Killer three way split, two parts Japanese, one part USA. Essential for Sludge doom fanatics, as this features a brand new unreleased track from Japan's mighty, unsung doomlords Dot [.]. Maybe it's the weird spelling, maybe it's the paucity of available material, but Dot [.] are every bit as cool and weird and heavy as Boris or Corrupted and this track proves that once again. But the big surprise here are the two bands we have never heard of before. both amazing, one quite possibly our new favorite band!
Up first are Japanese black thrash outfit Sete Star Sept who spew forth 4 tracks of super downtuned, blackened thrashing grind metal insanity, super low cookie monster growls, furious riffing, massive blown out production, thick swaths of shrieking white noise. Like a killer old school UK crust band super charged and run through some cracked Japanese blackgrind filter. So cool.
But holy fuck, Watch Me Burn just totally and completely knocked us on our asses. So heavy, so weird, so utterly damaged and freaked out. Imagine the Boredoms circa Vision Creation New Sun, mixed with later tripped out trancier spacerock Solar Anus (even though they're American), then imagine that band playing some super schizophrenic what-the-fuck grindcore, with tons of totally unhinged studio weirdness, random snatches of Swedish death metal guitar leads, swirling drifts of acoustic guitar and garbled beats, bizarre ambient stretches peppered with hand drums and guttural vocalizations, abstract percussion super tripped out malfunctioning studio FX, occasional plodding processed death metal chug, super spastic drum machine, bits of slowed down doom groove, weird jangly guitars, super processed slabs of rhythmic interference, blinding super brief blasts of Merzbowian face melting grind and too much other confusional fucked up randomness to even begin describing. Like Soilent Green or Brutal Truth chopped up and reassembled by a very high jungle DJ with two broken turntables. So fucking amazing.
And finally Dot [.], who give us just what we need, an absolutely crushing slow motion stoned doom drone groovescape. Starting out more Church Of Misery than Corrupted, the band sways and swings before stumbling into a druggy glacial lurch, a sick Eyehategod dirge, that crawls and slithers, wrapped in thick peals of feedback, a harsh, rasped super demonic vocal over gloriously murky downtuned sludge. Absolutely essential.
Not sure if the title of DJ Shadow's new production refers to himself or the listener, but there's no doubt there is something schizophrenically off-kilter here, and the jury is still out on whether this is a successful quality or merely a string of increasingly bad ideas. Chock full of guest appearances (mostly guest rappers-never a good sign!) including
local hyphy hip hop stars, Keak da Sneak and Turf Talk, Christina Carter from Charalambides and Chris James from Stateless doing his most earnest Chris Martin/Bono/Thom Yorke imitations. While the consensus from most of us here is that The Outsider as a whole is better than Shadow's last outing, The Private Press, what's missing here is that killer single track that makes the whole worthwhile. That said, we'll give Josh Davis the benefit of the doubt that The Outsider is definitely a grower with patient listeners reaping the most rewards from his erratic multiple personae.
Super limited live double cd, only available from the band, the label's website, and us!! Recorded live in 2004 at the Gothic Theater in Denver at a show celebrating the release of their latest record The Bloody Tenent Truth Peace, this is two full hours of wild and rambunctious, catchy and creepy country swamp rock revival, featuring tracks from all the Slim Cessna records as well as a couple of brand new tracks! For those of you new to Slim Cessna imagine some bastard mix of the Old 97's, Sixteen Horsepower, Uncle Tupelo and X, all whipped up into a hillbilly punk rock swamp folk country dirge din! Super clever, funny lyrics (think the Decemberists with a more backwoods bent) delivered with the fervor of a preacher testifying in a moth eaten tent sent up in a field in some God forsaken backwater, while the band whips up a furious bluegrass hoedown, moody and melancholy, replete with lap steel and banjo, all flecked with punk rock fury, and even the occasional country yodel! This is just the sort of rare and glorious show you can't even remember the next day, the only hints being your sweat soaked, mud caked clothes, your bruised and battered body, your black eye and split lip, the fact that you're laying on the floor in a pool of stale beer, vomit, moist sawdust and broken barstools, you smell of being bodily dipped into a vat of grain alcohol, there's lipstick all over you face and collar, and your ears are ringing so loudly you can barely think straight. So fucking awesome!
