In case you hadn't noticed, we've been totally in love with the latest Bardo Pond record Ticket Crystals, so we were pretty dang excited to discover this new release by Bardo side project Alasehir (just one of many, see elsewhere on the list for Vapour Theories another side project as well as a new live album!). Alasehir is the work of Bardo brothers the Gibbons' and is absolutely kicking our asses. 4 long instrumentals equal parts heavy, heady and blissed out. It may be 4 distinct songs, but taken as a whole it's a serious psychedelic monster! The guitar sound is so instantly recognizable, effortlessly unfurling blown out stoner riffs other bands can only dream about. After the first two tracks, rife with heavy riffs and fluid grooves, "Seven Tongues" finds the brothers busting out their sitars and unleashing a dreamlike stream of sweetly buzzing star gazing sounds. This is the kind of record that gets your head bobbing, not quite head banging and not quite daydreaming but some wonderful place in-between.
While the world of indie underground rock continues to fawn over the new free folk movement, Feathers, Banhart, Vetiver, Brightblack, Fursaxa, Faun Fables, Espers and the like, out there, deep in the forest, a similar breed lurks in the shadows, one that shuns the light, and the magazine covers, and the collaborations, choosing instead to pursue their own muse, perform their own rituals, create their own sonic magicks deep in the shade of the wood. Their music is of a much darker hue, drawn from a much more mysterious source, and the results aren't fuzzy or shimmery, they are chaotic, ominous, intense and intensely emotional, a modern folk by way of Comus, via the Wickerman, but without any frilly folk trappings, instead the sound is magical yet murky, morose and moody, a strangely hauntingly creepy crawl. Such is the music of the duo known as Alethes. Doom laced pagan rituals assembled from strummed acoustic guitars, tribal percussion, and growling gravelly vocals. Imagine some impossible mix of Kiss The Anus Of The Black Cat, Comus, Swans, Der Blutharsch, Woven Hand and an acoustic Neurosis. Gorgeously nihilistic, a somber and shadowed forest folk, lilting and lovely but always with some haunting uneasiness lurking right below the surface. A world of stygian shimmer, of doomic desolation, of blackened beauty. Truly stunning.
Gorgeous black glossy print on oversized, fantastically tactile rubberized six panel deluxe fold out sleeve. Wow.
Hey, look what SF classic just resurfaced after many moons languishing in label limbo / out-of-print-ness. American Music Club's fifth full length Everclear! This album which was originally released fifteen years ago delivers Mark Eitzel and co. in fine form from the bittersweet heartache of "Why Won't You Stay" to the anthemic proportions of "Rise" to the hillbilly hilarity of "Crabwalk". Really makes you wonder how great albums like this could be allowed to go out of print in the first place. Don't blow it, grab one of these before they disappear again...
Earlier this year, we reviewed two volumes of dreamy psychedelic sitar improvisations from multi instrumentalist Erik Amlee. Two discs, both absolutely gorgeous, so gorgeous in fact that we could barely keep them in stock. So we were super excited to get our hands on this, the newest release from Amlee, an actual cd, not a cd-r, another set of improvisations, this time performed on both sitar and acoustic guitar, and again so lovely and tranquil, blissy and dreamy.
Deep swells of buzzing strings drift lazily, the acoustic guitar strumming along in the background, adding yet another layer of steel string buzz. Some of the tracks are totally loose and abstract, druggy expanses of slippery psychedelic sound, murky and fuzzy, like the jammiest spaciest parts of Spacemen 3 and Hawkwind stripped down into weird stoner acoustic ragas, all drone and shimmer, a buzzing swirl of warm drug den ambience and sunny afternoon sparkle, a seemingly impossible mix that sounds pretty much perfect together. Some of the other tracks are much more structured and guitar based, gorgeous little chunks of neo-Appalachia, but with all sorts of extra buzz, all nestled within a billowy fog of spacey FX. And still others are a glorious mix of the two, a dreamy collision of Eastern Raga and Western twang, a slithering squirming drone that buzzes and builds into thick squalls of resonating strings and swirling ambient hiss, all wrapped in a blown out, super distorted, reverb heavy sound thanks to some post-recording production. So great. The perfect balance of freaked out psychedelic raga bliss and shimmery lilting buzz and twang. SO RECOMMENDED!!
The absolute hardest albums to write about are those we hold in the highest esteem and though we have an aversion to the general notion of a "desert island selection", this Amon Duul II disc is one of those albums that we could see as an definite inclusion on
Must be something about summertime and the feeling of nostalgia and memories of our younger days that has had us going crazy over some of our favorite '90s indie rock records as of late. Recent lists prove this, as reissues of Sebadoh and Spoon classics received our record of the week honors. Truth be told Icky Mettle is just as qualified for that honor as well. There was a period during the '90s when we used to joke that if you looked up "indie rock" in the dictionary you would find a picture of Archers of Loaf's Icky Mettle. But really, we sort of weren't joking. All you had to do was listen to it and you instantly understood the full glory of indie rock and how totally heavy and wild and kick ass and catchy indie rock could be. Guitars are crunchy and jagged, ringing loud and true, vocals soaring, melodies you can't EVER get out of your head, and a passionate urgency that makes your heart race and your soul shiver. It's pretty serendipitous that this record just got reissued as it's been playing around here quite a bit, Irwin rediscovered it earlier this summer, it's been rocking Andee's iPod quite a bit lately, and it gets played in the store NON-STOP!!
There is not a dud on this album... it's almost like Archers of Loaf made us the most perfect indie rock mix tape ever, except it's their entire album! The track "Web In Front" might just be THE GREATEST INDIE ROCK SONG EVER. If it's not, it's definitely top five. It jangles, it totally rocks, the vocasl are super intense but completely melodic, the arrangement is bizarre and the parts unlikely, but that only serves to make it that much more unique and unforgettable.
We can't count the times in the past that we've put songs from this record on mixes we've made for friends, crushes, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. It's got it all: the angst, the heartbreak, the longing, the anger, the catchy hooks, even the quintessential anthem about indie rockers. What a debut full length from a band a drift in a veritable sea of indie rock revolution, the next Seattle, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Helping to raise the bar for all their peers and proteges (Superchunk, Polvo, Pavement, etc.). This is not just some indie rock nostalgia trip, a longing for some unattainable indie rock heyday, this record has totally stood the test of time and still pretty much blows away any pop, rock or indie rock record you care to stack up against it. So utterly and completely and impossibly essential!!
Wow! Ariel Pink is on a hot streak! Just this year alone we've fallen for his limited edition and now out of print Latitudes series cd, his new project Holy Shit and now this new 7" which features some of the best Ariel Pink songs we've heard yet! A totally tasty Smiths cover on the 'b' side and pretty much warped pop perfection dripping from each groove. This is why we still love 7"s so much. So fun to pick up the needle and hear Ariel Pink take us to a wonderful world of Kodachrome bliss over and over again. We're still so smitten...
Quite a few of you who read our list are probably already followers of the whole Finnish folk-psych underground, right? So this Avarus will most likely already be going in your basket (especially since it contains all of their WAY out of print early releases!)... But if you're not yet a Finn-folk-freak, you'll also find this to be a great introduction to one of the key bands from that scene...
This double cd collects the early recorded works of the mysterious Finnish free folk collective Avarus. Previously released as limted run cd-r's and 7"s (in tiny runs of 50-200 copies), these tracks are a tantalizing glimpse into the mist-shrouded musical world of Finnish underground music, equal parts the hypno rock of fellow countrymen Circle, the pagan ritualism of The Wicker Man, the droning throb of Faust, the propulsive rhythm of Can, and the lo-fi clatter and skree of the Dead C.
Imagine a land of forests and fjords, a land of dark skies and windswept landscapes. Then imagine the sort of music this land would evoke. Droning hypnotic clattery free folk, dark and propulsive, mesmeric Krautrock, rhythmic pagan musical rituals, all detuned guitars and hand drums, chanting and wild free percussion, and everything in between.
Avarus combine psychedelic folk rock, motorik Krautrock, free jazz and modern noise into a totally mesmerising, totally unique modern avant noise/folk, unfurling lengthy meandering almost funereal jams, desolate and mournful, but dreamy and pastoral, machinelike and hypnotic at the same time. Strummed acoustic guitars frame distant throbbing caveman percussion, dreamy soundscapes are punctuated by occasional clang and clatter, all swaddled in the warm drone of amp buzz and ambient hum. Lo-fi, rambling, ramshackle blues jams mutate into wildly propulsive psych-folk with intensely strummed guitars and far-away flute melodies.
Dipping their toes into whatever variant of their unique 'sound' that strikes their fancy, Avarus sway woozily from atonal Jandek-ian campfire hippy hoedowns, to wild jams with spastic drumming and sing-songy melodies plucked out on beat up, strangely tuned guitars, to wild clattery bursts of percussion splattered haphazardly over a Skullflower-ish skree, to stripped down, jangly hyperactive psychedelic rock to loose ambient soundscapes of whir and buzz and twang, with slithery, sitar-like guitars. Occasionally Avarus kick up quite a racket, a thick slab of sound, with LOTS of guitars, feedback and some seriously dense drumming, recorded hot and overblown, adding just the right amount of distortion and haze to the recording. It almost sounds like some New Zealand noise rock band like Gate or UK psych/drone ensemble Sunroof! -covering- Avarus!
