As many of you know sometimes navigating the world of the prolific and brilliant legacy of Sun Ra can be so daunting and overwhelming. Not only did he make so many records in his lifetime but over the years there have been a multitude of collections, reissues and live recordings, to the point that knowing which Sun Ra recording you need next can feel quite overwhelming. Of course Sun Ra is most known and lauded for his free jazz inventions but what is often overlooked is that in order to go so out and free he first developed and explored an incredibly rich swing developing a seriously solid bebop foundation. This record gives little hints as to the outer world Sun Ra would eventually fly off to. Sheer brilliance! Such a great record!
What might one expect from a band named after a Dead C record? Something a tad bit noisy would be our guess, and you know what? We wouldn't be all that far off. Unlike the grinding Amrep style dirge rock of Trapdoor Fucking Exit, another Dead C named outfit, Sun Stabbed definitely occupy a sonic space much closer to their forbears. But unlike the splattery noise rock of the 'C, Sun Stabbed sound like a ghostly after image, like looking directly at the Dead C, then staring into the sun, then everywhere you look you see these shimmery white hot feedingback shapes, white hot outlines of the original. Imagine the Dead C stripped of drums, and any forward momentum and you'll have something resembling Radio, a big static swirl of incandescent guitar, huge throbbing thrum, keening streaks of luminous feedback: Bits of Sunroof! and Vibracathedral Orchestra surface here and there. And it's heaviest, it could be a dreamier mellower, more blissful SUNNO))), while on the other end of the spectrum it's a gentle lilting confection of lighter than air strums and ringing out chords, of amp buzz and soft warm whir...
We'd been holding off on listing this for what seems like forever. There seemed to be some strange mastering / duplicating defect. But after emailing with both the label and the band, we learned that that's just how the disc ended up sounding and while some slight imperfections exist, they were unable to be fixed and both the label and the band decided that they didn't really affect the record. The problem in question is a weird digital glitch between each song, it could be a little bit distracting if you were attempting to listen to this disc all the way through and drift off, cuz this is indeed the dreamiest driftiest Sunroof! we've heard. But fuck it, the music is so good, and this definitely ranks as one of our favorite SR! records, and since this is the only way you're gonna get it (it's actually been sold out and out of print for a while now), we suggest you just bask in the loooooong tracks and ignore the occasional glitch. Which you can definitely do, these tracks are lengthy and languorous, gorgeous tumbling swirls of sound, that open up and allow you to sink deep down into their billowy soft shimmery depths. Melody after melody all piled atop one another, buzzing guitars over burbling melodic fragments, the whole thing whipped into a gloriously light, sunbaked, psychedelic confection. So so so so good!
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Students Of Decay label head honcho Alex Cobb returns with part two of his Ribbons Of Dust series of solo guitar explorations under the name Taiga Remains. And since volume one is gone as is the super limited cassette we got a while back, you're gonna want to grab this one quick, cuz we'll be out before you know it and it's pretty dang great. Huge billowy clouds of dense but soft electric guitar drift. Melodies played out over minutes instead of seconds. Ambarchi meets Fennesz but with the bones removed, leaving just a drifting ghost of the guitar. It's hard to even think of this as a guitar. There's no strumming, or picking, or bowing, instead it's nothing but shimmering and glistening and sparkling and reverberating and drifting and shining and floating and twinkling and slowly fading away...
Packaged in a mini jewel case, with a pretty black on dark blue sleeve. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. These will be gone in no time!
While the name Jorma Tapio may not be familiar to you, the name Terje Isungset sure as heck should. He's the man responsible for the Igloo record, a past record of the week, recorded entirely on instruments made from ice. We've been selling that like CRAZY, when all of a sudden we got an email from Jussi (Circle, Pharaoh Overlord, etc.) letting us know that his label Ektro was releasing a brand new record by Isungset, teamed up with some guy names Tapio. We were of course intrigued, but had no idea what to expect. And had we actually expected something, we probably never would have guessed how weird and wonderful this record would be. No ice instruments sad to say, but armed with flutes, bells, voices, kantele, percussion, Jew's harp and lots and lots of drums, these two whip up a super wild and wooly, ultra dense blast of what we can only describe as tribal forest folk free jazz. Or something like that.
