Wow! To be able to make music that is both charming and soulful is a feat few can meet. This collective from Bogota, Columbia have done just that. Crafting really colorful minimalist pop that totally hits its mark. Eighteen short 4-track recorded songs that all feel like tiny treasures you want to keep in your pocket for good luck. Their ability to keep intact the most satisfying elements of primitive song writing while allowing themselves to explore all kinds of different sounds and styles. Think tropicalia meets The Residents meets Young Marble Giants meets a Smithsonian Folkways record of the future. Excellent!
Here's a unique kind of movie soundtrack, and an excellent one at that! Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man features live recordings of Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Teddy Thompson, Nick Cave, Antony (of And The Johnsons), Beth Orton, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, The Handsome Family, Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen, U2 and the man himself, Leonard Cohen. The performances (except for the Cohen/U2 one) were part of Hal Willner's production "Came So Far For Beauty: An Evening Of Leonard Cohen Songs" which took place twice in Brighton, England (2004) and Sydney, Australia (2005). Cool!
This Dodo Bird is charming from the very first song! The other four gentle folk pop tunes with their effusive acoustic guitar and soft-spoken male vocals are pretty darn lovely too. The gent behind all of them is Meric Long, a singer/songwriter from right here in SF (fyi: he's recently performed under the moniker Dodo Bird). This is his impressive debut ep, and it's super confident and composed. Very much in the easygoing, engaging tradition of Simon And Garfunkel, Astrud Gilberto, and definitely recommended for fans of Iron & Wine, Kings Of Convenience and Elliott Smith. Can't wait for more!
Curious that we hadn't reviewed Lustmord's impressive 1994 album The Place Where The Black Stars Hang until now. One reason for that is that this is one of those records that has slipped in and out of print over the years; but thankfully Soleilmoon has just released this remastered version of the dark ambient classic. Brian "Lustmord" Williams began his musical career in the late '70s as a member of SPK, whose early Industrial albums set a very high standard for aggressive electronics, shock tactics, and raw aggression, definite sonic inspiration for current darlings such as Wolf Eyes and Prurient although those groups have never quite surpassed the original. While Williams and SPK's frontman Graeme Revell have remained close friends and occasional partners for Hollywood sound design projects, Williams struck out on his own in the early '90s as Lustmord, taking SPK's psychoacoustic intensity, noise, and ill-temper with him. While the early Lustmord records have the finger on the SPK template, Williams really made his first big impact with 1990's Heresy -- an overwhelmingly bleak album that literally fused the reverberations from catacombs and underground passages with a spectral ambience whose influence can be felt from the acoustically inclined realms of sound art to the infernal expressionism of black metal. While the follow up album to Heresy (The Monstrous Soul) pushed further toward the occult and horrific with incredible panache, it never received the universal acclaim that Heresy did; but The Place Where The Black Stars is the other verifiable masterpiece in his catalogue of recordings. Taking poetic license from the astrophysical studies of black holes as well as from archaic solar cults, Williams has crafted an electronic album that is as nightmarishly bleak as it is Wagnerian in scope. Long passages of irradiated dark matter stream into eternal drones reflecting the vastness of empty space; and subdued half-melodies and siren-song chantings slowly churn into ever deepening rumbles and the blackest of ambient drift. Absolutely essential.
Hey! Check out this new female duo from LA who call themselves The Lynx Technique! Their smart energetic pop struts with a little bit of swaggerin' attitude. April and Grace seem to be channeling the stellar spirit, sound and songwriting of Throwing Muses's Kristen Hersh and Tanya Donnelly. This five song ep features lots of craftily arranged crunchy guitars, interesting tempo'n'mood changes and cool vocals that alternate between a slinky coo and a snarky sneer. This is a terrific debut cd stunningly packaged in a special screenprinted digipak, and comes with 1" buttons for the band and label. Fans of Pretty Girls Make Graves, Tegan & Sara and Metric just might appreciate the non-textbook, tuneful schooling of The Lynx Technique's Algebra.
Psst, plus these goodhearted gals not only named themselves after the endangered North American Lynx, but they're also donating 1% of this cd's proceeds to non-profit organizations who aid endangered species.
A Magik Markers live recording released by Textile Records in Paris, France.
From the sounds of things this might've been their most surprisingly subdued and least chaotic performance ever. The somber guitar pickery and mostly incoherent vocals simmer under washes of cymbals with rhythmic drum rumbles surfacing in the more aggressive stretches. Surprisingly nice.
That's right. We're not even sure if anyone uses mouse pads anymore what with those newfangled optical mice. But whatever, this is a MAGMA mouse pad. So we got a few (just a few). A 19 cm diameter round foam rubbery mouse pad emblazoned with the familiar Magma symbol in red. Cool, eh? 'Nuff said, I can't believe we're reviewing a mouse pad!
People (well, Magma fans, who are the best sort of people, right?) have been waiting for this! Another dvd document of the modern-day (and still amazing) Magma playing live, which is a very special thing. And super super special when they're doing really really old stuff like on this dvd. All the songs here date from the dawn of Magma, the early early '70s, "Epok 1" in the terminology of this dvd, which is the first in a projected four-volume set documenting 35 years of music from the band. In the spring of 2005 they played four weeks of sold-out shows in the intimate confines of the Paris club Le Triton, devoting one week each to what they consider the four "Epoks" of their career to date. So the compositions performed on this volume, from the 1970-72 era of such albums as Kobaia, 1001 Degrees Centigrade, and MDK include: "Malaria", "Stoah", "'Iss' Lansei Doia", "Aurae", "Kobaia", "Sowiloi", "KMX B12", and the 35 minute first movement of "Theusz Hamtaahk".
Now, we just got this in, so we haven't actually had the chance to screen the whole thing. But we did excitedly slip it into the computer and skipped through a few chapters and definitely what we saw made us eager to find the time to sit down in front of the TV, crank the volume, and watch the whole thing through (like, ten or twenty times -- but we ARE huge Magma nerds).
Aside from the basics -- that this is a professionally shot video recording, filmed from multiple angles, of a kick ass band of both young and old Magma folks, including a long haired, leather-vested Klaus Blasquiz on vocals, plus Stella Vander as well, and a bald headed Emmanuel Borghi on Fender Rhodes -- we noticed a few entertaining details. Borghi, lurking at his keyboard, resembles Nosferatu just a bit... Blasquiz's gives what seems to be a genuinely shocked reaction to a particularly noisy solo played by guitarist James Mac Gaw... and no, bearish band leader Christian Vander doesn't have a tattoo -- what looks like a tattoo is actually an excess of upper-arm hair!
OK, there's no getting around it. This will probably make you laugh. They're funny. We admit it. But they're not a joke, and while they make us laugh at times, being so over the top and insane and absurd, and looking so dorky-cool (the horn section, in their oversized white Magma t-shirts, were definitely "band guys" in high school, if you know what we mean) they are also completely awesome for other reasons, musical reasons, as well. And if you're interested in this dvd we imagine you share that opinion so we won't spend any time here talking about their bombastic brilliance.
Speaking of t-shirts, watching this you'll realize if you haven't already that Magma are probably the most heavily "branded" band ever. The spikey, semi-circular Magma symbol is displayed on everybody here, on shirts, pendants, etc. The band themselves seem to be one of the biggest markets for Magma merch... Which reminds us, by the way, we've got a handful of official Magma logo *mouse pads* for sale, see elsewhere this list!
