A massive triple lp set of damaged, improvised, outsider free folk from member of various Kentucky rock/noise outfits (Magick Markers, Virgin Eye Blood Brothers, etc..). The stuff we'd read compared Valley Of Ashes to Siloah, Amon Duul 2, Trad Gras Och Stenar and Stone Angel, which seems pretty much impossible, but to be honest, those comparisons are not all that far off the mark. Imagine some impossible blend of all four of those bands, but seriously up the druggy stumble quotient and the damaged lo-fi fuzz and murk levels and you'll be pretty close to getting a feel for VoA's dirgey backwoods krautfolk. Like a folkier NNCK, Valley Of Ashes, weave and stumble through a dark droney landscape of slightly off kilter folk, cracked basement blues, hypnotic alsmot raga-like hum and whir, all with a distinctly Eastern vibe. Delicate chimes drift behind buzzing detuned steel string guitars, clangy pots and pans percussion is wrapped in distant sheets of feedback and laid to rest on a thick blanket of warm fuzz. For being super muddy and lo-fi, at times, everything just clciks and the sound becomes impossibly lush. There are moments when the drifting free folk locks into a seriously stoned groove, getting heavier and much more aggressive, guitars snarling, BIG riffs staggering and lurching, a stone wall of fuzz and clatter, dizzyingly exotic and darkly ominous, a bit like some stoner krautrock band coming completely unmoored, trying desparately to rock, but drifting further and further from the riff, sounding a bit like the No Neck Blues Band on ESP. Some impossible mix of Sabbath, Cromagnon and the Godz. But the fury never lasts long, usually settling back into another perfect doomy dreamy free folk drift...
Packaged in a gorgeous thick full color psychedelic sleeve. Be warned though that all of the sleeves are slightly scuffed around the edges. Most won't notice, but bound to get record collector nerds' knickers in a twist!
Another missive from the Wooden Wand Universe, a dizzying world so filled with hokum and smoke, character changes and rotating pseudonyms that it's really hard to keep things straight. We may be only half-right on the details, so bear with us. Vanishing Voice, (the choral and instrumental Body of the Wooden Wand Mind) taking advantage of Wooden Wand's momentary dalliance with spiritual advisor Satya Sai and the Sky High Band in California, has retreated into the dark woods of Norway (or perhaps Vermont?) to imbibe in some dirty pagan Ur-folk jams. Kicking up a whirring dust devil vortex of clatter and murk, the title track is a side-long excursion and sounds fresh off the Gypsy Freedom sessions except minus the free jazz horns and howling vocals. The three ghostly tracks on side B, offer up some haunted banjo picking, subdued chanting, wolf howls and something we can only describe as "baby skree", which sounds like the mewling of a lost baby animal whose cries are unraveling like thread through the branches. Remember that scene in the Blair Witch Project, where the lost campers wander into that grove of trees with all those creepy hanging stick sculptures and strangely wet piles of rocks?
Well, this record sounds like it was recorded there. Truly Fucking Spooky!
Just when you thought that an issue of this magazine of hip-hop, jazz, funk & soul, couldn't get any better than the last one, the drop this Special Parliament-Funkadelic Issue on us! Pages and pages of individual articles/interviews devoted to the various funkanauts who've manned the Mothership, from George Clinton to Bernie Worrell to Gary Shider to Bootsy Collins to Billy "Bass" Nelson to felt-tip warrior, LP cover artist Pedro Bell... Wax Poetics is known for lots of colorful vintage album graphics and cool photography, so of course there's plenty of amazing images from the P-funk realm for them to incorporate here! There's some other stuffs n' things in this issue too, but if you aren't down for the upstroke and ready to make a mothership connection, keep your mind and your ass away from this.
Wow. When it rains it definitely pours. Especially when we're talking pop. And a lot of this recent downpour of pop goodness comes direct from the perfect pop headquarters of Barsuk Records, who in the past, have given us Death Cab, Nada Surf, Rocky Votolato and more. We've got two new Barsuk releases this time around. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the latest release from weirdo smartpop combo the Starlight Mints, and here we've got the debut from moody jangly dream poppers What Made Milwaukee Famous. We know, not the catchiest name ever. But it's sure as heck a lot better than calling your band Beer.