Super limited split between two new (to us) bands, Snake Apartment and Work / Death.
The Snake Apartment side is a side long track, a murky Brainbombs-y dirge, blown out and gunky, thick and corrosive. A plodding slab of sticky syrupy sludge rock, mixed with haunting disembodied lounge singer vocals, the whole thing a sort of moaning sea sick stumble.
Work / Death offer up their own druggy dirge, theirs is a noisy abstract drone, crowd sounds, room ambience, footsteps and muffled conversations are eventually sucked up into a vortex of thick rumble, peppered by blasts of fuzzy murk, the whole thing sounding like a damaged recording of a roomful of amps with guitars leaned up against them. Intense and abstract and pretty fucking cool.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Six different covers, by six different artists: Will Schaff, Ben Barnett, Mike Taylor, Merdith Stern, Scott Reber and Mat Brinkman!
It's hard to believe, but it's true. SOLAR ANUS IS HERE! It took almost 5 years, but it was well worth it! But what exactly is Solar Anus? An essay by French writer/philosopher Georges Bataille... a burst of plodding pummel from UK freedrone outfit Skullflower... but also, and as far as we're concerned more importantly, a band whose music conjures up a mysterious land of legendary monsters, ancient customs, cult beliefs and ritualized incest, all hidden just below the surface of our everyday world, a place only accessible through Matsuri, a group trance during which music and sound, lights and pictures help transport participants back to those mysterious other worlds and ancient times.
Such is the strange world of Japan's mighty tranced-out psychedelic doomlords Solar Anus, whose sound most definitely exists as Matsuri, a music designed to lull us into a trance and carry us off...Ô mesmeric, hypnotic and HEAVY.
Here, for the first time ever readily available outside of Japan, is the entire recorded output of the legendary Solar Anus, all collected into one massive head crushing, mind melting double cd.
Skull Alcoholic chronicles the band's dizzying trajectory, from stumbling, buzzing, bloody-stumped, sludge doom behemoths to druggy, tranced out psychedelic outer space visionaries, swinging wildly toward both extremes the whole time. An impossible blend of Black Sabbath, Hawkwind and the Boredoms, Flower Travellin' band, Pink Floyd, Boris and the Melvins.
Beginning life as a dizzy and druggy, slow motion stoner doom outfit, with their 1997 album On, Solar Anus channeled both the garagey spacestomp of old Monster Magnet, the epic miserablist doomscapes of Candlemass, and the purposefully obtuse sludge riffery of the Melvins, taking all of these disparate but distinctly heavy sounds and incorporating all manner of primitive percussive rituals, drifting dronescapes, 16 rpm Krautrock groove, dreamy angelic female vocals, massive fuzzed out guitars, huge in-the-red monster drums and swirls of creepy crawly dirge into a truly epic dronedriftdoomgroove sound.
The band's blend of propulsive tripped out krautrock, dizzying drum jams and glacial stoner sludge is at once ominous and swoonsome, crushing and psychedelic, lurching wildly from tripped out tribal Can worship to massive bulldozing metal grooves to super abstract druggy dreamscapes, often within the same song.
Album number two, 1999's Trance!! found the band trudging even more resolutely into a bleak and blown out world of dark doom, sounding more and more like classic doomsters, My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost and Cathedral, but completely tweaked of course, and confusingly blended with epic stretches of lurching lo-fi psychedelic Krautrock blow outs a la Amon Duul II.
By the release of their final album, 2000's Next World News, the band had stretched out yet again, dragging their druggy doom into a head spinning world of cracked skull outerspace trance, spinning even further into the void, not so much heavy as blissed out and psychedelic. Lots of abstract rhythmic workouts, like a more demented, damaged version of Finnish dronerockers Circle, a swirl of confusionally dense and relentless FX drenched Krautrock spacejams rife with belching foghorn brass, squawking birds, dizzyingly dense tangles of hippy drum freakouts, chanted vocals, as well as all sorts of studio fuckery, chopped up tape loops, warbly pitch shifts and layer after layer of fuzz and buzz and psychdrone blur.
