Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left.
So this pack includes a killer red on black Grey Daturas t-shirt, a Grey Daturas pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with small t-shirts we only got 8!!!
The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge.
We realized a list or two back, that we had somehow managed to make it to list 200-and-something without ever listing any records by Ukrainian black metal horde Hate Forest. Which obviously needed to be rectified since pretty much all the metal inclined folks we know LOVE Hate Forest. So we listed Nietzscheism, a sort of greatest hits, with the intention of digging in to their catalog, and giving all the AQ list metalheads a chance to pick up some of these amazing discs.
So here we have Purity, recorded back in 2002, another perfectly frosty, relentlessly buzzing slab of intense and furious black metal. Just like all of their other records, the sound of Hate Forest here is not fancy or fucked or convoluted or complex, just simple, ultra aggressive, ultra fast, grim and chilly, the perfect sonic representation of the snow cloaked Ukrainian forest. A blast of blurry black metal that over the course of the album spreads out into a thick black drone, a bleak mesmerizing whir, thick with buried melodies and growled demonic howls. A thick squirming blackness that swallows you whole and leaves you shivering and alone, praying for death, as the oppressive black hole heaviness crushes you into the frozen ground.
We realized a list or two back, that we had somehow managed to make it to list 200-and-something without ever listing any records by Ukrainian black metal horde Hate Forest. Which obviously needed to be rectified since pretty much all the metal inclined folks we know LOVE Hate Forest. So we listed Nietzscheism, a sort of greatest hits, with the intention of digging in to their catalog, and giving all the AQ list metalheads a chance to pick up some of these amazing discs.
So here we have Sorrow, Hate Forest's most recent and final full length, and besides being a seriously dense and buzz drenched slab of blackness, it has one of the most amazing covers ever, a barren mountainside covered in leafless dead trees, the sort of photo you can stare at and get lost in, which is exactly the sort of black web these guys weave.
Sharing members with Drudkh, Dark Ages, Astrofaes, Nokturnal Mortum and probably every black metal band in the Ukraine, the now defunct Hate Forest offered up a relentless buzzsaw blast of white hot lightning fast black metal, blast beats all over the place, a near static wall of fuzz, riffs so serpentine and furiously fast, they almost become a solid black buzz. Melodies surface here and there but only briefly, quickly swallowed up by the churning downtuned whirl of whirring furious brutality.
Nothing subtle, or even that weird, no intricate tempos or convoluted song structures, this is pure cult grim blackness, a million miles an hour, a buzzing black bullet aimed straight for the depths of hell. So fast and relentless, that it becomes so hypnotic and dronelike that you almost can't help but drift into a glorious black dreamstate. Awesome.
Includes a big booklet with more breathtaking photos of snow covered mountains, rushing rivers, forests and fjords.
Wow! If you loved this duo's last album Darkness At Noon and/or Beirut's Gulag Arkestar album and/or eastern European folk music in general, keep the love a-flowin' cause we think this might be your new fave! Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost (also of Beirut) clearly possess a deep respect, admiration and understanding of traditional Balkan, Bavarian and Turkish gypsy music. Together with guests Beirut's Zach Condon and old aQ faves Fanfare Ciocarlia, they've crafted a fantastic, faithful patchwork of the distinct regions' sounds. In fact, the latter were recorded in the tiny remote village of Zece Prajini, Romania. The air prickles with the intricate interwoven rhythms of sputtering brass, rattling percussion, reeling accordions and flourishing strings. Immensely vibrant and moving. Very very recommended!
Just because Jim is an AQ employee doesn't mean we can't gush like crazy about his new record. C'mon, pretty much everyone who works here plays in a band or runs a label. We like to think that the music we all make and release would be just the kind of stuff we love to listen to and sell, and just the kind of stuff you all like to listen to and buy. And such is the case with Jim's new record Telegraphy By The Sea, an album he's been working on for several years now, cobbled together from material culled from various elements used in installations and performances in New York, Australia and various locations in between.
The disc is lovely, all wrapped in an ominously blackened but totally beautiful package of silkscreen and letterpress that could at first glance be mistaken for another Jesu or Godflesh album with its telephone poles smeared into moire patterns.
The music inside is just as lovely. Rust, drones, shortwave, drones, acid rain, drones, a big pile of rocks, drones, a small pile of rocks, and more drones. Drones and drones. But like all of those great drone artists we freak out about (Chalk, Coleclough, Basinski, Organum, blah blah blah...), Jim's not one to let the drone settle as a terminal pool of inactivity. This is a dynamic album, bristling with texture amidst the shifting passages, dramatic shifts, and evocative soundscapes. The visual side of his installations has this weird eeriness as he builds dense layers of rust and debris on top of corroded photographs of abandoned buildings and desolate landscapes. Those same metaphors of abandoned, desolate spaces are musically represented in Telegraphy By The Sea. In these spaces, time is accelerated with things rusting, falling apart, getting covered in moss, and being washed away by the ocean. Scrapes and gurgles from all of those bits of metal, bricks, and rocks dissolve through radioactive sinewaves into a gorgeous magnetic wall of grey-slab tones, gradually building through half-melodic phrases, a clatter of monochrome, and squalls of crackling static. All of this snaps in an instant at the end of the album, giving way to a wondrous nocturnal ambience cobbled from luminous bell-tones and detuned shortwave radio communications.
One of Jim's good friends and collaborators Loren Chasse, said it better than we could, "A telephone cord in the sand? A message taken down using an alphabet of sea-glass, shell and carapace? It all makes sense in the last 11 minutes!"
The first thing you'll notice about the newest from Swedish black metallers Heresi is the amazing artwork, a dark shadowy tangle of demon parts, gnashing teeth, sharp claws, desiccated flesh, all with that awesome oil on canvas texture from the original painting. Flip it over and feast your eyes on a baby head in the grips of a taloned claw, its blood emptying into a blood filled dish held by the very same demon, his teeth flashing in the corner. Ugh. Why does the art look so familiar? It just so happens to be from a painting by Wrest from Leviathan and is totally striking and super creepy. Perfect for this newest release from Skamfer, and his one man black horde Heresi. This is the sequel to last years Psalm I and is even heavier, faster, more grim and more darkly depressive. Skamfer is an ex member of the mighty Ondskopt and it sounds like it. Furious blazing black metal fuzz, a thick wash of mosquito buzz riffage, pounding blast beats, howled guttural vocals, but like with Ondskapt, a surprisingly melodic flair. A soaring mournful majesty buried beneath the swirling wall of blackness. Think Deathspell Omega, Onskapt obviously, Ofermod, Funeral Mist, and you'll get an idea of where Heresi fall. Very Swedish sounding, with lots of death metal elements, but also plenty of weird psychedelic guitar leads, creepy harmonies and dense tangled arrangements, all doused in black blood and wrapped in spiked fury. Heavy and hypnotic and so fucking great.
If you read any rock magazines, Rolling Stone, Spin, whatever, or watch MTV or whatever channel they have now that shows videos, you've probably heard of the Hold Steady by now. This is their second or third record already, but they're only now being touted as the next big thing. But with a weird angle. they've been really pushing the 'bar band' or 'club band' angle. As if every young band didn't spend all their time rocking little clubs all over. But in this case it seems to be more that they 'sound' like a classic American rock band, heartland, beers, and after work parties, old pickups and Pabst Blue Ribbon. That sort of thing. We weren't really sure what to expect, it is on Vagrant after all, so maybe we were feeling a little Get Up Kids or something, but holy shit! This really is modern American roots rock bar rock bandanna rock and roll. Lots of piano and organ, simple drumming, big crashing guitars, and a vocalist who has a weird lazy drawl, and who sort of slurs more than sings. And while that combo is totally infectious, and the songs are hooky as all get out, we don't hear the Replacements and Soul Asylum (Dave Pirner guests on a few tracks!) and other classic Midwest rockers that often get mentioned. Nope. We hear lots of Springsteen, and as hard as it may be to believe, a whole lot of Eddie And The Cruisers!!! Sounds funny but it's true, and in no way is that a bad thing. Bad ass working class rock and roll, every song a tale of workdays and weekends, cars and chicks, life and love, but given a modern day, Vagrant Records, big guitar emorock spit shine, but without losing the rootsy goodness and working man shit kicking get drunk and rock hard vibe. Definitely makes us want to head down to the local watering hole, sidle up to the bar, and spend the night getting sweaty to loud wild rock and roll, and hopefully not going home alone...
