Yay, four more (five if you count the atmospherically stutterin' intro) tracks of the sinuous, powerful post-punk poppy progginess that Portland's 31 Knots has always wowed us with! They still sound like some weird, choppy blend of Yes and Fugazi (to use the usual shorthand), and their arty experimentation and sheer sonic bombast hasn't lost any of its punch or pleasurableness. And oooh, it's one of those cool lookin' 3" cds, with the extra clear plastic rim 'round the outside to give it the regular cd 5" diameter total. You'll understand what we're talking about when you see it.
This came out at the tail end of 2006, so we're hoping that they're pretty much ready to unleash the new full-length for which this has whet our appetites!
One of our favorite Acid Mothers Temple records available again thanks to the kind folks at Swordfish. Originally released on the band's own label and long out of print (we reviewed it originally way back in 2000), this new version is ultimately the same with a few minor alterations, different liner notes, now in a jewel case instead of a cardboard sleeve, but it's the music that matters, and the music is mind blowing.
Ivan Piskov's Wild Gals A Go-Go was these Japanese space travellers' third album and is jam packed with freaked out avant-hippy insanity. "Tumultuous psychedelic trip sound...Potentially massive frontal lobe damage. Real punch-drunk music!" is what it says inside. And that's pretty right on. Ultra epic psychedelic guitars blown into fuzzy druggy psychedelic space rock madness that we can never seem to get enough of.
This pretends to be a soundtrack to a supposed "psych-nonsense" film by alleged "Russian mondo film" director Ivan Piskov, but we're pretty sure that's all a put on. Regardless, check it out, especially if you need your fix of outerspacepsychrock!!
Second full length full length from East Bay sound technician (and AQ customer) Brandon Nickell, who spent the last year painstakingly assembling the sounds that would eventually become this here disc.
His previous full length, a big AQ fave was a blissed out collage of deep drones and thick soundscapes of high end skree, soft focus whispery minimalism and dense squalls of swirling noise. Even some shuffling skittering rhythms found there way into the mix.
On Maw, Nickell's approach is similar, although the first track threw us for a loop. A strange spacious slab of music concrete, the focal point being a strange grunting gasping reverb drenched animal sound. Like some mysterious electronic beast, confined to a tiny pen and registering his displeasure as it ruts and calls out to others of its kind. Creepy but pretty dang cool. The second track returns to more familiar waters, a super tranquil drift of burbling barely there rumble and subtle electronic pulses. A slow lugubrious crawl beneath and within the tiny sounds that make up a mysteriously indistinct low end world. After that it's another visit to the strange electronic zoo, to observe the insect enclosure, where some seriously angry winged creatures buzz wildly as they careen back and forth in front of the glass.
We move on into another long form stretch of abstract ambience, sparkling and glimmering like the glassy surface of a pond in the late afternoon, and then it's one more quick glimpse into the final enclosure, the beasts within are much more calm, lazing in the fading sunlight, their cooing and snorting, like some sort of shortwave radio static, interrupted by electronic birdcalls and the manufactured whoosh of a warm electronic breeze. So weird but strangely compelling and beautiful.
There's some definite Nurse With Wound worship here, as well as nods to Coleclough, Hafler Trio, and the like, but Nickell knows enough than to just ape his heroes, instead he takes what he needs and does some serious exploring on his own... and we like it.
Packaged in a super simple and striking white on white sleeve.
Gorgeous reissue of two long out of print cd-r's from Bay Area abstract drone drift outfit The Alps, featuring AQ staffer Scott Hewicker (Troll), Alexis Georgopoulos (Tussle) and Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Colophon, J.C. Ledesma), who together weave breathtaking expanses of blissed out shimmer and glistening meditative soundscapes well-suited to gazing at frosty mountain peaks such as those of their namesake.
The Alps explore mysterious worlds of haunting folky foresty freeform loveliness, trafficking in dark dreamy wonder, disembodied strains of some lost Appalachia float weightless in a dusky forest of murky mumbly ambience, while muted guitars and stumbling tribal drumming swirl and sway amidst delicate tendrils of creepy ghostly falsetto croon and swoon. Elsewhere, deep pools of shimmering cymbal wash sparkle and glimmer, the sky above a moonlit smear of ethereal electronic effervescence, all run through with streaks of subtle melody. Squeaky clarinets and alien flute toots melt into whirls of swish and whoosh, all laid over ominous drones and instrument hum and tape hiss.
Think The Wickerman meets Jewelled Antler or Neu! played at 16rpm broadcast through a moss covered speaker on the bottom of the sea, or the sound of the Northern Lights, recorded onto a wax cylinder and played back through a shortwave radio, while a boy on a nearby rooftop hurls broken cymbals into the drained swimming pool next door, the entire thing subtly underpinned by the relentless throb and pulse of rain dripping on upended plastic garbage cans. So good.
