The Drag City revival ship has moored in our ports once again carrying with it one of the most important and influential British folk artists, Bert Jansch. Jansch, whether solo or with his band, Pentangle was a main figure in the sixties British folk revival bringing Celtic, blues, and eastern European forms to his eclectic and spirited guitar playing. Joined here by a cast of contemporary stars, including co-producer Noah Georgeson, Helena Espvall, Devendra Banhart, and Beth Orton, as well as Jansch's son Adam, Jansch brings his gauzy Scottish brogue to new and traditional songs including "Katie Cruel", and "My Pocket's Empty." For those who have never heard Jansch's seminal solo albums, such as Jack Orion, Lucky Thirteen or Rosemary Lane or don't know about his major influence on sixties artist's such as Neil Young and Jimmy Page, should pick this up right now! Incredible!
Seems like you can almost trace the evolution of Jan Jelinek's based on just his album covers. While his early releases were packaged in monotone no frills minimalist sleeves his more recent releases have been covered in designs with much more blur, mystery and texture. And it's pretty accurate to say that the same goes for the sounds he's been creating. Gone our the days of his crisp, clean and ultra linear creations, making way for a much more seductive world of murky and rich soundscapes. In fact, this outing's cover art first made us think that it was on the Hapna label, and it actually does have the sort of sound would be quite at home on that fine label as it demonstrates a mysterious almost field recording like sound mixed with organic electronica, which also had us wondering what it would sound like if Boards of Canada got their heads out of the clouds and buried them in the mud.
The Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson has now signed to 4AD, after a couple of mighty fine albums released through Touch; and 4AD is certainly the right outlet for this album, as Johannson's grandiose scores for orchestral arrangements, vocal chorales, and electronics enjoys the same weighty sentimentality heard in many a Dead Can Dance or This Mortal Coil album. Lush, cinematic, and utterly dramatic, this album curiously is not a soundtrack (although it has all of the repeating leitmotifs and syrupy pathos of a big budget Hollywood film of the tragic / romantic genre); rather Johannsson contextualizes all of these majestic, post-classical elements as a tribute to the IBM 1401, a state of the art computer from 1960. The computer came with a audio training manual from which he culled samples about the machine's maintenance. While some of the exchanges of Michael Nyman-esque orchestral phrases with the authoritarian vocals from the manual are quite interesting, the album is wholly saccharine in scope, rendering whatever nostalgia for technologies past as something of a quaint detour from the orchestral bombast.
Sweet southern shoegazer stoner dirge metal?? Well it makes lots of sense here. It's been two years since this band's last release, the (excellent) ep War Bird. A long wait but worth it, as Jucifer have become one of our go-to bands for music that's both punishingly heavy yet also thoroughly laced with indie-pop prettiness, and this new one does not disappoint on either score. For those of you that need the intro, these fuzzed-out faves of ours are a male/female two-piece from Georgia (home to Harvey Milk as well, and we imagine some sort of kinship), the guy on drums and the gal on guitar and vox, pushing more air than most five-piece bands, amp on 11, crushingly heavy but with enough spaciousness in the mix to allow for the lady's lovely, breathy vocals to soar over her doomier than thou riffage. She can also manage some stressed out banshee screams when necessary. We've always compared Jucifer to an unholy mixture of the Melvins and the Breeders and that holds true here on If Thine Enemy Hunger, their first album for diverse metal label Relapse. And we're not sure why we never thought of it before, maybe it's more noticeable on this album, but listening to this we're thinking Nirvana Nirvana Nirvana, it's very In Utero sounding at times!! Which we can't help but like. Some of it's just that catchy, and that moody. Just in time for the current AQ grunge obsession! (Though this is more like a stripped down, alt-rock Boris than a grunge band, we should note). We're in love.
Similar to the West Coast axis of US black metal, Leviathan, Xasthur, Draugar, Crebain, etc... there is another less geographically based hub, centered around French label Norma Evangelium Diaboli, a label that has managed to gather up most of the super intense, ultra progressive new wave of black metal bands: Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist, Antaeus, Katharsis... Every record gorgeously designed, and inside each, all manner of black metal conventions twisted into uniquely hellish shapes. It's a bit surprising NED hasn't swooped in and tried to add Leviathan to their elite black brood. But while Leviathan is indeed twisted in his own way, there is definitely a distinctly European feel to the bands on NED.
Where as DSO are like a black metal Slint, with epic arrangements of black buzz and plenty of brooding post rock passages, and Funeral Mist are a grim black horde with massive production, creeped out ambience and thick swaths of impossibly pummeling brutality, Katharsis are a spastic, "Kommando Metal" blast of blackened thrashing drums and buzzing insect guitars, bizarre reverb drenched psychedelic leads and freaked out vocals that scream, howl, growl and shriek, all smeared into massive black squalls of relentless blackthrash. This German outfit are not about subtlety, their sound is intensely furious burst after harsh hellish blast of ultra intense, brittle and buzzy black metal, channelling the old school classics through their own cracked and screwed perspective.
But it's the epic album closer, the 16 minute title track "VVorld VVithout End" where the band really push the limits, and take their own peculiar black metal into totally new realms, slowing down to a buzzing Burzumic midtempo lope, slipping into a weirdly propulsive groove, when suddenly insane falsetto vocals, and keening high end lead guitars whirl into a bizarre super dramatic, super tense minor key crescendo, then returning to the same buzzy groove. This happens a few more times, before everything sort of collapses into thick swirling thrashing chaos, multiple vocals, some shrieking, some grunted and spoken, bits of hysterical laughter, tangled and convoluted buzzing riffs, angular melodies, all crashing and slamming into each other, drunkenly slipping from lightning fast blast to lugubrious crawl to midtempo lurch in a dizzying fade to black. So goddamn good.
And as with all NED releases, amazing packaging!
If you've never heard Kid Koala before, be prepared for a seriously head spinning wild ride. Unlike most DJ's, Koala doesn't go for insane turntable pyrotechnics, or goofy classic rock / hip hop mash ups, instead he uses his nimble mixing skills to weave together elaborate journeys through sound, assembling new songs out of various scratchy vinyl fragments, or subtly tweaking old songs into warbly tripped out new ones. Rock riffs get skipped and stuttered into new groovier shapes, Koala accompanies himself on old jazz jams with various instruments "played" on another turntable, lots of soundtrack snippets and random voices get all tangled up into bizarre conversations, separate records get mixed into super psychedelic blowouts, blues jams are peppered with slippery turntable solos. The results are twisted and slightly off kilter, like viewing a turntable jam through a cracked funhouse mirror. Alternately super rocking, super groovy, crazy funky, or just chin scratchingly baffling.
The most amazing thing is that Koala does all this stuff with just turntables and a reel to reel. This isn't some nerd with a computer, meticulously piecing together bits and pieces, this is one guy, a bunch of turntables, and some seriously mad skillz.
First off, doesn't the cover for the latest Killers album looks like one of those '90s dime-a-dozen major label bad rock releases that you end up seeing a slew of the next week in the used bin? Oh they're Anton Corbijn photos? Whoops. We hope you're able to get past that unfortunateness, and give 'er a spin though. We did and can attest that the music fares much better than the packaging. This Las Vegas combo extend their shelf life past the fifteen minutes of fame afforded them by their single "Somebody Told Me". For their sophomore release, it sounds like The Killers are aggressively aiming to avoid being 'so two years ago' by shedding the '80s Duran Duran-isms and going heavier on the more timeless big rock pomp.
Slicker than ever, oozing with cocky confidence and so radio-ready. While a few Cure-ish moments do crop up, the band is modeling themselves more like anthemic grandeur of maybe U2, Yes and Queen. Funnily enough though, instead of that, we were thinking 'Gowan warbling with Interpol'. What? Too harsh? Nah. They're big boys now.
The Coachmen are probably mostly known as the band that featured a pre-Sonic Youth Thurston Moore. We always just assumed that JD King was in fact a made up entity and was in fact Moore. But apparently the two met way back in 1976, bonding over their love of all things Velvet Underground, Flamin' Groovies and the like. So the two joined forces, started a band, and jammed around NY until they broke up in 1979. At which point Moore went on to Sonic Youth while King went on to become a illustrator / cartoonist. A few of those records came out in the mid eighties on Ecstatic Peace, which is probably why we all assumed that The Coachmen was just Moore in disguise. But King and the Coachmen resurfaced in the mid nineties with a new record before sort of fading away again, and then wham! 2006 and they're back again!