Another brand new release, this one another actual cd release (not a cd-r), and again featuring Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower, etc.) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ, etc.) as they coax an endless flow of molten sounds from their array of instruments and noisemakers.
On Chimerendammerung, like most of the Hototogisu releases, the pair seem to be taking the dreamy drift of Bower's Sunroof! project, and supercharging it, giving it some serious teeth, what was once meditative and hypnotic, is now a serious slab of sound. A swirling vortex of distorted guitars, and bowed strings, all furiously whipped into a frothy psychedelic wash of buzzing overtones and blurring timbres. Within this dense chaotic miasma, are all sorts of raga like drones, muted rhythms, fragmented melodies, a veritable sea of strange sonic occurrences, blended together, piled atop one another, layer after layer. It's like exploring some alien ocean and drifting through the inky blackness, the only illumination coming from a panoply of mysteriously iridescent undersea oddities, the light and the subtle colors all blending into a dizzyingly overwhelming whole.
This may be noise music, and to the casual listener it may sound harsh and unmelodic, but the magic of this band, and these players, is the ability to create this music, this sort of noise, from distinctly un-noisy elements, which is why the final blast of sound, the disc you hold in your hands, is anything BUT noise, a beautiful and hypnotically captivating sound, so rich and textured and completely mesmerizing.
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You'd think Neurosis and Isis would be getting royalties at this point for the sheer number of bands that have 'borrowed' their sound. Then again, if that's how it worked, everybody in Slint and the Pixies would be millionaires. But as we've stated repeatedly in the past, maybe there's nothing new under the sun, and yeah all bands steal/borrow/are influenced by other bands, but it's what you do with those borrowed sounds afterwards that makes a difference. Sure, without Neurosis there would be no Isis, but Isis took their Neurosis obsession and went in a whole new direction and created their own super distinctive sonic world. Hence most of the Isis and Neurosis influenced bands we love, have done just that, taken certain parts, and incorporated their own angle, added their own unlikely influences, and created a sound that if not ALL their own, was at least a unique take on a familiar sound.
Irepress definitely fit right in that whole post rock metal crowd. So all you fans of Isis, Pelican, Rosetta, Mouth Of The Architect, Tides, Grails, Angel Eyes, Conifer and the like, can probably just stop right here and press that BUY button and be done with it. But for those of you who are maybe a little saturated in terns of the whole postrockmetal thing, and wonder why exactly you should free up precious space on your cd shelf for Irepress, well, we'll tell you.
First off, these songs are just awesome. angular and complex, convoluted and tense. Emotional and super catchy. Not as metal as a lot of their brethren, but still pretty dang heavy, crunchy riffs, that go from jagged and harsh, to smooth and spacey often in the same song. But what makes Irepress really stand out is their unabashed, over the top progginess. Sure the genre itself has a built in prog aspect, with long songs and lots of parts, but Irepress take it even further, with LOTS of super proggy spacey breakdowns, swoony and blissed out, but mathy and a bit noodly as well, guitars are muted and understated, weaving complex soundscapes of subtle shuffle incorporating hand drums, trumpet, spaced out FX, drifting minor key melody, lots of delay and reverb, and a whole bunch of super unexpected little flourishes before lurching back into some loping monstrous metallic groove. Some of those parts sound like Santana, others like Genesis, but the thing is, they aren't just little breaks, they are as much a part of the sound and the songs as the crushing riffage or the mathy post rock. It's a strange combination, it takes a little while to get used to, imagine some jammed out fusion breaking into some almost Maidenesque guitar over a chugging metalcore breakdown, or some blissed out percussive ambience slowly building into a massive sludgy epic. Beyond the bands unique progginess, a lot of the riffs themselves are really strange, cobbled together from or broken up into convoluted chugs and soaring high end leads, bits of indie jangle and some seriously downtuned crunch.
A super strange band for sure, pushing lots of our favorite buttons, moody math rock, crushing metallic groove, spacey proggy noodle, dreamy ambience, all pretty dizzying actually, which is exactly why we can't seem to stop listening to this!
Subtitled: Visual / Aural Fragments And Excerpts 2001-2005. That means, if you're an Isis fan you'll be buying this, we're pretty sure. But actually, it's also the sort of thing that might turn you INTO an Isis fan, if you weren't already. Check it out -- a selection of live performances, seven individual songs filmed at various venues 'round the world in 2001 and 2005, plus a full 70+ minute live set captured in Australia last year. The full scope of Isis's blend of crushing heaviness and mesmerizing post-rock beauty is on display here, much of it professionally shot and edited. Totally arty and moody like we'd expect from 'em. Even the dvd menu and chapter title screens are works of art.
Besides the live footage, the music video for "In Fiction" is also included, along with miscellaneous extras like a discography and photo gallery. Plus a 20 page dvd booklet with liner notes, art, graphics, and even lyrics. Pretty sweet. Heck we don't really think you can call yourself an Isis fan if you don't get this, eh? So, pick this up and ready yourself and your DVD player for a devastating dose of the dark, dynamic, precision post-metal that you've hopefully already experienced Isis delivering live in person (if you haven't, all the more reason to invest in this).
So what do you get when you take a band who specializes in grand and epic, super sweeping metallic post rock epics, and put them in a studio with another band who specializes in grand and epic, super sweeping metallic post rock epics? Yeah, it's sort of a trick question. The answer in case you weren't able to figure it out on your own, is: grand and epic, super sweeping metallic post rock epics! Not really a surprise then. But who cares really. If that's your cup of tea, then drink up, this will for sure hit the spot.
These two monsters of metallic post rock got together for the In The Fishtank series and whipped up these three songs, and if you're a fan of either band, you'll pretty much need this. The first track sounds a lot more like Aereogramme, brooding and slow building, loping minor key math rock, that shimmers and shuffles, eventually joined by soft vocals, while the drums get more and more affected and dubbed out. Track two is a lot heavier on the Isis, and we do mean heavier. A chugging juggernaut, slithery slow crawl, with reverbed vocals and chiming melodies, and huge howled choruses. The final track is back to the mellower side, slowly drifting guitar shimmer and droning ambience, soft swells of melody and drums way up in the mix, super dubbed out, the whole thing sounding like some sort of post rock dub version of a Sigur Ros B-side. Nice!
With the recent release of The Devil And Daniel Johnston, a documentary about Johnston's genius and continual struggle with mental illness, more of the world is getting a peak into the magical world of one of the greatest musical minds of the last several decades. While the film and most of the press surrounding Johnston tends to focus on his mental health and long bouts of illness, the recent release many of his classic albums seemed like the perfect opportunity to seriously gush about his oh so prolific musical output. We can't think of many songwriters over the last couple decades, or maybe ever, who have written as many memorable, deeply honest, and totally profound songs as Daniel Johnston. His ability to get to the core of human emotions, insecurities, hopes, fears, and desires is pretty much incomparable. This cd collects two of his earliest tapes on one cd.
Hi How Are You was recorded in 1983 and Continued Story in 1985 and both contain some of the most raw and powerful songs in Johnston's catalog. "It's Over", "Casper", one of his best Beatles covers "I Saw Her Standing There" and so many other classic damaged pop masterpieces. So amazing!