Tech specs: this dvd is all region, NTSC, 1 hour and 56 minutes long.
Yet another new release from one of our new favorite cd-r labels, Portland's Onomato, run by the guys in Ghosting!
Matt Marble is a composer, a researcher, a student of Speech And Hearing Science, and he's also the co-editor for sound art magazine FO A RM. He spends much of his time composing for large ensembles and "non-musicians". Chiasmata, like many of his works, was created using processed field recordings and hand built instruments.
The first track begins with 5 minutes of upper register shimmer, like rainfall transformed into bells, a ringing chiming high end drone, that gradually dissipates into an ultra minimal low end drift, before breaking down even further, into a barely audible, seemingly unaltered field recording, insects, leaves, wind. The second track, part two, begins where the first track ended, a microscopic world of insectoid scrape and skitter, distant chimes, all manner of found sound. Eventually, a subtle drone begins to materialize, a barely their uneven buzzing, soon some sort of looped vocal moan appears, and suddenly for the last few minutes, the sound builds to its most active, a warm thick drone, wrapped around a dense clatter of rattle and chime before just as abruptly, it disappears. Nice!
Packaged in hand printed covers with a full color photo affixed to each, photocopied insert and all housed in a heavy vinyl sleeve.
LIMITED TO 90 COPIES, WE GOT ABOUT 20. ONCE THEY'RE GONE THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
Some super nice, unexpected sounds from Austin based soundsculpter Shawn David McMillen. While Tompkins Square is now releasing this on cd (the vinyl has been out a little longer courtesy of Emperor Jones) we mistakenly jumped to some conclusions before we even threw this one in, assuming McMillen to be another in a long line of finger picking Appalachian style Fahey disciples, and we have to admit we were a bit relieved to discover this was not actually the case. We can't deny that there have been some great releases in that style over the last few years but we've reached critical mass, especially when folks like James Blackshaw and Jack Rose have already raised the bar so high that most others can't really compete. McMillen on the other hand explores a more experimental approach to his playing which comes off sounding like a more subdued No Neck Blues Band at times which to our ears sounded damn fine. We were also reminded of the wandering explorations of Loren Chasse and the more delicate side of the Jeweled Antler family. What a nice surprise, excellent!
Between this new album from Lambchop and those from Jason Molina and M. Ward, whoa, this is quite the week for country rock excellence!
Mr. Molina doesn't want you to be caught empty-handed... without his music! He's released his latest album as a cd/lp combo (same music on both vinyl and cd packaged together in an lp sleeve. The music is absolutely solid Molina fare of his more hushed and stripped down variety rather than his bootstomp tavern rock. Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go is composed of nine timeless stark arrangements of just his voice, some piano and guitar. Really, the only unfortunate thing about this release might be the choice of cover photo -- a sort of Alfred E. Neuman 'what me worry?' shot of Molina and his guitar.
Pssst, want more Molina? A Magnolia Electric Co. album is comin' REAL soon.
If you've been following the escapades of guerilla interviewer, garage rawk maestro, indie radio / TV personality and proud Canadian Nardwuar The Human Serviette, you already know that he mystifyingly gets himself into the most coveted and cursed of situations. And while in the heat of many moments he's had plenty of things seized and/or destroyed -- videotapes (Quiet Riot, Sebastian Bach, Tom Green), records (Sonic Youth), touque (Sebastian Bach) -- he's also been on the receiving end of some truly amazing stuff (a piece of art by and from David Lee Roth to name just one!). And for this calendar, he's gained an all access pass to the photo archives of legendary punk rock photographer Bev Davies. She was once hailed by Stiff Little Fingers as "The best photo taker in the whole world". Yup, the great championer of all things Canadian and old school punk (as well as innumerable other subjects of course) follows up his crowning achievement -- the stupendous Nardwuar The Human Serviette 'Doot Doola Doot Doot' double dvd -- with this cool document of the pre-'82 punk scene as shot through the shutter of Ms Davies. The 40 pages contain so much more than a 13-month calendar! There's an ongoing interview/commentary from Nardwuar and Davies with loads of hilarious 'back in the day' stories, extra photos, stickers... oh yeah, and the photos!! The Subhumans, Motorhead, Avengers, Black Flag, Adam and the Ants, D.O.A., Johnny Thunders, The Clash, Pointed Sticks, The Go-Gos, Dead Kennedys, Gang of Four, Ramones and Duff McKagen (eons before GNR and Velvet Revolver, back in his Fastbacks days)!
From the label devoted to attractive unusual packaging, limited edition runs, and way-underground psych/drone artists, comes a solo electric guitar album from Japan's Munehiro Narita, best known as the axe-meister from heavy-duty Tokyo psych legends High Rise. Forty endless exploratory minutes of freaked out freeform feedback and distortion sculpting, recorded at two live dates in 2005 and 2006 but sounding decades older, really, like a wailing '60s psych rock guitar hero going totally over the top -- basically y'know what this sounds like? Jimi Hendrix doing his infamous take on the Star Spangled Banner. That sort of thing. Which of course is cool. LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!
Last year Nouvelle Vague seemed to hit the scene out of nowhere with a recipe we were surprised to discover hadn't been done to death yet. Sweet, swank versions of some of our favorite 80's punk, post-punk and new-wave classics. It worked then, and it works now, and now they are back at it again. This outing is another round of covers, this time The Buzzcocks, Blondie, A Certain Ratio, Billy Idol, The Cramps, Bauhaus, Visage and loads more. Trading in the samba delivery of the first album for a more Caribbean slant this time around and adding a bit of a darker vibe to the proceedings, this is still totally fun and wildly charming. While Bande A Part does have a few duds (does anyone need to hear U2 covered at this point?) it's still got enough fun moments to keep us smiling and dancing!
Kjetil Brandsdal may be known best for his antique, guitar-grit drones that got released on Corpus Hermeticum and Ecstatic Peace, but he's also been quite active in the "Nor Wav" scene in his native Norway. Where much of the No Wave sensibilities have been resurfacing in the US through the angular, noise-core, costume rock of Pink & Brown and Lightning Bolt, Brandsdal's Noxagt finds
On the back of the advance copy of this Jennifer O'Connor cd we received from Matador Records, the label conveyed the press quote from Time Out NY "another Liz Phair or Elliott Smith waiting to happen". While we definitely concur with the former on songs like "Turn It Down" (at least in regards to Phair's Exile In Guyville album NOT her more recent daliances), we disagree wholeheartedly with the latter. Casual, no frills, girl next door-ish. She's very much in tune with other female singer / songwriters along the lines of Shawn Colvin and Indigo Girls. In fact, if there was still a Lilith Fair, she'd fit the bill just right.