So what the heck do these Coachmen sound like? Well, it's been ages since we've heard the old records, but we do remember it maybe being some sort of disconnected convoluted garage rock buzz blues stomp although it's been so long it's all a bit fuzzy. But fuzzy actually does begin to describe JD King And The Coachmen circa 2006. Imagine abstract streaks of fuzzed out guitar and dreamy tendrils of minor key melodies, hovering over thick swells of distorted buzz and a dense web of noodily bass lines, peppered with muted percussive thuds, or deep cavernous tangles of dense guitar over angular riffs and thick swaths of fuzznoise and simple tambourine, or tripped out space rock drift all tangled up in thickly reverbed guitar, freaked out psychguitar drift and moody mumbling backdrops of shimmering acoustic guitar and muddy bass rumble, or a tripped out disembodied Stoogesy stomp wrapped in swirling layers of distorted psychedelia and warm whirls of frothy fuzz.
This is some sort of alien garage rock, some disembodied blues, broadcast from some other time (past? future? both?) from some other plane, a mysterious alternate universe that has more in common musically with bands like the No Neck Blues Band, Avarus, Excepter, Sunburned Hand and the rest of those druggy free rock troubadours than it does with the Velvets or the Groovies. But that's the magic, it's like King and his cohorts are a tribe of modern mediums, who mixed up a magical brew of guitar, bass and percussion, managing to conjure up a brood of garage rock ghosts of the past, letting them get all tangled up with the free noise spectres of the present.
A few lists back we made Burial record of the week. An incredibly dense, super spare black hole of blissed out utterly bleak dub. Creepy and queasy, a black rhythmic crawl under a midnight sun. Like Massive Attack or Portishead slowed way down, and with all the skin removed, leaving a gorgeously spare skeletal grimey dub.
Here we have release number two from the Hyperdub label, the first full length from label head Kode9, after a handful of legendary vinyl only eps. In fact, Memories Of The Future is actually more of a singles collection then a proper full length, collecting some of the early long out of print tracks as well as a few newer 12"s.
Kode9's sonic world is a seriously dark and dangerous place. A world of low end subterranean throb. A low slung mutant strain of modern dub. The rhythms slither through a thick haze of murk and grime. Bits of reggae guitar surface here and there, but jangle just once, and are then sent spinning off into oblivion. Basslines are like slow moving rivers of black tar, all wound up into a creeped out druggy droney dubscape, so fucked up and laid back it makes Spectre sound like C+C Music Factory.
Most tracks also feature the lugubrious haunted house flow of Spaceape, a seriously ominous, skin crawling, killer growled ragga toasting, like some dancehall DJ pitchshifted all the way dooooooown. A demonic flow that sounds like Tricky chopped and screwed. Some slow motion sound system rolling slowly through town, broadcasting through a set of 15 foot woofers, sending out seismic basswaves as the townspeople shutter up their houses and cower in terror.
Speaking of Tricky, we still remember the first time we heard Tricky way back in the day. It was still dance music, sort of, but it was so slow, so creeped out and ominous, so sexy and deep and dark. It was hard to imagine that that kind of music could ever get any scarier. This Kode9 disc makes us feel the same way. At some point, grime or dubstep or whatever, when slowed down and blissed out any further would just lose all of its rhythmic cohesion and break into pieces and drift away. Which only adds to the inherent musical tension.
A few tracks skitter into more grime territory, or dancehall, or a more cohesive digital dub, but the majority of Memories Of The Future is spent bathed in darkness, slithering through some pitch black wasteland, sparse rhythms spread out all the way to the horizon, an endless abstract framework, the bass throbs like thunder in the distance, pianos tinkling and glistening like nighttime rain drops, vocals drifting above it all like the ominous refrain of some fallen band of angels, a deliriously disembodied demonic dancehall growl slowed down to a mumbled murmur, the whole thing a blackhole glacier drifting in slow motion across a blackened dancefloor.
Planet Mu continues to shower us with all sorts of killer grime and dubstep. This latest chunk comes from Neil Landstrumm, who offers up two sides of dubbed out block rocking bleeping buzzing groove. Side A rocks a totally hypnotic, skeletal rhythm, beneath some Beverly Hills Cop synth bass, huge bursts of distorted grinding grit and lots of strange jungly (as in THE jungle, not jungle) electronic FX. The B side is all super blown out space age skitter, with thick swirls of synthy fuzz and bleeping and blooping outer space effects, as well as some twisting buzzy basslines. Like the soundtrack to some futuristic outer space adventure movie. Shit like this makes some of us wish we weren't so deathly afraid of the dancefloor.
EM strikes again! Another out of left field release from our favorite weirdo reissue label. This time it's a career retrospective of the one and only Legendary Stardust Cowboy. More heard of than actually heard, this super deluxe collection gathers up all the essential bits and pieces from the Ledge's tumultuous career, from his first single, "Paralyzed" recorded in 1968 by a then unknown T-Bone Burnett (who also played drums) all the way up to tracks from his 1984 album Rock-It To Stardum.
But who is the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and why does anyone care? Well, it's been a long time since we heard this stuff, and boy does it sound even more totally wacked than we remember. It's like stripped down country rhythm and blues with a maniacal madman screaming and howling, in a totally unintelligible much mouthed howl over the top. Anyone familiar with Brak from Space Ghost Coast To Coast or with Homer, the crazy guy who plays guitar on various corners of Valencia Street might have an inkling of what's going on here. Or imagine AQ fave Jon Wayne (the band not the man) recording a record after full frontal lobotomies. Completely mental, ultra damaged, outsider country rock. Hard to believe the reaction the 'Ledge must have gotten when he appeared on Laugh In in 1968, these days we're exposed to so much insane music and so many weird records, but back then, this must have been the freakiest goddamn thing America had ever seen or heard.
For some songs, the Ledge cranks it down, and delivers his demented narrative in a sung-spoken drawl, like a more damaged twangy Lou Reed, but even those tracks are peppered with stumbling spastic drums, fake bird calls, random bits of talking, studio sounds, detuned guitars, weird bursts of way-up-in-the-mix sci-fi synths and all manner of bleating trumpets.
THE definitive slab of outsider country music. Like some impossibly demented mix of Chet Atkins, Reynols, Daniel Johnston, Brak, Jon Wayne, Joe Meek, Buddy Holly, Wild Man Fischer and Hasil Adkins.
And as with all EM releases gorgeously and extravagantly packaged, in an oversized Japanese style jewel case, a huge booklet packed with liner notes (most in Japanese), photos and lyrics and of course a Japanese style obi. The entire thing beautifully printed with gold ink on white. Leaves us saying "wow" for a bunch of different reasons!
Now available on vinyl for a super limited time. Only 500 copies made so act fast (and be aware that the vinyl contains 2 less tracks than the cd)!
Everyone wants a glimpse into the blackened Leviathan vaults, containing the legendary 20 or so cd-r's and cassettes recorded and released during the years 2000-2002, early demos that played more like full-on proper albums, hell they WERE full-on albums, highlights of which were released as the two disc Verrater (soon to be repressed!) on tUMULt a few years back. But Wrest from Leviathan has made it clear that those were then, and averaging a new release every few months, including full lengths and splits, is now. Well, that is, except for this. Probably your only chance, outside Verrater, to hear where it all began. Howl Mockery At The Cross is an essential shard of the mysterious obscured blackened history of Leviathan, and while sonically a bit rougher than the more recent records, it's still a dark and twisting, buzzing and howling serpentine trip through the black, bleak and brutal sonic world of Wrest and Leviathan. Some of these tracks were actually first choices to be included on Verrater, but at the time Wrest had planned on re-recording them. But with each new record, and after a few aborted attempts, the idea of going back to old songs seemed less and less appealing. So this is now the only place to hear those amazing tracks. Lots of that blackened buzz we love so much, but as with all Leviathan records, there are plenty of distinctly un-BM parts all over the place: dense mathrockisms, blissed out droning breakdowns, sludgy doom, bizarre times signatures, impossibly complex drumming, mournful minor key melodies, that immediately recognizable heavily affected demonic howl, all twisted into a gorgeously dark and demented, moody and murky blackened squall. Even includes a Death In June cover, properly drenched in buzz and blackness, so much so that it sounds like it could have been penned by Wrest himself. Striking metallic silver cover with the Leviathan upside down cross and dripping moon logo.
