ditty.
We'd never heard of Drayton or Swung, but this lil' disc definitely has us hankering for more!
Packaged in a cool little full color 3" sleeve with a printed insert.
Fans of Ms Tujiko, it's time to rejoice. One of her early releases has been reissued with extras!
Perhaps you're wonderin' what happened to the original? Well, a short time ago (12/2005) the fine Austria experimental electronic music label Mego sadly bit the dust. Fortunately an even shorter time ago (1/2006!) Electronic artist Pita (aka Peter Rehberg) brought the label and select titles back from the edge of oblivion under the new moniker Editions Mego. Hurrah!
Back in 2001 when we carried the original release we briefly summed it up in this way: Temperate electronica, pretty ditties rest on cyclic heaving -- some dismantled soul and some traditional-ish Japanese vocals.
Allow us to elaborate a bit more this time around: Each track gently drifts to and fro with layer upon layer of chiming musicbox style melodies, more beefy sturdy thud-pulse rhythms, and gauzily effected breathy vocals that waver between curious child, coltish girl and soulful woman. This album predates Tujiko's very Bjork period (2002's Make Me Hard and 2003's From Tokyo To Niagara), but ties in well with her more distinct recent recordings (the spacious Blurred In my Mirror and the lovely 28). Richly textured in pastel watercolors. FYI: The first fourteen tracks are from the original release, and tracks 11 through 15 were previously pressed into vinyl for her "I Forgot The Title" 12".
While only one of us here has actually been to Turkey (that would be Allan, the lucky bastard), we'll all pretty obsessed with Turkish psych/prog/folk music for quite a while now, as is evidenced by the fact that we review pretty much everything we can get our hands on. Edip Akbayram, Erkin Koray, 3 Hur-El, Mogollar, Bulent, Selda as well as comps galore, Love Peace And Poetry, Turkish Delights, Hava Narghile, we just can't get enough. The one aspect of Turkish music we haven't really explored is 'club' music. Could be that we generally don't even like American club music, as none of us are or ever were really what you might consider clubkids. Or it could be that there was never any really comprehensive collection of Turkish club music. Probably a little of both.
But leave it to Germany's mighty Trikont label to set us straight. With such a big Turkish population in Germany, the Istanbul music scene has a following there too, and Trikont asked popular DJ Ipek Ipekcioglu to put this collection together. Underground Grooves Of Turkey covers a wide expanse of Turkish sounds, from straight up dance floor pop, to weird guitar heavy grooves, to dub and hip hop, and pretty much every stop in between. While the sound veers dramatically all over the sonic map, there are definitely aspects that seem to be present in most, if not all of these tracks. We hear LOTS of Bollywood music stylings. The more playful upbeat tracks, the ones with big beats, wild rhythms and strings all over the place, it's hard not to imagine huge big budget dance scenes, dancers twirling, epic and massive and WILD. The more low key, laid back tracks alternately remind us of Muslimgauze, Dead Can Dance, and Jaz Coleman and Anne Dudley's Middle Eastern themed Songs From The Victorious City released several years back. As well as obviously all of the vintage Turkish music we have been digging.
Every single one of these songs is totally unique in its own way, and distinctly Turkish, incorporating all manner of other sounds while managing to sound fresh and original. The first track on the comp, The Night Session's "La Mirage" had us at hello. Imagine 50 Cent's "In Da Club" with its loping laid back swagger, mashed up with haunting minor key, Eastern tinged strings, fluttering flutes and soaring Arabesque vocals. Pretty kick ass. Could definitely be a club hit here. Surprised this track hasn't already been snapped up by that whole Sounds Of The Asian underground scene. With a comp this varied, probably the best way to approach it is track by track. Worth it for the opening song alone, but the rest of the disc is dense and dizzyingly wonderful as well:
-- A soundscape of dense swirls of playful, festive Bollywood exuberance, with amazing vocals from Sivan Perwer, one of the most famous Kurdish vocalists, now living in Germany.
-- Cay Taylan from Vienna, doing a more modern take, a downtempo triphopped version of a traditional Turkish dance, with lots of strings, Eastern percussion, lots of spacey FX and some groovy dubbed out rhythms.