Last list we reviewed a fantastic disc by Japanese avant-garde turntablist/guitarist Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Orchestra, with the self-explanatory title of Plays Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch. It truly was a brilliant, respectful yet fresh versioning of that classic jazz album. So we figured we should also bring in this other, self-titled ONJO release on the same label, from 2005. It's quite good too, just as we expected. Now, to our minds, pretty much anything Otomo does is at least interesting and is often much more than that, from minimal "onkyo" electronics to solo guitar improv to big band mash-ups to noisy droning rock. This we'd put in the "much more than that" category of Otomo output, especially if you appreciate his roots in jazz. Using all the experimental elements of the "empty" turntable glitchery and cut-up compositions that we've heard before in such Otomo ensembles as Ground Zero and I.S.O., ONJO makes some gorgeously moody "actual jazz" music. It's definitely an "easier listen" than much of Otomo's Ground Zero recordings, for instance, but no less amazing. (And if you're a fan of GZ's Plays Standards and/or ONJO's Out To Lunch then you have an idea of what this will be like.) Alongside Otomo's own compositions, this includes covers of jazz standards (and not-so-standards) by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and even Jim O'Rourke. Some of these songs have actually been done before on recordings by Otomo's New Jazz Quintet (ONJQ) so don't get confused. ONJO is similar to ONJQ but, well, bigger. Making this an "Orchestra", there's 18 musicians credited, some non-Japanese names among them, including such well-known European improv folks as Axel Dorner, Mats Gustafsson, and Alfred Harth. And perhaps you've heard of Kahimi Karie, who whisperingly sings on three of these tracks?
The results of all their efforts here are really freaking lovely, from the pops and crackle of vinyl mixed into the quiet bits to massed horn blow-outs to smoky, romantic noirish atmospheres invaded by the sinewaves of Sachiko M and the John Zornish jumpiness of Otomo's arrangements. Nice nice nice... as is the packaging, in the digipack with die cut hole in cover revealing a bit of the cd booklet underneath that's typical of most doubtmusic releases.
Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho! Outkast finally return, and in full Juke-Joint mode. Employing Tin Pan Alley quirks, marching bands, and swing-era rhythms and melding them all to hip hop beats, Idlewild may not be the return to the Dirty South sound that some folks were hoping for but it sure is fun. While still more solo than together, Andre 3000 and Big Boi have a yin/yang working dynamic that supports the flow of the record nicely. Though some songs are performed together, there are no overt distractions of inconsistency. There are a lot of interludes and skits we could do without, but that makes more sense with such a multimedia-blitzed soundtrack concept. We look forward to the next time they get back together for a proper studio record (if they do one, that is!). But we sure are fine listening to "Morris Brown" in the meanwhile...
This man can do (and has done) many many different things musically (Slint, Tortoise, M, Aerial M, Papa M, Early Man, Dead Child and Zwan as well as guesting with Matmos, Anomoanon, Bonnie Prince Billy, Peggy Honeywell to name just a few!). David Christian Pajo's fine self-titled album last year was his most straightforward, traditionally song structured work to date, and Pajo's 1968 follows suit. It's an intimate album of hushed, subtle gestures. He's set his soothingly smooth voice front and center. A wise decision, it draws you in close, an invitation into his trademark wistful, pastoral picked guitar landscape. Very lovely.
Newest installment in the always great and way too limited Latitudes series comes from none other then Jenny Hoyston of Erase Errata fame, with her side-project Paradise Island. The second we put this on we knew we had a new favorite Summer song! "Mptions" has this amazing urgency, simplicity, power and passion that has seeped right down into our souls. In fact we're pretty happy to finally put the "repeat" function to use on our cd player's remote control as Irwin and Scott had to get their fix over and over and over! Luckily the rest of this short ep is just as good, definitely some of the best songs that Jenny has ever churned out. We can't even begin to tell you how obsessed we've been with this ep playing it again and again in the store and still more at home. While DJing? On our iPod? Yes yes yes! Four songs of direct action cutting out all fat and leaving us only with the sounds that matter. This is the kind of D.I.Y. punk spirit that still makes our heart go all a flutter. So good! Remember this is part of a limited series so make sure to get one before they are history...!
For a lot of folks, the Plasmatics were a band that was more seen than actually heard. With Wendy O. Williams and her mohawk and duct tape covered nipples, nearly seven foot tall guitarist Richie Stotts, often clad in a mask and a French maid's outfit, the whole band was a motley crew of subversive imagery, punk, metal, bondage, sex and violence. When this record came out in 1983, a lot of us were just getting into metal, and the Plasmatics just seemed too PUNK. Sure, the young boys among us couldn't get enough of the near nude Williams destroying guitars with a chainsaw, or amps with a sledgehammer or even cars and buildings. But we just figured we wouldn't dig the music. When we finally did hear the band, this record specifically, we were blown away and kicking ourselves BIG TIME. This was indeed METAL. Sure it was punky in a lot of ways, but more than anything the Plasmatics were whipping up some serious heavy metal.
Described as "One part Grand Guignol, one part minimalist / kamikaze conceptual art and one part Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the Plasmatics also managed to be one part AC/DC, one part Motorhead, and one part New Wave Of American Heavy Metal (NWOAHM?). It was easy to forget that the Plasmatics were actually a band. A good one. Live shows were orgies of destruction, blowing up cars, smashing televisions, destroying instruments, in magazines and interviews, that's all anyone wanted to talk about. That and the nipples, but fuck if this isn't an absolutely killer metal record. Huge riffs, classic eighties metal hooks, and Williams' throaty growl/howl. Catchy and complex, head banging and fists in the air, like a female fronted AC/DC-Motorhead hybrid, with strange little bits of glistening pop here and there, where Williams would really sing, delicate and lovely, before launching back into a vitriolic face smashing metallic pummel. Awesome!
Totally remastered, with extensive liner notes, tons of photos, and FOUR bonus tracks: two demos, a work-in-progress recording and a hilarious radio ad! This is the first release we've reviewed from a new line of eighties hard rock and metal reissues on the Rock Candy label. Other releases include records by Armored Saint, Icon, Ted Nugent, Billy Squier, Coney Hatch, Ram Jam, Helix, Riot and more!!!
Killer match up between Pete Swanson of the Yellow Swans (and also overlord of the mighty Jyrk Collective label) and Pulse Emitter, a one-man synth outfit from Portland who not only whips up a serious wall of analog sound, he also builds his own gear, and has been making his own synths for years. Eat your hearts out Wolf Eyes. Actually, Wolf Eyes would not be a bad reference, although this collaboration is not nearly as caustic or abrasive as Wolf Eyes. In fact, it's downright soothing in a way. The opening track is a swirl of thick warm fuzzy washes of analog synth, like floating weightless in a sea of buzzing whir, neither soft nor sweet, but more a sort of roughly smooth. The second track is a bit more noisy, lots of high end, definitely testing your aural stamina, but in there somewhere is some melody, although it would take a suit of armor and some shock proof pliers to find it. The final track is a gorgeously creepy drone, almost like someone took the least structured Goblin track, and sort of smeared it into a single slow shifting tone, still rife with creepy tension and all sorts of haunting goodness, eventually letting the track explode in a frenzy of thick fuzz and some serious Merzbowian rrroooaaaar!
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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Super limited tour only split featuring a serious arsenal of awesome underground noise makers. The names alone should have loads of you diving for that click-to-buy button, but on the off chance some of you are unfamiliar with any of these outfits, here's a quick breakdown.
Pumice is NZ musician Stephan Neville, who often crafts delicate outsider folk, Jandekian guitars, keening sadboy vocals, all bathed in lo-fi 4-track ambiance, but can also kick up a serious skree. Both sides are represented here. A soft folk opener, followed by a blast of serious Dead C-like clatter, immediately followed by another delicate drift, this time, a haunting guitarscape wrapped in some strange strange buzzing crackle, finishing up with a brief nylon string lullaby that sounds like a lo-fi Hawaiian folk song interpreted by Jandek.