With the recent release of The Devil And Daniel Johnston, a documentary about Johnston's genius and continual struggle with mental illness, more of the world is getting a peak into the magical world of one of the greatest musical minds of the last several decades. While the film and most of the press surrounding Johnston tends to focus on his mental health and long bouts of illness, the recent release many of his classic albums seemed like the perfect opportunity to seriously gush about his oh so prolific musical output. We can't think of many songwriters over the last couple decades, or maybe ever, who have written as many memorable, deeply honest, and totally profound songs as Daniel Johnston. His ability to get to the core of human emotions, insecurities, hopes, fears, and desires is pretty much incomparable.
Yip! Jump Music was recorded in the summer of 1983 and is an amazing look into the early and raw world of Johnston's song writing. Mostly just him, a keyboard, his obsessions and lots of unrequited love, it's a record that's both full of humor and rife with despair. With songs like "Casper", "I Remember Painfully", "Sorry Entertainer" and "Speeding Motorcycle". Little did the world know, that in the summer of 1983, a homemade cassette would contain some of the greatest pop songs of the last quarter century.
Debut solo release from Mike Jourgensen, whose name you may not recognize, but who has some sort of connection to the mighty Longmont Potion Castle. But don't be expecting any goofy deadpan crank calls, or squiggly over the top instru-metal. Nope, Jourgensen is all about the indie rock. And the sound of I've Had It is uncanny. It's like it's 1990 all over again. Seriously. Somehow, Jourgensen manages to channel Dinosaur Jr., the Lemonheads, Superchunk, all the greats, taking bits and pieces and weaving them into prefect chunks of winsome melancholy indie rock. Guitars alternately jangle and crunch, the rhythms are simple and propulsive. Hooks everywhere, some songs are soft and bittersweet, others are super rocking and almost grungy, and Jourgensen has the perfect indie rock voice, sort of soft and sad boy, struggling to hit the super high notes, earnest and emotional, capable of a coy whisper as much as a rock yowl. Nothing brand new for sure, but with all the indie rock revisiting we've been doing lately (Sebadoh, Lemonheads, Chavez, etc.) this totally hits the spot!
Last year Mr. Jurado presented his full band melancholic splendor on On My Way To Absence. This year for his seventh full length he takes a different, more stripped down but no less evocative approach. For much of the album it's simply his overcast voice and his guitar which drift in and out of fog-like, heavy atmospheric drones. Every so often there'll be a glint of piano. Man, no one does desolation like Damien Jurado! Totally haunting and heartbreaking from start to finish (don't miss the last track "Montessano").
Japanese bass player (with some help from friends) takes on the US invasion of Iraq! That's right, the new album from electric four-stringer Kato Hideki (Ground Zero, Death Ambient, Dying Ground, Bass Army, etc.) is an instrumental concept album taking a critical view of Bush's Iraq war and occupation. We're probably in full agreement with Kato's views, though the problem with making INSTRUMENTAL music to "say" something non-musical is evident -- other than guessing from the song titles, you wouldn't know without being told what the heck Green Zone was "about". However, Kato's concern with the situation in Iraq is what's on his mind and so why not use it to give purpose to his art? The resulting music is definitely powerful and passionate and now we know why. Political ideas aside, Green Zone is definitely the sort of thing that fans of Japanese bands like Ground Zero and Ruins will enjoy, heavy-duty prog power trio skronk from professionals. These slow burning build-ups of distorted grinding guitar over Magmoid bass burps and hard-hitting drumming are gonna also appeal to anyone into the likes of Gone and Stinking Lizaveta, we'd imagine.
Like most Doubtmusic titles, packaged in a nice digipack featuring a distinctive die-cut hole in the cover.
Whatever you do, don't let the godawful cover art fool you. This is not some crappy new age cd you'd buy in an art gallery in New Mexico, while picking up some healing crystals. This is some seriously demented, gloriously inspired outsider free jazz abstract psychedelic dub tribal weirdness. You'd never know from the cover though. A super cheesy crayon drawing of the band beneath some pyramids... ugh. Inside there's a bad ass photo of the band, killer afros, leather jackets, cravat, one guy holding a flute, leaning against a wall, looking ready to unleash some seriously cosmic musical might. Had that picture been on the cover you'd know exactly what you were getting into. Cuz this is indeed some seriously cosmic shit.
Released originally in 1973 in a run of 300 copies, this disc by vibraphonist Khan Jamal has become a jazz head free music freak holy grail. And it's easy to see why. A heady mix of vibes, marimba, clarinet, drums, glockenspiel, guitar, bass and percussion. But it's all about the drums. These four lengthy tracks are all about rhythm. If the opener doesn't totally blow your mind, there is something seriously wrong. A completely effect drenched burst of free jazz drum splatter, careening and echoing all over the place, horns bleating, reverberating into infinity, adding more tripped out percussive swirl to the already chaotic soundfield. Eventually the drums drift off, and the track morphs into some dizzying glockenspiel marimba jam, all tinkle and shimmer, still drifting in swirls of FX and random clatter. This track alone makes this disc essential. But it's only the beginning.
The second track is like a supercharged, blown out, extended version of the opener, just with more horns and a more obvious rhythm. A groovy free jazz drum jam, beneath skronking horns, shouting and hand clapping, reverb drenched horns, a total wild and wooly free for all, before the marimba comes in, and things coalesce into a slightly less abstract funky free jazz percussion blow out. So good.
Track three is the most subtle of the bunch, but that in no way means it's any less weird or tripped out. A droney bass line, some jazzy smokey guitar, all beneath a dense swirl of percussive shakers, wrapped in tons of FX, a sort of dubbed out ambient jazz. A slow mellow groove that sort of drifts and slithers, occasionally bits of freaky effects float by, but for the most part it's all late night mellowness, a slow stroll through a moonlit alley, or hold up in the dark corner of some alien jazz bar.
The final track takes the smokey moonlit ambience of track three and gives it the King Tubby treatment, Sounds are dubbed to kingdom come, melodies become distorted and crumble into pieces before they're sent careening into the ether, drums shuffle and stutter, occasionally being propelled dubwise, the whole thing sounding like some Wes Montgomery b-side produced by Lee Perry. A supreme, super laid back dub drenched free jazz freakout of the highest order.
In fact this whole disc is some sort of cosmic dub drenched free jazz from beyond. Some seriously Sun Ra meets King Tubby in the great hereafter shit. A divine jam session transmitted through some mysterious sound system and captured on tape.
Totally and completely mindblowing.
Kousokuya are one of the bands whose heavy sounds predate such current Japanese psych scenesters as LSD-march (who played here in SF last week) and Suishou No Fune (who are playing here next week), and without whom... well, along with Fushitsusha they're one of the longest running dwellers in darkness that Tokyo has produced. They've been around for going on three decades now, and as you can tell from the title of this disc, PSF has managed to dig up a tape of their very first ever live performance back in '79. Not a bad-sounding tape either. And definitely special not just for historical reasons, but for the amount of synth freakoutishness heard here, courtesy of a keyboardist who was only briefly a part of Kousokuya's early line-up. Reminds us a bit of early Comets On Fire, all totally damaged and dirgelike, embellished with tons of electronic fuckery... in fact, if you focus on just the vocals and the effects, this sounds like it could be a new release on the noise-mongering Load label. Just three songs, a densely-packed 25 minutes.
Here's a nice digipack reissue of something that's reputed to be one of the best ever psych albums from south of the border, right up there with Los Dug Dugs (who'd be our personal pick). And oh yeah, it's from 1971! If you've got the "Love, Peace and Poetry: Mexican Psychedelic Music" comp then you've already heard some La Revolucion De Emiliano Zapata, though their track on that comes from their second album, Hoy, not this their debut.