Epic and endless, rumbling and stumbling, space-y psychedlic folk jams spread over two discs, TWO PLUS HOURS. Imagine the Total or The Dead C playing Finnish forest music. Or the Tower Recordings covering International Harvester next door to Reynols' practice space? Droning, damaged clatter, like the wild drunken cavorting of drugged out hippy carpenters. Space-y and druggy and totally mesmerizingly beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "Horuksen Vasemman Silman Mysteerikoulu Royh Eli Vuh Tai Siis Moi Kaikki: Rikottu Noidat Haluavat Luusi Universumin Pienin Kysymys Varisten Kokoontumislaulu" [/audio/avarusvasemmann.m3u]
MPEG Stream: "Horuksen Oikean Silman Mysteerikoulu Astraalikaali 25 Metria Kavellen Veden Alla Kirjoitusmerkki Aikamerkki Arkistosali" [/audio/avarusoikean.m3u]
First things first, the sticker on the front of this LP says "debut solo record from Crooked Fingers' Eric Bachmann". Uhhh, we thought Crooked Fingers *was* Eric Bachmann's solo persona. What's up with that?! Now we've gotta say that everyone's got their own hang-ups, and for us with regards to Mr. Bachmann, they've been two-fold. We can't shake the stunning vocal resemblance between Bachmann and Neil Diamond (when we hear Bachmann we hear Diamond... not a bad thing, mind you!), and we can't help but yearn for his Archers Of Loaf days. Yeah we know, gotta let it go. This fine album does much to dismantle one if not both of those distractions though (pssst... with regards to the latter, we're pleased to report that Archers Of Loaf's Icky Mettle album just got reissued! yay!). Whether his music goes under the moniker Crooked Fingers or Eric Bachmann, it consistently steeps your ears with an overriding sense of weathered weariness and resignation. And yet on To The Races, his voice has acquired a surprising lightness (almost boyishness) to it not present on his previous recordings. His songs no longer seem slumped on a bar stool, but have taken to the outdoors with a broader scope and scale. There are actual glimmers of hope in these songs. That certainly seems to be the central distinction between Bachmann as Crooked Fingers and Bachmann as the official solo Eric Bachmann. Note: the cd isn't here yet, just the vinyl version, but of course there will be a cd. Soon.
Seems like all we have to do is blink and voila! Another batch of freaky and far out Jyrk cd-r releases materializes. We're not complaining, we're just saying is all. So here's the first of this installment's threesome, by the very mysterious Ball Lightning, who just so happens to be William Sabiston, the percussionist for Axolotl. 18 tracks in 20 minutes, brief little snippets of sound, a sound that is pretty dang tough to describe. Some weird mix of Sunburned Hand Of The Man tribalism, some skittery percussive free jazz and some sort-of-electronics, a super listenable hodge podge of rhythmic exploration. Clicking, shuffling, squeaking, pulsing, pounding mini soundscapes of glitch and click and buzz and throb and stutter and clang and clatter. This disc almost sounds like someone took a twenty minute This Heat outtake, chopped it up into minute long pieces, mixed them all up and reassembled the tape. Cool and hypnotic and very very weird.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. WE GOT 30 COPIES, ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD, IT'S ALREADY OUT OF PRINT AT THE LABEL!
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An awesome live recording from these psych rock astral travelers, this lengthy two track performance recorded live in the living room of a house somewhere in Philadelphia finds the Pond at their driftiest and dreamiest. The opening track is a 34 minute psychbliss epic, guitars swirl and shimmer, drifting lazily across a gauzy sun dappled sonic sky, violins float by occasionally as do snatches of fluttering flute, the background dense with chimes and distant bells, muted melodies and slow undulating waves of guitar groan and ambient rumble, colored here and there by some scrape and hiss, as well as voices and sounds from the partygoers seated around the band. It's a sloooooow build and when it finally does reach it's peak, it's not a blow out as much as a heavy drone. Totally mesmerizing and tranceworthy! The second track, clocking in at a much more brief 12 minutes or so, is an even more mellow affair, simple drifting acoustic guitar, hand drums, flutes and ethereal female vocals, while in the background, thick billowing clouds of distorted psychedelic guitar pulse and swell, like some mysterious sonic Northern lights. So nice. Hard to imagine these sounds emanating from a house in some suburb, unless that house suddenly became unmoored and began drifting through alternate universes, or through some unexplored corner of the galaxy. So perfect!
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!! Two different covers, each one super striking, no need to ask for a specific cover, they'll be pulled at random, and you'll be pleased as punch either way!
Bastard Wing is the duo of Christina Carter from Charalambides and Andrew MacGregor who records as Gown. A while back we reviewed a cd-r collaboration between MacGregor and Carter, which was a strange and creepy affair, but also a fairly caustic and atonal one, with plenty of anguished Jandekian wailing and Keiji Haino like frenzied howling, cacophonous and bizarre, but beautiful in it's own damaged way. The Bastard Wing finds the two in a much more contemplative mood, spreading out warm thick blankets of psychedelic strum, swirling fuzzy ambience, over which breathy ethereal vocals drift and shimmer, gorgeous foggy soundscapes of distant blown out psych guitar, haunting disembodied vocals, crackling crunchy distortion, swooping vocals that seem to creep up right to the microphone before fading into the murky background, everything bathed in thick reverb, tons of delay and clouds of swirling outer space FX. Some tracks sound like deconstructed Mazzy Star, with any semblance of 'rock' taken out, so the ghostly remnants are allowed to drift incorporeally heavenward, while others are frenzied otherworldly rituals, dense with thick vocal swirl and damaged guitar histrionics, although even at their most manic, everything is muted and smeared into an indistinct haze. Creepy and lovely. Definitely for fans of Grouper, Lichens and of course Charalambides.
Like all Free Porcupine Society releases, nicely packaged, this time in a cool simple white cardstock folder, printed with metallic silver ink, spare and striking.
We've long championed the work of Maurizio Bianchi, the grim electronic sculptor whose work in the early '80s paralleled the likes of Whitehouse, Ramleh, and Matthew Bower's early power electronics project Total. As much as we would like to ramble on about Bianchi's intriguing musical and existential history in reference to this record, it's almost a moot point as it's really hard to discern any sounds that bear the signature of Mr. Bianchi. Don't let that caveat scare you off from checking out this thoroughly amazing blur of noise, drone, acoustic tumult and electronics; but we have to be completely honest. No, it doesn't sound much like a Bianchi record; instead, the real author of the final mix of The Epidemic Symphony No. 9 is the little known Japanese sound artist Hitosji Kojo (who also records as Spiracle). If there's any justice, Hitoshi / Spiracle shouldn't be "little known" for very long. In fact, he should be heralded as the viable contender to replace David Jackman / Organum as the king of the droning acoustics. And no, none of the guttural drone expressionists who splatter cd-rs with quickly rendered cosmic exasperations come close to the power that Jackman was capable of in the '80s. But Hitoshi Kojo does.
Like Jackman, Hitoshi's work is a dense compounding of layered acoustic textures, each of which are impeccably recorded and carefully positioned within the stereo field. In working with the source material presented by Bianchi and Nobu Kasahara (another obscure Japanese sound artist who has collaborated once before with The New Blockaders, giving some clue as the cacophony he's capable of), Hitoshi continues this strategy of precisely placed sounds which are then given plenty of opportunity to growl, rumble, vibrate, and bristle however they see fit. Where the first lengthy track steadily builds up to a crashing crescendo that abruptly cuts to silence, the second track exhibits some of what may be Bianchi's sounds -- a return to the Sacher Pelz techniques of varispeed tape and crushed turntable clatter which Hitoshi compounds into rippled acoustic shimmer. For the finale, Hitoshi blurs the source material into an industrial chorale marked by a surprisingly elegant two-note melody. Highly recommended!
Ooops, meant to list this last time with Homogenic and Post...
Hey, have you heard of this newfangled technology? It's called a dualdisc. A CD on one side, a DVD on the other! Pretty good idea except you should be forewarned that these discs do not play on every cd player nor every dvd player. For one thing they are thicker than 'normal' cds and dvds. Yeah, we know these things aren't all that new, but we felt the need to elaborate a bit 'cause they do seem to cause some confusion and disgruntlement.
Anyhoo, Bjork fans probably already own these just-released reissues of her early albums, right? And everyone else is to some degree or other probably pretty darn familiar with them too just by their omnipresence, eh? Sooo are introductions to these albums all that necessary?
We will say that Bjork really got her post-Sugarcubes solo ball rolling on this one back in 1993, didn't she? Who'da thunk that over the years she'd roll it into such a Katamari Damacy-like colossal mammoth of a body of work (and if you don't know what that means, well then, you don't know FUN! Google it!). At times and often all at once, she's wickedly mischievous, sugary sweet, coyly sexy, quirkily charming, and elegantly sophisticated. Pushes all the right buttons! Continues to delight old fans and new listeners (if there are any left!) alike.