Next up is Ghosting, who have gotten AQ customers into quite a lather with their massive ghostly dronescapes. This track adds some tribal percussion to their bag of tricks, resulting in a sound like a much more blissed out laid back No Neck Blues Band!
GMS is Gabe from Yellow Swans, who offers up a strangely minimal solo guitar piece, that drift dreamily along for almost 10 minutes before the hammer falls and a distorted guitar gets locked into a super hypnotic ultra blown out loop before drifting back into gentle tangles of acoustic guitar. Really nice.
Finally it's Bonus, another band that folks around here have been loving BIG TIME. 17 minutes of ultra ultra minimal drone. This is definitely headphone music. A low level sonic event, spread out over a vast expanse of open space. Like the sounds of your home or office, isolated from the world around them, the air conditioner, the refrigerator, placed in a vacuum, allowing us to hear the microscopic music that is all around us. Wow!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES! Packaged in cool hand screened cover, includes a photocopied insert, and housed in a thick vinyl sleeve.
Seems like there have been a surprising number of vocal oriented releases lately, Lichens, Grouper, it makes sense though, the most intimate and personal music making device there is. This most recent exploration of the human voice comes from the strangely monickered Pump Kinn, a vocalist named Michelle who channels the spirit of Diamanda Galas, but adds a heaping dose of effects and stereo panning to send our heads spinning and our ears into a confusional tizzy. The first track sounds like water running, a shower, the soothing white noise slowly shifting from the right speaker to the left speaker and back again, a soothing, slightly dizzy sensation, before the vocals appear on track two, a soft faraway cooing, swinging from right to left along with the fuzz of the running water sound. Track three is a strange world of creaks and cackles, screams and shrieks, lots of reverb and delay, a world of alien bird calls, and cooing alien infants. Track four finds the voice turned into rhythm, careening from speaker to speaker, truly haunting and disorienting. The next five tracks drift from haunting ethereal ambiance, to swirls of high end shriek to dreamy drifts of distant harmony, like a feral Joan LaBarbara or an outer space Fursaxa scampering wildly between your speakers. Truly far out. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Packaged in a super striking custom, full-color, 6-panel fold-out slowly undeveloping faux-Polaroid cover. Really cool.
Another mysterious disc of murky drone from the label run by the Ghosting guys. Elsewhere on this list we review a split record between Ghosting and an Irish group called Bonecloud released on the Yarn Lazer label. Bonecloud sound a bit like a more fucked up lo-fi Taj Mahal Travellers, well, Quetzocoatl happens to be one of the guys from Bonecloud and thus Sunlight Blossom Confusion travels a similarly murky and droney path. And we love it. How could we not really. Can you really imagine anything that sounds more appealing than a more fucked up Taj Mahal Travellers. We sure can't!
An hour long swirl of processed vocals, violin, organ, electronics, and found objects. Seven tracks, each a haunting excursion to the bottom of some brackish sea, or a trek through some desolate wasteland, murky and muddy, a thick fog of muted cacophony transformed into a gauzy dreamlike soundworld. Clatter and crunch are smoothed over and stretched out, melodies and pulled apart and mixed into the mesmerizing whirl, like watching sunlight sparkle through a window covered in a thick layer of ice, or like listening to the world around you through a thick concrete wall. So awesome!
Packaged in hand printed covers with a full color photo affixed to each, photocopied insert and all housed in a heavy vinyl sleeve.
LIMITED TO 90 COPIES, WE GOT ABOUT 20. ONCE THEY'RE GONE THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
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This is the latest disc of dark ritualistic drone music from Ruhr Hunter, aka Chet Scott, the man who runs the Glass Throat label, who in the past have brought us amazing music from Beneath The Lake And Elemental Chrysalis as well as his own Ruhr Hunter. A handful of copies of this disc (made for friends of the band only) came packaged in a box filled with ocean stones, dirt, pebbles, crow feathers, mink bones & teeth, insects, branches & White Birch bark collected from the forests of Maine, a box of death, and earth, sky and water, transition and rebirth, symbols for the musical world of Ruhr Hunter. Sounds born of nature. A true forest folk music, dark ritualistic soundscapes, primal, tribal, shamanic. Lovely and dreamlike. The sound of wind in leaves, the sound of rain falling through trees, rendered in swirls of acoustic guitar, distant shimmering drones, hushed whispered vocals, as well as actual sounds of the wild, animals, and nature, woven into Ruhr Hunter's dense sonic tapestry. A moody and melancholy missive from the heart of a dark forest, a mysterious figure cloaked in a constantly shifting swirl of low end rumble, sits before a black cauldron suspended above a crackling fire, shadows dance wildly on the canopy above, into the pot the figure places a Jewelled Antler, a Dead Raven, blades of grass, a handful of Lichens, a pine cone and a Wooden Wand, a glorious sound drifts from the murky brew, like tendrils of smoke, drifting heavenward, tangled up in the branches overhead, shifting amongst the shadows, filling our ears with a soft warm otherworldly fire.
As with everything on Glass Throat, breathtaking packaging. An oversized brown textured six panel sleeve with the text and imagery embossed in a darker brown, the cover, the instantly recognizable Ruhr Hunter raven talon logo. So nice.
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 Sagan and one by Girl Talk. Plus: The first 100 of this Sagan single comes with a little extra something -- a bonus 3"cdr! Don't fret too much if you do miss the first 100 though 'cause we've been assured that the track will be available online for download too. The ever mischievous and crafty trio of Jay Lesser, Blevin Blectum, Wobbly pour out the prickly tickles, thick bass thuddery, and druggy effected vocals for these two short heavily processed and distorted tracks. Always entertaining! We've only got a handful of these. Snoooze'n'loooze, kiddie!
A druggy troll through a cough syrup drenched new wave underworld. Like waking up in some filthy sonic back alley, your head spinning, and you ears filled with fuzz. The memories of last night's little fragments, coming back to you in bits and pieces, some murky analog synths, some stumbling drum programming, lots of creepy low slung bass...but it's the druggy female voices that swirl around your head like some hangover halo, sultry and sexy but also distinctly alien, drenched in FX, cooing softly in your ear, a late night, narcoleptic narcotic lullaby. An Adult. 45 played at 16 rpm, Nico fronting some slow motion electroclash outift, a mysterious damaged doom version of Glass Candy, a seriously fucked up new wave Portishead? Sally Strobelight is all of those things. A delightfully damaged, druggy, slow motion new wave electro dirge missive from some doomed and drug ravaged otherworld. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Clear vinyl housed in a gorgeous in tranluscent, full-color vellum sleeve!