Each languorous stretch of fuzzed out metallic groove is swathed in blown out clouds of Hawkwind bongsmoke, but broken up by bleary expanses of chilled out 4am trancemusic, but instead of a post-rave laid back Ecstasy come down, it's like crashing and burning in some dirty back alley from an all night PCP binge, silvery streaks of electronic glitch laid over a pulsing techno throb, surrounded by thick washes of processed tribal drums, the whole thing a very Boredoms like primitive percussive ritual, hypnotic and heavy, sprinkled with all kinds of sparkling sonic twinkles and drifting chimes, and underpinned by a wasted moody muted sixties psychedelia.
A quick look at the band's convoluted thanks/inspiration list gives another glimpse into their twisted musical world: German Oak, Crash Worship, Twink, The Electric Prunes, Stooges, Nebula, Pungent Stench, Timothy Leary, Monster Magnet, Ash Ra Tempel, Sodom, Sleep, Amon Duul II, Exit-13, Cathedral, Joel Peter Witkin, Saint Vitus, Church Of Misery, Corrosion Of Conformity, Romain Slocombe, Jimi Hendrix, Gong, Funkadelic, Budgie, Guru Guru, Electric Wizard, Brutal Truth, the Beatles and more. Phew.
And for all you Asian psychrock obsessives: The Solar Anus track "Dear Mother Coral" is actually a cover of a classic tune by Japanese psych legends JA Ceasar!
One of the weirdest, wildest, heaviest collections of druggy, dreamy, dirge-drone-doom-kraut-space-noise-sludge rock EVER!
Mind blowing psychedelic collage cover art, housed in a super deluxe die-cut 'solar anus' slip cover. Includes a massive 12 page booklet, with the original album art and liner notes. These two discs contain every single bit of Solar Anus ever, including their final recording, the previously unreleased nine minute title track, "Skull Alcoholic"!
2006 truly is the year of the anus! SOLAR ANUS!!!!
ONE TIME PRESSING OF 2000 COPIES!!!
The Andy Votel-affilated Finders Keepers label rarely, if ever, disappoints. They've brought us "Welsh Rare Beat", Jean-Claude Vannier, The Yamasuki Singers, etc., etc. Yep, Finders Keepers dig the crates like nobody's business, coming up with some incredible, unheralded psych/prog/funk gems to reissue. That brings us to Gluckskugel, a very interesting n' entertaining first-time-on-cd collection of music by Germany's Bruno Spoerri, whom we're told is an electronic, musique-concrete composer with Can connections. He certainly made a whole bunch of far-out, fun sounds in the '70s, ranging from rejected TV themes to experimental film soundtracks to industry demos, as documented here. Weird, wild, kinda kitschy! Sometimes augmenting his arsenal of electronics and tape loopings are live jazz/funk musicians, resulting in plenty of percolating, analog-synth laden grooves that recall the work of Goblin or John Carpenter (without the fright factor). Or, Spoerri would work alone at home with his musical gizmos, producing, for instance, the aptly titled "Drillin'" from 1971, using an early-model Japanese drum machine to great effect (and to the annoyance of his family). This comes packaged with cool photos and track-by-track liner notes by Spoerri himself, who promises that more unreleased music of similar vintage might be forthcoming, if he can find the tapes!
NOW ON VINYL!
Who'd expect a big bunch of pasty Bay Area indie rockers to form a reggae group? You'd probably be a bit suspicious of their intent, wouldn't ya? But Still Flyin' are without an ounce of irony. There's simply no room for it when there's such a truckload of genuine enthusiasm for the music. Yes, it's quite a surprising turn of events, innit? They frolic on the bright sunny side of reggae with lots of buoyant melodies and exuberant vocals. This is fun, feel-good music with not a cloud in the sky. Their good time van seats over a dozen including frontman Sean Rawls, Brian Girgus (Trackstar, Lowercase), Yoshi Nakamoto (Aisler's Set) and it used to include Wyatt Cusick (Trackstar, Aisler's Set) too before he moved to the distant shores of Scandinavia.