What we will bring to your attention today though is that these dualdisc Bjork reissues are all subtitled 'Surrounded'. Why? Because a major feature on the dvd side of each one is a Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS Surround Sound version of the album. So why listen to this album 'just' in stereo, when you can have some "Big Time Sensuality" pulsating though your whole living room!? Of course, if you do want the stereo option, the cd side has that for ya too in a freshly remastered state. To sweeten the deal even further, there's also five of her deliriously delicious videos -- "Human Behaviour", "Venus As A Boy", "Play Dead", "Big Time Sensuality" and "Violently Happy" -- which are also in Stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS Surround Sound. Swoon.
Psst, we should add that for all of you SERIOUS Bjork fans there's also a deluxe seven dualdisc Surrounded boxset which includes her six studio albums plus the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack!
We've listed this before, long ago, but have been out of it for a while...but now, along with Boris' "Amplifier Worship" and the Keiji Haino w/ Boris disc, we've got this back in stock *and* at a much cheaper price than before (while supplies last). This is a
An absolute delight from start to finish! Like a big ol' box of Crayolas, The Future Crayon is a collection of Broadcast rarities. The eighteen tracks are compiled from singles, eps, and compilations dating back to 1998. They effectively remind us that while this UK band is perhaps best known for their plush synth-driven pop, their musical spectrum stretches far beyond that into jazz, space age, exotica, krautrock, prog, and the science fair even! Needless to say, your ears will surely find that they're so much more delicious than those waxy coloring implements. They're more like the aural equivalent of a fifty scoop sundae -- towering in dream pop yumminess comprised of soft creamy sherbet (Trish Keenan vocals! sigh!), occasional bloops of marshmallow cream and hot fudge (their analog synthesizers!), a sprinkling of nuts and sugary bits (the snappy often jazzy percussion as well as those synths again!). It's all perfectly summed up in the cd's sixteenth and seventeenth numbers "Minus Two" and "Violent Playground", both taken from their 2003 EP Pendulum. Fantastic! Yes, recommended!
For nearly twenty years now, Eugene Carchesio and Leighton Craig have been creating wayward recordings in barely-released editions on cassette and cd-r for their exploratory free-folk / semi-improvisational communions with the Australian landscape. Only recently have any of their recordings made their way across the Pacific, mostly by way of their contributions in the group Lost Domain, whose drifting, monochromatic ragas have been released by such shambolic stalwarts as Digitalis Recordings and PseudoArcana. Leaves is another such entry in their humbly spectacular wanderings; this time, it's through the exceptional Australian label Naturestrip. The easiest comparison that anyone could make to Leaves would be to The Blithe Sons, where two dedicated listeners creating droning harmonics alongside the unpredictability of natural events. Carchesio and Craig often are found slumped over their battery powered keyboards, creating shimmering drone vibrations that accompany the cacophony of lorikeets, crows, cicadas, and wind in Leighton's Brisbane backyard, where these recordings were made. When the birds and insects allow it, Carchesio and Craig pick up an acoustic guitar, violin, and recorder (amongst other instruments) for some purposefully primitive arrangements pocked with dreamily psychedelic references and quietly clattered improv. Really, really nice!
Long overdue reissue of this shoegaze classic. Out of all the bands dubbed shoegazers in the UK in the late eighties, Stone Roses, Primal Scream, Ride, Slowdive, Swervedriver and especially My Bloody Valentine, for some reason, Chapterhouse never really received their due. Sure they sold some records, had a few hit singles, but no one spoke about Chapterhouse with the same hushed reverence as they did when name dropping Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine. Every single band since the nineties, with even the slightest hint of noisiness or spaciness never hesitates to reference MBV as a huge influence, but now that we're finally getting a chance to listen to Whirlpool again, it definitely reminds us how fucking great Chapterhouse were, and what a unique take they had on the whole spaced out bliss out shoegaze thing. Swervedriver may have been the heaviest, My Bloody Valentine the wildest, but Chapterhouse managed to be the most interesting, dipping their toes into both Stone Roses-y dance tracks, and blown out druggy psychedelia a la Swervedriver or MBV. In each instance the band made the sound their own.
The heavier tracks here, "Breather", "Treasure", "Guilt" are packed with dense squalls of heavily affected guitars, big swirls of droney ambience, all of the elements that defined the shoegazers, but Chapterhouse were much more subtle, the result sounding much more druggy and droney like Spacemen 3 (their sonic inspirations) than freaked out and wild like MBV. And when they chose to, like on "Pearl" or "Falling Down" they could whip up an ultra danceable groove, albeit still swathed in a good amount of guitar fuzz and blissy psychedelia. Either way, Chapterhouse at their core, were a pop band, and at the heart of each song was a pop song, a catchy hook, that would either get buried in a thick wash of blissy fuzz, or draped over some sort of funky groove. Either way, we love it!
This reissue includes the Whirlpool album, the Freefall ep, the Sunburst ep and the Pearl ep. Huge booklet with liner notes, band interviews, photos, original album and ep artwork and all of the lyrics printed for the first time!
While on the road Canadian indie songstress Ms Ora Cogan came strolling into our shop with these cd-rs charmingly hand-packaged in cut up old flea market record sleeves. On first glance of the varied decontextualized artworks, you might expect her music to be along the earthy experimental lines of the Bay Area's Jewelled Antler and Jyrk Collectives, but she's definitely coming from a different place -- Salt Spring Island, BC, haha! Seriously though, she's been making good ol' down home, twilight porch swing tunes for the past seven years. Her vocal delivery bears more than a passing resemblance to Ms Jolie Holland's. It possesses that haunting, soulful quality that seems like its source is coming from deep deep within or beyond. Like a mysterious transplant from decades past, it's as though she opens her mouth and a lilting voice from the '20s comes drifting out. It's beautiful in its simplicity, just her and her guitar and a few banjo and back-up vocal additions. Cogan is part of a close knit Canadian folksy sisterhood which includes the Begood Tanyas and Carolyn Mark. If you've a fondness for those ladies (and Ms Holland too), don't wait another second. This is totally for you!
It's been nearly a year and a half since the venerable British drone composer Jonathan Coleclough has offered us something new; and this collaboration between Coleclough and Murmer (aka Patrick McGinley) is well worth the wait! The two met a couple years back after contributing works to the same compilation. Soon after, Coleclough began making regular contributions to McGinley's weekly radio series Framework for Resonance FM in London; and their continued communication sparked the interest for a collaboration. Much of the music found on Husk originated from semi-improvised sessions whereby the two processed various field recordings, small tactile events, and other electronic devices -- gradually developing beyond the gestural and into a monumental sprawling album which is in the running for best drone album of 2006. The two had cited their source material as refrigerators, thunderstorms, sheep, car horns, ferryboats, windblown sand, and crackling charcoal; and it's a crap shoot to discern which of these electrically blurred drones hails from an overheating kitchen appliance or from farm animals. Not that any of that really matters, as the art of Coleclough and McGinley is in their alchemy, transforming the commonplace into the celestial (albeit, a very dark and very cold heavenly body). Throbbing drones of low end harmonics are joined by secondary sustained timbres which undulate as polyamorous tangles, spreading rhizomes, and slippery knots bristling with tactility and spotted with plenty of hints of the organic. Each of the four tracks proposes a variation on glassine drones counterpointed by rasping textures, at times hedging for the subdued drama of smoldering crescendos and others the sublime stare at glacial immobility. Coleclough's work has always been exceptional, and his collaboration with Murmer is no different! Highly recommended.
Digging ever deeper into the EM back-catalog (just like this wonderful Japanese label digs ever deeper and deeper into the realm of obscure and out-of-print LPs, looking for weird gems like this to reissue), we are so psyched to finally review this disc, devoted to the music of Noah Creshevsky. Like the recently reviewed EM releases by Barton Smith and David Rosenberg, this Creshevsky guy is another eccentric electronic music pioneer -- just look at him on the cover, with his bald head, mustache, and little sweater vest! But appearances aside, the eight tracks of audio found on this cd definitely live up to the EM standard of wonderful weirdness as well. What you've got to know about Creshevsky is that he was totally into the gospel of ol' JC -- no, not Jesus Christ, we're talking about 20th century avant-garde composer John Cage. Chance and randomness! The thick cd booklet (pretty much all in Japanese, but heavily illustrated with pictures and graphics) includes a color photo of Creshevsky hanging out with his hero in 1986, and there's also a track here, 1976's "In Other Words (Portrait Of John Cage)", that consists of nine minutes of quietly ominous electronic drone backing some words from JC. That's probably the "calmest" cut on this disc, though, as the rest are much more in the mode of tape-spliced mayhem. You get a display of musique concrete as chop socky boom-bap on the cut-up, percussive first track, "Strategic Defense Initiative" (which with a title like that you won't be surprised to learn dates from 1986). Puts us in mind of early Boredoms, almost! The next track, "Highway" from 1979, brings in more snippets of speech, a collage of non-sequiturs sampled from TV and records. But track three, 1971's "Circuit", sources its sounds, layered and looped, from the chiming strings of the harpsichord only. It's a mesmerizing, maddening bit of music that verges on suspense movie spookiness (with sudden jarring jumps in volume). Other cuts here include "Drummer" (1985), a choppy battery of drumming, of course, plus ambient street sounds and screwy tape garble; the amusing "Great Performances" (1978), a cartoonish concert of sampled symphonic sounds and more spoken non-sequiturs; "Sonata" (1980) which continues the classical theme but adds drum machine blasts and a dose of Nyquil to the verbal component. And then things wind up with the last and latest piece found here, 1992's "Cantiga", another jagged "classical" piece that sounds like the work of an ADD-afflicted Carl Stalling, that manages to establish a nicely moody effect in the end. Overall, The Tape Music Of Noah Creshevsky is damaged, deranged, and full of a lot of detail to delve into. Today's breed of digital Plunderphonicans perhaps could claim Creshevsky as an ancestor, and certainly the pop-culture element here posits Noah Creshevsky as a precursor to the (pioneering themselves) Tape Beatles, for instance. Neat.