-- A super pop gem from Nil Karaibrahimgil. A mix of drum and bass and hip hop, a childlike rhyme about the weaknesses of men, a sort of Eastern version of the Spice Girls or M.I.A., kind of sassy, and playful, fun, and funky,
-- Baba Zula mixes traditional jazz with Eastern psychedelia, a heady swirl of dreamlike vocals, traditional percussion and melodies, and plenty of late night jazzy shuffle. Some of his past recordings were produced by Mad Professor!
-- Orient Expressions are from Istanbul and carry on the musical tradition of Alevites, a religious minority of Turkish Islam, with a track based on a Kurdish folk song, taking traditional religious music and giving it a dubby electronic makeover, with washed out atmospheres, lilting vocals and super laid back beats, almost like a much more Eastern Enigma or Dead Can Dance
-- Ayhan Sicimoglu is the first Latin musician in the Turkish music scene and offers up a bad ass dancehall jam, a stuttery funky beat over a buzzing kazoo-like melody played on a Zurna, a traditional Turkish folk instrument with just a hint of the dreaded Reggaeton sound (which sounds KILLER here)!
-- dZihan & Kamien are a Swiss / Bosnian duo from Vienna, who craft epic trip hop dubscapes of shuffling slithering rhythms, minor key strings, strange vocal snippets, all wrapped into super catchy laid back grooves.
-- Ceza is one of the biggest names in the still developing Turkish rap scene. He gets compared to Eminem all the time, cuz of his rapid fire flow and whiney voice, and that's not far off the mark. If you can imagine Eminem rapping IN TURKISH over a killer bed of swooping Bollywood strings, fuzzy bass, and skittery almost dancehall rhythms... Wow!
-- The music of Burhan Ocal is really hard to describe, VERY Bollywood sounding, epic and dense, lots of funky rhythms, strings soaring and stirring, elements of Turkish traditional folk music, and some really strange female vocals from Emal Sayin, "the dame of Turkish art-music". She has a strangely strangled sounding mewl that goes from guttural growl to throaty croon, all over super dense and complex string parts and skittery electronic drums. Cool!
-- Baba Cay unfurls a groovy laid back ambient chillout groove, a sort of blissed out R+B, a little hint of new age swoosh, and plenty of Turkish filigree BUT it's not sung in Turkish, instead he sings in a made up language a la Magma or the Ruins.
-- The band with the very un-Turkish sounding name of Brooklyn Funk Essentials are all about super festive party music, equal parts USA and Turkey, with elements of Klezmer, ska, acid jazz, funk and hip hop, a wild block party groove, with loads of horns, that go from ska bounce to dizzying Klezmer swirl in the blink of an eye. Almost like a Turkish / Klezmer version of Jurassic 5!
-- Burhan Ocal is a famous Turkish percussionist, who weaves an intricate percussive backdrop over which traditional instruments like saz and oud buzz and swirl, a droning gorgeous rhythmic ritual, simultaneously ancient and modern, near the end a drum kit kicks in and then it sounds like some modernized Zakir Hussein jam. So good. Very reminiscent of Muslimgauze.
-- Goksel is a modern Turkish pop singer, with a breathy passionate voice, very melodramatic, performing here some sort of displaced modern American pop ballad, filtered through a distinctly Eastern vibe, reverbed guitars and traditional percussion mixed into soft focus Turkish moody pop, with a slight Western (as in country and western) twang. Her voice actually sounds remarkably like Nina Persson from the Cardigans!
-- Replikas are a guitar heavy underground rock band, who have been written up in the Wire and have even worked with Sonic Youth (and downtown NY) producer Wharton Tiers. Big distorted guitars, pounding drums, driving rhythms, sprinkled with distinctly Turkish bits here and there, soaring vocal melodies, moody strings, all makes for a gorgeous and strangely affecting track...
Not sure how this fits in with the rest of these "underground grooves" but pretty cool nonetheless.