Free jazz is probably the closest comparison, the first few tracks are dense psychedelic percussive freak outs, lots of splattery spastic free jazz drumming all over the place, deep bowed bass, steel string zings, and super creepy strangled and howled vocalizations. Everything sounds very primal and tribal, thick swaths of rhythmic throb underpinned by shimmering washes of cymbal sizzle and warbly mumbled melodies. Isungset proves to be a pretty bad ass drummer, whipping up some seriously wild squalls of spastic skitter, and octopoidal crash and bang. The vocals grunt and chant, sort of yodel, and hoot and holler, very festive and just a little nuts sounding. When the drums recede a bit, the band sort of wonders through some ancient forest, fluttering flutes, simple subtle percussion, distant drones. A bit reminiscent of Avarus or Anaksimandros for sure. The 20+ minute centerpiece, the track "Selainin Tuli / Sacred Fire" lets the duo spread way out, and lay out an expansive tribal soundscape, like the earlier 'free jazz' tracks but stripped way down. Hints of No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand definitely surface now and then, the track eventually building to a howling shrieking psych drone freakout before settling back to almost complete silence. then a gentle lilting smudge of soft flutes and abstract clatter. That smeared clatter sort of drifts into the next two songs, disembodied scrapes and creaks, random bits of percussion, thick washes of low end thrum, quite dark an lovely.
The final track is a flittering flutescape, a spare landscape of woodwinds and distant shimmer, which is soon joined by a buzzing Jew's harp, and the harp and flutes get all tangled up into a strangely propulsive groove, some sort of skeletal prog laced with primal psych rock primitivism and festive Renn Faire revelry, like stumbling into some clearing in the woods and finding some strange open air market, with a very strange duo performing before a crowd of rapt onlookers. Weird, but pretty darn cool as well. Finnish music obsessives need this no matter what. Lovers of that modern free folk new weird America thing might just find that this pushes all their buttons, and REALLY REALLY open minded jazz heads might also want to give this a try.
Highly recommended!
We might as well mention right up front, we only got 19 copies of this, so be prepared to leave empty handed. But if you are one of the lucky 19, you'll get the chance to fill your ears with that sweetly shimmery Skatery mumbled murky sonic gurgle. Which of course makes perfect sense since Teotihucan is the work of one half of Bay Area noisemakers the Skaters. This super limited tape, recorded "In Tijuana mexico and the desert outskirts of El Cajon California October-December 2004", is an expansive world of lo fi drones blurred into fuzzy slabs of indistinct melody, peppered with twinkling sonic sparkles and squeaking creaking feedback, buried loops of hypnotic disembodied vocals and strange instrumental smudges, all under layer after layer of buzz and rumble and hiss, then all washed out, like a chalk painting on the sidewalk after a rainstorm, a barely there swirl of soft focus color and blurry whirls of faint melody, a big beautiful colorful smear of sound.
Packaged in super janky, beat up, dirty and old-price-tagged thrift store answering machine style cassettes, which leads us to a brief aside: While we totally support and celebrate DIY artists -- as seen/heard on the plethora of homespun cassettes and cd-rs we have in stock and that we seek out from all over the world -- we also heartily encourage said artists putting the same effort they put into music making into the presentation, the art and the packaging. Sure photocopied covers, recycled vintage record sleeves, handwritten liner notes are all parts of the aesthetic, but could you at least clean the old price tags and label adhesive off of your taped-over thrift store tapes and their cases before releasing them to your audience? C'mon, a little lighter fluid goes a long way towards makin' something look like it wasn't just dredged up from the bottom of a dumpster. Your art and your audience deserve it.
Remember a couple lists back we reviewed a Paradigms disc by a mysterious, very cool instrumental space rock band called Titan? We told the story of how, some months previous, these guys had sent us some cd-rs to check out, but with no contact information. And then when they finally did follow up with an email, and we tried to order some, we got no response! So we never ever got those cd-rs, but the Paradigms cd was a nice surprise.
Well, of course what happened was this: the slightly-flakey-but-nice Titan folks (hey this IS some kinda stonery drug rock, so some flakiness is to be expected, eh?) read our review, and emailed to see if we still wanted the cd-rs.... only they didn't have the one they'd sent us originally any more. But they did now have a new cd-r release, recorded at the same sessions as the Paradigms cd release. Plizmarmelade is a single 40 minute long track, starting off skronkily aggressive, with the noisy bite of a Lightning Bolt, before getting building into a relentlessly energetic, almost... jaunty... crazy crunching howling throbbing bass groove, like Zombi or Circle or Pharaoh Overlord on happy pills, freaking out on the guitar solos and sci-fi effects!! Acid Mothers Temple would be proud of this. Eventually the pills wear off and things fade into a calmer, deeper, droned-out zone, still way out in space. Wow. Basically krautrock from Brooklyn, that's the deal here. If you dug their Paradigms release, this should turn you on too.
We do have a bunch of these, but since they're cd-r's in home-made looking (silkscreened) digipacks, chances are they're limited...plus who knows if Titan will email us back if we need more...so get 'em while you can.