Back in stock again, an old time favorite that has strange ties to some of our current faves!
Not a new release, but we figured fans of the New Pornographers / Zumpano school of fantastic pop just might want to take a trip back to some pre-New Porn Carl Newman-penned weirdly wonderful hits. Superconductor were a veritable crowd of Vancouver indie rockers who were known to annually perform an honorable tribute to Neil Diamond with great aplomb, and who all too often were dismissed as simply a quantity-not-quality, eight guitar, maximum volume, hairy, screwy supergroup bunch of guys (which they indeed were earlier on), In later days they seemed to become much more of a Newman-dominated group. Brilliantly covering Donovan's "Colors" and The La's "There She Goes" (long before the dreadful Six Pence None The Richer's horrendously bland version). His mighty grand pop songwriting skills seeped into the works of the 'Conductor making for a much more melodic and crafted album than previous noisier efforts. That's not to say that they're no longer hefty nor immensely retarded as hell at times. No way! Case in point, "Gimp Stroll" and the lil' twinkie sounds of "Merry Tune Of Seduction". That said they also kick ass on many current electronic-rock bands such as Trans Am with tracks like "Computer Stroll" then leap into some weepy-eyed, melodramatic balladry on "Mary Ann". And you can even catch a glimpse of his formerly more frequently heard shriek on "Goddess of Fire, Poetry, Handicrafts And Metalwork". With a few exceptions, most tracks are mere sonic spurts rarely stretching past a couple minutes a piece, wasting not a moment before proceeding on to their next musical mission. Awesome.
This is definitely not the kind of music we ever expected to hear from Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace! label. A dark and languorous folk, moody and murky, spare sinewy guitars, barely there percussion, and a thick warped ambience. Not that we're complaining, it just seems like the Tall Firs are a little too melodic, and maybe not difficult enough to fit in with their labelmates. But hell, we're always up for surprises, and this debut from the Tall Firs was a big one. Featuring a very misleading musical pedigree (including At The Drive In among others) the band weaves gorgeous and delicate soundscapes of thick reverb, gently fingerpicked guitar, subtle rhythms, from muted thumps to tinkling chimes, warbly organs and gorgeous world weary vocals, into a totally riveting dreamlike slowcore folk. Fans of Red Red Meat, Califone, Low and the like will be immediately smitten for sure.
Tall Firs began way back in 1990, didn't play their first show until 2001, and didn't record an actual album until this year. You can sort of hear the slow burn of fifteen years emanating from each of these songs. Intense and intensely personal, foggy and fuzzy, like sitting in a huge hall, lit only by candlelight, flames flickering and casting ghostlike shadows, the band at the far end of the hall, letting notes and melodies drift from the stage, slowly filling the room with a thick hypnotic shimmer, each song a buried memory played out in the flickering firelight like some otherworldly shadow puppet show, acoustic guitars getting tangled up into little squalls of mumbled buzz, the vocals slipping from a croon to a whisper, every word dripping with some ineffable melancholia, often underpinned by bits of harmonic dissonance or random snatches of electronic glitch or machine made skitter. Dreamy and creepy and lovely.
psst: They also do a gorgeous Quix*o*tic cover!!
Every now and then a reissue will come our way that totally exceeds all of our wildest expectations. Unbeknown to us, Swans drummer Jonathan Kane made an ep in 1981-82 with Daniel Galliduani under the name Transmission. This was before The Swans even existed and demonstrates an unparalleled world of east meets west blistering percussive mastery! Imagine LaMonte Young leading a no-wave band with The Boredoms as his players and you'll start to get the idea of how ahead of their time Kane and Galliduani's sonic explorations actually were. With Kane's drumming creating a feverish trance and Galliduani's sax processed toand transformed into some sort of snake charming wall of guitar sound, the two created a relentless 22 minute polyrhythmic excursion that just drips with sweat, life and blazing rhythm. Decades after this recording was made a new wave of no-wavers and sonic explorers like Black Dice, Excepter, Lightning Bolt, Gang Gang Dance and countless others began to explore this same intense sound manipulation, rife with percussive heavy psychedelia, but truth be told this record is pretty impossible to top! In our minds the best record Jonathan Kane has ever made. Totally scorching, wildly creative and rushing wildly through our veins!