First off, there's plenty of stinging acid rock guitar awesomeness here, big time FUZZ action. But there's also mellower, more melodic side to them as well. Basically they cover all the bases of badass rockin' and rollin' California sixties psych influenced garage freakdom here. And they sing in English, whereas on Hoy they switched, mainly, to Spanish, which was a radical move as the conservative Mexican government/society of the '70s apparently would tolerate a lot of things sung in English but not in Spanish. Considering that two of the song titles here are "Nasty Sex" and "Shit City" maybe that's understandable...
Hopefully Dynamic will be reissuing Hoy as well someday, it's also a good one!
Heads up! Here's three new songs from these Japanese spazz-art-poppers. This bright opaque blue 7" record is comin' atcha by way of Australian record label Phono-Statique! Churningly angular and dizzyingly rambunctious, it sounds like they loosened all the strings on their guitars for this one. The b-side "Halation" features lyrics that are primarily a male singer chanting "one two three four" in Japanese. Count along with him! We've said it before and we'll say it again: definitely for fans of Deerhoof and Melt-Banana... and of course Limited Express (Has Gone?)!
Ahh, the Body. One of our favorite crushing sludge behemoths. Purveyors of pulverizing brutality. Khanate, Moss, Corrupted, all sonic brethren of the mighty metallic monsters known as the Body.
So what might you think if you heard that two of the guys from The body had a side project called Lorna Doom? Well, you'd probably be thinking the same thing we were. Fuck yeah! The Body, Lorna DOOM. How could we not be psyched?! Okay, well what if we told you Lorna Doom was in fact The Body's HIP-HOP side project? Then what? Run screaming? Or would you still be intrigued? Maybe more than intrigued, maybe kind of excited? Well we were, and we still are, cuz this is pretty fucking dope.
Woven together from simple drum machine beats, weird post rock guitar lines, jazzy horns, bizarre samples, and AWESOME loops (the first track is made from a loop of Rob Base's ("it Takes Two"!) and of course some bad ass white boy rapping. At first we were sort of thrown for a loop. But the more we listened to this, the more we dug it. Not hard to see these guys rocking the mic and holding their own alongside the big boys. Funky and funny, but not joke-y at all. This disc had us reimagining Eminem's movie 8 Mile, but recast with these two bearded indie rock metal dudes in the part of Rabbit (or Rabbits I guess), how fucking awesome would that be?
Anyway, not necessarily for fans of the Body, although we are and we dig this a lot. Regardless, some seriously solid, funky, outsider, homemade hip hop. Cool stuff for sure.
After two cd releases this local band have opted to enter the glorious vinyl realm... a limited 4-song 12" pressing no less! On "Into The Fire", The Love X Nowhere continue the bigger rock trajectory they set on their last release the Odyssey cdep. Comes in a brown cardstock sleeve nicely printed with a circle of black birds and radiating blue lines.
We've been waiting to hear THIS for YEARS. An extremely rare and mysterious circa '71 underground UK psych LP of which we knew little and had been able to find out less. But it seemingly promised great things, as we shall explain in just a sec. Now that, thanks to the Dynamic label who have reissued this at long last, we've -finally- heard the thing, we can say that while it's not exactly what we hoped it would be, it turned out to be something quite, um, remarkable nonetheless. And after all, what we'd hoped for might have been a (literal) pipe dream anyway... Lucifer really couldn't be all it was cracked up to be, could it?? I mean, the band's very name, the all-black Smell The Glove style cover, the hairy/scary band photos, the song titles -- "Banshee", "Prick", "Winter", "What Was That Thing I Saw You With Last Night" -- all portend something impossibly dark and heavy, leaving us hoping that Lucifer would sound like some sort of unknown, underground, creepy cousins to Black Sabbath! And the album's original, rather confusional liner notes also hint in that direction, spouting wonderful nonsense about how the band has "this cave in Arizona" where they like to record their "evil music"! We're also informed that they did a single called "Fuck You" that was never released, having been confiscated by the police!! Sounds pretty darn metal, right? Add to that the fact that the first time we ever heard of Lucifer, years ago, was in an old interview with none other than Ozzy Osbourne, wherein he mentioned this album as being something he and his Black Sabbath mates dug back in the day! That's a lot of expectation to build up. And the truth of course is that Lucifer sound NOTHING like Black Sabbath, or metal in general. They're not even particularly heavy in the guitar dep't -- heck, quite a lot of this is acoustic. Yet they ARE totally weird and fucked up and cool and a bit ridiculous, and definitely "heavy" in the "heavy, maaaan" stoner hippy sense of the word. We'd compare 'em to contemporaries in the British busking free fest hippy druggy psych scene like the Edgar Broughton Band and (lighter) Hawkwind, or (maybe) to NYC's Godz. And at their heaviest, when guitars are plugged in and all, some of this is murky and dismal enough to sound like something by AQ obscure Krautrock faves German Oak. Some other primitive, blues-damaged Krautrock we like also comes to mind, like Kalacakra, Siloah and Zippo Zetterlink.
The unlucky thirteen tracks here consist in the main of meanderingly simple and repetitive hippy guitar riffing, gruff freaky vocals, subversively anti-establishment lyrics ("working is just a bore, smoking's against the law, I'm just a natural man"), and junky rhythms, all contributing to a definitely underground, overwhelmingly wastoid vibe. It makes the Pink Fairies sound almost straight. Definitely dated, yeah, but a charming artifact of a long-gone, LSD-lifestyle...
NB just in case, be aware there are other Lucifers out there, including one from 'round the same era but from NY instead, more of a garage band that one.
The evil, epic sounds of San Francisco's Ludicra ooze forth once again, their third album demonstrating that they're still among the most highly emotive and intelligent masters of brutality in the business, no less despairingly obsessed with urban decay and man's inhumanity to man than on previous efforts Hollow Psalms and Another Great Love Song. Interestingly (perhaps) this album is their second for Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles label, hardly a bastion of nihilistic black metal art -- indeed, they haven't signed any MORE black metal bands since Ludicra, but we'd imagine that's 'cause they rightly figure that they already have one of the best! And also one of the most unique -- how many black metal bands feature not one but two female lead vocalists (one of 'em on guitar as well), alternating demonic rasps and moaning clean singing? Not exactly typical. Something that has also been said of their sister band, the amazing Hammers Of Misfortune (both share the talents of guitarist John Cobbett). And Ludicra are in some ways a crustier, filthier, bleak black metallized version of Hammers, with similar progressive urges and social concerns...and displays of neo-classical, heavy metal guitar! Which is where the most sophisticated "beauty" is to be found amidst the midtempo grimy grim grind of these five tracks (none of 'em short -- in fact the album terminates with the twelve minute "Collapse", gripping guttural symphonic sickness with cello courtesy of one of the members of Amber Asylum).
The evil, epic sounds of San Francisco's Ludicra ooze forth once again, their third album demonstrating that they're still among the most highly emotive and intelligent masters of brutality in the business, no less despairingly obsessed with urban decay and man's inhumanity to man than on previous efforts Hollow Psalms and Another Great Love Song. Interestingly (perhaps) this album is their second for Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles label, hardly a bastion of nihilistic black metal art -- indeed, they haven't signed any MORE black metal bands since Ludicra, but we'd imagine that's 'cause they rightly figure that they already have one of the best! And also one of the most unique -- how many black metal bands feature not one but two female lead vocalists (one of 'em on guitar as well), alternating demonic rasps and moaning clean singing? Not exactly typical. Something that has also been said of their sister band, the amazing Hammers Of Misfortune (both share the talents of guitarist John Cobbett). And Ludicra are in some ways a crustier, filthier, bleak black metallized version of Hammers, with similar progressive urges and social concerns...and displays of neo-classical, heavy metal guitar! Which is where the most sophisticated "beauty" is to be found amidst the midtempo grimy grim grind of these five tracks (none of 'em short -- in fact the album terminates with the twelve minute "Collapse", gripping guttural symphonic sickness with cello courtesy of one of the members of Amber Asylum).