Another fucked and demented and mysterious metal record, this one from the East Coast of the United States via Australian label Goatowarex. We weren't able to find out too much about these guys, other than the description: "Pure fucking depraved death metal lacking political goals or other such human bullshit." All right then. This may be 'death metal' although it definitely sounds to us, at different points, more like black metal and doom metal than death metal, and in fact it's some sort of confusional blend of the three. Some tracks are blazing fast, a roaring murky buzz, others are a lurching slow motion dirge, they even open with their own version of Mayhem's "Voice Of A Tortured Skull". The sound is super cavernous and lo-fi, with tons of natural reverb drenching the thrashing blackness in a thick cloak of ambient buzz, like it was recorded in some musty murky cave. That opening cover is a creepy Abruptum-ish ambient drone, with thick buzzing guitars and creepy anguished voices, and all sorts of weird sounds, which gives way to a super blackthrash freakout with buzzing riffs and blown out drums, the whole thing so in the red that it almost sounds like some sort of Merzbow-metal. The rest of the record shifts back and forth between totally fried black thrash and creepy ambient midtempo plod, and it's the doomier stuff that is the weirdest, with strangely obtuse riffs, lots of space, and fucked up arrangements. Halfway through there's another haunting ambient track, all organs and buzzy guitars, almost like Devil Doll or some Satanic wedding march or something, before lurching back into some killer Darkthrone style blackness.
How many reviews have you read where the influence of folks like Brian Eno, John Cage and Frank Zappa are mentioned? Lots! But it's not as often that we get to talk about someone else who had a deep influence on those very same icons. But one need look no further then the tender and melancholic piano playing of Erik Satie to find the roots and foundation for some of the most important music of the last century. This is one of the better Satie cd's to come out in recent years as the playing of Francis Poulenc is impeccable. The second half of the disc finds him playing his own compositions, and while Poulenc's pieces are beautiful in their own right, considering that it's pretty tough to follow up all of those amazing Satie pieces. Some of the prettiest, most delicate and touching pieces of music ever written. This is the sound of piano taken to higher level of majestic beauty.
No, this is not some outsider electronic record based on Arthur C. Clarke's dark tale of alien invasion (although that would be rad, wouldn't it?). No, this is actually an extremely rare psych-folk record from Down Under originally released in 1971. How rare? Well, a recent eBay seller was asking $700 dollars for this. Whoa! A bit country-tinged with some really great songwriting, this remind us of a more electric Gordon Lightfoot (whom we love!). We believe this is Phil Sawyer's only release, and even this album is not very well known outside high-caliber record collector circles, which is a shame because it's really good. Looking for some psych-dappled singer-songwriter fare in the vein of Graham Nash, Gary Higgins or the abovementioned Mr. Lightfoot? Look no further. Awesome!
Another amazing sonic document from one of our favorite sound makers, NZ outfit Seht, aka dronelord Stephen Clover. The Green Morning picks up right where the recently reviewed Federacy Boot left off. If anything it's even darker and dreamier, which is quite a task considering how much we dug the last one. Opening the proceedings is a gorgeously lugubrious soundscape of slow subterranean rumbles, a glacial low end shimmer, that gradually begins to allow dreamy song fragments to surface, just barely breaking the surface, before slowly going under again, a droning dreamlike voyage across a thick fuzzy sonic sea. In fact the first three tracks here all sort of follow the same template: a lengthy barely shifting slab of densely layered deep dark drones, while beneath all sorts of random melodic fragments and sonic debris drift and bob. Almost like a thirty minute three part epic. The second to last track is less droney as it is dreamy, the bulk of the song is a murky melody, smeared into a shape so indistinct it almost does become a drone, but somehow hovers just this side, very underwater sounding, almost like a slowed down Oval, with a strange slow motion rhythm picked out by a sporadic glitchy crunch, like footsteps on gravel. The final track is a 20 minute epic, that returns to the sonic theme of the opening trilogy, but manages to go even deeper and slower and more abstract, delivering a delicate drone that barely shifts, just sort of pulses gently, the whole thing wrapped in a barely there layer of sparkling static.
One of our favorite modern electronic hip hop outfits offer up a super limited double disc instrumental version of both their previous albums.
Shadow Huntaz are the ultimate crazy crew of brain melting tongue twisting outer space hip hop visionaries. Disconnected rhymes, sputtering, glitched out beats, total mind melting confusional free funk freakouts. For a while there, Antipop Consortium were pushing the envelope, Anticon definitely had their own avant angle. But we had been hankering for someone like Kool Keith. Paging Dr. Octagon. We wanted some damaged stuttery beats, warped warbly synths and fuzzy glitched out grzzzzt. Most importantly, some maddening slurred, drug drenched, space age, conspiracy theory WHATTHEFUCK flows. Maybe that's why we've been leaning toward Grime so much lately. It just feels so much more dangerous and fucked up and unconcerned with hip hop convention. But now we've got the Shadowhuntaz. A rogue band of futuristic hip hop explorers, who mix the perplexing sci fi / high as fuck mush mouthed ramblings of Dr. Octagon with the glitched out hip hopped electronic squelch and thud, skitter and skid, slowed down IDM beatscapes of Antipop (they are on Skam after all) into a fucking killer trip hop skittery groove. On this double disc instrumental collection, the vocal tracks are stripped away allowing us to focus on the truly visionary sounds and HOLY FUCK, we didn't think we could dig this stuff any more but we do!!! The beats, hiccup and slither, bounce and bump, the music is a claustrophobic swirl of haunting loops, weird industrial clatter, moaning drones, and all sorts of production fuckery, effects swirl and shift, little vocal snippets are chopped and looped, skipping samples, warm washes of ambient whir. Phew! Plus there's some totally fucked up scratching, little snatches of DJ freakout, but those scratchfests are run through the Shadowhuntaz supercomputer and spit out the other side a careening chaotic crush of chopped up, impossibly complex textural collages of scratch detritus, like they dropped 3 or 4 DJ's, wildly scratching and tearing shit up, into a huge blender, and then sprayed the resulting funk flecked gore funk all over these tracks.
Funky, fucked up, freaked out, cool and creepy and quite possibly contender for INSTRUMENTAL hip hop record of the year!
Packaged Skam style in a clear jewel case with no artwork and a Braille sticker along the spine!
Sheriff is the Swedish duo Magnus Granberg (vocals, piano, guitar) and Henrik Olsson (percussion), and this is their second release. They are not men of many words. Absolute barebones, intimate, slow and resonant. A piano's keys are struck, the notes allowed to linger languidly. After a few moments they're joined by a deep, very present male voice sing-speaking a handful of lyrics. Each word joins the notes in the air hanging like amber pendants. The following four tracks offer much the same but the piano is occasionally replaced or joined by low plucked guitar strings and strikes of percussion and bowls. An example of just how Spartan the proceedings are: the third song is titled "Stay, Stay" and that word repeated solemnly over and over again forms the better part of the song's lyrics. Brings to mind the most minimal moments of Slint. Hushed and meditative, Sail, Sail Away is an exercise in utter restraint. Super limited, and soon gone, as we only were able to get a handful...