-- Finally, the last track comes from Taner Demiralp, a young conductor / composer who delivers an almost liturgical sounding piece based on a traditional poem, praising the sultans, composed in the style of court music from the Ottoman Empire, including the lyrics and vocals, which are sung and composed in a traditional style no longer in use. Gorgeous crooned melodies over mournful minor key strings, all over a shuffling stuttering electronic beat. creepy and quite beautiful.
Absolutely essential for fans of Turkish music, and anyone who loved any of the Turkish psych compilations we've listed in the past. And all you folks who dig stuff like Kruder And Dorfmeister, Tosca, Peace Orchestra, Kid Loco and the like and just might be open to something a little more exotic, might really dig this stuff.
Like all Trikont releases, Beyond Istanbul is packaged in a full color digipak, and includes a massive set of liner notes, with a history of modern Turkish music, notes on each song and artist, as well as lots of photos!
For those of you who just flipped over our recent Record Of The Week selection the Drum>MachineGun compilation, and want MORE crazed drum machine grindcore insanity, this other collection entitled Electro Grind Holocaust should also be of interest! It's slanted a bit more toward the underground and obscure than the Drum>MachineGun comp, and also more towards the porno/gore obsessed side of this bizarre metal/punk subgenre -- a subgenre that features, as displayed here, razor sharp spastic guitar riffage, techno dance beats, belching death metal grunts and growls (some so subsonically extreme that they sound like bubblings from below the earth), non-sequitorial samples (often offensive and, um, humorous), and lots of bleepy bleepy bleargh distortion and noise. There's a unexpectedly high catchiness quotient, in spots, but these tracks are definitely utterly maddening at the same time. It's kind of a "chocolate-in-my-peanutbutter" deal with the electro danciness and the harsh splattermetalgrindnoise in collision. In fact, it's kind of unclear just who this sort of music is supposed to appeal to: we can't imagine techno fans digging all the noise and gore, and we didn't think so many metalheads liked techno-dance beats -- but I guess we were wrong! Of course we like it, so...
Electro Grind Holocaust contains 28 tracks from 17 bands, most of whom we'd never heard of before. Some names: Atomik Surfing, Shunt Incision, Basket Of Death, Vomitrone, Skrotum, 666.Porn.Star, SMES, Posthuman Worm, Absurd God, Tourette Syndrom, Firbrosarcoma... A very international line-up indeed, the bands hailing from Brazil, Japan, Mexico, France, Croatia, Holland, Germany, Panama, Spain, Australia, and Italy. It's a veritable World Cup of sick underground electro grind! While here at Aquarius we're better versed in black metal, doom, and "true" metal, if we ever do decide to turn this drum machine fueled electronic grindcore deviancy into an AQ specialty, we'd definitely start by tracking down more stuff by the bands on this comp!
Maybe only John Zorn's Tzadik label devotes as many releases as the Japanese (Kansai region) Alchemy label does to stuff to do specifically with the activity of the label-boss! It seems like almost every recent Alchemy disc has been a Jojo Hiroshige project of some sort, whether it be a solo DVD or a best-of or the current series of reissues of his seminal noise band Hijokaidan. Of course, we're all for it, we love his stuff, diverse as it is, from full-on noise assault to spacey drone to folky melodiousness...
So, perhaps no surprise that this latest Alchemy release is a various artists TRIBUTE compilation to the "King Of Noise", the very same Jojo Hiroshige. And no surprise (or maybe a little bit of one) that it's so very diverse too! These ten cover tracks by ten different artists range from shambolic pop to frenzied punk to blissed out psych to harsh industrial mayhem. Several familiar faces from the Alchemy roster show up -- "Love Love Love" as performed by female psychsters Doodles is particularly lovely, while Solmania's contribution of psychedelic guitar drone is uncharacteristically calm and beautiful. And as an appropriate finale, Masonna chimes in with some full-on noise as is his trademark, the first new recording from the hopping one in a long, long time. A lot of the contributors seem to be making a definite Kansai / Kraut konnection here in paying tribute to the admittedly Krautrock influenced oeuvre of Alchemy bossman Jojo. Recommended to all fans of out-there Japanese psych, rock, and noise action.