You've loved him for years in Mudhoney and Monkeywrench (among numerous other extracurricular musical jaunts). Heck, where Seattle grunge crushes were concerned, you could keep your Mark Arm 'cuz this fellow was totally the prize in Mudhoney, although in Monkeywrench Tom Price gave him a run for the money... but we digress. Now doncha just love him all by his lonesome? We sure do! Actually dandy guitarist Steve Turner has been goin' solo sans trumpeting fanfare for a few years now. Despite the album's title, his sound is neither new wave (there's not a synth in sight!) nor punk (tho' he's prolly got a pretty big punk heart inside), and we wouldn't think of him as an asshole neither. So, we assume the name is not self-referential. Instead New Wave Punk Asshole is for the most part retro bluesy rawk that drifts occasionally into countrified terrain. IF comparisons are to be drawn, we'd say that vocally on this album he sounds quite a bit like Mike Peters of The Alarm... which is a good thing in our opinion. Oh yeah, and as far as his chosen backing band moniker goes, we looked real hard and couldn't find a real stinker lurkin' anywhere.
This is definitely a strange compilation. Although all comps are sort of strange by their very nature. Gathering a bunch of different musicians to contribute one song each, usually relating to a theme. Well, the them here seems to be some sort of broadly defined psychedelic music. But the bands and the sounds are so all over the place, it seems to be a much less obviously definable thread that runs through the different artists (minus the fact that maybe they've all released something one Mind Expansion record label?).
Regardless, this is a pretty killer comp. A good intro to lots of psychedelic space rock bands, droney hypno-rock bands, haunting slowcore pop bands, and anything in between.
Sonically, all of these bands love FX, reverb, and delay and chorus and whatever other pedals they can get their hands on. Hence the psychrock angle. A lot of the bands on disc 2 lean toward some sort of Krautrock, minimal electronic vibe, but still with plenty of psychedelic overtones. A handful of these tracks are exclusive, the majority are not. But it functions quite well as a great psychrock / weird rock mix tape. Lots of AQ faves represented: Spacemen 3, Teenage Filmstars, Amp, Bardo Pond, Paik, Fuxa, Magnetaphone, Piano Magic, Landing, The Telescopes and more. But probably the most exciting part of this comp is how many bands there are we'd literally never heard of. We didn't necessarily love them all, but we did like most of 'em. And our ever growing list of bands to investigate further now includes Mazarin, Venture Lift, Elevator, LSD And The Search For God, Unknown Celebrities, Large Number, Kid Yahtzee and loads more!
We know that some of you like it dirty! And so do we when dirty is done with wit, style and old potty mouth class. This is an amazing compilation of old RnB with the kind of NAS-T lyrics that tickles us silly. What's so irresistible about this collection is how musically it still sounds so classic and clean in that sock-hop Mom and Dad on the dance floor kind of way. But when you hear the lyrics, OOF! Songs about poon-tang, sixty minute men, and big ten inch... um records (later covered by Aerosmith!). Greats like Dinah Washington, Lavern Baker, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins getting down and dirty as well as some lesser known but equally great performers. R-rated songs from the likes of The Blenders, The Treniers, Dorothy Ellis and more. Comes with amazing packaging including a thick booklet with tons of photos and all the lyrics so you can sing along to these dirty ditties. For some reason we always think that the 40's and 50's were so squeaky clean, prude and sedate. It's just that all the glorious filth was a big dirty secret. And this comp's got the sass to prove it!
P.S. Someone needs to get a copy of this to John Waters as this is bound to be his new favorite record! (although we imagine he might have some of the originals!)
By now there's almost no point in writing much about the incredible Eccentric Soul series on the Numero Group label every single record seems to speak for itself, LOUD AND PROUD!. One after another, lost pots of gold (should've-been-gold-records, that is) are constantly unearthed, dusted off and presented to us for maximum grooving. If there was any question as to how deep Numero have been digging, the answer becomes evident with this most recent outing, which compiles amazing soul recordings from the not so soulfully hip city of Phoenix, Arizona, recorded during the 60's and 70's. Being that I (Irwin) grew up in Phoenix, this release proved just how deep and far these guys will go for their lost soul.