Latest blast of abstract sounds from the murky and mysterious musical world of Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, this one from UK dronelord Culver, who tries his hand, according to the blurb on the website, at some atmospheric ambient 'metal', there's even an Abruptum namedrop which obviously sets the bar pretty dang high. It is true, Abruptum, among others, has definitely proven that mood and atmosphere can be just as heavy and grim as riffs and shrieks, although we're not so sure this is -quite- as evil as that Abruptum reference would have led us to believe. That said, this may not be -evil- but it's still incredibly dark and ominous and droney. And that's definitely enough for us. The first track is all acoustic guitar, plucking out a funereal threnody, a creeping mournful melody, droney and dirgey in an atmospherically acoustic way, over the course of 14 minutes the notes buzz a little more and the melody blurs slightly into an even more fuzzy and haunting acoustic dirge. Not heavy perhaps, but really fucking awesome. And subtly scary in its own way. The second track is a keening shimmering buzz, a nine minute exercise in building tension, sounding like some sort of minimalist horror movie music, tense and gorgeously static, while under the surface lurk subtle sonic shits and distant droning rumble. The final track is a 20+ minute whir, warm and thick and layered, like a super super lo-fi SUNNO)), a churning metallic riff, slowed waaaaaaay down and sort of blurred into a swirling sea of black buzz. Super hypnotic and mesmerizingly seasick, a slow neverending ebb and flow of crumbling fuzz drenched drone. The kind of song/sound you wish would play forever. The ultimate minimalist dronemetal trance jam!
SUPER LIMITED! WE GOT ABOUT 30 COPIES, WHEN THOSE ARE GONE THAT'S IT. ALREADY SOLD OUT AT THE LABEL!
Ahh, the eyes they may be wandering, but Canadian country/folk songstress Angela Desveaux knows where she's goin' with her impressive debut on Thrill Jockey. Indeed, her first full length is a remarkably accomplished, golden affair with quite a luminous array of guests, mostly pals from a little Montreal music scene you just might be familiar with (former Arcade Fire drummer Howard Bilerman, Hanged Up's Genevieve Heistek, Harris Newman, Wooden Stars' Mike Feuerstack, and Mike Moya of Molasses, Set Fire To Flames, Hrsta et al). She alternately brings to mind the sweet youthful earnestness of current girlish singers such as Jenny Lewis or Laura Veirs and the aching world weariness and womanly wisdom of Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch (in press photos she actually looks like she could be Welch's long lost younger sister), leaning more heavily in the range of the latter two. Recommended!
This was given to me as a gift, from a friend who shares the same love of the deep dark ominous drone as we do, and before he let me unwrap it, he had all of these provisos: ignore the horrible cover, promise to listen to it before you pass judgment, ignore the fact that it's on New Earth records and that it says "Music For Meditation" on the cover, ignore the rainbow logo and the cheesy landscape, ignore the blurbs on the back cover, basically, try to ignore everything BUT the music. I did, and I'm so glad I did. So now we must do the same for you, faithful AQ customer. Listen to the sound samples, close your eyes and let these gorgeous mystical drones carry you off.
Some of you may know of Deuter before he went all 'new age' -- he was responsible for D, an awesome early '70s Krautrock document of studio experimentation, tape effects, and guitar explorations. While this is a completely different beast, and may have been intended for a whole different audience, it's actually quite stunning. This definitely holds up to any of our favorite dronelords, Chalk, Coleclough, Mirror, in fact this is another one of those releases that if it were some super limited homemade cd-r imported from Finland packaged with twigs and some wire, people would be freaking out BIG TIME! So let's just pretend that this IS some weird obscure drone cd-r, that way we can skip all the bullshit and totally dig in to this divine droney drift.
Made completely from the sounds of Tibetan bells, bowls and chimes, these two tracks (skip the third track, a two minute recording of a burbling stream) are lengthy gorgeous meditational drifts, a deep sea of overlapping tones, shimmering resonance, slowly drifting ovetones, beating gently against each other, creating a dense swirl of microscopic colors and warm subtle shadings. Nearly fifty minutes of divine drone, simultaneously dark and ominous, bright and dreamy, close listening reveals layer after layer of hidden almost-melodies, super subtle mysterious sonic events, a divine dreamworld of deep drifting ambience. So totally and utterly amazing. Pretty awesome that one of our favorite new drone records is not a cd-r from Finland, but a cd from a German ex-hippie new age guru living in New Mexico. Fuck yeah!
Quite possibly our favorite Ukrainian black metal band. And before you scoff, there's plenty of competition, Hate Forest, Nokturnal Mortum, Astrofaes, Lucifugum (and about 200 more according to the Encyclopaedia Metallum), but Drudkh somehow manage to prevail.
Drudkh's particular brand of black grimness, is of the midtempo Burzumic variety, but they infuse their buzz with a surprising amount of epic majesty, mournful melody and strange chords and phrasings that lend all their riffs a strangely haunting gravity. It's kind of hard to explain actually, but every Drudkh song is just so intense, so emotional and so full of mystery. A few things have changed on Blood In Our Wells though, the first is all the Ukrainian folk music and random dialogue purloined from some Ukrainian film, that really adds another strange layer to Drudkh's already dense sonic world, the other thing that's different, is the surprising amount of guitar leads, not the squiggly lightning fast black leads you might expect, but some super melodic strangely glam rock leads. Really! Sounds strange, but it totally works. And just manages to make Drudkh even weirder and cooler.
There's plenty of buzzing blackness for the true and grim and black hearted, but folks who dig Godspeed and Isis, and that whole slow build, explosive climax, quiet-loud-quiet thing might find this Drudkh to be their gateway drug. The perfect moody blackness to drag all those indie rockers to the dark side. TOTALLY RECOMMENDED!!!
Slowly but surely Electrelane has developed a decent sized following over the last several years. Thanks in part to the good taste of folks like The Ex and Broadcast taking them out on tour as well as their own musical progression which has seen them develop from their instrumental roots into their now more dynamic full sound. This collection pieces together singles, b-sides and live tracks from their early days right on up to recordings from last year. Their love of the building repetition of krautrock, the naivete of The Shaggs and the complexity of Stereolab has made them one of the more compelling bands in recent years. What's so nice about Electrelane is that they have this ability to please the ears of those who can trace their roots as well the ears of those who don't have an extensive relationship with things like krautrock and Farfisa organs. Their populist approach becomes more evident on some of their covers like Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire". But we have to say we like when their originals more. And this collection's chock full of gems for all kinds of ears to appreciate.
We're slowly working our way through the blackened back catalog of the mighty Supernal label. They've been responsible for some of our all time favorite black metal weirdness (Benighted Leams, Fleurety, Meads Of Asphodel) as well as some seriously intense grim blackness (Drudkh, Hate Forest) and all sorts of gorgeous ambient dronemusick as well (M87, Dark Ages, Fall Of The Grey Winged One).
Ethereal Woods falls somewhere between the first two. They are definitely bizarre, strange arrangements, weird production, seriously unique sound, but at the same time they definitely have a traditional black thrash going on in there as well.
Ethereal Woods are some sort of Eco-black metal band from the UK, their unique brand of buzzing loping blackened thrash is rife with "dreamy mysticism and sylvan sensibilities", which is also represented in their song titles, band name, lyrics and the legend across the back of the cd stating: "Ethereal Woods support the campaign to protect rural England!"
And what better way to do that than by unleashing a strange black musical concoction equal parts fuzzed out guitars, simple spacey riffing, mournful arpeggiated melodies, bizarre growled vocals way up in the mix and lots and lots of dizzying circus-y keyboards swirling and warbling and whirring. While they do occasionally bust out some series black blasts, they tend to sort of hover between doomy dirge and sort-of-groovy midtempos, sounding sometimes like a more blackened, more moody and miserable Khold. The rhythms have a sort of seasick waltz feel to them, very hypnotic, and while the guitars buzz blackly, more often they just sort of drone beneath dreamy sad sounding melodies, with the keyboards drifting like black clouds, giving the proceedings a strangely epic slant. Quite cool, and as you might expect from Supernal, pretty weird too...
How awesome is the name Yarn Lazer?! If it wasn't already the name of this killer cd-r label, it would definitely be the name of my band, or my restaurant, or maybe my first born!! This is a super limited split between Portland drone ensemble Ghosting, a band AQ folks just can't seem to get enough of, and Irish stoned drone ensemble Bonecloud (also a possible name for the first born btw!).