Finally back in stock. One of the best soundtracks to one of the greatest movies EVER!! Really. The last time we listed this was almost 5 years ago and we just now managed to get another batch in. Here's what we had to say about this amazing disc:
This is simply one of the greatest films ever made. You can call AQ and argue with us if you disagree. This film is so personal and intense. So completely thrilling and perfect. And it features what has to be Gene Hackman's best performance ever (except maybe for The French Connection). Also features Harrison Ford and Cindy Williams in one of the best scenes of all time (the scene in the park, filmed in San Francisco's Union Square). And the soundtrack is equally impressive. David Shire, who also did the score for the oh so amazing Taking Of Pelham 123, was presented with a new challenge in the scoring of the Conversation. First, Coppola insisted that the score be simple and stripped down, unlike the bombastic full orchestras Shire was so adept with. Second, the score was composed before the film was finished (like Morricone with Leone), which allowed the score to guide the filming and really help focus the performances. So the score ended up being mostly just solo piano (with Shire believing the whole time that they would orchestrate it later). Dark and minor key. Simple, but so goddamn creepy. It's absolutely chilling and almost too perfectly captures the paranoid unhappiness of Hackman's Harry Caul. It's way scarier and dismal sounding than anything more modern doomsters like Piano Magic or Tindersticks have been trying to pull off. Another interesting aspect of the score is the 'jazz records' that Hackman's character plays sax along to in the film. Those 'records' were actually composed by Shire specifically for the film and Hackman actually played the sax. He had never touched a saxophone before, so on the set he had someone teaching him to play, and he would spend his time practicing scales instead of going over his lines. Those tracks are on this disc, complete with Hackman's sax accompaniment. Another bonus on the disc is a full band version of the Theme From the Conversation, where Shire finally gets to flex his arranging muscles. This soundtrack has never been released in any form, so it's pretty exciting that the folks at Intrada managed to pull it all together and get this out (they actually had to do quite a bit of legwork, remixing, re-EQing, and re-editing to put this all together!). Not really available at stores, we're managed to get a few copies 'cause we're such slobbering The Conversation fans.
And for those of you who haven't seen The Conversation...WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? WALK AWAY FROM YOUR COMPUTER RIGHT NOW. WALK TO YOUR NEAREST VIDEO STORE. RENT THE VIDEO. UNPLUG THE PHONE. AND WATCH. YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY. An absolutely beautiful film with some of the best performances, directing, and music you will ever see or hear.
Graced with some pretty amazing fake Pushead cover art (by John Baizley of Baroness), this four-song ep is a strong contender for being the most intensely tight and brutal Bay Area thrash meets NWOBHM meets blackened death styled 12 minutes of heavy metal you're gonna hear this year! Imagine a hybrid of Coroner, Slough Feg, and Dissection, with ultra-raspy death metal screaming n' grunting vokills. That's Ohio's Skeletonwitch, who do in fact get a big endorsement from our pals in Slough Feg, who played with them a couple times this summer. And the truth is, cool as this ep is, seeing them live will *really* make you a believer. The razor-sharp riffs, shredding leads and sick harmonies are all the more impressive when being pulled off perfectly in person, these heshers thrashing like mad on stage in a strobe-lit fog cloud. And it's great beer drinkin' music too, that's for sure. But for home use this ep is a worthy addition to their so-far scant discog (they have one full-length album previous to this that we gave the thumbs/horns up from us last year). Racing and bracing, Worship The Witch is a perfectly titled and all-too short assault from a truly badass band (and nice bunch of guys).
This is the debut cd-r from lone sludge-folk troubadour Sleepy Boy Moe from Oakland. There's so much murk and hiss on his lo-lo-fi recordings that they sound like they're coming off an old cassette tape that was retrieved from the bottom of the lake. But don't let that dissuade you. Peer through the haze and listen close. You'll hear what we've likened to the tweaked instability of Daniel Johnston sung through the sandy throat of Tom Waits.
Finally back in print and available again, the debut release from one of our favorite far out and fucked black metal bands EVER!! We made their more recent release, The Near Death Experience, our record of the week a while back, and their debut is just as good. Hewre's what we had to say about it when we first laid ears on this demented black gem:
Not a list goes by without a review declaring some record THE WEIRDEST EVER. So, okay, we can be a little hyperbolic at times, but it's just cuz we get so damned excited. But since we're always on the lookout for the weirdest records ever, it's not really all that strange that we might actually keep discovering some new weirdest record ever! They just get weirder and weirder. AND, as you probably could tell, it just so happens that we have a definite thing for bizarre black metal, the more fucked up and strange the better! And again, always being on the lookout for weirder and weirder metal records, we manage to stumble across quite a few. Recently we got a copy of a record by a band called Spektr, without a sleeve and a paucity of any useful information. But we were totally struck by its bizarre take on grim black metal, spending most of the record not blazing and thrashing, but instead, creeping through funhouse mirror ambiance, plodding mathrock doom, dreamy acoustic breakdowns, bizarre sound collages and lots of Jeck / Basinski style fuzzy smeary loops. Woah. Eventually we tracked it down, and learned that No Longer Human Senses had been released on the Appease Me label run by French black metal squad Blut Aus Nord! Not too long ago we reviewed the most recent release by Blut Aus Nord a bizarre and brutal, sprawlingly complex black metal record equal parts classic Norwegian style black metal, pummeling Industrial crunch a la Godflesh, creepy droning dark ambience and strange squiggly plain old weirdness. So when we discovered BaN had a label it made perfect sense that this Spektr record would end up there. No Longer Human Senses is definitely a black metal record, as is evidenced by the buzzing droning riffage and thrashing blast beats, some serious Darkthrone worship for sure, but that's really only a tiny piece of the whole picture. The bursts of black metal, marked by a particularly virulent strain of brutally brittle and harsh guitar sound, float through a twisting serpentine maze of random sound events, almost like a massive Christian Marclay installation. Haunting church organs, weirdly affected spoken word, all manner of creepy lilting melodies over lots of hiss and static and record crackle. Loops repeated over and over, but gradually decaying into stretches of fuzzed out shimmer, often erupting into bursts of super harsh black metal mayhem, only to fall apart moments later into a chaotic mess of buzzing, malfunctioning machinery, super distorted industrial sludge with more warbly minor key loops, all beneath thick waves of dense buzz and crumbling melodies, thick swaths of ambient blur and strange ghostly tinkles, peppered with brief snippets of classical music, found sounds, field recordings and random bits of sonic skree, the whole mess dropped into a swirly abyss of blackdrone and super creepy psychedelic ambience. This is one of those rare records that is so fractured and demented and wonderfully bizarre that is has you constantly checking to see what the hell it was you were listening to! Definitely one of our favorite new weird black metal records!
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Spiracle's 20 minute composition Iris was actually released well over a year ago, but Clouds Of Static has been dormant ever since Mnortham abdicated his position as the artistic director for the label. It's a real shame, as there were some real gems which might have come out on the label, with recordings by Murmer and John Duncan and talks of reissuing the brilliant first cd-r from Of (aka Loren Chasse). Yet, none of that will probably come to pass; and it was quite possible that the remaining stock of what was released through Clouds Of Static may have languished in some Swiss castle (quite literally) for years. Fortunately, we were able to uncover a few copies of Iris by Spiracle (aka Hitoshi Kojo, whose collaboration with Maurizio Bianchi is reviewed elsewhere on this list). Taking cues from David Jackman's arsenal of growling harmonics from bowed metals, Ellen Fullman's long-stringed instruments, and Akio Suzuki's impeccable ear for tactile events, Hitoshi offers a dynamic drone composition of compacted layers of acoustic sound with slowly scraped strings amassing into a sustained drone made porous by tumbling fistfuls of sand poured out upon the floor and a weirdly compelling flanging bellow. We only got a dozen or so of these in; and we don't plan on storming any Swiss castle anytime soon, so these few copies are probably all that we'll be able to get!