As anyone who has lived in Phoenix over the last quarter century can tell you, any relics or history of a soul scene going on in the valley of the sun are pretty much non-existent. Luckily when Mike Lenaburg lived in Phoenix he had his finger on the pulse of the city's soul scene and managed to produce some totally scorching tracks from folks like Michael Liggins, We The People, and the Soul Blenders. Names that never got the same kind of glory that their rock 'n roll Phoenix counterparts like Alice Cooper did. But even so, these guys were responsible for some of the richest and liveliest sounding recordings to ever come out of Phoenix. As a high school kid I spent many of my waking hours in vinyl stores all over the city eavesdropping on the classic vinyl store employees and regulars talking for hours about the good old days, when there was a world of rich and vibrant soul music happening all over the place. I had no idea who those artists were and the one time I got the courage to interrupt and ask if I could see one of the records they all laughed and told me good luck since they were all pressed in such small runs that anyone who had one wasn't EVER going to give it up. So for years I could only imagine what these soul sounds from the desert sounded like but now I get to hear them for real, we all do, and they blow away anything I could have dreamed of. Phoenix, a goldmine for soul!!?? Who would have ever known. Thanks again Numero Group!
Pretty much all you gotta say about this one is EXCLUSIVE TWELVE MINUTE CIRCLE TRACK!!! Okay, so at least a handful of you already leapt wildly for the click-to-buy button and have already moved on. For the rest of you, this comp, the first release on Barge Recordings, has way more to offer than just one track (although it is a killer... more on that in a minute).
This is one of those compilations that is perfectly balanced between names you know and love, and bands you've never even heard of, but the good thing is, the tracks by the lesser known bands are just as good! You've got Finnish hypnorockers Circle but you've also got Polmo Polpo, Tim Hecker, Loren Connors, MGR, Geoff Mullen, sounds like an AQ dream compilation already. So the tracks by The Fun Years, the Kallikak Family, Bird Show and Animal Hospital are just gravy. But with a comp like this, the only real way to get a feel for it is to go track by track. Needless to say, if you dig Circle, and Tim Hecker and the rest of those, odds are you're gonna dig all of this.
The Fun Years offer up a lovely soundscape of warped melodies, delicate guitar strum and all sorts of staticky record crackle. Much more dreamy and melancholy than the band name might lead you to believe. Next up is the Kallikak Family, whose track is like a glitched up, chopped and screwed version of some classic Appalachian folk tune, steel string guitar, dreamy vocals, all crunched up and stuttered into strange rhythms and droney swirls. Cool! Then it's Bird Show, a Kranky Records outfit which should give you a rough idea, with muted thumb piano melodies, like some drugged out less festive Konono, underneath strummed guitars and haunting monotone vocals, creepy and super pretty. Polmo Polpo follow up with a grainy grinding dronescape constructed from what sounds like sine waves, bird calls, fragments of guitar buzz, shortwave radio and theremin. Tim Hecker is up next and does that thing he does so well, the blown out fuzzy soundscape, melodies and rhythms indistinct and buried under swirls of gauzy hiss and shimmery whir. So goddamned perfect. One of those tracks that should be hours long. Loren Connors follows Hecker's thick swath of sound with a much more spare and somber track, simple plaintive electric guitar, shimmering reverb, lots and lots of space, delicate and elegiac. Then we have Animal Hospital, who unfurl a thick Sunn 0)))-like guitar, a churning glacial throb, over a static field of cricket chirping high end. Like a more moody melodic Skullflower, or Godpeed tackling a track from Earth 2. But way prettier. Finally we get to the Circle track, which eschews there usually propulsive, almost metal, hypnotic krautrock style groove in favor of a weird ambient soundworld, of pulsing low end drones, caveman like grunts, bizarre muttered vocals, abstract guitars, lots of tinkling percussion, thick swirls of ambient sound. It almost sounds like the Orc obsessed soundscapes of Za Frumi, or a more Quest For Fire version of their live sound on the long out of print live Mountain lp. Either ay, essential for all you Circle nuts. Hot on Circle's Neanderthal heels is Geoff Mullen, who takes his stringed implements (guitar and banjo usually) and transforms them into a grinding corrosive battery of moans and groans and wails, of buzz and glitch and crunch, a clattery, keening industrial psychedelia, that manages to be harsh and caustic, as well as strangely pretty. And finally, MGR, 1/4 of the mighty Isis, who under the name Mustard Gas And Roses, weaves dreamy, darkly doomy, meanderingly melancholy abstract post rock dronescapes, lovely and mysterious, the track here is no exception, the main difference being a strange Morricone Spaghetti Western vibe, that gives the track a cool, cinematic deserty feel. So nice.
A killer comp for sure, and a whole mess of new bands we're gonna have to track down more music from!
Note: Be warned, it is quite difficult to get the disc out of the sleeve. The inner sleeve is just a little too big. Be careful removing it, best to open it all the way and push from the inside. A bit more work, but it's WELL worth it!
Did you know that late, great BBC Radio 1 disc jockey John Peel's wife Sheila was also known as "The Pig"? We didn't know that... presumably it was an affectionate term of endearment, or described her appetite for old timey 78 rpm records, of which she and Peel had a large collection. This disc compiles a selection of John and Shelia's favorites in a "Beginner's Guide", featuring all sorts of fun, scratchy old treasures, 23 cuts in all, from piano rags to delta blues to music hall numbers, just anything interesting that Peel and The Pig discovered on vintage 78s. Amusing and charming to say the least!