Ghosting pretty much sound like their name. Their sound is a drone based wander through a ghost town, or better yet, a ghost world, the sound of floating wraithlike through a moonlit landscape, dreamlike and indistinct. Lovely but slightly ominous. Completely mesmerizing.
Bonecloud offer up their own sonic ghostworld, beginning as a shimmery high end drone, before slowly devolving into a murky subterranean crawl, muted voices, buzzing strings, thick whirs and pulsing white noise, all wrapped in a druggy fug and left to drift through along some Stygian stream, a dense murky fog, wrapping your head in muted fuzz and filling your ears with a warm thick sonic syrup. A bit like a modern day, lo-fi, cd-r Taj Mahal Travellers!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!! Packaged in screen
printed and spray painted sleeves with a photocopied insert.
Heads up! Here comes another wave of limited edition 7"s from 333 Records! Each release in this series is pressed in an ultra small quantity of 333! The latest additions are this one by Girl Talk and one by Sagan.
For their two tracks, Girl Talk pitch down and piece together snippits of old top 40 hits producing something that is retardedly infectious fun. Check out those sluggy-thuggy vocals! This reminded Andee of DJ Screw and of being a youngster and playing his 45's at 33 rpm. We've only got a handful of these. Snoooze'n'loooze, kiddie!
Wow, this is ballsy! Mining ultra-familiar pop from the late '70s to last weeks number one hit, Girl Talk has fashioned an infectious dance record completely out of supposedly unauthorized samples. The inside booklet gives a shout out to the plundered artists who include Elton John, XTC, The Yin Yang Twins, Madonna, Amerie, Smashing Pumpkins, The Verve, among hundreds of others. While this is neither a conceptual Plunderphonic cluster fuck nor merely just an illegal mix of mash-ups, Girl Talk fashions cleverly dance-y compositions using the flotsam and jetsam of pop music's collective unconscious. By the time you get to recognition, new sample juxtapositions occur just in time to throw your head into a tailspin. This is definitely a good party-starter, Girl Talk being very aware that it is the girls who get the dance party started, but usually only if something familiar and fun is playing. And there is enough of that incredible stuff on this album to guarantee a nasty but well worth it hang over. Crafty!
Yet another guitar / drum duo! And man are these guys heavy as fuck! What do you expect with a name like Goliath Bird Eater? Usually when a band decides to go bassless, it seems like a really bad idea, and we always tend to think "dude, you guys would be SO much heavier with a bass player", but in the case of GBE, we're not sure what the heck they would do with a bass player. Every conceivable inch of space is stuffed with super pounding blown out drumming or crushing downtuned metallic guitars, or during those brief moments where there are neither, dense tangled squalls of feedback freakout. There are definite nods to the Champs, and to Hella, even though this is ostensibly a 'metal' record, it's definitely got a serious post rock vibe, especially the drumming. It almost sounds like a more minimal version of the Dazzling Killmen. Which is not a bad thing at all. Hard to believe GBE mainman Bobb Bruno once did time in indie rock outfit Polar Goldie Cats cuz man can he wield an axe like nobody's business. Be sure and stick around for the final 30 minute track, a dreamy, slow burning krautrocky bliss out, all droning keyboard and simple shuffling drums, that waits until the last three minutes to break out into some super aggro metallic bombast. Cool exploding veined octopus lady cover art too!
Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom's alchemic synthesizer excursions invoking 70's Klaus Schulze/Manuel Gottsching/Tangerine Dream's long-form synth-prog efforts get the remix treatment on this single. What you get is an alternate take and 3 remixes of the song "Relevee" from their self-titled full length on DFA. The remixers are DFA (of course), Baby Ford ('80s acid-house, anyone?) and the minimalist house of Carl Craig, whose latest remixes, this and his remix of Rhythm and Sound's "Poor People Must Work" is actually making us enjoy house music. Which, as you well know, is quite a feat around here.
It maybe took a little while, but folks around here finally started digging the Grails, A LOT. After their last record, their second release on Neurot, the band went through some personnel shifts, which often trigger the end of a band, but in this case, pushed the band in new directions and resulted in some of their best music to date. That Neurot record was cool, but at the time we had sort of reached our post rock, quiet-loud-quiet saturation point. It wasn't that the Grails weren't a great band, it was because we had raised our bar on moody epic post rock. It was no longer enough to just drift along post-rockily before exploding into epic metallic bombast and drifting back again. As pleasant as that is to listen to, there was SO MUCH of that going around, we just needed something more. Soon after the band released an ep of international psych covers and that was the beginning of a glorious new direction. We knew whatever was gonna come next would be a killer, and thankfully, The Black Tar Prophecies, are indeed just that.
The whole three volumes thing was a bit confusing, and still is. We never actually carried volume one, a super limited split 12" with the Red Sparowes, which went out of print before we could get any, we sold tons of volume two, a limited colored vinyl lp on Aurora Borealis, and as far as we can tell, volume three exists only as the two unreleased tracks on this here cd. Regardless, this is some, dark and amazing, absolutely beautiful music. With the Black Tar Prophecies, the Grails finally shrugged off their influences and forged their own sound, never hesitating to experiment, explore, or fuck around with songs and sound. These musical 'Prophecies just might just be the weirdest, most subtle, least rock set of songs they've ever produced. We were definitely always fans, but when we heard that psych covers ep, on which they covered psychedelic songs from around the world, including AQ faves Flower Travellin Band, well, we were suddenly WAY more than fans. They had us as Flower Travellin Band. Anyway, Black Tar Prophecies takes their obsession with psych rock, and their deft mastery of all things post rock, and turns them inward, into a darker, doomier, moodier place. And we love it. Super gloomy rhythmscapes, jazzy piano, totally dubbed out drums, everything bathed in smoky atmospheric swirl. Reminds us a little of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore at times. Songs that wander down dark alleys, streetlights barely illuminating the murky streets, sonic ghost towns, haunting cinematic postrockscapes, like a more rock DJ Shadow, all low slung bass and shuffling rhythms, very smoky and dreamlike. Elsewhere, dreamy psychedelic guitarscapes, strummed acoustic guitars, beneath fuzzed out moody psych leads, really seventies sounding, like a more abstract post rock Hendrix / Santana thing. But the doom inclined among you will find much to love too, here and there, thick slabs of glacial that will have dronedirgedoom nerds frothing at the mouth, as if to prove they can throw down with the big boys (Boris, Corrupted, Isis, Pelican, Moss, etc...) the band unleash massive downtuned dirges, thick washes of slow sludge guitars woven into tarpit riffs of gargantuan proportion, distortion so blown out it crumbles like dirt clods stuffed in your ears, the recording strangely lo-fi, giving the proceedings a dreary droney, Hawkwind meets Gore sort of dirgedoom vibe. Epic and amazing.
This cd collects both the previously released 12"s and adds two exclusive and previously unreleased tracks!
We've said it before (more than once) but it does bear repeating AGAIN, Lampse is the label of our dreams. Quite literally in fact. Not only have we been totally captivated by every release we've heard so far, each one a gorgeous glistening slab of ethereal ambience, each buried in or delicately obscured by thick layers of gauzy sound or record crackle or tape hiss or any manner of fuzz and buzz, but these Lampse releases are all the perfect drifting off music, late night, lights low, cool breeze, floating off to never never land, sinking into a deep warm blackness, the absolute perfect going to sleep music. Our bedside listening has pretty much been exclusively Jasper TX, Machinefabriek and this dreamlike sonic document from the hard to pronounce Gultskra Artikler.
GA might be the strangest of the bunch, which is saying a lot. The songs are much more active, with more obvious instrumentation, lots of guitars, most rendered into weird little angular shapes, sometimes stretched into gauzy smears, strings everywhere, sometimes pizzicato, drenched in reverb, floating dreamily in a swirling black void, sometimes soaring in the distance, weaving emotional epic backdrops to the sounds in the foreground, lots of mysterious percussion, and wheezing keyboards, fuzzy synths, but where the other two Lampse records we've reviewed employ a serious arsenal of sonic detritus to give their sounds a melancholy soft focus patina, Gultskra Artikler utilize a series of subtle field recordings, low level conversations, clinking silverware, footsteps, wind and rain, as well as what sounds like haunting disembodied tape loops, all woven delicately into the already ephemeral fabric of each song. And the thing is these are actual songs, there are melodies, and refrains and riffs, buried rhythms and soft swells of sweet sound, all rendered in deep shadows and indistinct hues. Grainy sound worlds that creep and swirl, drift and hover, an alien pastoral folk music buried beneath dense whirls of thick fog, slow, sleepy stretches of abstract ambience stretched into songlike shapes and allowed to drift lazily amidst a haunting world of shrouded beauty...
So absolutely lovely!
So it took the rest of the world a while to catch on. Don't be too hard on them. Harvey Milk are one difficult proposition. Don't blame us though. We've been there all along trying to convince everybody just how brilliant this bafflingly bizarre sludge combo really was. Andee even reissued their seminal Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men album on his tUMULt label. And don't blame Henry at Chunklet, the man responsible for this here document. In fact he was right there every step of the way, a one man Harvey Milk archivist and booster club. And of course we don't blame you, loyal AQ list readers, cuz we know you feel the same way we do, you just can't get enough of Harvey Milk's pummeling, crushing, obtuse and confusional heaviness. Well for you, and for us, and for the heavy music lovers of the world who have yet to discover the difficult joy of Harvey Milk, life is is about to get a whole lot sweeter.