Although Life Is Abuse is the name of the label, they want to make life easier on those of us who love the inner city black metal art of San Francisco's Ludicra by putting out this brand new EP, featuring three unreleased songs from the Billy Anderson-recorded Another Great Love Song sessions, to hold us over until the next full-length Ludicra album coming out on Alternative Tentacles in the fall. Yay! These three tracks are prime Ludicra insanity, majestic and dark and fucked up and brilliantly composed as only a band featuring members of Hammers Of Misfortune and Impaled (among others) could do it.
Actually, you get more than just those three new tracks here: the cd comes with Quicktime footage of Ludicra performing live & brutal on October 7th, 2005 (five tracks) plus a Ludicra photo slideshow!
Hard to believe the Melvins are still around. And that they STILL don't suck. After like, what... 200 albums? Equally hard to believe that they have somehow morphed from one of the most difficult and gloriously difficult bands to ever sign to a major label (outside of the Butthole Surfers) into purveyors of super kick ass, head banging stoner Stooges stomp rock. But hell, we're not complaining...
And who cares if this is release #1 or #201. Or how many bassists they've pile up in their "morgue" (like Spinal Tap was with drummers), it still packs a mighty wallop, and gives us just what we've come to love and adore and expect from the Melvins, almost too much so, but more on that in a minute.
A Senile Animal is the first "true" Melvins album since 2004's Pigs of the Roman Empire teamup with infrasound specialist Lustmord, and sees the Melvins circa 2006, aka Buzz & Dale, join forces with the equally chaotic duo of Jared & Cody, otherwise known as Big Business (Jared also ex-Karp).
Together as the (new) Melvins they are bigger and badder than ever. With the power of THREE vocalists, TWO bass players, and most excitingly, a DOUBLE DRUM attack, a sort of hybrid drum kit manned by two different drummers!!
We haven't seen it yet, and heard they share cymbals or hit some of the same drums, or maybe hold hands while rocking out, but however they get it done, it WORKS. BIG TIME!
This record will definitely hit the spot for those of you craving more of that heavy / catchy sludge pop, found on past Melvins classics like Houdini or Stoner Witch. In fact, a lot of A Senile Animal sounds like it was just plucked from those very same sessions. Not a bad thing mind you. It's just that some of us, especially after the gorgeous fucked up heavy weirdness of Pigs of the Roman Empire, imagined that the Melvins might have been headed down a much more twisted and fucked up musical path. And while that is not necessarily the case, we're not too disappointed. In fact this disc's got most of us too busy rocking out and banging our heads and air guitaring and flailing wildly about to even notice.
And we sure as heck can't wait to see the crazy drum kit thing everyones talking about, and to have our asses thoroughly kicked by the NEW Melvins, not so much a quintet as much as a POWER-POWER trio! Fuck yeah.
We will admit, we've pretty much reached our Merzbow saturation point. For all the joking we do about bands who are WAY too prolific. Nobody come close to Merzbow. Not even counting the mighty Merzbox, Merzbow must average a release a month. For the last 20 years. Holy shit. You do the math. And some months there are 2 or 3 new Merzbow releases. Does anybody need every single one? We're pretty sure the answer is no. And there are probably a few people who could argue that nobody needs ANY. But c'mon, for every pointless disc of straight white noise feedback, there is a disc of weirdly chopped rhythms, or weird karaoke noise, or a record made from all jazz drums. Maybe the ratio is quite that balanced, but there are quite a few discs well worth checking out. And Metamorphism is definitely qualifies. Sure most of the disc is a head shredding barrage of brutal digital glitch and shrieking looped feedback and all sorts of caustic harshness, but even within a squall of such brutality, there are lots of cool little sonic subtleties and bizarre alien melodies, careening and getting all tangled up into impossible shapes and mixing to form even more unlikely sounds. The final track is our favorite though. Some damaged detuned Jandekian guitar buried under thick swirls of spacey FX and fuzzy white noise whir, all the while haunting ghostly stumbling melodies hover and drift within a lurching looped psychscape of tangled and garbled sonic splatter. So cool. So even after maybe thousands of records, he's still got it in him to surprise us with something super far out and surprisingly listenable.
Another way in which certain Merzbow records stand out is their packaging. The Merzbox of course, 50 cds, a shirt a book, a poster a medallion, all in a weird rubberized case, the legendary Merz-cedes, an actual Mercedes with a Merzbow cd permanently stuck in the stereo, and a dizzying assortment of strange shapes and weird cases. But Metamorphism definitely has to be one of the nicest we've seen. A thick velvety bag, holds the disc, a printed insert on thick glossy cardstock, all housed in an incredible heavy marble box, hinged on one side, with a fossilized Ammonite engraved into the top. So amazing. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Sound piled upon sound piled upon sound and piled on more sound is the signature of Michael Northam's process in his installations and compositions. Far from the irritating collisions of sound in Merzbow, Northam softens, rounds, and blurs his dense collages into a shadowy minimalism; and the Molecular Knot Phase One is an excellent example of Northam's methods. He began this short 20 minute composition with source material he produced with Seth Nehil, whereby the two gently struck a variety of zithers and found objects. Northam then extracted tiny sounds (hence the title) from that source material, stretched and compounded them into timbral drones, then densely collaged those sounds into the eerie mass found on Molecular Knot Phase One. Very nicely done.
The expatriate American sound artist Michael Northam has been wandering across Europe for many years now, finding himself in various residency programs where he has built an impressive body of installations, collaborations, and recordings from densely superimposed sounds that result in gorgeous swarms of magnetic vibrations and droning minimalism. For better or for worse, Northam has consistently released his work on small labels in small editions, meaning that we've not been able to dedicate as much to his work as we would like. Porous is one of those, released on the Cloudmirror label, which Northam had a hand in establishing. This lengthy, two-part composition is a reworking of a 24 channel installation Northam produced for the Klangturm in St. Polten, Austria back in September of 2001. Northam typically begins with acoustic instruments or phenomenon; and Porous is no different, as he collects tiny sounds from plucked pine cones, rustled leaves, and scribblings from other found objects. Slowly, he builds these textural sounds into quiet thrashings of muffled events that begin to echo and fold on top of each other into a thick droning mass. A very nice record, Porous ends up sounding not too far from the best work of Francisco Lopez, Andrew Chalk, Ellen Fullman, and Loren Chasse.
Sigh. This is such the ideal album for drifting along in a rowboat on an ultra calm lake or floating along in a giant hot air balloon across a cloudless blue sky. Even if you don't find yourself in either of those scenarios, German combo Mountaineer may help you find your own sweet and peaceful place.
Their third album When The Air Is Bright is a little folksy, a little bossanova-y. So very nice! Frontman Henning Wandhoff's vocals are low, mellow and smooth. and they're complimented beautifully by Anna Bertermann's backing vocals. The central instrumentation of gently picked and strummed acoustic and electric guitars and understated percussion is occasionally embellished by delicate horn, organ, harmonica and xylophone. This fits perfectly on the Type label alongside rostermates Ryan Teague, Khonnor, Julian Neto and Helios. It'll also fit perfectly in your music library alongside pastel hued day dreamers Jose Gonzalez, Kings Of Convenience and Juana Molina.
For a country whose entire population is only half that of San Francisco, Iceland has an exceptionally prolific arts community. One could easily look to the big Icelandic names in pop music (i.e. Bjork and Sigur Ros); but there's also slightly lesser known (but even more adventurous) music from the likes of Johann Johannson, Apparat Organ Quartet, and the entire output of the Kitchen Motors institution. But our personal favorite from Iceland remains Stilluppsteypa, whose dada drunkenness and black humor has developed arctic undercurrents to their increasingly bleak drone-based work. On Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna, the Stilluppsteypa duo of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson have hooked up once again with the Swedish sound artist BJ Nilsen, perhaps best known for his triumphant elemental drone work as Hazard released through Touch. Sigmarsson sums up the communal idea behind this album as a "love for drones, Scandinavia, and alcohol." Of course, he then proceeds to type a polysyllabic onomatopoetic bunch of drunken text that makes our extend-o-spelling of doom seem trite by comparison.