There's old fashioned novelty bits like Albert Whelan's "My Brother Makes The Noises For The Talkies" and Ronnie Ronalde's "The Yodelling Whistler"... Then there's the velvet vocal harmony, jumpin' jazz, dry comedy, and early rock n' roll too. And even a song in Cantonese by artists unknown. And lots more besides -- it's a mix as eclectic as it is interesting. But it all kinda goes together in some crazy way, a nice tribute to the shared taste in music (and humor) of The Pig and her famous husband. Such a shame he's no longer with us, and her. She provides extensive liner notes, by the way. We love how we can count on Trikont for cool stuff like this!
Inspired by his plentiful good times spent down in Sydney, Australia, DJ Tom Thump has compiled a double cd mix of twenty two tracks. One disc is appropriately titled 'Get Up', and the other 'Get Down'. Included are tracks by Playgroup, Chicken Lips, Frankie Knuckles, Cordovan, Makossa & Megablast, Julius Papp & Charles Spencer, Hideo Kobayashi & Pheeko Dubfunk, Chuck Love, Loopwreckas, Salvo, Shrift, and many more. You don't need to travel abroad to put this mix to good use as your own late night soundtrack to some randy loose'n'lively action.
We were in absolute buzzing raga drone, funk soul heaven when we learned that those amazing and totally fun vinyl-only releases in the Sitar Beat series had now been compiled onto a cd. Most of us were never lucky enough to get the lps but now we can get our sitar funk on all the same! Chances are if you've been in the store in the last couple weeks you've heard us playing this, as this is one of those rare records that every single one of us can't help but be in love with. '60s, '70s and early '80s Bollywood jams and Indian-influenced psych-grooves HEAVY on the sitar. R.D. Burman, Ananada Shankar, Asha Bhosle, Serge Gainsbourg, Klaus Doldinger just to name a few of the responsible parties East and West who will henceforth be making your parties way more fun!!! But be prepared for tons of questions when all your friends start asking you what it is you're playing. We've been fielding those questions for weeks, but we're more then happy to answer with a simple reply: "It's Sitar Beat!..." and before we can even finish our sentence said questioner is on his or her way out the door with a copy. We rest much easier at night knowing that we're doing out small part to spread these amazing soul stirring buzzy freak funk grooves far and wide, filling ears and shaking souls!
While we are admittedly totally obsessed with damaged and demented, freaky and fucked up, bizarre and obtuse outsider black metal, every once in a while we'll discover a band who manage to incorporate bits of all of those things, but in a way that's much more subtle. A band can be really weird without being totally fucked up. Completely demented without stumbling and struggling and sounding totally damaged. A band can be furious and fast, heavy and complex, brutal and intense, but still be super far out and perplexingly bizarre. Think Spektr, Blut Aus Nord, and now the VEGA Corporation. Or V.E.G.A. Or more specifically, Vacuum Era Gelid Atmosphere. Thanks to AQ pal Drew for turning us on to these guys. We were definitely surprised when we finally heard them. Not at all what you might expect. With a name like Vacuum Era Gelid Atmosphere, and a record called Cocaine. Some trippy abstract very UN-metal artwork and a liner note proclamation that goes like this:
"(V.E.G.A.) supports freedom of thought, sometimes misunderstood as insanity by the most.
The band was born at the last breaths of black metal and dies soon after.
This album is a gift to its memory... a dead-born child... a trip went wrong... a nightmare in your brain...
Feed your insanity...
We now live in the future... as lights, always hiding in the dark, yet shining... as a new band, "VEGA-KORPORATION"
Totally devoted to the exploration of mind, soul and technology..."
We were totally prepared for some stumbling recorded-in-a-cave, howling, midtempo, warbly damaged black buzz. And we would have been totally happy with that for sure. But this band is absolutely nothing like that at all.