Courtesy And Good Will is getting reissued again, on Relapse, any day now, there's a BRAND NEW Harvey Milk record due sometime in the next month or so, there are rumors of a deluxe reissue of the long out of print Harvey Milk debut, a serious holy grail, My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, maybe with an extra disc, and then there's THIS. Four long years in the making, and it was worth every single second. Most of us who dig Harvey Milk, even those of us who might go so far as to say we are obsessed, never actually got to see the band play live. And this three and a half hour DVD collection of live shows spanning over 12 years is just as much a revelation as we knew it would be.
From super grainy early live footage, when the band was much more of a punk rock, Touch And Go / AmRep sort of beast, you can, out of the corner of your eye, see the sludginess and fuckedupness creep up through the music, slowly and subtly infusing every song and sound with some ineffable something, that helped turn Harvey Milk into a band that sounded unlike any other band, then or now. Theirs was a career trajectory based entirely on getting weirder and sludgier and more obtuse and WAY more difficult and fucked up, a bit like the Melvins, but without the unexpected mainstream success and major label deal. Harvey Milk also unexpectedly shifted gears for a while, letting their ZZ Top obsession take control, and becoming impossibly groovy and rocking, which only lasted a single record before the band returned EVEN MORE damaged and slow and brutal, as if that was even possible.
The band look so unassuming, frontman Creston Spiers just an every day Joe until he opens his mouth and unleashes that impossible low banshee-like howl, bass player Stephen Tanner, with his weird, fey, Doogie Howser look, goofy smile and even goofier sexy hip swivel. And the drums, the drummers... Harvey Milk's songs are so full of space, so slow and stretched out, the drums are often the only thing holding the songs together. Whether they are shuffling in the background, or pounding out a massive slow motion throb, it's the drums that allow the guitars to spin off into space and the songs to unfurl into confusing super spacious epics.
Probably the most amazing part of the disc is when Creston wields a sledgehammer, pounding an anvil in time with the downtuned bass and pounding drums, while howling in that anguished banshee wail of his. Normally it would be weird to see a band set-up like that -- bass, drums and sledgehammer -- but somehow, for Harvey Milk it seems perfect. Creston swaying back and forth, cradling the hammer like it was a guitar, while the band pounds out a sludgy dirge behind him. So good! Woven in to the older material are plenty of long slow drawn out moody post rockisms, with drifting simple mournful melodies, and mumbled crooned vocals that eventually build into the epic whirls of swirling sludge we hold so near and dear to our hearts.
The biggest surprise here is how much footage there is from the band's "ZZ Top period," a stretch that on record only lasted a single album, but live seemed to have spanned several years. A wild and hair twirling, head banging super groovy sort-of-Southern rock with howled and yelped superrock vocals, less obviously sludgy, but still ultra heavy. This was never really a favorite sound for lots of Milk fans (although it is Allan's favorite) but seeing these songs performed live is enough to convince us that maybe we were WAY off and this stuff is some of the best Harvey Milk EVER!!!
It sounds like southern rock filtered through the Melvins. Or Ram Jam played by the Corrupted. It's just so awesome to watch with drummer Kyle Spence's massive Boham-esque kit (complete with Bonham's logo on the bass drum head) a huge gong, just tearing it up Bill Ward style holding the whole thing together... And because of the film stock and the sound and the style, it's almost feels like watching some recently unearthed German television footage of some ultra heavy long lost proto metal band from the seventies, they even whip out a little "Pinball Wizard!" Someone needs to reissue The Pleaser now. C'mon!! Maybe we just weren't in the right frame of mind when it first came out, but we're pretty sure that record would kick our asses now!
After that, the band sort of drifted off and disappeared, before resurfacing in 2005, as a much grungier, hairier looking Milk, all jeans and long hair and Voivod t-shirts, and they sound like it too. A return to the impossibly glacial dirge of Courtesy, but even heavier and somehow more even more fucked up sounding. Like Sabbath at 16rpm, massive lumbering, blown out sludgerock divinity. How many ways can we say it. WE LOVE HARVEY MILK!!! THEY ARE WITHOUT A DOUBT ONE OF THE GREATEST BANDS OF THE LAST 20 YEARS!!
There's also a DVD Easter egg (thanks Jace!): just go to the credits menu and push up until "40 Watt '93" is highlighted, for some footage from an April Fool's show where the band tackle three R.E.M. covers, taken from a show where the band covered R.E.M.'s Reckoning in its entirety. Seriously! (the also once did a whole set of Hank Williams covers, let's pray someone has a tape of that stashed!) It's pretty dang cool to see one generation of Athens rock take on another. And they don't really sludge it up all that much, playing 'em pretty straight, but managing to make them -almost- sound like Harvey Milk originals!
Also included is a four song 3"cd containing previously unreleased, super rare tracks, one of which is their version of R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain"!!!
And of course the packaging is breathtaking. Designed by Stephen O'Malley and Henry Chunklet, it's a gorgeous oversized DVD style, fold over interlocking cardstock sleeve, greenish brown, with O'Malley's instantly recognizable graphic shards in dark brown, the title in embossed reflective silver, inside copious liner notes from Henry printed in metallic silver, the back has an angular H and M diecut, through which you can see the inside sleeve, a black folded cardstock gatefold with silver metallic ink which houses both the DVD and the 3" cd affixed to the inside on little nubs. So awesome!
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF 1000 COPIES!!!!!!!!
Not sure how it happened, but somehow we've never reviewed any Hate Forest records. Which is surprising since all of the AQ metalheads LOVE Hate Forest. How could we not? They hail from a pretty amazing Ukrainian metal scene, and feature members from a bunch of other bands we dig: Drudkh, Dark Ages, Astrofaes, Nokturnal Mortum. Got your attention now do we?! The sad thing is as of recently Hate Forest have decided to call it a day. Some of the HF folks have a new band called Blood Of Kingu which we'll of course track down as soon as it's out, but just because the band is gone, are any of their records any less amazing.
We'll try to list all of them eventually, but we'll start with Nietzscheism, which is kind of a greatest hits, a collection of 7"s, compiling material from Resistance (2004), Darkness (2000), Blood And Fire (2001) and Ritual (2001).
The disc starts off unexpectedly with a Carl Orff piece that had Kerry feeling like she just had her heart torn out in some Indiana Jones movie, which we imagine was probably the intended effect. An epic, majestic, super dramatic intro to a song cycle that is all of those things, albeit much much blacker!
Fans of Drudkh and Nokturnal Mortum will have some idea of what to expect from these Ukrainian black metal warriors, a relentless and furious blackened attack, a buzzing blackness rife with incredible riffs, simple blasting beats, deep growled demonic vocals, a weird blend of black shriek and death gurgle, all violently tangled up into a pummeling, crushing black metal majesty. There are brief stretches of midtempo Burzumic buzz, loping sea sick rhythms and mournful melodies, amidst the grim black brutality, and there's even a track that hints at the weirdness Nokturnal Mortum would later turn into entire records, simple martial percussion, sounds of the forest, crickets, owls, crackling fire, whispering wind, creepy affected spoken vocals, but those moments are merely brief respites, glimmers of false hope, single rays of light amidst a sky of roiling stormclouds, fleeting glimpses of dronelike buzz between huge swaths of hateful Satanic black brutality. So fucking awesome!!!
OK, all you dedicated fans of the French synth prog act Heldon, here's the other live document of Richard Pinhas' band recently released by the Japanese label Captain Trip, alluded to in our review last list of the double cd Well and Alive: Live in Nancy 1979. We mentioned that while the 1979 set was both rhythmically precise and wonderfully spacey, this single-disc collection of earlier live recordings from the 1975-'76 era consisted of looser, stoned, rockin' jamming. Indeed. Of course, still pretty darn spacey. This wasn't recorded by electronic robots by any means. Sounds more like mellow Hendrix-digging freaks doing drugs and getting off on droning acid rock guitar. We can't exactly argue with that, though.
Be warned that sound-quality-wise, this is fairly hissy and lo-fi. Not a pristine studio recording, that's for sure -- but it really works with all the fuzz, effects, and feedback, akin to a Rallizes boot. Still, not the place to start if you're utterly new to Heldon.
52 minutes, seven previously unreleased tracks, limited to 1000 copies, packaged in a nice Japanese mini LP styled sleeve.
Holy crap, we weren't kidding when we mentioned in the -other- Robert Horton review on this list, that this man has been busy busy busy. Releasing records for going on 30 years now, but everything we've heard has been absolutely amazing. So we're not complaining, we're just scrambling to keep up, and to make enough room on our shelves at home. You pretty much need a dedicated Horton shelf by now, but it's well worth it. As we said, everything we've heard has been great, and this latest release is no exception.