For those of you out there who somehow "missed punk rock" the first time around (it was pretty cool sez the old guys...) here's a pretty decent companion / compilation / soundtrack to the Steven Blush book-turned film recently released by Sony Pictures. We've yet to see it, but it looks amazing. How could it not be? Interviews with tons of hardcore legends as well as tons of insane and rare live footage.
This is the perfect 'mix-tape' of classic tracks from movie and the golden age of punk rock: Black Flag, Flipper, Bad Brains, Negative Approach, Void, etc.
Makes a great gift for all those young-uns whose punk pedigree doesn't stretch much father back than Good Charlotte or My Chemical Romance. Wouldn't be a Warped tour without these guys and all their blood, sweat and beers...
Anyone for some "mosh" potatoes with your turkey while you skank around the 'ol X-mas tree anyone?
(All blame for that last line goes to mailorder-underling Jason. He has been punished.)
Bay Area indie band The Cubby Creatures make home-spun crafty pop music, and their homebase label Cubby Control run by bassist/vocalist Brian Weaver also puts out compilations of other likeminded Bay Area and beyond artists. This is the fourth and final volume of the series which began back in 1997 as a celebration of 4-track home recordings. This volume differs from its lower-fi predecessors in that it is comprised of twenty completely exclusive tracks by exclusively Bay Area artists. There's quite a variety of styles from acoustic folk to funk-a-booty, from loopy psych-pop to minimal dub-tronic, from an off-kilter carnivalesque theme to a more urban soundscape. A charming lil' something for everyone! The participants include Thee More Shallows, The Slow Poisoner, Dax Pierson, Jai Young Kim, The Andy Peters Show, Mos Eisley, Thee Druggles, Brian Weaver and The Cubby Creatures or course.
Goin' Down Slow is a small but super satisfying sampling of modern day free folk cd-r artists who are doing strange and wonderful things with acoustic guitars. It's not just strum and pick and twang anymore, although we do love us some of that too. Instead, these visionaries transform the simple acoustic guitar into strange shapes and wondrous sounds. As with a lot of these comps, there's an exciting collection of known names and favorites, but an even more exciting assortment of folks totally new to us.
Some of the favorites include Tom Carter (from Charalambides), who takes his guitar and stretches it into a slowly slithering raga like buzz, local boy Robert Horton, who offers up a tangled cacophony of detuned strum and damaged jangle, Finnish troubador Keijo who unfurls a very exotic sounding folk jam that is equal parts old scratchy blues and some exotic snake charmer music, Armpit who take a simple strum and a mumbled vocal, and wrap them in thick swaths of distorted electric guitar and dense spacerock FX, The North Sea, who offer up the most straight ahead piece, a dreamy rambling melancholy Appalachia, as well as Sindre Bjerga and Mike Tamburo. The new names here: Andy And Michael Futreal, Don Bosco, Amigo Result, Ville Moskiitto, Stephen Lewis and Mark Dagley offer up their own varied takes on the steel string, from dark and languorous bluesy buzz, to super abstract sine wave wrapped shimmer and strum, to murky percussive fingerpicked tangle to gorgeously languid near ambient folk drift and beyond.
Another amazing collection of guitarists on the periphery, and a beautiful introduction to some new names we definitely want to hear more from.
Packaged in hand painted sleeves, with two printed inserts.
SUPER LIMITED!!! ONLY 80 COPIES PRESSED!! We got about 20, but those are sure to be gone in no time so act fast.
Holy crap! This record almost immediately became our favorite new record, while at the same time, proving to be maybe the most fantastically aggravating record of all time. Folks from Baltimore are probably well familiar with this kind of stuff, DJ Technics and the like. A sort of dizzying mash up of Miami bass, four on the floor techno, and druggy house music, but stripped down to its bare essence, usually a single loop, synths, drums and vocals, repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. But somehow we just can's stop listening to it. Super primitive, and maddeningly catchy, this must drive people fucking nuts on the dance floor. This is get wasted and dance until you drop club music for sure. Like those Rio Baile Funk comps, all cranked up, looped and let loose. Not many of us around here actually go dancing, but this relentlessly funky disc has at one time or another got every single AQ staffer if not dancing, at least bouncing or swaying, which is a serious testament to the sheer dance floor funk power of these joints.