The only drag here is that the label decided to leave off one of our favorite tracks, the final number on Spirit Shambles, fearing its lo-fi sprawl and clatter didn't fit in with the Alps' lush ambience and moonlit glimmer, which is precisely why it worked so perfectly. Oh well, to hear what we're talking about you just might have to do some internet searching or late night eBaying, but don't let that deter you from picking this up, even minus that burst of corrosive murk, you'd be hard pressed to find a lovelier batch of shambling sonic swoon...
Packaged with all new artwork in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder.
We got a wee bit more from Animal Collective to close out 2006! Or, shall we say, to start 2007. This is their limited edition Australian import 'tour only' release People! There was a cdep version comprised of four songs: the title track, "Tikwid" and "My Favorite Colors" as well as a live version of the title track, but that's already gone (actually, we've got 2 left so we're not even listing it -- however it's gonna come out domestically sometime this winter supposedly). But we do still have maybe a dozen of this 7", which features just the first two tunes. It's a limited pressing of 1000, and we won't be able to get any more... so don't dilly dally!
With a band name that tips a referential (and we assume reverential) hat toward surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, an artist renowned for his haunting disembodied doll-centric creations of distorted body image perceptions, The Bellmer Dolls bring their own brand of musical dismembered remembrances or remembered dismemberments. Their turbulent songs contort and unravel with true late '70s /early '80s post-punk angst and aggression, but styled with a '00s blase couture flair. While their unhinged male vocals unquestionably echo those of early Nick Cave and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, overall the Bellmer Dolls follow most closely in the tumultuous path of more recent bands such as Pleasure Forever. The closest kinship perhaps is with that sadly now defunct SF band's criminally unsung guitarist Josh Hughes whose highly textured effected guitar atmospherics were capable of brewing up a blinding maelstrom all on their own. So needless to say, we think that's a good thing, but Bellmer Dolls aren't just sound-alikes. They cut their own shadowy, slightly sullied yet well-angled silhouettes. Very cool.
The Work Which Transforms God, Blut Aus Nord's most recent release (originally released in 2001, but reissued in 2005), quickly became an all time AQ fave, with its strange mix of damaged off kilter black metal, caustic industrialism and droney dark ambience. Since then the first three BaN discs have gotten reissued and we're just now finally getting around to reviewing them.
The Mystical Beast Of Rebellion was Blut Aus Nord's third release from way back in 2001, immediately preceding The Work Which Transforms God and displayed more of a classic black metal vibe, very droney and mesmeric, a seasick buzz drenched blast, with warped epic melodies, all very minor key and melancholy, lending the proceedings a very moody doomlike vibe. Very reminiscent of classic Immortal or Satyricon. There is definitely some sonic foreshadowing of weirdness to come, slow slithery stretches of murk and mumble, abstract ambient breakdowns, long stretches of buzz slowed way down into truly harrowing lurching lopes, riffs that bend and seem to warble as if some invisible hand was altering the pitch control, dark and dreary miserablism twisted into very Nortt like mid tempo droney doom.
But The Mystical Beast Of Rebellion is more about the blast and buzz, the forst and fuzz, and if you're anything like us, that should suit you just fine!
Oh yeah. '70s Turkish FUZZ rock in effect here, big time!! Knowing how much AQ customers LOVE the psychedelic Turkish tunes of decades past, this is a no-brainer. Buy it. Now. That is, if you like Edip Akbayram and Erkin Koray and all the others we've gone gaga over as the stack of such reissues gradually grows... These guys actually have membership links to all sorts of Istanbul rock stars, from Koray to Mogollar to Cem Karaca (whose early band Kardaslar we'd love to get a reissue of...). They were a pretty important band in the scene, on an underground level anyway.
The name Bunalim apparently means either Depression or Frustration in Turkish, fitting for a band hailing from a city, Istanbul, who defining mood is melancholy (according to Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk). You can hear both the energy of frustration and the sadness of depression in their music, which consists of blistering, Iron-Butterfly-heavy hard rockers mixed up with the style of traditional Anatolian folk dances and songs. Ballsy bombast and beautiful balladry both. And we're not kidding about Iron Butterfly -- one of the tracks here is a Turkish language cover of "Get Out Of My Life, Woman", a song (originally by Allen Toussaint, actually) that appeared on Iron Butterfly's first album, Heavy. Definitely it's the IB version that inspired Bunalim's rendition! Why so much "Bunalim" with these guys? Well it wasn't easy being a long-haired, underground rocker in that conservative society in those days! Plus even in the West there was much to make the youth feel worried and oppressed.