Horton seems to derive perverse pleasure in getting pretty sounds of some of the most unlikely sources. Even at his droniest and dreamiest, it's not uncommon to discover he was using vibrators and electric toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners or footwear. And this disc follows suit. He employs the usual array of soundmakers: Boot, sex machine, pump organ, dulcimer, vibrator, turntables, contact mics and on and on. Weaving all of the disparate sounds these items produce deftly into gorgeous dronelike shapes. This record in particular sound especially guitar heavy, one track with buzzing slipper slide, another with repetitive strum, over some deconstructed Appalachia, some weird blown out fuzzy psych, but these 'jams' are balanced by a delicate world of drone, pulses and shimmers, some truly lovely stuff. The most far out track has to be "Tern", where Horton performs solo on a barometer, creating a clattery clanging percussive workout. As always, super stuff!!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Packaged in a screen-printed/photo cover, with a photocopied insert, pressed on cool black cd-r's and housed in a heavy vinyl sleeve.
The Bay Area's very own Robert Horton has been a very busy beaver, and it hasn't just been lately, as is evidenced by this, volume THREE in the Horton archives, collecting various bits and baubles recorded between 1985 and 1988, all of it just as stunning on anything from the last few years.
The opener is a massive 12 minute epic utilizing 8 guitars, using just intonation, producing harmonics by vibrating the strings with vibrators and electric razors, the result a gorgeous keening high end drift, slow peals of upper register drone slowly shifting and shimmering. The rest of the tracks here are also drone based, with subtle variations, dancers swinging rocks together for percussion, various unlikely stringed instruments, chanted vocals, even horns, the results without exception, lovely and serene. It's frustrating sometimes, trying to keep up with the prolific output of many artists and labels today, now that putting out a cd-r is as easy as stopping at Office Depot on your way home from work, but whenever we almost give up, we throw a new disc on and are whisked away to some droney dreamy sonic wonderland and just drift away, wondering how the heck we could have been thinking about giving up...
Includes full color insert and extensive liner notes, Horton history and info on each track.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. WE GOT 30 COPIES, ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD, IT'S ALREADY OUT OF PRINT AT THE LABEL!
John Reis and Rick Froberg were responsible for one of the best and most copied rock bands of the '90s, Drive Like Jehu. While Jehu only left the world with two full lengths, Reis continued pouring his soul into Rocket From The Crypt as well as his many side-projects. He also started his own label, Swami, and began doing an amazing radio show in San Diego. Answering the prayers of so many Jehu fans across the globe Reis and Froberg reunited to form a new band together. Hot Snakes are a much more straight ahead affair then the intricate near prog bombast of Jehu but the guts, fire and passion ring just as loud and true. Back when I (Irwin) was living in Southern California my old radio station KSPC put on an amazing concert series. One of the highlights was when the Hot Snakes were to embark on their first tour playing only a handful of shows across the states and ended up playing at a show I helped book! A dream come true. They completely tore apart the basement where the show took place and we all felt so sorry for the other bands that opened since once the Hot Snakes started playing, every trace of the opening band, every memory was blown clear out of everyone's heads before the end of their first song. This release captures Hot Snakes in all of their sweaty and hard rocking live glory, during one of their last shows in Australia, reminding us of what a joy it was to get to see these guys live. Sounding just as perfect, adrenalized, and spot on as they did in the studio. This last incarnation of Hot Snakes was rounded out by the great drumming of Mario Rubalcaba (Clikitat Ikatowi, RFTC) and the so totally underrated guitar stylings of one of San Diego's unsung treasures Gar Wood (Tanner, Beehive & The Barracudas) proving that Hot Snakes were indeed hands down one of the best live bands on the planet.
Sometimes we just have nothing nice to say about a record. So instead we'll just quote this compelling blurb their label wrote, from the sticker on the front cover: "belief pacts, beatnik poetry, sandpipers and perfume, axed lungs, prison lullabies, pigmented moments, bonneted lambs, January storm fang. I'm listening illuminate with your attention."
Um, yeah, sure. Sounds more like a bunch of kids banging jars and howling obnoxiously to us...sorry!
We have the feeling that even though Jay Dee is gone from this world that we will continue to see new releases of his work. Sort of like a hip-hop Arthur Russell, or a hip hop... umm... Tupac? Anyway, the man was a mad alchemist, constantly working and experimenting. We predict that even earlier records he produced such as A Tribe Called Quest's Beats Rhymes, and Life and De La Soul's Stakes Is High -maligned when they were originally released- will soon be greatly reconsidered in the context of Dilla's finally much-respected legacy.
And that's a good thing, because we'd hate to think that The Shining would be viewed as Jay Dee's crowning achievement. Working on this at the time of his death, his friend Karriem Riggins stepped in to finish the job, and while there is some great production work, it feels like more of a tribute record than a proper album. A number of A-list rappers including Common, Busta Rhymes and Guilty Simpson guest on most of the tracks too. While we like this less than we liked Dilla's previous effort, Donuts, (largely because it was instrumental) we think fans of Jay Dee will find much to love on The Shining.
Savage Pencil cover art. Gothic font. Grim graphics. Black metal sonics. So this is the new Jazzkammer?! Metal Machine Music sees this Norwegian electronic noise duo changing their name (slightly) and suddenly adopting a black/death/doom metal sound. Maybe in this case we should say Metal, using the capital M for it like The Wire magazine does. Not sure what inspired this new direction, we'd hate to think it was just that in avant-experimental-indie circles Metal is now 'cool', and that they thought hey if SUNNO))) can do it, why not us? But chances are that being from Norway they're well aware of the black metal scene and dig a lot of the same stuff about it that we do, the perhaps unintentional avant-gardisms of bands like Abruptum for instance, and figured it was time to delve into it fully themselves. What matters, anyway, is how did Jazkamer's Metal Machine Music turn out? Well, we like it! First off, Jazkamer, as opposed to Jazzkammer, is not a duo, they've brought in some other folks to help out, including a real ringer -- Ivar Bjornson of AQ fave Viking black prog metallers Enslaved!! So we're taking it pretty seriously already.
The first track, "Friends Of Satan" is a pretty harsh intro, and should serve to weed out listeners who AREN'T in fact friends of Satan. It's a blurred, blasting battery of drums and distortion, not unlike that sampled death metal disc by Francisco Lopez, Untitled 104. Or the Dave Lombardo track on Jonathan Bepler's Cremaster 2 soundtrack. The chorus of anguished vokills at the end of the track further nail down Jazkamer's black metal ballsiness. They'd be pleased to know that someone here asked, when this was playing, "What's that? Besides headache-inducing?" Following that, we encounter one of this album's main events, the 16:51 "The Worms Will Get In", a study in slow-motion, doom-dirge minimalism a la SUNNO))), Earth, and Khanate. Simple but effective. When it ends, it's a jarring segue into the next track, the jagged "Abomination". Probably the thing on here that most sounds like it could be from a "normal" black metal album, albeit with No Wave / Voivodian influences. Next up, the title track, that's along the same lines as "Abomination" but, like, ten times noisier. And then, the finale, the 12 and a half minute "Occult Glider" that's a menacing ambient fuzzed-drone soundscape, beautiful and powerful.
We're impressed. Our doubts were quashed. Better than any Jazzkammer album we'd previously heard, as a matter of fact!
Jazzfinger may seem like they just burst upon the scene, what with the recent flurry of cd-r releases, but these guys have been making beautiful noises for going on a decade now. We have been LOVING everything, we just can't get enough!! So much so that we pulled out our decade old copies of The Little Girl On The Plane Who Turned Her Doll's Head Around To Look At Me, their debut from way back in 1998 (although it was recorded in 1996-97). And holy shit, did that stuff sound just as good now as it did then. We were so blown away when we first discovered this record, we were convinced Jazzfinger would be huge, then they sort of just disappeared for a while before resurfacing more recently. Anyway, we were lamenting the fact that all the folks who had been freaking out over the recent spate of Jazzfinger cd-r's would never get to hear the one that we might just consider to be the best. The lo and behold, we get a call from Ben Jazzfinger, who out of the blue lets us know that the label still has a stash of these discs! Well, needless to say, we had a little freakout, did a little dance, and ordered us up a whole mess of these amazing discs. Needless to say, if you are already a fan of any of the recent JF releases, this is ESSENTIAL. And all you cd-r nerds into Jyrk, Onomata, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, PseudoArcana are definitely gonna want to check this out!!
So what does it sound like? Well if you're hip to the Jazzfinger already, you probably have a good idea, but as this was nearly a decade ago, the sound is a lot more raw, a lot more varied, and really fucking awesome. A caustic soundscape of high end streaks, like howling dogs and balloons being rubber together morphs into a thick fuzzy dirgescape thick with industrial scrapes and warbly organ, like some long lost Dead C jam, then some damaged acoustic guitar beneath a field of buzzing electricity. A lurching sort-of doom metal free noise dirge leads into a stuttering soundscape of sliced and diced vocal and instrumental snippets, a glistening swirl of shortwave interference, found sounds and thick grinding guitar feedback gradually melts away revealing a bizarre low end landscape of gurgles and rumbles, and some stumbling percussion. A radio broadcast is transformed into a thick super distorted snarling beast, jagged and harsh, swathed in fuzz and sheets of feedback, before it drifts away replaced by a strange beeping bleeping symphony of upper register tones and haunting chimes. Finally, an epic, super dramatic, free noise freaked out psych jam, like the Dead C covering Goblin. The music for some alien horror movie. Thick and caustic and noisy but somehow so creepy and pretty. Such an amazing record.