Do You like sixties pop-jazz with your underwater nature films? Then you will love this. Norwegian composer, Sven Libaek scored dozens of Australian science and nature films in the sixties and Trunk Records has compiled some of the best examples here. Some of you may be familiar with Libaek's work for Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic, which featured four of Libaek's themes in the score. Full of vibes, piano and strings, Libaek's film score work recalls the best of John Barry, Vince Guaraldi and John Cameron, composer of Kes and Psychomania. Totally Awesome!
Two of the leading lights in the dubstep underground team up for this killer slab of modern digital dubbed out bliss. Unlike the spastic over the top manic energy of grime, dubstep is way more laid back, spare and sparse, like a modern more junglized version of African Head Charge or Twilight Circus. The same sort of synth sounds and digital production, lots of King Tubby echo, but more sleek and space aged.
Digital Mystikz spit out a super abstract, stripped down blown out shuffle, with weird distant keening siren-like high end, and fuzzy low end squelches that sort of rumble and wobble dizzily.
Loefah counters with some super druggy modern dub, a dubstep steeped in the sounds of classic old skool dub, but given a glitchy stuttery makeover. A super minimal, ultra hypnotic rhythm, swirling synths drenched in reverb and echo-ed into oblivion. Huge loping grooves drenched in thick clouds of outer space bong smoke. Awesome.
Oh my goodness! This is one whale of a good time! It goes without saying that if only Kevin Bacon had had this new Los Straitjackets album back in his Footloose days... well, the world would be a very different and far better place. In no time, this cd/dvd set will have you impressing the gang with your newfound fancy footwork and good taste in tunes. The cd offers up a baker's dozen of Los Straitjackets' primo Lucha Libre wrestlin' masked originals and a trio of covers. Very faithful to their '60s surf garage forefathers and pretty hot stuff unto itself, especially with the Pontani Sisters and Kaiser George spicing things up. Now add the dvd on which the burlesque-alicious Sisters put you through the snazzy steps of a very thorough dance class. Shimmy! Shake! Twist!
Very strange and cool. The debut album from this SF group brings with it a heady air of somber intrigue. The Lovely Public draws together many styles as they roam through different dramatic scenes, slinking in and out of the shadows -- like an ensemble of olden time court entertainers descending into an electrified pagan ritual. Burning Tape At The Mystery Dinner has elements of jazz, post-rock, avant-folk, pop, krautrock, psych and much more. Whew, can you keep up with them? At once, very trippy yet very surefooted. Fans of Oneida and the latest Liars album will probably find much to dig here. Recommended.
This is the debut album from Bay Area indie rockers Low Red Land. The band wastes no time in stepping up to the plate to take a swing at the emotive smart pop ball being played by the likes of Pinback, Built To Spill, and Modest Mouse. Plenty of punch, big fuzzy guitars, emo boy vocals and some nice rhythmic twists.
We always seem to be trumpeting the virtues of some dark folk troubadour around here, whether it's the biblical fire and brimstone of Woven Hand, the swampy backwoods folk of Sixteen Horsepower, the deconstructed skeletal country of Souled American, the mopey slowcore twang of Califone, or the deserty mariachi of Calexico. Sometimes with all of this searching far and wide it's easy to overlook something right under your nose.
Thus, right here in SF, we have Mr. Jeffrey Luck Lucas, whose music speaks to anything BUT a life of luck. But whose dark sonic magic is certainly equal to any of the above mentioned night wanderers. In fact, if anything, Lucas seems to incorporate little bits of all of those different shades of black into his own dizzyingly dreary world of heavy heartedness. A dark Tom Waits-ian lurching meander through tall weeds and dark alleys. A minefield of broken hearts, and long lonely nights. Perpetual sadness lit from within with glimmers of hope flitting in the darkness like fireflies.
Lucas' voice is a ragged drawl, slipping from whisper to growl and back, over warm beds of dramatic shimmer, simple percussive shuffles, twangy reverbed surf guitar wrapped in a mist of nighttime murk, backdrops of moaning cello, slithery lap steel, angelic female vocals. Simple fingerpicked guitars pick out haunting melodies, swaths of dreamlike soul draped over tinkling pianos, singing saws and wheezing accordions get all tangled up in a seasick waltz. This is the kind of music that evokes back woods and small towns, trailer parks and barren landscapes, empty city streets and lonely rooftop vigils. Like the score for some unfinished Jim Jarmusch film, dramatic but understated, dark and doleful but so goddamn pretty. Along with folks like Tom Waits, American Music Club, Calexico, Sixteen Horsepower, and the like, Lucas continues to explore some mysterious lost Americana, a timeless world where the shadow of the past still darkens today. So nice.
What's in a name? Well, when the name of your band is Marblebog, and the name of your record is Csendhajnal, pretty much everything is in the name. We were sold before we'd even laid ears on it. But we're happy to report, the dark sorrowful sounds within more than live up to the bizarre monicker.
Marblebog specialize in that super fuzzy mournful black metal, midtempos and blurry hypnotic guitars, every track a slowly swinging seasick waltz, so completely droning and mesmerizing. The metal buried within churning clouds of thick murky ambience. The guitars not always sharp and jagged and buzzing, but sometimes just distant grumbles and whirs, buried beneath dense swirls of swooshing Tangerine Dream synths, while the drums sort of plod along waaaaaaaay back in the murk. And the vocals, woah, some of the most anguished, tortured, howling, damned-soul sort of howls we've ever heard, think Weakling, Silencer, Bethlehem, Sterbend, a near hysterical shrieking. But in Marblebog the vocals sound almost out of place, making them that much more harrowing and depressive. Imagine a lonely overgrown graveyard, weeds, flowers, ivy tangled in the bars of the wrought iron gates, the sky a dim grey, overcast, pregnant with the possibility of storm, the sound is not wind or birds or passing cars, instead it's a depressive dirge, not harsh or super aggressive, not even really buzzing, more a thick blanket of grey fuzz smothering everything in gorgeously miserable murkiness, then right in the middle of the graveyard, a mysterious figure is pushing his way through the dirt, a rotting creature of the night, crawling up from the grave, emitting a fowl hellish shriek of utter and absolute terror, while thick tendrils of graveyard mist swirl up around him, the vocals a glaring and harrowing blight on the otherwise peaceful (yet still dark and depressing) world of the dead.
The vocal-less tracks on Csendhajnal are downright lovely, slow, meandering synthscapes, of low end melodic miserablism, and slow drifting dark shimmer, like a more ambient Skepticism or Burzum, some haunting, otherworldly new age dooooom. But even the more properly metal tracks here are imbued with the same sort of new age dreaminess and slow motion, end of the world doominess. So awesome.
This disc collects the debut cd (from back in 2003) from this Hungarian horde and tacks on a whole bunch of killer extra tracks including the Nostalgic Moods In Grimwoods demo from 2002, the Arhat promo from 2002, and the rehearsal track "Hatefullmoon" from 2003, most of which were released as super limited tapes and/or splits. Killer cover art too!!!
SUPER LIMITED! 555 copies, each disc hand numbered!
This is hands down our favorite new grime / dubstep / what-the-fuck big beat sort-of-dance record. It's so heavy and fucked up and groovy and weird. Some impossibly tangled up mess of Jungle and grime, hip hop and dub step, IDM and full on dub, all pulled apart and reassembled into this fucking super tripped out, big beat, Frankensteinian dancefloor destroyer.
Every track is some sort of super stripped down grimey dubbed out slab of skitter and stutter. HUGE crunchy beats stretched into lazy loping hiccupping grooves, almost like some killer jungle 12" played at 16 rpm. But with all the guts and organs yanked out leaving massive skeletal rhythmic beasts. There are all sorts of strange sound effects and random sonic flares all over the place. But judiciously applied, leaving the overall sound still spacious and spare. That instantly recognizable Star Trek warning klaxon gets chopped into weird melodies, bits of bleep and bloop, swoosh and shimmer, drift and hover between the pummeling thump and skitter.