Some of the tracks are fierce and gangsta like "Murdaland" with it's gunshot percussion, almost jungle rhythm and raspy voiced rapping. Others are like nursery rhymes set to club music, like "Oxy's Anthem Featuring Roxy Cottontail", with a tired sounding club girl talking about shaking her ass endlessly over a super mesmerizing shuffling loop. And some are just bizarre, like "Kidstuff" featuring vocals by a gaggle of kids, over a stuttering, chopped up house beat. And those are just a few picked at random, every track here is somehow totally fucked, totally catchy and absolutely irresistible. Absolutely, THE dance party record of the year. Just toss this in your player, push play and let it spin over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
Oh man, these Science Faction comps are KILLING us! The B'More Gutter Music comp reviewed elsewhere on the list. A killer dubstep comp we'll be reviewing soon, and this, the latest blast of grimey goodness from the UK. It's been a long time since we've gotten some serious grime. Seems like the world has discovered grime's mellower side and made the move to dubstep. Which is cool, don't get us wrong, but there's something about super blown out over the top grime that just totally kicks our asses. Totally hits the spot for us the way hip hope used to. It's just so aggressive and weirdly rhythmic. It's like the best parts of hip hop, jungle, and ragga, all wrapped up into a wild and goofy, funny and fucking fierce blast of fuzzed out, stuttery what-the-fuck. The flows are even faster, mush mouther and tongue twisting, wildly leaping to and fro, over weird snippets and loops and samples, all over a crunchy dancehall like rhythm and thick squelchy synths. This just might be the best collection of grime so far though. From Crazy Titch's bastardized classical music jam "Sing Along" all strings and flutes and huge moaning symphonies chopped into funky little bits, to Roll Deep's crunchy synth and growly ragga toasting, to the sci-fi videogame freakout funk of Bruza's "Doin' Me", to the gangsta ragga skitter of the Regal Players' "Rude Boy Remix". This is all just completely nuts. Funky, phat and fucked up and freaked out. If I was a dancing man, which I am most certainly not, but if I was, I'd be all over this shit. As it is, I don't have a single dancing bone in my body, and every track on this comp totally kicks my ass and gets my toes tapping and my head nodding, which is as close to actually dancing as I will ever get.
Completely mental. And of course, recommended!
Our favorite magazine of hip-hop, jazz, funk and soul both old and (sometimes) new is back with another great issue. "Boogaloo Bad Boy" Joe Bataan makes the cover. There's articles on early drum machines, the albums of Richard Pryor, Baltimore club music, and DJ Food's favorite cut-and-paste albums...among much much more. As always, a pleasure to look at as well as read.
This is a downtuned stoner sludge face off between two German outfits, who tackle their Sabbath obsessions in slightly different ways. Weed In The Head start things off with delciate clean guitar figures, which are interrupted by ULTRA distorted blasts of metal riffing, the kind of distortion that is so fuzzed out the sounds are almost crumbling into pieces. Doesn't take long before the clean guitar disappears under an avalanche of groovy sludge, pounding Cromagnon drums and wailing sort of Ozzyish vocals. A weird blend of Sabbathy groove and Kyuss-y desert rock, heavy but most definitely stoney and groovy. Things occasionally slow down into almost Eyehategod terrirtory and eventually bliss out into a druggy trippy Monster Magnet style space jam. Cool!
Gorilla Monsoon (named for the wrestler we presume) counter with their own stoner psych sludge groove, starting out with a gorgeous bit of hazy ambience, all guitar distortion and feedback, before the main riff powers through, kicking up all that ambience into a swirling sonic dust storm. Dark and murky, but a bit more rocking than WITH, and much harsher vocals, that swoop wildly from a King Fowley type growl to a near Khanate like hellish shriek. There are some sludgy Eyehategod moments, lots of loping midtempo fuzz and groove, but like Weed In The Head, Gorilla Monsoon are ultimately channelling the spirit of the mighty Sabbath (heck, the singer's nom du rock is even Jack Sabbath) and there ain't nothing wrong with that.