This disc collects their rare singles tracks (they never made an album) from 1970-'72, and captures them at their most raw and garagey, loud guitar rockin'. They definitely showcase a distinct, kick-ass Middle Eastern take on the acid rock sound of the day, and really what could sound better than that??
This cd reissue includes well-informed liner notes and lots of cool vintage photos in the cd booklet. Shadoks, keep 'em coming!
After a couple of super limited cd-r's and tapes, a release or two as Colophon, and a bunch as records as a member of the Alps and Tarentel, The Garden Of Forking Paths is Cantu-Ledesma's first proper full length, and it's a doozy. A subtle and immersive sound that belies the huge array of instruments used. Electric guitars, acoustic guitars, gong, sruti box, harmonium, singing bowl, cassette, microcassette, reel to reel tape machine, electronics, sound booster and ride cymbal, with help on one track with percussion, tapes and electronics. Somehow, all of those bits and baubles are melted down into a gorgeously lush, yet minimal series of slow crawls, deep rich drones, each adorned with subtle variations and bits of sonic color.
The multitude of tape machines used in the creation of this record gives the proceedings a raw, fuzzy analog vibe that definitely hits our Jeck-Hecker-Basinski spot. Fuzzy and indistinct, thick smeared sonic drifts, that occasionally glow with some sort of diffused inner light, but for the most part, slither darkly through the shadowy corners of your speakers. Here and there, some of the sound will spill from your speakers like black ink, shiny and shimmery, staining you ears with a mysterious darkness. The final track is the only track where you can hear the guitar, a mumbling buzzy melody buried way down in the mix, creeping through a moonlit landscape of shimmering warble and distant barely-there hum. A gorgeously murky minimal world of slow moving tape, vibrating metal, creaking buzz, whirling whispers and abstract dreamy drift.
Packaged in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder.
Ooooh Neko fans, this will surely send glorious shivers down your spine! Back in 2003 shortly after the release of Blacklisted and prior to The Tigers Have Spoken, beloved chanteuse Neko Case performed before a studio audience on the venerable country music tv program Austin City Limits (now over thirty years old!). This cd offers up her complete set of fourteen songs from that show (psst, there's also a dvd version for a few bucks more!). A well balanced mix of originals and covers, it inevitably ends up being sort of a 'Best of Neko Case' compilation (well, up to that year at least!). It offers more proof (not that any more is really needed) that she's definitely one of the few artists around whose performance and personality are just as potently captivating and affecting live in person, on live recordings and on studio productions.
As always, she's supported by a stellar group of musical friends -- Jon Rauhouse on pedal steel, guitar and banjo, Tom Ray on stand up bass and Kelly Hogan on backing vocals. The latter once again provides her trademark high dulcet tones as a sweet counterpart to Case's lusty smoldering delivery. It's almost as though Case is being accompanied by an angel. Lovely!
Many many fan favorites are included: "Deep Red Bells", "Hex", "Furnace Room Lullaby", "Outro With Bees", and yes, "Favorite"! Plus many wonderful covers too: "Hank Williams' "Alone And Foresaken", Bob Dylan's "Buckets Of Rain", Catherine Irwin's "Hex" and a smokin' rendition of "Look For Me (I'll Be Around)" an ol' classic popularized by Sarah Vaughan. Need we say? Recommended!
The long running TV show Austin City Limits has been dipping into its rich vaults as of late. Elsewhere on this list is a totally stunning live performance from the show that Neko Case recorded a few years back. Digging a couple decades back finds this never before released live performance by the late great Johnny Cash. After a twenty or so years of being on Columbia, the 1980's found him bouncing from one record label to another, never quite getting the freedom or respect he so rightfully deserved, and would finally begin to claim again right before his death. But even in those tumultuous times, there would be no denying Johnny's power as a live performer. This live set from 1987 finds him visiting many of his classics and he's joined by June Carter Cash on the bittersweet "Where Did We Go Right?" Needless to say even with Cash gone, we'll no doubt be hearing lots more from the man in black.
While we've always loved us some Billy Childish, there's something about when he and Holy Golightly collaborate that just takes it to the next level for us! And maybe it's because as much as we love Billy we love love love Holly Golightly! She's without a doubt one of the strongest, sexiest, and most confident singers of her generation. She possesses a timeless poignancy that we think will make her even more revered and appreciated as time goes on. Luckily her inclusion on The Broken Flowers soundtrack helped her reach a well deserved wider audience. When she joined The Headcoatees in 1991 she became a part of one of the best garage bands of that decade. She and Childish side by side are like a grittier version of Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra. This is a reissue of the pair's 1999 album and it still packs a serious punch. Primal blues soaked rockabilly with a garage pop sensibility. It don't get a whole lot better than this!