The previous collaboration Vikinga Brennivin was an homage to the Icelandic firewater of the same name; yet it held a clarity and singlemindedness rarely attributed to alcoholic excess. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna has that same contradictory dualism of conceptually relating to being fucked up without totally losing a grip on reality. Or perhaps these three Scandinavians have gotten so loaded that they drifted into a parallel universe of liquid physics and amorphous gravity. Needless to say, Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna is another masterful album of alchemical drone, that's even darker and more morose than its predecessor. Sonar pulses and crackles of wood break up the jet-black atmospheres of frozen electronic drones, resonant frequencies, and hallucinatory echoes rippling way out on the outer regions of the event horizon for this sonic black hole. At times falling close to the constant spiralling of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste, and times recalling the best isolationism of Thomas Koner, and yet at others surpassing the blackened ambience of Nordvargr. Somber, magnificent, and exquisitely constructed!
When we made the newest record by An Albatross record of the week a while back, we were pretty sure there could be no band faster and more convoluted and more prog and more fucked up, but I think maybe we were wrong. The curiously named The Number Twelve Looks Like You, take the furious grind prog of An Albatross, ditch the keyboards, and focus on being faster and more complicated and more totally baffling. And succeed, BIG TIME.
Every track here is a mind blowing tangle of complex convoluted leads, super mathy, ultra complicated arrangements, some of the most impossibly dexterous drumming EVER, as well as a cacophony of shrieking vocals, downtuned chugs, blown out crumbling production, and strange almost mosh like breakdowns. Huge blasts of hypergrind are butted right up against almost catchy melodic riffing, before the two somehow collide and join forces and become some ultra impossible melodic hypergrind. Or something. We're tempted to declare this the grind record of the year, but most grindheads would be baffled. Same with metalheads, there's so much space, and weird pop, and so many what-the-fuck moments, that it's impossible to call this a metal record either. But we can safely say it's one seriously fucked up, weird and wonderful, heavy and confusional, convoluted metallic psych prog freaked out grind. Seriously heavy weird shit that just might be your favorite record of the year, if you're into seriously heavy weird shit that is.
And as if to prove our point, and maybe draw attention to their numerical monicker, the last 4 tracks are some sort of baffling Number Twelve suite. Track nine is called "Die" and is 12 seconds of silence. Track ten is also called "Die" and is also 12 seconds of silence. Track eleven, also called "Die", all silence. Track TWELVE is 12 minutes and 12 seconds long, all silence, EXCEPT for the last 12 seconds, which consist of a 12 second long drum and kazoo jam. Fuck. Yeah.
Rat Tapes One may be the first in a series of outtakes and unreleased material from the vast back catalogue of Nurse With Wound. If the quality and diversity of material found on the first volume is indicative of what's to come, then we are going to be in for some serious treats for the next many years! Rat Tapes One also marks the return of United Dairies, the label run by NWW's Steven Stapleton, after years of inactivity, as other labels had been releasing Stapleton's records. What ultimately makes this album so fascinating is the range of production strategies and alchemical variations differentiating these recordings from those that actually made it on the various NWW records. Take for example, the opening number, a cover of Patty Water's "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" originally found on She And Me Fall Together In Free Death where the drone guitar has faded into the distance behind a series of dark funereal bells (probably the same used on the Angry Eeletric Finger sessions) and Stapleton's voice twisted into a helium saturated cartoon of the original. Proving that the 1992 seminal album Thunder Perfect Mind was a true labor of love, Stapleton presents at least four different outtakes of the xylophonic percussion matched with the digital scrubbing sound that became the signature of that album. Even for the die-hard NWW fans here, some of the material is hard to place, especially where the sounds for the fucked-up drum 'n' bass number (seriously!) came from. While Rat Tapes One was originally sold at the 2006 NWW shows here in San Francisco for the fans hungry for more material, Rat Tapes One also makes an exceptional introduction into the surrealist tinged, psych-damaged collages that Stapleton has made as NWW for well over two decades now.
We once mentioned that the best way to discover the most amazing music in any genre, is to check out what other musicians are listening to. Never has that been more true than with black metal. A genre predicated on bands' underground status or level of grimness, how cult or frosty they are. Which means, some of the best bands aren't often heard outside of tiny circles, many times just other bands and close friends. Limited tape releases, cd-r's, demos. You have to be super tenacious to really be on top of the latest greatest grim horde from Bolivia or Paraguay who only have a single cassette release, and it was limited to 10 copies, each one doused in the band's blood.
Such is the case, although not quite so dramatically with Russia's Old Wainds. Ask any of the BM elite. Ask Wrest from Leviathan, Ancalagon the Black from Crebain, Hildolf from Draugar, Azentrius from Nachtmystium, and any one else you can pull from their blackened crypts, who their favorite black metal band is, and odds are all or most of them will tell you Old Wainds. And we might have to concur. The frustrating thing is most of the Old Wainds discs are only available on eBay at totally exorbitant prices. But you know what, it's completely worth it. Old Wainds play some of the most primal, furious, gloriously buzzy black metal we have ever heard. Although it might be better to start here, with this normally priced cd reissue of the bands Withers Of The Wainds demo.
Each track a blast of cold black winter winds, swirls of murky buzzing riffage, thrashing drums, and super insane vocals, that are strangely processed / affected so they sound like some strange death rattle, drenched in reverb, like the battle cry of some pterodactyl / rattlesnake hybrid. So completely alien and harshly harrowing. But perfect for the bleak buzzing blackened landscapes below. Killer riffs (you can pretty much boil ALL metal down to their main component, the riff), a murky production that swaths everything in a gauzy black veil, and those insane over the top vocals, all whipped into an impossibly furious black attack.
Absolutely and utterly essential black metal. We'll do our best to track down the rest of the Old Wainds discs that are available (not many? none?), and we'll wait patiently for the out of print ones to be reissued (or reissue them ourselves, if Andee can get in touch with the band), but for now, hails to Arma Diaboli for reissuing this disc and saving us all $50, and allowing us the opportunity to finally bask in the unearthly black glow of Old Wainds!!
Ong Ong! The third issue of this Seattle-based zine comes packaged as a goodie bag of sorts. Not only do you get the zine which has interviews with Grey Daturas and Slim Moon, but there's also a crafty chaotic mish mash of stories, stickers, comics, flyers, pictures and a compilation cd with music by The Vonneguts, Western Graves, Na, Ghost Family and Ear Venom! Limited to 250 hand-screened, hand-cut, and hand-assembled copies! We only have a handful, so snooze not!
Undoubtedly, there are at least a few Roy Orbison songs somewhere in your collection. Most likely in the form of a greatest hits collection. Or covered by another artist. Which makes perfect sense as he wrote hit after hit, most of which have become part of our general consciousness, known to those who grew up with Orbison's songs back when, and to younger folks who may have heard them in David Lynch films. But Orbison was an artist of incredible depth and emotion and the way his actual albums were crafted deserve to be heard from start to finish, the way they were conceived. In Dreams is for sure his absolute masterpiece. A record which reaches tje very heart of longing, loss and yearning. While millions of records would follow dealing with many of these same heartbroken sentiments none of them quite understood and musically portrayed the beauty of anguish like Roy Orbison's records did. With lush instrumentation and his soaring unmistakable voice, In Dreams is a record that gets under your skin. A record for lonely nights, rainy days, and long drives. A dramatic flare that you can never doubt, not even for a second. What's so striking when you listen to In Dreams is how it actually could be be a greatest hits album. Who else could craft an entire album full of such perfect songs, each and everyone deserving to be played over and over again? Every one of these songs could be the song to take that devastating mix you're making to the next level. Every one of these songs brings a cinematic level of beauty to the heartache that undoubtedly all of us have felt at one time or another. No matter whether your current musical obsessions are psych-folk, black metal, prog, emo, indie rock, etc etc we dare you to listen to this record and not be moved. Timeless beauty and the ultimate anguish.