If by some freakish chance, you or someone you know has never heard the music of Stereolab, this is *the* cd to get him/her/yourself. Really, Serene Velocity could easily be titled The Best Of Stereolab collection. Sure there'd be lots of disputing the song selection -- we've all got our personal favorites of course! -- but each time we've played this in the store someone (customers and staff alike) inevitably bursts out an "oooh, I love this song!" for almost every song! The sweet sixteen songs are "Crest", "French Disko", "Ping Pong", "Cybele's Reverie", "Metronomic Underground", "Percolator", "Brakhage", "Miss Modular", "Infinity Girl", "Come And Play In The Milky Way", "Space Moth", "Double Rocker", "Vonal Declosion", and "...Sudden Stars" as well as rare 7" versions of "Jenny Ondioline (Part 1)" and "Wow And Flutter". Sure, devoted fans probably already have multiple copies of each of these tunes, but heck! Even they might find it to be like the yummiest Stereolab mixtape around!
This rare acid folk record from 1972 is not as Ren Faire as the cover would imply. Although subtle comparisons can be made to the Incredible String Band and Trees, Subway were neither staunch traditionalists or back-to-the-woods fairie folksters. Made up of American guitarist and singer-songwriter Irv Mowrey and British violinist Malcolm Watson, the duo met up in England, decided to go to Paris to try to make it, ended up playing in subway stations (hence the name) and wound up cutting a record on the French imprint of Epic Records. Of course, the record didn't fare very well and Epic ended up destroying the surplus, assuring them cult and holy-grail collectible status ever since. Mowrey's songwriting is first rate adding a nice American touch to their urban folk sound. There is also a really nice modal instrumental piece that takes this far past your average twee acid folk. Nice!
This is the silliest sounding (and looking) cd we've gotten in a long time. So much so that we spontaneously blurted out new words to describe it... like "twinkee booobles shplicka poing-poing"! Dunno quite what that means -- won't find it in a dictionary -- but it sure fits this Belgian fellow Laurent Baudoux's music. To boot, all the lyrics are befuddlingly sung in Japanese by MC Illreme! Yes, some folks might describe the tracks as being old video-gamey sounding, but there's more loopy-bloopy layers and jagged rhythmic outcrops going on that Super Mario would prolly have a hard time negotiating... but not us! Fans of Atom Heart (any one of his numerous personas) and Aavikko might experience particular breathless glee in Orchestre Philharmonok. More fun than a barrel of balloon-a-gram toting monkeys.
Unloading The Sun is both the premier release on new SF label Grand Gallop Music and the first solo cd by Luke Top. Perhaps you're already familiar with this gent as he has also been known to play in The Cave-Ins (plural) and Ceramic Isles, and perform on the road with Cass McCombs. For his debut he keeps things all breezy and easy-going. Unloading The Sun is filled with eight nicely crafted mid-tempo pop tunes featuring muted horns and drowsy lilting vocals quite akin to those of Rufus Wainwright. A well timed, mellow, wind-down-your-summer kind of album. Limited edition of 300 packaged in a cool 3-color screenprinted cardboard case.
It feels weird to be reviewing a Tortoise record in 2006. There was a time, way back in the mid nineties, that Tortoise was one of our favorite bands. Everyone we knew loved Tortoise. Not since Slint, had a band so captivated the world of indie rock, and so distinctly defined post rock. And not since Slint had a band been the impetus for the formation of so many similar sounding bands. Makes sense. Tortoise were an amazing and ingenious mix of instrumental post rock, dub, jazz, free jazz, electronica, and anything else that sounded good to the band, all deftly woven into a super unique and utterly distinctive sound. Their self titled debut was near perfect, dubby rhythms wrapped up in moody lilting post rock soundscapes, blissed out and hypnotic. And if their debut was merely -near- perfect, their next record, Millions Now Living Will Never Die was absolutely perfect. Everything we loved about post rock, post punk, post everything, melted down into simple, mesmerizing krautrock laced rhythmscapes. Jazzy and dubby and dreamy, subtly propulsive, expansive and epic. No record could touch Millions, although hundreds did certainly try (and still do). There was also the way too limited remix record, Rhythms, Resolutions And Clusters, featuring alternate versions of classic Tortoise tracks by Steve Albini, Brad Wood, Bundy Brown, Jim O'Rourke, John McEntire and more. Many folks consider that to be Tortoise's finest moment, since most of the remixers were in fact in Tortoise, or had in some way contributed to past Tortoise recordings, it was almost like the band simply reimagined and reinterpreted their own songs, a sort of meta-Tortoise record.
After that though, it was a gradual downhill slide, the band continued to release records sporadically, but nothing they did after that had the same resonance. All of it was pretty good certainly, but where they were once the ones creating the post rock template, a freejazzdubrock sound for others to emulate, it just seemed like the band was treading water, creating more out of obligation than passion. And it showed.
This greatest hits / out of print rarities collection reminds us just how amazing Tortoise were, while serving as a perfect introduction to those who missed out the first time around, or for all the post-post rock obsessives into Isis and the Grails and the Red Sparowes and all of that stuff who might not have realized that none of those bands would exist if it weren't for Tortoise. Plus, this box collects lots of vinyl only tracks, compilation tracks all in one place for obsessive fans, as well as finally reissuing the remix record in its entirety while adding one of the tracks that was cut from the original release.
All we can really say is wow. WOW. This stuff sounds so amazing, so fresh, so alive. Weird and wonderful. Droney and dreamy and hypnotically catchy. Some of our all time favorite tracks are here: "Gamera", a killer 12" track never on cd before, a couple of Autechre tracks from the 12" only remix series, as well as the Tortoise tracks from the Headz 2 comp, the Red, Hot + Indigo comp, a Yo La Tengo remix, a Joy Division cover. A bunch of singles and Japanese bonus tracks round out the first two discs. Our only complaint is that this isn't EVERYTHING. Anyone willing to pay $25 for 4 discs, would probably be willing to shell out $40 for 6 or 7 discs if it meant that this set collected ALL the random Tortoise tracks instead of just a lot of 'em. But what the heck, this still kills.
Disc three is the remix record Rhythms, Resolutions And Clusters, originally released in 1994, well before we were fed up with remix records, and sounds so goddamn amazing. The added track is a Mike Watt remix with Mike and his partner Kira from Dos adding extra basses, and extra basses can never be bad! The Albini remix is a killer, as is the O'Rourke mix. In fact ALL of the mixes are amazing, and they flow perfectly unlike most remix records. If you didn't know better, you might think it was just an actual, albeit much more experimental proper Tortoise release. Worth the price of admission alone for sure. Although if you dig RR+C you'll obviously love almost everything on the other two discs too.
The dvd has a handful of music videos, all very striking and perfectly matched to the music, from a slow motion procession of floating spheres, drifting stuffed animals, and contorted band members, to manipulated grainy super 8 footage of cities and seas, to gorgeous expanses of sped up nature footage, swirling clouds, and snowy forests, to strangely primitive computer animation, to super abstract video collage. So nice. Also included are a whole bunch of live performances, often filmed super creatively. Some are super high tech, recorded in some sort of huge venue, with multiple camera angles and video screens, while others are obviously in small clubs filmed on grainy super 8 and edited with random live projections. There's also some live footage of Tortoise with the Chicago Underground Trio at some jazz fest, a pretty amazing piece, like a jazzy Reich. There's also what looks like some sort of cable access show, with the band obviously lip synching, all wearing plastic monkey masks, and a wild crowd dancing cartoonishly in the background on a tiny TV sound studio, and finally a Tortoise performance recorded for the Burn To Shine project, where bands play in abandoned and about to be demolished houses.