Beneath it all, some unbelievably MASSIVE, fuzzed out super-dense low end crunch, supporting occasional disembodied ragga toasting that gets all tangled up in the crunchy grinding beats. At one point a sweet lilting female vocal drifts into the picture but is soon crushed under some black hole heavy bass fuzz and spears of digital speaker shred, all the while a killer loping beat keeping heads nodding and toes tapping. Milanese is like some DJ cast into the pit, damned to an eternity of spinning nothing but demented demonic slow motion jungle dub for all of the other cursed souls writhing spastically on blackened dancefloors all over hell. You know what they say about Hell and Satan and all the best bands and tunes and all that, well, we can only imagine the same applies to DJ's and electronic music, and if you ever needed absolute proof, Milanese rises from a black breach in the ocean floor spewing broken beats and belching black fire, all to a killer freaked out funky stuttery apocalyptic soundtrack. So recommended!
Holy shit! More incredible grimey dubstep weirdness, this time from the mysterious Milanese who we had never heard of before, but who have teamed up with the Virus Syndicate, maybe one of our favorite grime outfits ever (we raved about their full length a while back), who are the perfect match for Milanese's ultra creepy dubbed out bass-scapes. The A side features huge thick ominous washes of low end rib cage rattling bass drone, over a strangely brittle dubbed out hip hop beat, it ends up sounding like some demented electronic haunted house music. Over the top, Virus Syndicate spit some super aggressive lyrical flow, all growly and raspy.
The B side has to be one of the weirdest tracks ever, a sun baked flamenco guitar, accompanied by handclaps, underpin a confusing flow of multiple vocals, all sort of swirling and smearing and bumping into one another. There is some sort of rhyme and reason but it's so amazingly confusional, each voice sort of stumbling all over the others, really bizarre sounding. And mixed in are all sorts of weird vocal tics incorporated into the rhythms, sudden inhalations or exhalations, lip smacking, all floating around amidst bits of tinkling bells and electronic chimes. Another record that has us almost reconsidering our no dance policy!
At the risk of getting a huge amount of grief, we have to be honest and admit we were never all that into the Minutemen. Sure we dug the concept. And the energy. And the politics. And they seemed like super cool guys. And of course they were down with all of our favorite bands of that time, Black Flag, Descendents, Husker Du, Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, the whole SST stable. But their sound, at least at the time, was just a little too funky. Watching this movie though, definitely gives us pause, and had us re-evaluating, and it's suddenly so obvious how much those guys owed to groups like P.I.L., the Pop Group and especially Wire, and now, how much they beat the current wave of new wave post punk revivalists to the punch by 20 years.
As a film, though, We Jam Econo is as much about the time and the scene as it is about the band. Amazing interviews with all our punk rock heroes all grown up, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Jack Brewer, Dez Cadena, Nels Cline, Kira Roessler, Lee Ranaldo, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Mills, Thurston Moore, David Markey, J Mascis, John Doe, Jello Biafra, Milo Aukerman, Joe Baiza, Chuck Dukowski, Flea, Grant Hart, Greg Norton, Curt Kirkwood, Colin Newman and loads more. But it's pretty much the Mike Watt show, as he drives around in his old beat up Econoline, pointing out all the punk rock historical landmarks that are now Petco's or condos, as he gives an insane rambling account of the Minutemen's convoluted and endlessly fascinating history. There's some amazing live footage and a cool interview with the whole band, and D. Boon does seem like the coolest nicest guy in the world. And the tragedy of his passing really hits home after living vicariously through those years via this film.
Not sure that we necessarily LOVE the Minutemen now, but we do dig them a bit more, and the movie was awesome, and there are for sure a few songs that stuck, and will have us hunting down some Minutemen discs for sure.
Includes tons of amazing footage, and lots of extras, including videos, a set of acoustic covers performed live, uncut interviews, deleted scenes and more. The second disc includes 62 songs from three live performances, at the Starwood in 1980, at the 9:30 club in 1984 and at the Acoustic Blowout in 1985. Also includes a massive booklet packed with photos, notes from the filmmaker, and liner notes from David Rees who does the killer comic Get Your War On!
NTSC. All Region.
This 3" CD from the always impressive sound artist mnortham (nee Michael Northam) was conceived as a tribute to his father who was a race car driver from 1949 until 1965. In those days, Northam's father strapped himself into what was quite literally a rocket of a car, as it was little more than a aerodynamic cylindrical frame, a beast of an engine, four wheels, and barely enough room to cram in the driver. While the sound artist Northam didn't have any archival recordings of the race car driver Northam as source material, mnortham did venture to the Terre Haute Raceway back in the summer of 2005. From the field recordings of that event, mnortham concocts a surprisingly elegant collage of cyclical tumblings and aerating sonic masses reflecting the centripetal forces of the human body when put under such rigorous conditions. As volatile and aggressive as the soundfield of raceways can be (one can look no further than the Santa Pod collection of racetrack recordings released by Ash International a few years back), mnortham has wholly avoided the Merzbowian noise precepts. While cacophonous in the truest sense of the word, Go is a certainly not a noise composition instead adhering to the signature aggregate sound of compounding and compacting layers of sound into a vulcanized, elliptical drone mass aiming for the elation from speed and acceleration over the testosterone implied by the roar of an engine. Very well done.
Psychedelic, surreal, bizarre, expansive, campy, politically charged, charming, stylized, kitschy, technicolorful, captivating. Oh my god, what the heck could all of those adjectives apply to? The Monkees' Head of course! Yup, it is all of that and so much more! If you've passed on watching Head in the past because you saw The Monkees' name on it, you've been seriously missing out on a work that is *exactly* whatever you might think The Monkees and their music was, but it also reaches far beyond their scope as well as that of more shall we say 'serious' auteurs... and successfully so. Co-written and co-produced by Jack Nicholson and director Bob Rafelson, this 1968 movie continues to kick ass almost forty years after its original release. Seriously, DO NOT MISS THIS!
Besides being one of the filthiest, sludgiest doom bands EVER, Moss also hold the uniquely AQ distinction of being the first band to get 40 'o's in an AQ review. That's right. Moss are most definitely the supreme masters of D-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-M. Only that many 'o's in doom can truly represent the sort of twisted anguished glacial drone drenched doom these guys are capable of unleashing. Every thing they touch turns to murky, dirgey mayhem. A blackened, hateful soundscape of slow motion thud and growl, a hellish trudge through a black sonic pit. But we're sure we already had you at 40 'o's!
So what could be more appropriate than a single ninety minute epic lo-fi doom dirge, captured on three microphones and recorded on a fourtrack, then pressed on to a cassette, the grimmest and most cult of formats? Well how about if each cassette was housed in an mindblowingly elaborate, and highly dangerous, welded iron, industrial sculpture-like case? And how about if each cassette 'case' was welded together from nails, and strange rusty hinges, and huge links of chain, stuffed with burnt parchment and actual moss? Doesn't get much more doomy than that.
Seriously though, when we cracked open the two HUGE boxes these tapes came shipped in, and began to unwrap these sharp and jagged works of art, everyone in the store gathered around to see what the next one would look like. Some were like Venus Flytraps made out of nails, others were huge bear trap things wrapped in chains, and spiked with nails. It was like discovering some long buried ancient armory. A dizzying array of sharp edges and hinged nails, weird greased axles that allow pieces of metal to slide open revealing the tape inside, or dense tangles of bent nails melted into tiny cassette coffins. So intense. And amazing looking. And so appropriate to the massive downtuned sludge inside. It's almost like these tapes occurred in nature, and the protective welded iron coating is a warning to wildlife to beware of what poisonous brutality lurks inside. Each case has the band's name welded or soldered on the side, and each contains a parchment like insert with the liner notes. And plenty of moss as well. So awesome.
So here's the complicated part. They're all totally different. Some are huge, and weigh close to 5 pounds, a massive chunk of metal, some are quite not so big, but still equally spikey and dangerously sharp. So the postage will vary depending on which one you get, and due to the intensely spikey and sharp nature of these beasts, if you order them along with anything else, they MUST be shipped separately. And thus will incur an extra shipping charge. Unless you don't mind all your other records having huge nail holes in them and everything ripped to shreds. But let's assume you do mind, and so we'll just figure on separate shipping. But hell, it's so worth it. These are amazing and creepy pieces of art. It's almost just a bonus that inside is a tape of some seriously damaged, harsh and crumbling lo-fi doom.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES! WE GOT HALF OF THEM! When these are gone, they are gone forever.
Very much like how all the black metal bands in the Ukraine seem to be made up of the same 5 or 10 people, just in different combinations, black metal bands in Russia also tend to revolve around the same 2 or 3 visionaries, along with whatever black legions they can enlist from their little scene to help shape their black musical world.