Packaged in a nice fullcover foldover sleeve and pressed on nice thick vinyl
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 black on white exclusive Australian tour design Wolf Eyes t-shirt, a Wolf Eyes pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with large 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.
only 4 in stock!!
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 black on white exclusive Australian tour design Wolf Eyes t-shirt, a Wolf Eyes pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with medium 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.
only 4 in stock!!
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 black on white exclusive Australian tour design Wolf Eyes t-shirt, a Wolf Eyes pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with small t-shirts we only got 4!!!
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.
only 4 in stock!!
Over the years, Wolf Eyes have morphed into a whole different beast. Without losing the very essence of what made them so vital and exciting. After countless releases (including hundred of tapes and cd-r's), their caustic corrosive confrontational side has been tempered by a knack for creating dark soundscapes, for crafting sinister cinematic tableaus, and for making serious, almost musical music.
We never thought it would happen. And it happened so gradually that we almost didn't notice. But a quick listen to opener "A Million Years" tells the whole story. A brooding doomy plod. Grinding industrial drones drift over a simple machine like thud, in the distance free jazz horns bleat and squeal, suspended in thick clouds of grimey glitch and hissing buzz. This could definitely be the soundtrack to some post apocalyptic horror movie. Huge howls spill out of cracked electronics, like pools of black blood. It's amazing, that Wolf Eyes could get MORE melodic and MORE musical, and somehow be even more fucking frightening.
And the rest of the record wanders bruised and bloody through similarly harsh and harrowing sonic landscapes. Veering from sounding like some sort of plodding doom metal behemoth to dreamy atmosphericists. A keening buzz becomes a raga like drone and then devolves into a thick caustic dirge, with growled blackened vocals, pummeling throb percussion and what sounds like a swarm of detuned guitars, all lurching evilly beneath a dense cloud of shimmery skree. Gurgling low end, sine waves and grinding electronic grit spread out over a wide expanse of creepy crawly ambience, a drifting droning underworld rife with weird horn like squalls and all manner of little sonic irregularities. Muttered vocalizations, are unfurled Whitehouse style over a corrosive bed of broken synth buzz and muted percussive thump. Huge swaths of grinding, howled metallic grate and howl drift and hover over ominous swirls of foghorn rumble and the growls and moans of some primeval wounded beast.
This is some scary scary shit indeed. But at the same time, it's hauntingly beautiful, a glimpse into some hellish underworld, each listen revealing more details, more black shadows, more mysterious melodies lurking around and beneath each prickly squall of creeping bleat, all sorts of minor scale sonic events and subtle dreamlike drones buried within every pulsing wave of subterranean throb and buzzing ambient grind.
If Hollywood had any sense, or any balls, Wolf Eyes would be scoring every fright flick from here on out. But the truth is, we've never actually seen a movie scary enough to warrant music this goddamn scary!
As much as we love the cool black and white woodcuts used on the covers of probably 90% of the grim black metal records released every year, we may have finally reached our breaking point. For a while, that sort of cover actually had some significance, it gave you an idea of what sort of blackened musical evil might lurk within, you could actually pick up a record just on the basis of the cover and be fairly sure of what you were getting into. Now every bedroom black metal nerd with a book of Dore woodcuts and a scanner can have 'one of those covers'. So bands have had to dig deeper, look for more arcane images that properly capture the mood and emotion of the music, maybe even making the cover art themselves (gasp!), or just stealing from WAY more obscure sources.
We loved this Wolfe record the second we laid eyes on it. Such a beautifully creepy and fucked up cover. Strange ghost like figures all wrapped head to toe in white cloth, it looks like they are all in some sort of big bed, their heads also wrapped in cloth, the background a washed out near blackness, but the figure on the far left, his cloth wrapped head has sort of turned into some sort of beast with big horns, the cloth turning grey and displaying some animal-like tufts of hair. Euuuw. So fucked up and evil but also strangely lovely.