The whole set is housed in individual printed sleeves and a cardboard box, all adorned with cool creepy super striking traffic accident photos by Arnold Odermatt. And if you couldn't tell from all of the above, this is WAY RECOMMENDED!!
These guys have been the talk of the town lately. Folks can't tell if they're serious or a total pisstake, or if it even matters. The music is a wild raucous glammy punk rock, simple and catchy, snotty and repetitive, funny and rocking as all get out. Lots of sing along parts, lots of super simple guitar leads, the vocals delivered in a thick Cockney sneer with plenty of attitude. Their look is total eighties glam punk, skin tight trousers, ripped t-shirts, Doc Martens or Converse All Stars, leather jackets, sun glasses, and BIG teased glam rock hair. We're not sure what all the fuss is about. They look awesome. They sound awesome. What more do you need to know? Who cares if it's a joke? They're like some sloppy collision of the Sex Pistols, Hanoi Rocks, G.B.H., the Damned, the New York Dolls and Andrew W.K. which sounds pretty good to us. If you're a punk purist you'll probably immediately want to beat the shit out of these guys, but if you dig the Darkness, love the above mentioned bands, and are in the market for some big, fun, wild, dumb, air guitar worthy glampunk rock and roll, you can't really do much better than the Towers Of London.
ATTENTION LOVERS OF INSANE, DAMAGED, DEMENTED BLACK METAL!!! It's that time again. Another bizarre and fantastically fucked release to blacken your soul and your heart. This German outfit are obviously channeling the spirit of Burzum and Abruptum, but have also inadvertently conjured up some Benighted Leams and some Dead Reptile Shrine, and the result is completely bafflingly brilliant. A single half hour track, an abstract soundscape of stumbling plodding caveman doom drumming, weird warped downtuned riffing, every available space filled with squealing feedback, while above it all some of the most demented howling anguished falsetto vocals ever, a sort of Weakling meets Bethlehem meets Silencer. A lurching plodding blackened doom, the feedback everywhere combined with the tempo almost reminds us of Eyehategod. So if you can imagine some sort of abstract, ambient, slow motion, black metal, doom sludge you'll get at least an idea of what freaked out grim and frosty otherworld these guys inhabit. If you dig ANY of the above mentioned bands, we shouldn't have to tell you, but we will: this is absolutely essential.
The Tompkins Square Label focuses its spotlight locally on the next generation of Northern California acoustic guitarists -- Sean Smith, Matt Baldwin and Adam Snider. Hailing from Berkeley, where John Fahey's label Takoma was (as well as where Windham Hill first began to blossom), these three young and very talented players have been playing in local clubs and cafes for a few years now. Sean Smith, whose stunning debut on Isota we reviewed a few list back and was also featured on the second Imaginational Anthem compilation, is the "elder" of the group, while Baldwin and Snider have their recording debuts here. Lovely and melancholy with beautiful cover art by John Baizley of Baroness (which looks remarkably Pushead-like), this is a great introduction to the local acoustic guitar scene.
Total demonic freakbeat garage rock heaven! This disc has had everyone at AQ bouncing and bopping. We're all gonna go out and get skull and crossbones tattoos, shag haircuts and Voxx guitars. Seriously. This is a super wild garage fuzz blowout. Lots of customers in the store assumed this was some old old reissue, but figured it couldn't be cuz it sounded so good. But that should give you an idea of how great this comp is. Classic and old school sounding but at the same time super modern and rocking. We originally wanted to track this comp down when we discovered that Japanoise legend Masonna had a garage rock band ACID Eater, a sort-of spin off of his psychedelic noise combo Christine 23 Onna, but once we finally did get these in, we ended up digging all the bands equally.
ACID Eater is probably the heaviest of the bunch, a fuzzed out outer space graveyard blast of super blown out fuzz guitar, chaotic caveman drumming, killer Fuzztones style organ and superdistorted vocals, all wrapped in some freaked out far-out FX, a freakfuzz reverb that occasionally spin the vocals into oblivion like some weird garage dub, but other than that, this is surprisingly un-NOISEY and sort of straight ahead, but still super fierce and in-the-red. All four tracks are recorded ultra hot, so it feels like you're in some tiny sweaty underground club, pressed right up against the P.A. getting drenched in sweat and beer and getting blasted with a thick wall of full on garage RAWK!
Then there's The Go-Devils, an all female garage rock combo, with murky buzzy riffing, droning organs, and lazy drawled vocals, with some sixties girl group background vocals, super fuzzy with tribal drumming and some seriously catchy hooks, we even hear a little Redd Kross in there, must be the sort of psychedelic sixties vibe.
Finally there's the Bai Tones or the Bait Ones, sort of hard to tell from the album art, who are definitely the weirdest of the three, whose sound is sort of lazy and laid back, droney and midtempo. A sort of slithery stomp, with plenty of strange guitars, abstract riffs, wild harmonica, drawled distorted vocals and some super weird, distinctly un-garage rock-like droney buzzy parts, each song is dripping with dirgey swampy buzzy garage rock murk...SO KILLER. Makes us feel like it's 1982 and we're in some sleazy little dive, bouncing and dancing and sweating and going completely and gloriously deaf.
We're not always huge into garage rock, but all three of these bands totally and completely knocked us on our asses!! SO RECOMMENDED.
As we approach fall, we find ourselves desperately hanging on to summer sun and celebrating summer fun. Nothing better than the sounds of cha-cha-cha's done just right to keep that feeling alive. Party songs you can trust, bugaloo that makes you move. And this cd version of a now out of print 7" box set of Latin soul and groove from a special heyday of this movement spanning the years 1966-1969 totally hits the spot. Mostly centered around neighborhoods in Harlem and other areas of NYC, a new generation of Latino youth were soaking up the sounds of raw R'n'B, incorporating elements of black culture and adding a definitely distinctive Latin element to the mix. If you've been digging the great Eccentric Soul comps that we've fallen for, this is another great '60s soul comp to add to your collection, and this one's got something most of those collections don't...intoxicating Latin spice!
We've been saying this for a while now but; wow, watch out Soul Jazz! 'Cuz Numero Group is quickly catching up. No other label has managed the quality, aesthetics or the consistency of the many killer Numero Group reissues from the last few years. This time out -- instead of unearthing the work of a long gone and forgotten regional soul label like they have in their "Eccentric Soul" series -- they turn their attention to a greater power if you will...the sounds of raw, catchy, wild gospel funk hymnals. While the two volumes of the Soul Gospel series on Soul Jazz taught us about the unique power and energy of '60s and '70s soul gospel sounds, this collection takes us even higher. Thumping bass, blistering percussion, and vocals sung with so much conviction you can't help but be moved. Gospel Comforters, Universal Jubileers, Apostles of Music, Masonic Wonders - with names like that you know these bands have serious soul power up their sleeves. All 18 tracks on this collection are beyond top notch... giving soul lovers something to drool about once again. Are you a believer? After listening to this it's pretty damn hard not to be!