We recently reviewed the only currently available disc from Russian cult underground legends Old Wainds, who as we mentioned in that review, are THE grim cult horde of choice among the black metal elite. And almost appropriately, all of their records, minus the just reviewed demo disc, seem to be way more difficult to track down than they should be, and thus of course, are seriously big ticket items on eBay.
So here we have the group Nav, also known in Russian as HABb, a black metal band made up of 50 percent of Old Wainds, primarily the project of Old Wainds drummer Izbor, so as you might imagine, the sound does not wander far from Old Wainds' grim frosty buzz. Which is of course a good thing. The same sort of fuzzed out primitivism, a gloriously murky production. But Nav add plenty of their own unique style, everything is so strangely mixed, with loud LOUD drums and guitars that swirl into a nearly impenetrable blackened haze. Demonic vocals that go from buried way down in the mix to a blown out raspy roar often within the same song, and bits of chaotic rhythmic stumble and haunting ambient weirdness, complete with the thunderous sound of horses hooves.
And unlike the straight black buzz of Old Wainds, Nav sounds a slight bit more melodic, with much of the riffing displaying a classic metal vibe, as well as rhythms that vary from the old black stand-by, the blast beat, lurching lopes, galloping thrash, pounding doom, lots of fuzzed out midtempos, all twisted amidst some strange breakdowns, where the rhythms constantly shift and the riffs contort and morph into slightly different shapes, there are even some super demented LEADS! Still, all the while the band continues to forge a wholly unique pitch black path. Fans of all things dark and frosty and cult and grim would do well to bow before the black knights of Nav!
We haven't been able to track down the cd, but we do have the ULTRA LIMITED vinyl version. Gatefold sleeve. Limited to 300 copies!
It seems like recently, the world has finally begun to openly embrace the joys of sludge-doom-death-drone or whatever you want to call it. Boris, Corrupted, SUNNO))), Earth, Marzuraan, Bunkur, Moss, Khanate, Nadja, nobody can seem to get enough downtuned sludginess, or glacial metallic pummel. And we couldn't be more thrilled. But if you were around the Bay Area way back in the late nineties, you might remember a band who were prime traffickers in such gloriously low end brutality, but who have seemed to have been completely forgotten.
That band would be Noothgrush, who back in the day, released records and toured with Corrupted, released tons of killer splits, and who were known to lay waste to tiny clubs all over SF.
Having broken up way back in 2001, and with almost their entire catalog out of print, Noothgrush seemed to be about a decade too early. If they were around now, we can guarantee people would be losing their shit (and tons of money on eBay) over this low slung, sludge rock power trio. And way before sludge nerds all over the world were smitten by the diminutive Wata wielding her mighty axe in Boris, Noothgrush were being driven by a young woman by the name of Chiyo, an equally diminutive rocker bashing the living shit out of her drums!
Sonically, there's a definite resemblance to early Corrupted. Huge plodding doom, massive downtuned guitars, riffs stretched out into near-drones, glass gargling vocals, a slow motion glacial black hole of crumbling doom destruction.
This cd collects the band's final studio recordings, all of their splits as well as a handful of unreleased material. The first half of their 'discography' was released on Slap-A-Ham and is now unfortunately out of print. But this 2nd part has most of our favorite Noothgrush material. The band really shone on their splits, and this disc collects all of their material from long out of print splits with Corrupted, Suppression, Gasp, Wellington and Carol Ann. Plus a handful of unreleased tracks. Hell yeah!
So completely and absolutely essential. Fans of SUNNO))), Boris, Corrupted and other plodding drone doom behemoths who somehow missed out on the glorious brutality that was Noothgrush can now see what they've been missing.
Includes a big booklet with liner notes, photos and lyrics.
When Steven Stapleton set out to make his seminal album Thunder Perfect Mind, he was intent on actualizing his idea of industrial music. Not what industrial music had become in 1992 with the likes of Nine Inch Nails and the Wax Trax! contingent of angry synthesists, but more of what Luigi Russolo had in mind with his Futurist noise-making objects Intonarumori. That same spirit of harnessing the mechanical orchestrations of industrial production holds true to the final chapter of Shipwreck Radio, a three volume series of radio broadcasts commissioned for the Lofoten International Art Festival and transmitted to the Norwegian fishing village of Svolvaer. While Thunder Perfect Mind focused on machinists hammering through a brilliant idiosyncrasy of instrumentation, the haunted sounds from the Shipwreck Radio series engage the monolithic architecture of the industrial workplace: huge cavernous reverberation, thunderous drones, metallic bellowings, and gasping exhalations of steam, acetylene, and oxygen. The first of the two extended tracks on the final chapter of the Shipwreck Radio sessions returns to this same material; and even though there's plenty of variations in the sounds found in the first two chapters, this piece finds Stapleton and collaborator Colin Potter in magnificent form. The second track is a bit of head-scratcher, though as it's little more than a DSP time-stretched applique of some vocal samples. The first track more than makes up for what the second lacks and is a noble finale to what is already a great body of work.
Most of you have already smashed the add to cart button to bits before even getting to reading the review, so we'll keep this brief. A monumental match up of modern psychedelic masters from the NorCal locale. On one side is the mighty post-Sleep behemoth known as Om, a bass and drums duo who churn out extended sludge mantras, and on this track it's no different. A super fuzzed out doomy plod and groove. When we first threw this one, we accidentally had it on 45 and it sounded pretty dang killer and super blown out and weird, until the vocals came in and went all doom chipmunk on us. But at 33 it was even slower and heavier and dirgier just the way it was meant to be. Note: the track on this 7" is the bonus track from the Japanese version of Conference Of The Birds that we listed recently, so a few of you may already have this song! On the other side we have Ben Chasny and his Six Organs Of Admittance, who seem to be upping their own personal dirge quotient in order to compete with the sheer heaviness of Om. There is still some lilting folk, but it's buried beneath wild squalls of psych guitar freakout that sounds VERY Japanese (High Rise, Mainliner, Fushitsusha).
Definitely essential.
On her second release Our Hearts First Meet, SF chanteuse Rykarda Parasol sounds as though she's weathered a storm or two since her well-received debut cdep a couple of years ago. Her deep, slightly tattered, world-weary vocals bring to mind those of Carla Bozulich and Siouxsie Sioux, but mellowed out in a way that's more along the lines of Cat Power's Chan Marshall. Much rain and tear soaked enchantment is infused in each of her fifteen songs. The shadowy mood is supported by the beautiful cover art and striking, hazy black and white insert photo of Ms Parasol, but it's also unfortunately somewhat undone by the assorted casual band photos that reside on the inner traycard. Alas, but 'tis a minor distraction. Nevertheless, a fine follow-up to 2004's Here She Comes.... Released on the evergrowing SF indie label Three Ring Records.
Another new name (at least to us) in the wonderfully whacked world of grime and dubstep. Pinch are way on the super minimal end of the spectrum, constructing super spare rhythms, dubby and seriously spacious, with drifting sitar-like buzz over the top and incredibly weird croaking frog synths, weird burping bblllllaaaeeerrrrp's that have your speakers rattling and threatening to fall to pieces. Then suddenly, part way through the A side a crazy bass line drops, HUGE and thick and snarling and slithering and squirming, a gurgly, wiggly, warbly buzz, surrounded by glistening clouds of insect-like effects and and alien swooshes and bleeps. The B side takes the same track and drenches it in still more dub, making it even more loping and laid back, with strange percussive sounds mixed in, and THAT incredible bass line, but processed and pitched like crazy to sound like some sort of alien ray gun constantly firing in time with the rhythm. Awesome. Another nudge towards the dancefloor. Must... resist...
Here's the second full length from the Chicago trio known as Pit Er Pat. The band's name might conjure up docile thoughts of little feet, paws or raindrops, but their sound is much more substantial (psst, actually the name is in reference to a painting by fellow Chicagoan artist Jim Nutt). And while the winsome, expressive vocal delivery of Fay Davis-Jeffers might bears more than a striking resemblance to Mirah and Mary Timony, the music is something quite different. The band brings together the trademark Chicago style of post-rock jazziness with some off-kilter lilting folk pop and lounge-y exotica. The results are something smoky, brooding with a gentle yet insistent momentum. Quite enchanting. Recorded in Puerto Rico. Produced and mixed by John McEntire.