So what does a cover like that suggest the music will sound like? Well, it wasn't at all what we expected, not as utterly harsh and black, but it definitely does sound super buzzy and creepy and weirdly lovely, so maybe it is actually the musical equivalent of mummified and be-horned all wrapped up in a big demon bed.
Wolfe is a black metal duo, one half of which, Infestuus, is also in AQ fave Glorior Belli, whose single full length, now out of print, was a huge favorite around here, especially for folks (like us) who had been digging on stuff like Watain, Funeral Mist and Deathspell Omega. But Wolfe is a completely different proposition. No less appealing, just a whole lot different. Midtempo, super epic and melodic, these tracks aren't harsh and buzzing as much as they are almost dreamlike, with blinding bursts of Burzumic fuzz, the riffs are sort of sing songy and minor key, and even when the drums break into a blastbeat, the riffs still sort of soar and drift, thick layers of swaying high end, wrapped in a thick gauzy production like a black metal M83. The vocals are still super harsh, low and guttural, but they sort of crawl beneath the dense buzzscape of soaring riffage. And there are still plenty of nods to Watain and Deathspell, the sound definitely remains grim and kult, but the arrangements are just so massive, and grandiose, a super dramatic black pomp, that sort of Mogwai / Godspeed cinematic subtlety blasted with black buzz, underpinned by a constant blur of dense black metal psychfuzz and occasional insane flurries of bass notes that add a whole 'nother layer of throbbing low end to the mix.
The more we listen to this the more the cover art does make perfect sense: A surreal blackened dreamscape of haunting images and blurry figures, buzz drenched landscapes of grim brutality and obscured beauty. So good.
It's been a seriously productive year for the Yellow Swans. Multiple cd-r releases, some 7"s, a Australian tour with pals the Grey Daturas, as well as loads of splits and collaaborations with folks like Axolotl and the Skaters as well as teaming up with the Daturas for a couple releases as well. Phew! But thankfully, there seems to be no end in sight. With all those releases, it's a bit surprising to realize the Yellow Swans only have one proper non cd-r release, and that one flew so far under tha radar we wouldn't have known about it at all had one not drifted through here used a while back. So here we have a brand new, shiny silver, actual cd, non-cd-r, blast of Yellow Swans nooooooooooize! Joined on a few of the tracks by fellow noisy folks Inca Ore, Gerritt and Christina Carter (of Charalambides), Psychic Secession is another gorgeous chunk of sweet sweet noise, equal parts glistening shimmer, crushing and jagged skree, skittery diembodied rhythms, haunting ghostly vocals, blistering sheets of distorted electronics, squealing feedback, chiming reverb drenched percussion, glistening delicate ambience, even some ultra processed psychedelic rock, all woven into a dense chaotic and surprisingly gorgeous whole!
This will be coming out in the states on Load Records, but not until way later in the year, so for now we got this Australian import version which comes in a super spiffy oversized cardboard sleeve and is a completely different (supposedly 'noisier') mix than the forthcoming Load version!
This is part two of the Dove Yellow Swans' (remember, different 'D' word every time) two part (maybe more?) series, Live During War Crimes. On the first volume, they took older releases, out of print tapes, cd-r's and other long gone goodies, chopped 'em up, recontextualized them, and created a whole new chunk of brilliantly bilious bluster. For part two, the band recorded a live set back in the beginning of this year, and it's a doozy.
This is less splattery abstract noise, and more huge bulldozing walls of blown out fuzz, almost like SUNNO))) jamming with Sunroof! Tons of low end, massive slow shifting tectonic plates of sound, grinding and creaking, but mostly rumbling, a long drawn out muted roar. Thick and black, utterly dense tarpit drones, like some hellish sound system, playing every single Wolf Eyes record at once, all run through some old rickety distortion pedal, and broadcast from a million woofers buried under two feet of silt. Or like listening to a Merzbow record on the wrong speed, with the bass ALL the way up and the treble ALL the way down,
A mighty, murky, slithering, slow motion corrosive crawl...
packaged in a cool oversized full color sleeve with a little felt lined pocket inside to hold the cd. Cover art by Devendra Banhart!
- MPEG stream: 1
- MPEG stream: 2