Beautifully packaged too, in an oversized vellum sleeve, printed in metallic silver, the thick brown cardboard inner sleeve visible through the vellum, the whole thing housed in a thick vinyl sleeve.
NOT A WHOLE LOT OF THESE LEFT, SO WHEN WE RUN OUT, WE'RE NOT ENTIRELY SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE.
We are definitely masters of hyperbole. We admit it. So many of our reviews boldly proclaim records to be "the best ever" or "the most retarded ever" or the ever popular "most fucked ever". The thing is, at least from where we're sitting, there CAN be more than one "best ever", and there ARE many "most fucked" records ever... why not? It depends on your mood, what you're doing, where you are, stereo or headphones, car or computer, happy or sad, depressed or romantic, and hell, it could be as simple as a whim. Sometimes, you feel like listening to a specific record, and for that 40 minutes, it is without a doubt, THE BEST RECORD EVER. Now, granted, some 'best records ever' are all time top 10's, while some are favorite records of the summer, and others are favorite make out records, or whatever, but all of them are awesome. For us to make that sort of proclamation, a record has to completely rule, totally kick our ass, and get the shit played out of it! But sometimes, it's not hyperbole. Sometimes a record ABSOLUTELY IS, one of the best pop records EVER MADE. Like Jellyfish's Spilt Milk.
This is not a new release or anything, not even a remastered reissue, but 13 years after it was released, it still gets played A LOT, and still pretty much destroys every other pop record around. Jellyfish started out as a bellbottomed, paisley psychedelic retro combo, but quickly blossomed into a completely amazing, heavy rock power pop supergroup. Not in the sense of being made up of members of other famous bands, but in the sense that they were an absolutely super amazing rock group!!! Jellyfish took the over the top bombast and incredible harmonies of Queen, the perfect summery pop of the Beach Boys and mixed in their own off kilter approach to power pop. Incredibly intricate and complex arrangements, but done so deftly as to never take away from the inherent catchiness of the songs. The guitars are huge, crunchy and heavy, like a super charged Brian May, the drumming is incredible, heavy hitting, super creative, and as catchy on their own as any of the guitar parts or vocal lines. In fact, the one time we saw Jellyfish live, vocalist / drummer Andy Sturmer managed to sing all of these incredible harmonies WHILE playing incredible drum parts, on a STAND UP kit!! Totally blew our mind. A look at the cover and the incredible arrangement of instruments in the studio gives an idea of how epic and amazing this record sounds, gongs, timpani, strings, piano, organ, acoustic guitar, harp, xylophone and more and more and on an on.
Some of the songs are delicate and sweet, soft and shimmery, some are bombastic and heavy, some are sweet simple lullabies, others are incredibly complicated slabs of ultra complex prog pop, but every song on here is a stone cold classic. If there were any justice in the world this record would have been HUGE, and Jellyfish would be playing arenas and making music videos and still making even more incredible records. But sadly, the world wasn't ready for this kind of intelligent, heavy, proggy power pop and the band hung it up soon after. But what a way to go. Just listen to the sound samples and see if you aren't immediately kicking yourself for waiting more than a decade to dig in to this utter pop brilliance.
The title pretty much says it all... and the cover art tells you the rest. This cd features ten remixes of Kammerflimmer Kollektief tracks by Noze, Sutekh, Radian, Secondo, Lump200, David Last, Jan Jelinek, Aoki Takamasa and Hans Appelqvist. Each track sounds exactly like a textbook definition of "remix" -- skillfully dismembered, edited, and augmented glitchy electronica in which both artists are sufficiently 'represented'. That said, the Jan Jelinek and Aoki Takamasa tracks were particularly pleasing treatments of these German faves.
It's been several years since this was last available, so all AMT fans who missed Hot Rattlesnakes the first time should be happy that Prophase has reissued this album (originally released by Paratactile in 2002). Here's our review from back then, all comments about AMT's prodigious output still valid:
Another two weeks have passed. Must mean it's time for another AQ-list. AND another Acid Mothers Temple record!! That's a slight exaggeration, but -only- slight, as the insanely prolific Makoto Kawabata (surpassed only by the stupidly prolific Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices) unleashes yet more music, this time with his power trio Mothers Of Invasion and their debut recording "Hot Rattlesnakes" (a reference to the only Zappa record Allan thinks you might want to own). Fans know what to expect and won't be disappointed. Track one is a thirty minute, freaked out psychedelic rock and roll jam. Bass (Tsuyama Atsushi) and drums (Ichiraku Yoshimitsu) kicking out an endless groove while Kawabata goes to fuckin' town! Wailing and squealing and spraying gobs of freaked out Hendrix guitar all over the place. Endless guitar god nirvana. You know you love it! Track two is ten minutes of delayed and reverbed guitars warped into a hypnotic wash of warm guitar atmospherics and gently finger picked low end melodies. Subtle and quite nice. The closing 15 minutes is back to the jam, with an even more intense burst of psychedelic mayhem, phasers set to stun and flangers set to... well to FLANGE MOTHER FUCKER!!!!! The track blisses out for a moment while Kawabata wrings some emotion from his dying guitar, only to bring it back to life and exit in a blaze of guitar shredding, amp melting glory!
It must be pretty fun being Campbell Kneale's kids. Not only is he a cool guy, funny, weird taste, he also gathers his offspring together once in a while and records an album!! Man, when we were 7 or 8 years old, I'm not sure we would have even understood what was going on if our Dad asked us to start a band or record an album. But the younger Kneales, Winter, aged 7, and Caspar, aged 9, are old hands at this recording business. In fact this is record number two, for this familial ensemble, rounded out by Campbell, aged 33. The last Kneale-Cubed record, Myriapod, was a chaotic freeforall blast of noise, a wall of sound very reminiscent of Papa Kneale's harsher Birchville albums. But part of that may have been cuz the kids were too young to know better, nothing more fun than making loud noise after all. But it seems Winter and Caspar have matured, both physically and musically, as Majestic Header is a much more refined affair, two lengthy tracks of skittery beated drone, with Winter and Caspar handling most of the instruments: beats, electronics, and percussion, leaving Dad to violin and guitar. The result is pretty cool. Both tracks are long free form drone workouts, a thick layer of fuzz beneath squealing peals of violin skree, while nestled amongst the fuzzy drone and thick whirs, a simple propulsive drum machine pulses along and the whole thing is pelted with strange alien squelches and abstract FX. The second track has an almost-house music thing going on, although it's buried under some Black Boned guitars. Like a techno Total or a heavy metal Neu! or some sort of primitive Birchville remix record. Cool stuff. Can't wait to hear what sort of sonic trouble these boys will get up to in their teens!! We're sure Campbell is bracing himself as well!!
SUPER LIMITED! WE GOT ABOUT 30 COPIES, WHEN THOSE ARE GONE THEY MAY BE GONE FOR GOOD, SO ACT FAST!
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We're so excited to finally be holding this long in the works release in our grubby little paws. A long term collaboration between Loren Chasse and Ray Guillette, When I Lift I Can Feel My Sunburn Singing was originally intended to be released as a picture disc on tUMULt, but through a series of strange circumstances, the picture disc series was put on hold indefinitely, and the L/R record just sort of languished on a dusty shelf somewhere, which was an absolute shame as this is a beautiful piece of work. Thankfully, the folks at Paha Porvari tracked this record down and decided to give it a proper release. While we sort of wish they had pressed this as a real cd, the cd-r format's transitive nature is perfectly suited to the record's sound and theme.
Culled from a series of field recordings collected at the site of a ruined factory in South San Francisco way back in 1996, When I Lift I Can Feel My Sunburn Singing is the document of several live performances in 1997 and 1998 assembled from those sounds.
L/R explore a world of thick washed out drones, swirling seas of whir, gorgeously shimmery expanses of sun dappled sound, all peppered with crackle and glitch, cavernous windblown soundscapes, haunting metallic chimes and muted percussive events, jagged shards of sound, recontextualized into haunting rhythmic grooves, a constantly shifting soundworld of mystery and magic, alternately jagged and caustic, soothing and dreamlike. Incredible stuff!
Gorgeously packaged in an oversized black on black cardstock sleeve, inside lots of beautiful full color inserts, drawings and etchings and paintings reproduced on super nice paper, as well as two delicate vellum inserts with liner notes and credits.
Between this new album from Lambchop and those from Jason Molina and M. Ward, whoa, this is quite the week for country rock excellence!
Listening to the latest Lambchop album is a lot like wrapping your winter-chilled bones in an old wool blanket... or like being hugged by your favorite bearded uncle -- a bit bristly, but utterly warm and comforting. Y'know, something/someone you can always count on. Their country rooted sound is thick, smooth and dark like molasses with the piano, bass, steel guitar, strings and vocals all melting together beautifully. When this band is 'on' they simply can't be beat for deep, shadowy Americana goodness, and with Damaged they most definitely are! Recommended!