A nice super tense slab of creepy minimal dubstep darkness from the appropriately named Pitch Black. The A side is stuttery skeletal dubstep workout, with a huge trash can lid distorted snare crash, skittering muted kick drums and squelchy synths way in the background, Super minimal and spare. The B side is where it gets serious. The call of a crow, some weird drifting female vocals, a super stripped down simple rhythm. The female vocals are just ethereal and drifty enough that for a second it sounds like the track might get all cheesy with some sort of diva vocals, until suddenly the track morphs into an ultra distorted, blown out, crumbling monster beat, all crackly and damaged sounding, super hot and in the red, the drifting female vocals getting buried alive beneath the wall of crashing beats. Some serious dancefloor damage for sure.
You'll have to excuse us if we seem to have found ourselves at a loss for things to say about Mr. Pollard and his innumerable projects and releases. We've totally lost count. C'mon, cut us some slack! His songs may be utterly human and personal, but the man behind it is an almost inhuman music-making dynamo. While there are plenty of GBV and Pollard supporters around aQ, we're pooped. There's barely enough time to digest the last release before a new one lands in our lap, and there's always a few numbers that get their hooks into us. That said, this is pretty darn classic Pollard in indie rock mode... meaning there's very few of his weirdo wacko noisy detours. Normal Happiness = sixteen engaging, endearing poppy nuggets, the kind he does so well! Whew, looks like we weren't at such a writer's block after all!
Maybe not the place to start for GBV/Pollard neophytes, but will surely more than please his legions of devoted fans.
Oh Mac McCaughan, we will always have the softest spot for you and the remarkable pop gems you never run out of. From the heyday of Superchunk, to the fine label you run, to the way you helped put Chapel Hill on the musical map, to the way you always come through with that perfect song that we will undoubtedly have stuck in our heads for months to come. Be Still Please is a pretty great representation of the current state of Mac's song writing. From the all out catchy rock of "Sour Shores" and "I'm In Love With Arthur Dove" (contender for song of the year!), to the multi instrumentation and more somber grown up sentiments of "Black Buttons" and "Song For A Clock." Last week when Mac's buddy Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo did a guest DJ spot at KUSF all his selections came from older records from the 50's 60's and 70's, while his last selection was the sole contemporary track and it was the closer from this album, proving that what makes Mac such a great songwriter is exactly how and why he has created such an impressive catalog of timeless pop gems.
The Boredoms were always about rhythm, even if it wasn't overt, theirs was a sound based on rhythm. From the splattery chaotic hardcore of early records like Soul Discharge, to their later incarnation as a modern hippy drum rock jam band, every bit of their music was concerned with pulse and throb, it was propulsive and hypnotic, looped and cyclical, sometimes herky jerky and chaotic (but still precisely choreographed), other times serene and abstract, but always with some internal mechanism that tapped into all of the rhythms of life, which is precisely what made the Boredoms' music sound so alive and vibrant and often completely brilliantly baffling.
Last list we reviewed Budub, the 2nd album by Boredoms offshoot Puzzle Punks, which was the duo of Eye of the Boredoms and artist Otake Noboru. A fascinating very Boredoms-esque concoction of cracked rhythms and krautrock grooves, but super spare and stripped down. A garage rock This Heat maybe, traversing an abstract soundscape of loops and broken drum lines, pulsing and plodding, weaving skeletal song frameworks, and just leaving them like that, barebones and full of space. And the result was divine. Hypnotic and dreamlike. Some weird space rock broken down to its base rhythmic element, would up and allowed to stumble and lurch on its own.
Puzzoo was supposedly recorded right after that record, in secret, and recorded almost as you hear, not culled from hours and hours of jamming, rather a wholly realized organic musical happening, captured alive and kicking. Puzzoo finds the Puzzle Punks expanded to a trio, with the addition of an extra guitar, and includes some guest performances from two of the other Boredoms, one of them being Boredoms / OOIOO heartthrob Yoshimi. The result is like a much more beefed up Budub. A little more aggressive, a little more propulsive, but still stripped down and tripped out.
The opening three track salvo is worth the price of admission alone. A solid 40 minutes of damaged abstract spaced out krautrockiness. In fact, just the opener "Puzoo Lunch", a seventeen minute outer space tribal space jam was all we needed to hear. one of those tracks we wish would go on forever. And if the technology existed, we guarantee we'd spend the next 2 weeks listening to the extended 336 hour version, staying home from work, phone off, lights off, drapes drawn, just sort of drifting off in some body rhythm trance. But as it is we'll just have to continually press repeat on the cd player, and just imagine all that other stuff. But what kind of sound would have us in such a frenzy? Some some super bizarre seventies prog rock all tangled up in an alien percussive temple worship ceremony, like a roomful of deranged wind-up toys each given a little tiny set of drums and cymbals, rocking out in miniature to some acid fried psych rock guitar drift. The guitar weaves a deconstructed lo-fi garage rock, with angular no-wave riffs that drift over a motorik clangscape of clockwork thumps and a cacophony of tinkling bells and chimes and cymbals. Above it all hovers some blown out fuzzy blues guitar, weaving lazily in and out of the tangled rhythms. A dense swirl of warbling melodies and strange little sound effects wrap the proceedings in a mysterious spaced out conic cloak, the various guitar lines and melodies constantly mutating and shifting pitch. An impossible alien krautrock groove, an improbable junkyard space rock symphony, like some stripped down garage rock super jam with members of the Boredoms, This Heat, and No Neck Blues Band. Phew. And that's just the first track.
Track two, "Puzoout" follows a similar blueprint, but wraps its rhythms in fuzzy clouds of 8-bit video game sounds, whorls of primitive lo-fi synth and damaged guitar, all over a dizzying splatter of simple shuffle and propulsive skitter. Like a (more) outsider Acid Mothers Temple, but recorded on some sort of children's tape recorder. Track three, "Puzzub", the final part in the unbeatable one-two-three punch, is another druggy rhythmic workout, this time even more stripped down, a blissed out slow burning tribal jam, the main element being mouth harp which gets distorted and twisted, and stretched into a raga like buzz, in the background simple tablas and primitive metallic percussion, all wrapped in a super thick fuzzy veil of staticky haze, and warm warbling shimmer.
The final four tracks, ranging from under three minutes to a little over five minutes, are stunning little fragments of what must be (or could have been) monumentally epic lo-fi space jams, each one a dense little assemblage of deconstructed rhythms, melodic shards, fuzzy ambience, motorik propulsion, machine-like whir and druggy psychedelic atmospheres. All of them could have been stretched into hours instead of minutes without losing any of their mysterious power.
The sound of Puzzle Punks is very reminiscent of groups like No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, but especially the Finnish contingent of the neo-tribal forest drone folk sound, Avarus, Kuupuu, Kemialliset, Anaksimandros, but infused with a distinctly Japanese xxx, as well as a gloriously unhealthy obsession with krautrock, space rock, This Heat and all of the various permutations of the word Puzzle (Puzunk, Puzzdozer, PuZZ-Top, ZZ-Topuzz) So dementedly recommended. As is the previous disc Budub, which we still have a few copies of...
Between the recent delightful Senor Coconut reissues and new albums by Los Negritos, the man behind it all aka Atom Heart (uh, aka Uwe Schmidt) simply cannot be stopped... and who'd want him to anyways! Here's another of his musical incarnations, Replikant Rumba Rockers (let's hear you say that one five times fast!). For Atom Heart fans, this needs no introduction nor any explanation. For others, well, if you wanna get whipped up into a frenzy of deliciously bizarre laptop-tronica, few midi-minded artists can do it like he can and in so many different candy-colored guises. With that in mind, we have to note that this might be one of his most surprising low-key cds. It struck us as being positively sedate by his standards, yet still super fun! Mixed by frequent collaborator Burnt Friedman.
Screeeeeeeech! That's the sound of this hot rod peelin' out of the lot. What a perfect match -- Torontonian psychobilly hepcats The Sadies doin' the soundtrack for the film documentary about Ed "Big Daddy" Roth (perhaps better known as the man behind the bloodshot'n'buggy eyed rebel comic character Rat Fink)! Unlike their usual studio albums which careen across a vast and varied musical landscape, The Sadies for the most part takes a direct route to the surf, veerin' and huggin' a few curves in the process. Like lil' critters that dart out into headlights, their instrumental rabble-rousin' is flashed with a few dialogue snippits from the film. Super cool! What's that smell?! Burnt rubber, baby! They're smokin'!