And the name doesn't really prepare you for the jangly bouncy new wave classic pop sound these guys effortlessly conjure up. We knew it would be poppy since it was on Barsuk, but the name had us thinking HARDCORE!! Nothing could be further from the truth. What Made Milwaukee Famous take all that classic pop, you know... Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson (especially Joe Jackson), the Cars, and gives it a modern retro makeover. You'll hear some Maximo Park (and thus some XTC), some Modest Mouse, a smidge of the Arctic Monkeys, some Weezer, even some Strokes. And a little Postal Service. Especially on the first track, a gorgeously lilting gem assembled from bits of moody melancholy guitar drift and dreamy keening falsetto vocals, all draped over warm stretches of crystalline electronic skitter. And while that sort of Postal Service vibe surfaces subtly here and there throughout the rest of the record, for the most part most of the record leans way more toward that perfect mix of classic pop and modern indie jangle. Alternatingly rocking and lilting, crooning and swooning, bouncing and grooving. Just imagine Maximo Park channeling Joe Jackson instead of XTC, or a less quirky, more AM radio influenced Modest Mouse, and maybe you'd be getting close. Big guitars that jangle and crunch. Bouncy basslines. Some strings here and there, some piano. Warm warbly organs. And gorgeous vocals that croon and wail one minute, emote dreamily the next. A little bit retro, a little bit new wave, a little bit indie rock, which I guess would make this a killer retro new wave indie pop record. Which it most definitely is. Catchy as hell, hooks everywhere, moody but not maudlin, one of the coolest pop records we've heard in a while. And who knows, maybe one day what made Milwaukee famous will be What Made Milwaukee famous. Or... maybe not.
Two song teaser for an upcoming full length and it's a doozy. And it's two sides of Wolf Eyes we don't get to see all that much of, and hearing it here, we're sort of jonesing for more of both. On the one side (both literally and figuratively) we have Wolf Eyes as some sort of plodding doom metal behemoth. A keening buzz becomes a raga like drone and then devolves into a thick caustic dirge, with growled blackened vocals, pummeling throb percussion and what sounds like a swarm of detuned guitars, all lurching evily beneath a dense cloud of shimmery skree.
On the flipside (again, both figuratively and literally) we've got the softer more sensitive Wolf Eyes, well, okay maybe not so much softer and more sensitive as less harsh and noisy, more creepy and dark. Gurgling low end, sine waves and grinding electronic grit spread out over a wide expanse of creepy crawly ambience, a drifting droning underworld rife with weird horn like squalls and all manner of little sonic irregularities. Pretty dang cool. We're definitely psyched to hear what they do for the next full length.
It was only a matter of time really. The bad boys of noise rock, and the grandaddy bad boy of modern avant jazz... Okay, maybe it wasn't only a matter of time, who would have ever really dreamed up a Wolf Eyes / Anthony Braxton jam session? Braxton maybe. He has a penchant for odd pairings. Remember his saxophone / stand up comedian disc? Well Black Vomit might not be -quite- as whatthefuck as that one, but it is pretty strange. And surprisingly, it's also pretty dang listenable. Especially for a disc called Black Vomit, with tracks called "The Mangler" and "Rationed Rot". "The Mangler" starts off all dreamy abstract soundscape, with the Wolf Eyes boys creating haunting landscapes of scrape and skitter, deconstructed streaks of electronic buzz and thick smears of low end grind, while Braxton sort of soars above it all, his horn emitting thick swirls of resonant rumble, dissonant bleating, and mournful minor key groans. It almost sounds like that guy on the corner playing sax and busking for change being sucked into hell, the ground just opening up as he plunges into a cacophonous wasteland. The last 5 or 6 minutes do finally take the plunge into all out noise, but even then, it's weirdly textural and while not -easy- on the ears, still strangely accessible, even with the swirls of malfunctioning electronic crunch and weird demonic vocals.
Track two is introduced by the Wolf Eyes guys asking Braxton which he'd rather hear, "Leper War" or "Black Vomit"? His response, a hearty "BLACK VOMIT!" gets the crowd cheering and Wolf Eyes immediately launch into a musical world of hurt. The sound blisses out after a few minutes into a weirdly percussive soundscape, of low end throb and high end skitter, but before too long Braxton has joined the melee and they ratchet up the noise quotient and it's a swirling, grinding, churning free noise, wild jazz lead pipe to the side of the head. Wow. How fucking cool is Anthony Braxton? Recorded live in 2005 (the between song banter is pretty funny, especially the "Good night..." bit at the end), rumor had it that Victo didn't even want to release this, but damn if it's not one of the coolest records they've ever put out!