V.E.G.A. are impossibly grim and so Incredibly fierce and furious. We talk about black metal bands sounding buzzy all the time, but this is a whole 'nother thing. The first track is some sort of ultimate demonic buzz direct from the fiery pit. A buzz that is sharp and jagged, so blown out and strangely panned, that it almost makes you dizzy listening to it. Careening like a pissed off swarm of hornets from speaker to speaker, the buzz distorts and crumbles, fades out and then swoops back in super hot and completely oversaturated. It definitely sounds like there is something seriously wrong with your speakers, in a GOOD way! And within that buzz is a twisting squirming vortex of fuzzy riffs, insanely blasting beats, shrieked vocals, all in a dense super complex tangle of black fury. One song was all it took. Not only were we totally and completely sold. We were also totally brutalized. Exhausted. Our ears beaten to a bloody pulp. And we LOVED it. The record veers wildly back and forth between impossibly brutal buzzing and more Burzumic midtempos with just a bit of a groove like Khold. But either way, the songs are dense and dark, furious and brilliantly fucked up. And that's not even taking into account the non-metal elements which are legion. Songs are peppered with weird sonic bits, and separated by haunting interludes that range from creepy children singing to women screaming in terror, stretches of industrial pummel with skittery drum machines and super processed Laibachian Teutonic growls to dreamy blissed out minor key jangle with Mark E. Smith sort-of-spoken vocals, massive glacial dirgescapes of downtuned sludge, peppered with Godflesh style beats to weird folky foresty ambience. But unlike a lot of bands, those bits are just that, bits, little bits of unlikely shading, small demented complements to the bands furious metallic onslaught.
That is until you get to the epic fourteen minute closing track. A vast expanse of weird record crackle spread in a thick patina over soaring minor key strings and distant muted drums. Creepy and dreary, but sort of super emotional and sublime. It sounds a bit like an old scratched up Godspeed 45 being played on a Victrola while on another Victrola, someone is playing a super scuffed copy of some old Scorn 12" on the wrong speed, the machine like beats perfectly drifting into the majestic grandeur of the strings and swoonsome ambience. After a brief bit of silence, we're suddenly tossed into some sort of weird eighties sounding synth rock, a bizarre electronic drums drenched video game music sort of jam that is just totally twisted and not a little bit out of place. It eventually morphs into a more metal version of Goblin, creepy and slightly cheesy with big thick distorted guitars laid over top. Woah.
A definite contender twisted black metal record of the year for sure!
When we first heard about this band, it's because some magazine touted them as having "the best keyboards since Van Halen's "Jump"! We hardly needed more than that to get us curious. And when we first heard the single "Kelly" we pretty much concurred, a winsome eighties MTV rock ballad, with a soft swooshy chorus and THOSE keyboards everywhere. But when we finally got this EP, the big surprise was the opener "Mission", quite possibly our most played to death pop song these days. Some impossible mix of Tears For Fears or Fun Boy Three or ABC, and one of the more modern retro rockers like the Killers or Maximo Park or The Kaiser Chiefs, with spacey reverbed guitars, electronic drums, soulful crooning, crunchy guitars, that explode into an absolutely KILLER chorus thick with buzzing synths, swooshy space rock FX, a huge hooky riff and awesome falsetto vocals. Definitely worth it just for that track, definite contender for pop song of the year, but "Kelly" is a definite guilty pleasure, and "Sex City" is a dead ringer for the Fixx, and the closer is some weird Ultravox / Echo And The Bunnymen hybrid. There's also a super awesomely cheesy video for "Kelly", but if you're anything like us, you'll just throw on "Mission" and set your cd player to repeat FOREVER!! So good!
Some reissues of long-lost gems arrive here with little fanfare and turn out to be great nonetheless. This one though, came our way emblazed with blurbs proclaiming its immense awesomeness quoting the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Tim Gane, Jarvis Cocker and David Holmes. And guess what? Those guys do indeed know what they're talking about! This IS pretty fantastic. Here we have an action-packed instrumental concept album whose title translates into English as The Child Killer Of The Flies, which musically narrates a simple but creepy story by Serge Gainsbourg (written *after* he heard the album, not before, and included the liner notes, explaining each track title) about the horrific revenge of flies on a child who had tortured them. This musical story-telling is by way of schizoid arrangements of tracks that range in sound from groovy pop to jazz to avant-garde tape music to fuzz guitar rock! Sounds good, eh? Good n' weird for sure.
L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches is a "Fellini-esque psychedelic symphony" originally released (but poorly distributed and relegated to general obscurity) in 1972, credited to a unknown group called Isolitudes. The man behind Insolitudes, though, was one Jean-Claude Vannier, a musician and producer from the happening '60s French pop ("Ye Ye music") scene who had scored film soundtracks and collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg, most famously providing the arrangements for Gainsbourg's highly-rated L'Histoire De Melody Nelson album (the reissue of which we wish we had in stock also, but haven't been able to get a hold of lately). This record is thereby cited as the follow-up to that one-of-a-kind conceptual classic. Itself it's pretty much one-of-a-kind too. Funky and groovy, as well as deliriously, disorientingly hallucinogenic, this will hit you with lush string arrangements one moment, sound effects of sheer terror the next... it's psych, it's prog, it's funk, it's musique concrete. There's even a chorus of car horns put to good use here! It's the freakiest 'sploitation soundtrack that never was. This reissue includes two bonus tracks from a rare 7" single entitled Point D'Interrogation, and also boasts extensive and informative (and quite laudatory) liner notes by DJ Andy Votel. Very recommended!