Here's the debut full length from these local long hairies, whom quite possibly you've headbanged to already, live and in person -- most recently we saw 'em opening for The Sword at Slim's. Those from outside the Bay Area might know 'em from their previous ep release on Level Plane, or from their inclusion on Kemado's Invaders comp celebrating up-n-coming heavy psych and metal bands. Moreso even than The Sword, these guys were fully representin' the metal side of that roster. Furthermore, the Saviours' style of metal, make that METAL, definitely has one foot in the gutter, one fist in the gold... in other words, a big old school '80s influence. But this ain't no Motley Crue party rock. It's extremely HEAVY with kinda punk, shouty singing, which makes sense since they guys come out of the East Bay hardcore scene (though one of 'em also plays bass with smartass stoner rawk gods Drunk Horse). Works well for us. Plenty of fierce, chugging riffage, endlessly galloping, the band a mighty metal steed indeed. Imagine the heavy likes of High On Fire, Floor, or 16, but way more METALLIC(A). Or indie retro-metallers Early Man, with all their NWOBHM and Bay Area thrash influences, getting truly mean and ugly and throwing down big time. And we should mention: awesome drummer!
Bay Area label Three Ring Records expand their roster by a third with four impressive new releases by Rykarda Parasol, Frankel, Tom Thumb & The Latter Day Saints and these three Texans who call themselves Scattered Pages. Three Ring has already got fine releases by the indie rock/pop likes of Elephone, Soltero, Ebb & Flow and D.W. Holiday and Scrabbel, but with this recent outpouring they bolster their country and folk branches.
Scattered Pages' male vocals exude the sort of mellowness that you'd imagine was the result of the golden warmth of whisky. These are earthy country tunes that sway in the breeze while the burnished amber light of dusk fades. Nice. Despite the band's name, the band itself seems to be in anything but disarray. And despite the album's title, it seems that their story's only just beginning... and in a very promising, self-assured fashion.
Return of the mighty Shit And Shine, a massive sprawling noise rock collective from the UK. Multiple drummers, LOTS of guitars, even some lawnmowers and other noisemakers. This new disc takes their caustic freaked out psych-noise in a whole new direction, channeling their energy into blissed out sort-of krautrocky grooves, albeit still drenched in thick grinding crumbling grit with the needle ALL the way in the red. In fact -most- of the tracks here are some sort of hypnotic stripped down rhythm, just completely damaged and dinged up and pelted with thick slabs of hissy fuzz. Vocals struggly desperately to be heard, even the drums keep getting sucked under the massive swells of acidic sound, swirls of buzzing glitch and super blown out melodies are all draped over the endlessly propulsive rhythms, as they struggle to keep moving forward with layer after layer after layer of dense prickly buzz and drone piled atop them. A gloriously cacophonous caterwaul of rhythmic chaos.
Imagine the Psychic Paramount filtered through a Merzbow production and mastered by Masonna, pressed onto a lathe cut, then played a thousand times until the grooves all began to run together, then play it on a turntable made from an old microwave using a rusty nail as a stylus, and broadcast it through the blown out speakers in that junked car that's been sitting in your neighbor's yard for the last ten years. The record THAT sound, and broadcast it through a HUGE tuba shaped loud speaker with your head stuck all the way into the horn. Kinda like that. Imagine some Aufgehoben No Process, some Laddio Bolocko, some Wolf Eyes, some Butthole Surfers, even some Whitehouse and eighties no wave, but mix in a serious dose of Can and Faust and then douse it in thick swaths of noise, freeze it and shatter it into a million pieces. It all comes together on the album's 30 minute centerpiece "Practicing To Be A Doctor", a simple rock and roll drum beat, a million pounds of grinding low end, some grungy sludgy garage rock riffing, some buried mumbled vocals, and set the whole thing to just sort of lazily unfurl over the course of a lurching, druggy, damaged half hour. Suddenly we're also hearing some Brainbombs, some Terminal Cheesecake, even a bit of the Melvins, all wrapped up into endlessly motorik spaced out tribal sludge rock nirvana.
For a limited time, Jealous Of Shit And Shine also includes an extra cd, which contains their long out of print 12" "You're Lucky To Have Friends Like Us" on cd for the first (and last) time! Here's what we had to say about the 12" when we listed it way back in 2004:
You might want to keep an old rag next to your turntable for this one, to wipe the grit and grime and goo off your needle when you're done listening to this slab of sonic what-the-fuck. A confusional mix of buzzy, damaged psych rock spaceout, Buttholes style tribal weirdness, straight up icepick in the ear noise rock, speaker melting sludge and some very unlikely pop filigree. Instrumentation includes multiple drummers, multiple lawnmowers (?) and lots of guitar all melded into a pummelling wall of grindsludgepopnoisepsych.
Wander again through the mystic meadows with these two lazy troubadours of the rustic psych folk revival. Glenn Donaldson and Donovan Quinn and friends are back with another installment (11 songs, 35 minutes) of the SGL's always sunshiney and melodious mellowness. The haze hasn't lifted, these boys are still sitting crosslegged and deep in the dandelions, drifting astrally across their own inner California state of mind, a cosmos of '60s dosed song-half-writing... by that we just mean that this and other SGL artifacts could all be One, though this IS way more song-based than other Jewelled Antler related projects. They gently strum and strum and mumble and sing of Sally Orchid and the Egyptian Circus and Silvery Branches, and love, always love, and this is certainly lovely... Imagine (imagination is what the SKG's and their lyrically cryptic concepts certainly stoke) the delivery of a Dylan afflicted with the Olivia Tremors, engaged in pastoral nature worship, on a California trip.
We should also note the bumper-sticker ready song title here: "Jesus Was Californian". WWJD? Eat organic avocados!
Another amazing compilation of Cambodian psychedelic music recorded from the late sixties to the mid seventies. This comp, culled from much crate digging in the open air markets of Siem Reip, right next to the legendary temples Angkor Wat focus exclusively on songs performed and sung by legendary Cambodian vocalists Sin Sisamouth and Srei Sothear. Sisamouth is a name that should be familiar to all fans of Cambodian psych, as he is featured heavily on pretty much every single compilation of Cambodian psych from that time (including all four of the Cambodian Rocks comps of course). Sisamouth wrote thousands of songs, many performed by Sothear, and many for films in which she also starred. The two become partners and eventually became two of the most (if not THE most) famous singers in Cambodia.
Tragically, both were killed by the Khmer Rouge -- as were their bands and of course millions of their fans. Their musical legacy they left is staggering. Thousands of amazing tunes, from garage rock stomps to full on psych rock blow outs. Wild guitars, buzzing distortion drenched leads, groovy wah wah rhythms, and organs all over the place, whirring, wheezing, warbling, all fuzzy and thick, sometimes spitting out nimble high end melodies, other times a thick carpet of psychfuzz, add in some James Brown funky horns, wild drumming, and some of the most amazing vocals ever, that go from croon to wail to squeal to howl and every place in between, and you've got some of the wildest psych-rock ever made!
Full color psychedelic sleeve with liner notes on the back.
All proceeds of the sales of this album go to the United Nations' Cambodian relief fund Adopt-A-Minefield. you can learn more or donate by going to http://www.landmines.org.
It was inevitable really. The Japanese masters of Orange Amp-powered drone-sludge and the robed priests of low end doom. How could it not happen? In fact, if you remember the 2005 April Fool's AQ list, we actually jokingly predicted this epochal event! Although in our version it also included Earth, each band playing one note of the world's heaviest E chord.
The real question was never IF it would happen, it was when. And how. Especially how. C'mon, how on earth can you fit that many amps in a recording studio. They must have used an airplane hanger, either that or they filled a high school gymnasium with Sunn and Orange stacks and microphones, and actually played in an entirely different room.
Regardless, it happened, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Both bands completely compliment each other. SUNNO))), whose slow motion riffing borders on pure ambience, is given a serious propulsive shove, with more structured riffing and the addition of DRUMS!!! Boris get dragged back into the gloriously glacial tarpit of their older records, discarding their current garage rock rrrooooaaar for that classic slow motion doom trudge. However you look at it, it's basically the best record either band has put out. It's like an EVEN heavier SUNNO))), with bigger riffs and pulverizing doom rock drums, and of course wailing psychedelic leads. For Boris, they've taken their blown out grooves and dipped them in tar, added a million more pounds of guitar firepower and made the best Boris record since Flood.