One out of three ain't bad, especially if the one is so awesome that it obliterates the other two... more on that in a bit...
Being such big appreciationists of both Patton Oswalt and Chunklet Magazine, we really really really wanted to love his latest limited edition tour series cdep, but... we almost found ourselves filing it under: Guess you had to be there! Erm, the first two tracks on Pennsylvania Macaroni Company prove that comedians aren't always funny. This is a live recording of on stage banter between Oswalt, Eugene Mirman, Brian Posehn and Maria Bamford. Now, to our ears Mirman is seldomly funny at all, and the latter two definitely have their good'n'bad days or on'n'off nights, but we'd expect more from Mr. Oswalt. It's like some supervillain swooped in and zapped their powers of hilarity. Often it seems like the audience must be laughing because "those are comedians on stage and I am supposed to laugh"... or maybe it's because they're just as boozed as the folks are on stage.
Now you might've noticed that we only specified the first two tracks as being unfunny. That's because the third track, the song based Pennsylvania Macaroni Company portion of the show, is PRETTY GODDAMN FUNNY. Not surprisingly it's 'cause the spotlight is fully on Oswalt, and he is on fire. Wish he just kept on goin'! It's the reason you need this cd! We'd like to add though that for a serious half-nelson on both your cranium and your funny bone, check out Oswalt's no less inebriated gutbuster 222 Live & Uncut instead. He's so super powered on that one he's pretty much wearing a cape. We'll go ahead and blame the brief spell of unfunniness on Mirman....
Here's the third album (their debut on Sub Pop) from breezy Brooklyn popsters Oxford Collapse, an indie rock band who unflinchingly replicate the sounds of beloved bands such as Modest Mouse and Pinback. While we can assure fans of those two bands that they'll probably find many ear pleasers comin' from this trio, we can also say the same to the lovers of Arcade Fire, Hidden Cameras, Ok Go and Architecture In Helsinki. The album's totally wistfully feel-good. Even if you didn't have summertime sweetie, these songs will make you feel like you did.
Twee folkster Michael Nau has such an endearingly bleaty voice sort of a cross between Daniel Johnston and John Lennon (especially on songs like "Bush"). But his voice also has a cool scratchy raspy Paul Westerberg quality, that adds even more emotion, like he's always about to break into a top-of-his-lungs croon, or like his voice is always just on the verge of cracking.
The songs are simple, but surprisingly lush, rife with impossibly memorable hooks, and lots of little melodic flourishes and subtle instrumental embellishments. Musically Page France is like a latecomer to the Elephant Six set with a SERIOUS Neutral Milk Hotel influence, from the guitar / vocal interplay, to the clever turns of phrase, even down to the not so veiled religious subtext. Lots of songs about Jesus and love and salvation, although not always obviously so. This could almost be some early Jeff Mangum project, recorded right before his voice changed. It has the same wide eyed innocence, the strange surreal psychedelia and the eclectic kitchen sink instrumentation as NMH, there's horns, super simple shuffling percussion, chimes, vibes and Nau also finds his perfect female counterpoint in the childlike croon of Whitney McGraw. So catchy and dreamy. Neutral Milk Hotel fans do NOT want to miss out on this...
Hurrah, a new Pernice Brothers album never fails to brighten your day! While the very uncharacteristic '70s soft rock and '80s new wave leanings on their last studio album Discover A Lovelier You did cause a little bit of mild puzzlement around here last year, the band fortunately have fallen back in step with their old sweet, heartmelting selves for Live A Little. Mainman Joe Pernice steeps pretty much each and every one of his songs here with wonderful pop goodness. The generous serving of reverb on his tender vocals mean that each and every word is going to give your ears a big warm hug. Irresistible.
Sandro Perri was/is the man behind Toronto's always experimenting Polmo Polpo. Over the last few years he began playing under his own name and released a very limited cd-r of new interpretations of Polmo Polpo songs which are now seeing a proper release thanks to Constellation. Under his own name Perri has a much more delicate and seductive touch then displayed on Polmo Polpo recordings. While we liked a lot of the stuff on those discs, it really seems that in this incarnation, Perri's playing comes to life and feels so comfortable and never forced. Daydreaming washed out guitars that create such perfect melodies with understated vocals that never get in the way of the sparkling wave these songs create. We got a hint of this new direction earlier this year with the debut from Perri's killer new band, Glissandro 70.
We've been going through a bit of a grunge revival around here. Andee's been listening to a lot of Tad (anyone who has one of those God's Balls / Salt Lick 2 on 1 cds that they would be willing to part with will be handsomely rewarded). We've dug up our old Skin Yard records, been spreading the word about how great Gruntruck were. It's been pretty fun. One of the bands we've been listening to again is Paw. Not sure if you remember. They were sort of like Pearl Jam but with heavier guitars and a much more distinct twang. Sort of Southern grunge. The band wore jeans and big shitkicker boots and cowboy hats. And their singer sounded like Danzig. Hell, their big hit was even a song about the singer's dog!! What the hell does all that have to do with the new record from Planes Mistaken For Stars? Well, all we could think when we were listening to Mercy was that they sounded like a heavy metal Paw. Which is awesome. A killer mix of grungy Southern rock and chaotic metalcore freakout. What could be better? Plus PMFS all have big ol' beards and glasses and torn up t-shirts and jeans and boots and -probably- wear cowboy hats too!
But fuck it, even if you have no idea who Paw was, or don't care about all the amazing grunge you might have missed out on, this is one killer slab of super heavy, super groovy, twangy hooky metal. Weirdly minor key melodies, wrapped in countrified riffing, but all supercharged and blown out, vocals that that go from throat shredding howl to country croon, even some lap steel buried in there (unless we just -wanted- to hear lap steel), groovy rhythms, killer drumming, and super catchy hooks all over the place. Like Raging Slab, Paw, Antler and Down all mixed up with bits of Skynrd, the Outlaws, Blackfoot, doused in metalcore, filled with burnt meat and whiskey, lit on fire and set careening into the pit at a Converge show. Fucking awesome!
We can never get enough Boredoms. But unfortunately, there's never enough Boredoms. We hate waiting years between releases. Thankfully there are plenty of side projects and offshoots to hold us over. One such Boredoms related outfit is Puzzle Punks, featuring Eye from the Boredoms, along with his PP partner Shinro Otake. We carried the limited picture disc of this release years and years ago, but for some reason were never able to get the cd. We recently discovered that there is a NEW Puzzle Punks record (we're not sure if it is indeed new, or just a new collection of old material, but we'll hopefully have it in time for the next list) and at the same time we discovered we could finally get this, the cd version of the Puzzle Punks' 2nd album Budub.
And we forgot just how great this stuff was. Even after a decade the sounds on Budub sound fresh. Weird and fucked too (it is Eye after all) but fresh enough that you could be forgiven for thinking this was some weird Excepter record or No Neck side project. Which just goes to show you how much influence Eye and his gang had and still have on modern music.
The sound of Budub is less caustic and spastic than the first Puzzle Punks records, or the Boredoms records released around the same time. Instead it's a series of experiments in rhythm, maybe hinting at the direction Eye would take the Boredoms on late albums.