You know you must be just a little bit obsessed and seriously dying for new material by a band when two little songs are more than enough to tide you over! And that's precisely the case with this new 2 song single from White Magic. Their debut (also an ep) came out a few years back (and is now out of print!), and we've been waiting not so patiently for anything, a full length would have been ideal, but we can make do with this kick ass single!
Their debut ep had to be one of the best things EVER on Kill Rock Stars. Mostly the brainchild of Mira Billotte, who spent some time in an equally great band with her sister called Quix*o*tic. Mira has one of the most chilling and beautiful voices in indie rock without a doubt. The kind of voice that holds you down and forces you to surrender to its warmth and mystery. While folks like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom have garnered most of the attention, it's only a matter of time before the world catches on to the White Magic.
These two songs are such a gorgeously cruel tease, while we are forced to continue waiting as patiently as we can. The first song is their version of "Katie Cruel", an amazing arrangement of a classic tune by Karen Dalton and it's followed up by "Hold Your Hand In The Dark" a stunning original with immaculate piano playing and once again THAT voice, so effortlessly giving us chills and the grandest of goosebumps.
The sweet, dulcet pipes of one Mr. Erlend Oye can now be heard in a pop band other than Kings Of Convenience! It's The Whitest Boy Alive!
And yes, the name is quite fitting. You might say that Oye's body of work to date has been unflaggingly, Milquetoastily vanilla, and Dreams continues in similar fashion. Oye is an impeccable songwriter and this is his most guitar based outing yet with totally tasty instrumentation laying the perfect bed for his sweet alluring voice. He even reminds us of a younger Arto Lindsay with his suave stylings and undeniable charisma. Or like Sam Prekop taking one foot off the sea and onto the dance floor. This record stands out in all of its smooth, creamy, soft and soothing glory.
The latest dispatch from preeminent UK new music mag The Wire. This month on the cover, Pere Ubu's David Thomas (not to be confused with Dave Thomas of Wendy's!). Inside: Rafael Toral, James Blackshaw, Little Annie, Jayne Parker, a history of underground music in Melbourne 1976-1984, invisible jukebox with modern freejazz/freerock drumgod phenom Chris Corsano (who almost gets a perfect score!), Global Ear on Pretoria, as well as the usual massive batch of reviews: records, books, performances, shows, installations, DVD's and more!
It seems like not a week goes by without a new Wooden Wand release making its unorthodox folk presence felt. Up until now it's all been of the audio variety, but this week we've got something you can listen to AND watch! Moon Void Of Course is a self-released LIMITED TO 100 dvd-r packed with tons of WWATVV goodies and extras. The focal point of the release is a bunch of on the road live footage from their summer tour of 2005, but there's also a couple of music videos and footage from a particularly unconventional show they did at an orphanage earlier that year. To boot, along with the dvd-r you get a soundtrack cd-r and a lil' tour diary/insert booklet.
We repeat: This is SUPER LIMITED! You choose to snooze, you choose to lose.
What a long strange trip it's been for Malefic and Xasthur. What's even stranger it seems, is that he ended up finding a new home on the very hip indie label Hydra Head. Sure HH has released its share of dark heaviness, but black metal, especially of the ultra personal, cult and grim kind, is so concerned with staying true, and not selling out. So it's a bit of a coup that HH nabbed Xasthur. Especially after a whole mess of records on Moribund, Total Holocaust Blood Fire Death, Profound Lore and Southern Lord. There has apparently been a bit of a backlash in the true cult BM underground. But fuck 'em. Hydra Head is a killer label and Malefic probably just got tired of being screwed left and right. Plus, oh what a joy it is to watch the true grim warriors weep at the loss, their corpsepaint smearing in long grey streaks. But it really is their loss more than any one 'cuz damn if this isn't the best Xasthur record since Nocturnal Poisoning. And that's saying a whole lot considering how much we've loved pretty much everything he's ever done.
The thing With Nocturnal Poisoning is that it was this perfect mix of sorrowful melancholia and black buzz, the sound was murky and muddy and fuzzy, but above it, were delicate melodies, dreamlike minor key filigree over a bottomless black pit. It was that strange juxtaposition that made it so special. Take that pretty element away, and you're left with just another black disc of Burzum worship. It's a little like the oil paining on the cover. You could see the texture of the canvas and the individual brushstrokes beneath the art. And with the music, it was the same thing, you could see the various elements, feel their texture, see the thick grainy backdrop upon which Malefic placed all of his dreamlike melodies and murky anguished howls.