But it's not all pulverizing doom riffage. There's plenty of dark droning ambience too. Huge stretches of swirling guitar rumble, dreamy swaths of wispy steel string shimmer. murky and haunting, processed vocals and minor key melodies swimming in a black sea of echoey ambient guitars and sizzling cymbal shimmer. The strangest track is probably "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)", sort of the Boris / SUNNO))) version of a torch song, with FX smeared piano, strange buried rhythms, and hushed vocals, like a doom metal Mazzy Star.
The closer "Bloodswamp" is 14 minutes of churning downtuned guitars and shimmering Sunroof! like ambience. No riffs really, or if they are there, they're stretched into thick streaks of black fuzz. A furiously epic coda to a fucking amazing record.
The first 5000 copies come with a bonus disc titled SatanOscillateMyMetallicSonatas (a nod to Soundgarden, there?) that features a single 28 minute track called "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom" guest starring Dylan Carlson from Earth! Before we go any further... are you thinking what we're thinking... April Fools? SUNNO))) and Boris And Earth!!! And I bet you at least some of the bonus track is in E!! Boy, did we call it. And actually Atsuo from Boris confided in a friend of AQ that indeed, part of the reason they got Dylan to guest was because of that April Fool's review! How cool is that?!?
Anyway, the bonus track is a monstrous wall of churning guitars, with occasional howled almost death metal vocals buried way down in the mix, and languorous Earth Hex-like twang guitar draped lazily above a churning blackhole ambience. So good.
Besides Dylan Carlson of Earth, there are lots of other guest performers including Jesse Sykes, Joe Preston from Thrones (also ex-Melvins, ex-Earth), Kim Thayil from Soundgarden (aha) and Rex Ritter from Jessamine.
Packaged beautifully in a mini cd style gatefold, with AMAZING cover art, black on black with weird muted color and text printed in glossy varnish and metallic gold, both bands be-robed and standing in a cornfield, a full color booklet attached to the inside, a metallic sticker on the front, each copy individually numbered.
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrocky pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
Volume 1 is six tracks, a little over a half an hour, a dense assemblage of abstract rhythms and brooding, swirling psychedelia, heavy on the This Heat worship, beats stretched out over huge expanses of industrial whir and jagged angular guitars, very loping and hypnotic, brooding and drone-y, mysterious tribal rituals stretched out into epic spaced out, abstract rhythmic jams.
As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
Volume 2 is 4 tracks, 40 minutes, two epic jams, both 16+ minutes, separated by two shorter tracks. The opener starts with an endlessly hypnotic, near metal drum jam, over which guitars and sound makers creak and keen, a crystalline web of high end sonics over a swirling tribal rhythm. It could seemingly go on forever, and it sort of does, but near the end it dissipates into a dark spacious soundscape of distant clatter and thick rumbling buzz. After a one minute rhythmic experiment, all freaked out psych rock effects and super distorted drum sputter, the second lengthy jam kicks in, and it's definitely the most mellow and blissed out track on the first two volumes, some muted free jazz skitter, over a slow burning expanse of chiming guitars and smears of abstract melody all stretched into a near static glacial groove. So nice. As if that weren't enough, the last 5 minutes is some of that fuzzy crumbling blurry ambience we can never seem to get enough of. Soft focus and indistinct, shimmering guitars wrapped in thick crumbling guitars and a glistening sonic glow, like Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and that sort of thing, a gorgeous late night coda of dreamy drone-y bliss.
As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!
Now that they're a duo instead of a trio, SF's Tartufi have shifted their focus away from punchy pop hooks and towards a more epic and expansive punk/prog/pop exploration. The news has created some division around here between those who totally thought their old incarnation was pretty darn great and let down by their new direction; and those who think their old sound was good but a tad derivative and find their new direction amazing, ambitious and refreshingly their own. Perhaps this division would have been better resolved with a new name for their new sound, but what's done is done. Singer and guitarist, Lynne Angel and drummer, Brian Gorman with the help from Tim Green (of The Fucking Champs) have crafted a mathy stew of beauty and noise with vocals that are at times both angelic and damning with turn-on-a-dime changes, majestic sweeps, soft interludes, and only a touch of over-indulgence. The acrobatics that Angel brings doubly to the guitar and her voice have to be seen live to be believed, where they seriously sound like a four piece with a choir. While their new sound to some of us is definitely less immediately engaging than their old sound and may take a little getting used to, we think there will be plenty of fans, love and support for their new shift in focus. Rock on!
Every once in a while, we find ourselves missing the sound of classic math rock. The sound of late nineties post rock. Oh hell, who are we kidding, we're ALWAYS missing that stuff. Slint, Rodan, Bastro, Bitch Magnet, Breadwinner, Dazzling Killmen, Hurl, Crain, heck, even Andee's old band A Minor Forest. Mathy, convoluted, serpentine, minor key, weirdly catchy, strangely structured, lots of starts and stops. As much as we're loving the new breed of metal bands gone post rock or math rock. They definitely tend to lean toward the post side of the equation, preferring to bliss out rather than math out. But for any one who finds themselves getting a little chill when reading the above list of bands, Tiny Hawks are the band to give you everything you've been missing. Tiny Hawks are a duo from Rhode Island, but don't be expecting tangled Lightning Bolt spazz, or stripped down guitar and drums duo rock, this is a huge sprawling explosion of gorgeously melodic and deftly complicated math rock. You'd never know this was a duo (the drummer plays bass on the record) as these guys create a huge sound, thick and textured, dense and dreamy. Some tracks are spastic freakouts, all chaotic drum splatter and manic riffing, others are shimmery expanses of muted strum and dreamlike shuffle. There's definitely an early nineties Dischord element to their sound as well. Intricate, erratic, experimental, bits of jazz and metal twisted into post rock shapes and then set in a dizzyingly mathy framework. Convoluted minor key workouts peppered by sudden bursts of jagged aggro crunch and pound, and plenty of loping blissed out mellowness, drifting harmonics, clanging guitars, all drifting in a jangly haze. This is ALL the shit we love about the genre, all tangled up in a hugely fresh sounding kick ass blast of super aggressive, sweetly melodic, math rock anvil to the head. So goddamn good. Like your favorite band from 1996, got in a time machine, got a practice space down the hall from yours, and invited you over to stand around a sweaty, stinky practice space, get drunk, bounce around and have your mind and ears fucking blown!
Bay Area label Three Ring Records expand their roster by a third with four impressive new releases by Rykarda Parasol, Frankel, Scattered Pages and these New Englanders who call themselves Tom Thumb & The Latter Day Saints. Three Ring has already got fine releases by the indie rock/pop likes of Elephone, Soltero, Ebb & Flow and D.W. Holiday and Scrabbel, but with this recent outpouring they bolster their country'n'folk branches.
What a great introduction Kindermusik is! Their withery vocals are much like those of The Weakerthans with some Thom Yorke-ian inflections. They're set atop music that brings together the rustic twang of Calexico and the pop rocks of Sloan.
Very warm and engaging. Also ripe for the picking if you like M. Ward and My Morning Jacket!
Head spinning, herky jerky, bright and bold, yes indeedy one of our very favorite Load-label bands is back with a new album! Who else blends spazzcore prog with folk and hippy punk protest like these guys?? Nobody in the whole wide 'homeland' that every day makes this band's moniker more and more of a commonplace sentiment worldwide. It's no wonder that The Usaisamonster identify so closely with our nation's indigenous inhabitants, seeking some sort of (mythical, perhaps) spirituality, innocence and virtue somewhere in our shared American culture (the track "Okeepa Ceremony" is an example). Yet they don't choose to express their political passions (anger/disgust/horror, mainly) with unpleasant doomy grind or anything like that. No, their ranting takes the form of music that's much more creatively colorful and chaotic, up to and including epics like the 13 minute title cut, which spins from droning build ups to prog riff attack to simple folky strum. So even if you don't always get where they're coming from (or where they're going) the musical trip they take still is usually pretty interesting, or will be in just a matter of seconds. Imagine Lightning Bolt in Indian headdresses, jamming 'round a hippy campfire at an anti-G8 protest, something like that... musically, aesthetically and politically we can dig this album's general ideals, if not always the specifics, but regardless it's quite a spectacle!