The return of Wolfmangler, aka Smolken, who also just so happens to be the man behind Dead Raven Choir. Hot on the heels of a split with UK ultra doomlords Moss, Wolfmangler continue to explore the dark world of doom in their own truly peculiar manner. With bass, electric bass, drum, flute, trombone and bassoon (each band member is also credited with things like umber bulk, water nymph, floating eye, tengu, trapper and of course leprechaun) the Wolfmangler ensemble create a truly unique doom, woven together from wheezing woodwinds, throbbing low end, simple occasional drum beats and weird grumbled growly vocals. The result is not so much a massive doom sound as a creepy ancient court music, plodding and funereal. You can almost imagine some black clad procession trudging along the winding cobblestone streets within some walled fortress. Kerry though it sounded like punk rock slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down.
Texturally it's unlike anything we've ever heard. The closest reference might be Skepticism, the way it sounded like their music is being heard through the floor or from a building next door. Wolfmangler's sound has a similar timbre, a bit like some high school marching band dipped in tar and forced to march through a desert of black sand, or maybe like holding a stylus in one hand, and a scratched up 45 of Fleetwood Mac's tusk in the other, and trying to manually play the record by dragging the needle along each groove. Warbly and dizzyingly warped, Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucifed Wolves is some sort of hellish circus music, the soundtrack to a Fellini film, showed one frame at a time, a New Orleans Funeral Jazz band 78 played at 16 rpm on an old dusty victrola. So gorgeously slow, so pretty and creepy and dreamily doomy.
Everybody went completely nuts for the Wooden Shjips 10" we reviewed a while back (ourselves included) so we were super psyched to get our hands on this brand new two track 7" single. Packaged very much like the 10", clear vinyl, no artwork, barely any info, no sleeve, just a clear plastic sleeve, these two tracks are also quite sonically similar to the 10" and has us jonesing for a full length.
Side one is a buzzy lo-fi garage groove, beneath bizarre super distorted insectoid guitar leads, buzzing WAY up in the mix and sounding almost like some primitive malfunctioning synth. But the whole time, beneath the alien buzz, the groove just hums along, like some extra baked Velvet Underground outtake.
Side two is way more laid back, some blown out sun baked riffage, a super lazy groove, like Loop played at 16rpm, decorated with warm hornlike melodies that eventually stretch out into some serious outerspace psych rock explorations. The vocals we loved so much on the 10: resurface here too, laconic, drawled sung/spoken and super affected, very Lou Reed sounding albeit buried way down in the mix and absolutely drenched in thick reverb and fuzzy delay.
Awesome! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Recorded at the same time as the recently listed (and now out of print) collaboration between the YS, Axolotl and Gerritt, this disc treads much of the same sonic space, glistening high end feedback, distant crumbling drones, smears of sparkling glitchery, burbling underwater cd skipping, grinding industrial whir. Not jagged or harsh at all, not what you would expect from these noiseniks. Quite dreamy and soothing, all the harsh bits have the edges smoothed into a slow flowing dronee bliss-scape. Comes with a photocopied copy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Vietnam speech and comes in a gorgeous hand painted sleeve. As with all Jyrk cd-r's it seems, SUPER LIMITED, already out of print, and we have the last 30. So again, act fast if you want one of these. Once they are gone they are gone for good.
- MPEG stream: One
- MPEG stream: Two
Another entry in the slow, low, sludgemetal sweepstakes! (First prize, win a giant anvil dropped on your head! Second prize: a lifetime of depression! And for five runners up: rusted old guitar strings that once belonged to Tony Iommi!) These Georgia boys are all about total, trance-inducing heaviosity in the vein of Eyehategod, Bongzilla, Buried At Sea, old Melvins, and Om. Utter "dun dun dun dun dun" riff-mongering. Like certain strains of grim black metal, and modern minimalism, this is music that one can describe as "monotonous", but in a GOOD way. And the five tracks here (one of 'em an untitled, unlisted coda) are varied enough across this disc's approximate 33 minute running time to leave you wanting more. Released by Battle Kommand, who know quality darkness (Leviathan, Xasthur, Ruins of Beverast) and distributed by the equally discerning folks at Southern Lord, this is indeed a promising debut from Zoroaster. Oh, and there's a giant squid on the front cover, that's worth automatic mega bonus points in our book!