Every record after that contained similar elements, and amazing songs, but it seemed like the recordings got more brittle, lots of high end buzz, not so much of that glorious malefic murk.
Subliminal Genocide almost sounds like it was recorded right after Nocturnal Poisoning and shelved for the last few years. It's THAT heavy and dreamy and melancholy and murky and goddamn beautiful.
There's not a lot of black metal that you might consider truly beautiful, but the songs on Subliminal Genocide, aren't just blasting thrashing metal, they are gorgeous lilting laments, epic and majestic and minor key. Taken out of a black metal context, they'd sound like some sort of super emotional epic post rock, but as they are, buried under thick layers of blackened buzz and wrapped in huge swaths of fuzzy sonic fog, they become even darker and more desolate, lonely and mournful. Almost none of the record is faster than a loping midtempo, about half the tracks are slow motion dirges, downright doom, with the double kick coming in more as a thick black low end cloud than any sort of actual blast, and a handful of tracks are nothing but swirling whorls of sad black ambience.
And because of the fuzzy indistinct production, and the thick murky halo around every track, lots of Subliminal Genocide sounds like some bastardized black metal version of M83, or Tim Hecker, or a little like Jeck and Marclay spinning old scratched up Burzum lps slowed waaaaaay down.
This record is simultaneously so dark and depressed and utterly evil sounding, but also fuzzy and psychedelic and totally blissed out, it's sort of hard to imagine, especially listening to this right now, that there could ever possibly be a better combination.
It wouldn't be an AQ list without a new Yellow Swans release, and the 'Swans have been gracious enough once again to make sure that a Yellow Swans-less AQ list will never happen. Safe for two more weeks!
The way in which this is not just another Yellow Swans filled list is twofold, one: this is an actual cd, not a cd-r, and two: this is in fact a collection of super limited long out of print releases. Plus, this disc is fucking awesome!
It's Doubled Yellow Swans this time around (different 'D' word for every release) and Global Clone collects nearly an hour, five long tracks, from these long gone rarities: Declawed Yellow Swans cassette on Tone Filth, the YS half of the split cassette with the Skaters on Jyrk, the YS contribution to the Deathbombarc Tape Club, a split with Sex With Girls, and the Damaged Yellow Swans cassette on 23 Productions.
All five tracks are dramatically different, but this collection definitely flows like a proper album, and contains some of the loveliest YS material yet. Long lonely keening tones drift over a fuzzy backdrop that sounds like rain falling on leaves, thick tones reverberate and shimmer and beat out an almost rhythm while bells and chimes are chopped into a gorgeous high end trill. Huge washes of warm synthy fuzz swirl and billow creating gloriously blurry and indistinct melodies that drift and drone. Blistering bursts of freaked out space rock FX spun into dense little glowing orbs of burnished rumble and sparkle. Hissing soundscapes of white noise and electronic shriek spread out beneath an alien, sort of Celtic sounding melody, a warbling upper register trill, gradually swallowed whole by crumbling swaths of superdistorted sound. Gorgeous grinding waves of thick slow motion riffing and mumbled distorted vocals all tangled up in some lilting musical slow dance, droney and dirgey and buzzed out and dreamy.
As with most Yellow Swans action (but maybe even more than usual), SUPER RECOMMENDED!
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We got a small handful of these direct from Mr. Yeti himself. 6 or 7 copies. It's been out of print and unavailable for at least 3 or 4 years, so the first few folks to order will get 'em.
Here's our description from when we first reviewed it way back in 2001:
All hail the return of Mike McGonigal, who used to publish the cherished Chemical Imbalance zine and now offers "Yeti: Enthused Art, Music, Writing and Other Stuff". As with most zines, he (and Yeti's other contributors) cover material that they just plain like... and McGonigal's got great taste so we're the better for it. Super eclectic, Yeti features everything from a primer on lo-fi metal (written by talented AQ-pal Ian Christe), an interview with Swedish hippie progsters Trad Gras Och Stenar, the experimental electronic label Mego, and a bio of artist-filmmaker-musicologist Harry Smith, to AQ-fave Brad Johnson's collected comics for his band Virginia Dare, photos by Kicking Giant's Tae Won Yu, Tomata du Plenty of the seminal punk outfit The Screamers, James Brown's Funky Divas, a long interview with the folks from Destroy All Monsters, and so much more! This will keep you busy for weeks. The enclosed cd features rare and unreleased stuff from Stereolab, Elliot Smith, Mice Parade, Harry Smith, Nobukazu Takemura, Califone, Trad Gras Och Stenar and several others. Well worthy. ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