Subtitled: Heavy Underground (1967-71). Some great, late '60s heavy garage psych stuff here. Yep, another compilation of obscure bands from before you were born or at least before you were buying records. And even if you were buying records back then, chances are you didn't ever pick up any of these, tracks from obscure bands released on obscure 7" singles on obscure labels from obscure places, from Peru to Malibu! And amazingly, these dozen tracks really are all pretty darn killer, no filler. Seriously, We've been listening to this pretty much non-stop since we got it in. Like it says, this is heavy, but in that '60s way -- not really proto-metal but rather psych-pop garage rock jams turned up and turned on, folks gettin' a little freaky with the volume and the effects and the sonic psychedelic drug explorations. Lotsa FUZZ of course, that's a major ingredient.
Here's who's here: Blackrock, Sound Machine, Yesterday's Obsession, Mastermind, Sangre Mexicana, Bhagavad Gita, Protein Bros, Purple Canteen, Los Nuevos Shains, Blow Mind, and Dirty Filthy Mud. It's hard to pick faves, though the B-side of the single by Oakland California's Dirty Filthy Mud, "Forest Of Black" from 1967 is pretty much worth the price of admission all by itself if you're into ye olde heaviness like we are! All in all an excellent comp for the psychedelic minded, a bunch of great-sounding tracks we'd never heard before with a decent helping of vintage graphics and liner notes about each act in the cd booklet.
Thankfully it doesn't seem like the Studio One vault has been tapped out yet. Soul Jazz has been releasing collections from the vaults of Studio One for years now and have managed to expose the wealth of musical richness contained in those deep vaults. This is volume two in the Scorcher series which focuses on the great instrumental tracks which were the very heart of Studio One, from rock steady to dub explorations, every single track here is amazing! Not a dud in the bunch. Even so there are some definite standout moments along the way that will make you wanna keep listening to this record over and over and over. As the sun's been shining in SF as of late this is pretty much the perfect collection to be blasting, as the the warmth in these scorchers mixed with the sun in the sky pretty much equals blissed out perfection! We sell a copy or two pretty much every time we play this. Highly recommended!
Following up her very well-received fifth album Year Of Meteors (released in 2005), indie songstress Laura Veirs shifts gears with a reissue of her second full length Triumphs & Travails Of Orphan Mae, originally recorded and self-released back in 2000.
It's a collection of charming story songs populated with country folk. Veirs immerses herself in the character of the slower paced rural landscape, adopting a bit of a twang in her singing and picked guitar and banjo. Nonetheless, her voice possesses a honey-pie pop kinship with those of the Ditty Bops gals who in turn recall the fine harmonies of early female trio the Andrews Sisters. Lazy day dreaminess pervades the album as it does her later recordings, but this album proves that Veirs can be plucky too both in sound and in spirit.
Ok, it's definitely a gimmick. But a good one. David Weiss's 1985 album Virtuoso Saw is not just skating on "novelty record" ice, but actively sawing through the stuff (sorry). This is the fourth cd we've listed from the quirky Japanese label EM Records that showcases their obsession (quickly becoming ours too) with the instrument known as the musical, or singing, saw. A carpenter's steel saw bowed in such a way as to make a mellifluous sound, not unlike the wavering, haunting tones of an electronic Theremin.
Virtuoso Saw sees Weiss, as one of the few, proud, masters of the instrument, showing how it can transform both classical and pop tunes. You'll hear his saw sing on such chestnuts as "Misty" (with the saw, soooo dreamy) and "Sweet Georgia Brown" (jaunty, yet given a dose of the unfamiliar with the saw). In addition, Weiss plays Simon and Garfunkel, Gershwin, Satie, Saint-Saens, Ravel, Bizet, Bach, and the Beatles -- three tunes from them, "Eleanor Rigby", "Yesterday", and "When I'm 64". Oh, and he even does, believe it or not, "Rainbow Connection" from The Muppet Movie. How cool is that? Sends the kitsch value of this, already high, through the roof!!
Weiss's saw is set against lush orchestrations for strings performed by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (there's photos in the cd booklet of them playing at the Hollywood Bowl). Doubtless it was considered funny to see a guy in a tuxedo playing a saw... but maybe for us it's also a good excuse to listen to unique versions of some music that would otherwise not get a lot of play here at AQ even though we've got to admit it's quite nice!