Imagine some impossible jam session between the Boredoms and This Heat, or a lobotomized Hawkwind left to jam with the infant versions of the No Neck Blues Band. Or even a room full of musical toys, possessed and allowed to run amok. Dark and deliriously playful. Sometimes creepy and dark, but more often sort of strange and hypnotic. And always some bizarre world of rhythm and rhythmic wonder. Every track a strange sonic trip: analog synth squelches over dreamy chimes and tinkles, processed fuzzy krautrock grooves beneath strange chanted and muttered vocals, murky percussive plod and thud, over which a tiny sped up voice drenched in reverb mews and warbles, haunting vocal and percussion duos, very tribal and mysterious, thick washed out expanses of fuzzy spacerock FX and distant feedback, skittery almost techno shuffles, with bizarre vocalizations, deconstructed melodies played on a toy guitar, accompanied by a slowly wound jack in the box, a grinding wash of super thick distorted throb, a wall of low end whir, a murky world of jungle sounds like a lo-fi Perry And Kingsley and every random rhythmic stop in between.
Boredoms freaks who never picked this up NEED THIS BAD. And all you modern free folks and random rock weirdos into No Neck, Excepter, Sunburned Hand and the like might just dig this a lot!
Last list (#249) we reviewed the reissue of Quartz's amazing 1977 debut album. For those who missed it, we've got two words for ya: Black Sabbath! Quartz were pals of the Sabs, hailing from the same industrial city in England's grotty midlands, Birmingham. And Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi produced that first record of theirs, helping Quartz create what amounts to a great lost late '70s (pseudo-) Sabbath album: same guitar sound, same songwriting vibe, same riff magistery. Hearing that, who wouldn't want more? Hence, now we're listing this, the cd reissue of Quartz's second studio album, originally released in 1980. And it's definitely another slab of classy bashing from this shoulda-been-big, Black Sabbath meets New Wave Of British Heavy Metal sounding bunch.
The title cut is an vigorous, must-hear NWOBHM classic if there ever was one. That's followed by "Charlie Snow", which we'd be forgiven for thinking was song stolen from Sabbath's Born Again sessions! And we should also mention the grinding "Wildfire", which you could slag for being re-write of "Megalomania" from Sabbath's Sabotage album (yeah, the riff is certainly similar!), but while it's playing you'll certainly be banging your head -- and besides, Sabbath seemingly borrowed one of Quartz's tunes themselves on another occasion. Then there's the bonus track, a b-side called "Circles" that features uncredited guitar work from Queen's Brian May, and uncredited vocals from Ozzy Osbourne!! That's some b-side! Heck, everything on this disc is pretty killer, driving metal rockers with few peers outside of Sabbath's albums of the era. "Can't Say No To You" is the only sorta skippable track here, veering dangerously close to Foreigner or Bad Company territory. Not to say that's bad, but their Black Sabbathy stuff is way better... and this album is indeed recommended to all who appreciate the brilliance of later '70s, early '80s (end of Ozzy era through Dio and Gillan) Black Sabbath! And also the best melodic n' heavy NWOBHM stuff as well, of which this is a prime example.
Always something interesting being dug up by those Alchemy archeologists! This archival release from a Kyoto-based band called Rasen Kaidan ("Spiral Staircase" I believe) is a very moody and lo-fi, contemporaneous Japanese take on the UK post-punk sound of the early early '80s, a la Joy Division, Comsat Angels, and The Fall, maybe. Also of note, this trio included guitarist Jojo Hiroshige, who was soon to form seminal Japanese noise act Hijokaidan (and also went on to found the Alchemy label).
What you'll hear from Rasen Kaidan here are recordings from two live performances, dating from 1979 and 1980. The 1979 tracks are more witchy and gloomy, with plodding bass and female vocals. The first cut from '79 actually makes us think of a sedated Bardo Pond slogging through a droned-out "Iron Man"! We're reminded of some old NZ stuff like Dadamah as well. The 1980 material makes a switch to male vocals, getting more into that post-punk thing, but still with a weird, almost mystical atmosphere. Murky, raw, psychedelic new wave art punk, yeah!!
Album number two from this New York duo picks up right where their refreshing debut left off. Bringing all sorts of seemingly unrelated sounds and ideas perfectly together. The danceability of electronica, the organic emotion of guitars and the limitless possibilities of what can happen when you re-imagine different ways to create melody. With Classics they continue to create a world that makes you feel like you are some powerful character in a video game that you just want to play forever. There is something so endearing and instantly likable about this group. The way they make fun sounding music without being cheesy or gimmicky. The way they force you to use your imagination, it's almost impossible to hear these songs and not create elaborate shapes, colors and stories in your mind. Classics is the kind of record that can break through to even the most jaded hipster as well as hitting the spot for those who are always ready to have a good time. So fresh and fun!
Total '80s gloss thing going on (Andee thought it sounded like The Fixx!) here from these two members of Circle, sorta Talking Heads / Sparks / Oingo Bongo -ish... maybe even Barnes and Barnes? As as Christine put it: "fucked up aerobics music" with "Finnish goth" vocals! Or imagine Circle in tuxes and feathers, with Mika Ratto singing in a Popeye voice. Weird!
Night Gallery 3 compilation alumni Sarumatakeuitsuko (whose name might translate into something in English like "Monkey Crotch Mushroom Mituko"?? no that can't be right... we hope not!) bring us their debut full-length for Osaka's Alchemy label. They were also just on Alchemy's recently reviewed Tribute To Jojo Hiroshige, and both comp appearances whetted our appetite for this cd.
An all-female psych rock trio (vocals & guitar/guitar/bass... no drums!), Sarumatakeuitsuko's album is often a haunting and beautiful thing, initally making quite effective use of eerie, lovely vocals and occasional stabs of guitar, eventually exploring chanting, fuzzed-out repetition, using slashing guitar chords percussively in lieu of drums. But it's not all downer drone-psych minimalism, as with track three "An An" the disc suddenly veers into sunny indie-pop jangle a la Maher Shalal Hash Baz or Nagisa Ni Te. Eventually things cloud over yet again, getting again all drifting and dreamy, especially on the disc's final 13 minute cut "Akai Butter", wherein emotive vocals and notes plucked out on one guitar are suspended over what builds into a droning bed of distortion...wandering, narcotic. Very nice indeed. Certainly something fans of Nagisa Ni Te, Angel 'In Heavy Syrup, Doodles, Eddie Marcon, etc. should hear!
Well, it's about fucking time. The quintessential space-drone-komische-psychedelic headtrip has finally been reissued. Cyborg is one of those albums like the first couple Os Mutantes albums or Comus' First Utterance or Amon Duul II's Yeti that should NEVER go out of print, yet due to negligence or contractual issues or what have you, there have occasionally been times where those sorts of record do disappear, which then forces us to hop up on our soap boxes and holler until somebody makes it right.
Curiously enough, Klaus Schulze began his musical escapades as a drummer, first in Ash Ra Tempel and then communing in the early incarnations of Tangerine Dream; but his solo work is solely electronic. Moogs, mellotrons, and all types of synthesizers became part of his increasing arsenal for his sprawling electronic compositions; but in many ways, Schulze's best work was composed through simpler means. Cyborg, like its equally impressive predecessor Irrlicht, is a relatively sparse affair of floating electronic patterns, tones, and drones, without really hiding Schulze's admiration of Wagner's compositional grandreur and weighty moods. In framing the album about technology infiltrating the human condition, Schulze alternates between a sense of wonder, heralded by technology's promise of progress, and a sense of horror, with technology absorbing humanity within that drive for progress, whatever that may mean. It's an emotionally dymanic yet ultimately sinister record, and one that clearly has influenced hundreds if not thousands of electronic musicians since it's original release back in 1973. Brian Eno, Pete Namlook, Omit, Wolfgang Voigt, and Troum would be the artists we could cite as being hugely influenced by Schulze's work.
With the reissue of Cyborg with its four sprawling tracks of electronic scintillation, Schulze has fleshed out this double cd with a fantastic bonus track that's well over 50 minutes long! Even without that hefty bonus track, Cyborg was brilliant back then, and it's still brilliant today.