So if you've got EM's Jim Leonard and Sam Moore and Noahlewis' Mahlon Taits cds, your collection is not complete until you pick this up too... particularly if you were into Leonard's Super Saw disc, you'll want this, as it's a similarly impressive technical tour-de-force, updating the saw's repertoire to include a few more popular tunes of the rock era, such as those by Lennon/McCartney.
We wonder what EM's gonna dig up next for our musical saw section!
Endtroducing is still an amazing record, all these years later, fresh and weird and mysterious. Few (read:none) have even come close. Another killer book in this series that lets you read all about want went down during the making of DJ Shadow's hip hop / trip hop classic.
They may be thousands of miles apart, but it would take more than something like distance to keep these two forces of musical darkness from meeting and unleashing this Black Plague. AQ faves, Australian noise rockers the Grey Daturas, were visited recently by the US ambassadors of noise, Wolf Eyes. Never one to squander an opportunity to get together and kick up a ruckus, the Daturas dragged the Eyes into the studio, and both bands spent a few hours cooking up their own unique vision of sonic decay. Wolf Eyes came up with the 5 part "Post Civilization Muzak", 24 minutes of grrrrrrrrrrrinding post industrial brutality. Huge sheets of coruscating electronics, super distorted guitar, and wild streaks of white hot feedback, all tangled up into a blazing blood red supernova of sound.
The Grey Daturas counter with some musical density of their own. A bit more lo-fi, three long tracks, one a tangled freejazz grind psychnoise splatter, a blurred cloud of stuttery staggering freakout, another a slow plodding glacial sludge, with thick washes of abstract doom and simple tribal drumming and finally a full on far out post rock post punk instrumental epic, heavy and droney and massive. Pretty killer stuff.
Packaged in a glossy digipak and released on the Daturas' Heathen Skulls label. Includes a bonus Wolf Eyes track NOT included on the upcoming domestic lp version!!
Another killer fuzzy foggy blast of noisy beauty from these Portland based ex Bay area noisemakers, captured on the practically obsolete and thus still uber hip cassette tape format. We only got 20, so only the truly quick on the trigger (and by trigger we of course mean 'buy' button) will be claiming these as their own, so get that clicker finger all limbered up.
This latest missive, hear titled DAMNED Yellow Swans (in keeping with the always different D-word) find the band in almost ambient territory. Not that they were ever that far from ambientland anyway, but here the 'Swans unfurl massive slow shifting clouds of sonic steel wool. Grey and black and itchy and scratchy, prickly but with all the thorns dulled, so instead of pricking and drawing blood, these whirls of swirling sound just sort of wrap themselves around your ears and poke and prod, shimmy and shake, wrapping you in layer after layer of thick, dense reverberating foggy fuzz. Hand made sleeves and hand painted tapes. So limited, if you blink your eyes they'll be gone.
Burgeoning Bay Area label (and arts collective!) Howell's Transmitter doubles their roster in July and August with releases by Black Fiction (out on July 25th) and Michael Zapruder's Rain Of Frogs (officially out on August 15th, but we've got 'em a bit early). These two dandy, relatively new groups join our beloved Mission District neighbors Ray's Vast Basement and trippy cool Modular Set, pushing the label even further into wonderful eclecticism.
Michael Zapruder's Rain Of Frogs is quite a mouthful of a band name, but the music goes down really smooth. New Way Of Letting Go is filled with lavish yet sensitive guy pop in the tradition of Rufus Wainwright, Damien Rice, Elliott Smith, Etienne De Rocher and Sondre Lerche. That's not at all surprising though when we find out that although the band's name might be new to our ears those involved are certainly not! Backing up Mr. Zapruder on his second full length (but first under this moniker) are Camper Van Beethoven's Jonathan Segel, Scott Solter, The Decemberists' Nate Query, Scott of Pink Mountain, and Jon Bernson from Ray's Vast Basement among others! Lush keyboards, horns, guitars, expressive male vocals and female backing vocals are elegantly assembled in each of the album's eleven songs. Pretty darn great!