Making music is all about transporting the listener to another place. Creating sounds or songs that transform the listener's whole world, so with eyes closed, a person could be anywhere, drifting through space, wandering in caves miles below the surface of the earth, laying in tall grass in the countryside, holed up in a concrete bunker during a war, wandering through the smoking ruins of some ancient city, all through the magic of music.
Most of our favorite sound makers use their considerable talents to sonically alter the course of time, taking us back with them to some unrealized past, some mysterious otherworld where it's still the middle ages, or the 1900's, or the fifties or even just the seventies. Their sounds are faded postcards, old snapshots browned with age, glimpses of places and people long forgotten, it's all very evocative and hauntingly emotional. Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, they all meticulously craft windows to other worlds, using various instruments and techniques, they allow us to step through our speakers and into some rainy day, an overcast afternoon, in a barely populated city, an intimate get together with family and friends, a lonely walk through dark alleys and rain slicked streets, but unlike a film or a photo, these are less distinct, more like memories than actual visual images, and like memories, they are nothing but personal recollections of events long past, and like memories, some parts are fuzzy, indistinct, everything seems faded and ghostlike, on the verge of being lost forever. Capturing that ineffable sound, manufacturing a world of mysterious musical memories, with music, never fails to captivate us completely, and we could listen to those sounds, rich with nostalgia and warmth, rife with magic and mystery, pretty much forever...
French experimental sound artist Eric Cordier has taken a bit of a detour from his usual electro-improv and installation work and has joined the ranks of our favorite sound makers, with his latest, Breizhiselad, an epic and gorgeously inventive exploration of tape, the turntable and a single 78rpm 10" record found in the attic of a friend's grandmother. The original recording, one of the first to proudly feature the Breton language after years and years of persecution, was to Cordier's ears, "horrible because of the catechism-like vocal arrangements" but the conviction of the vocalists, as well as the condition of the record itself, convinced him that these were important sounds. SO he transferred the sounds to tape, and attempted to capture the essence of the music, the power and the passion, while discarding the rest.
The result is a haunting epic, an expansive drift through some lost era, the voices are disembodied and wreathed in murk and static, an EVP broadcast from the beyond, rhythms and melodies develop suddenly amidst a cacophony of distortion and processed voices.
The opening track sets the tone, with a looped low end rumble, fuzzy and mysterious, the rich warm sound of deep harmonies, amidst a bed of tangled crackle, looped and chopped into lurching rhythms, like some disembodied short wave doom, a creepy low end moaning melody that gradually fades into a soundscape of layered angelic voices, creating a stuttering blurry chorale. The record is peppered with field recordings and bits of found sound, whipping wind, footsteps, snippets of conversations, the crunch of boots in snow, all woven into the strangely liturgical sound of Cordier's mysterious world of sound.
Imagine the murky undersea drift of Oval's skipping cd-scapes, but wrapped in a thick cloak of analog imperfections, skips and pops and crackle and hiss, imbued with an ominous undercurrent, minor key melodies assembled from rumble and hum, thick swells of static and clipped stuttering snatches of organ or voice, all transformed into creepy complex squalls of sound, scraping and hiccuping, but just as often, smoothed into hushed, dreamlike drifts, warm and muted, almost like some analog Pop Ambient, letting us float serenely and ghostlike through a sonic world of dark forests and crumbling castles, small villages and rolling hillsides, battlefields and ruined cities, of war, famine and death, but also of hope and salvation.
Nearly forty years old and still as stunning as ever, Holger Czukay's first solo effort, Canaxis, gets a fully re-mastered second reissue. Recorded in 1968, just months after the formation of CAN, Czukay, a former student of Stockhausen, teamed up with producer Rolf Dammers to put these two nearly twenty minute pieces together, comprised solely of taped material culled from shortwave radio broadcasts. Czukay employed one of the first uses of "sampling" by putting loops of Medieval Choral music, Japanese Koto, Australian Aboriginal chanting, bells and most notably recordings of two anonymous Vietnamese singers together and subtly shifting and manipulating their tape speeds. What could have been a mere music concrete exercise, would become an engagingly disorientating meditation on what Brian Eno and Jon Hassell would later term "Fourth World" possibilities, harmonizing the organic and the mechanical of ethnic and western musical idioms yet tempered through Czukay's humanistic and idiosyncratic approach to his far-flung material. That it was illegally recorded at Stockhausen's studio just adds to the mystery and pedigree of this amazing recording (supposedly Czukay and Dammers, frustrated with the limitations of their own tape machines, broke into the Master's studio and recorded Canaxis in one night!). Newly repackaged in a 3 panel digipak with liner notes and the artwork of the original private pressing, and beautifully re-mastered by Czukay and Andreas Torkler. It features two bonus tracks (different than the one from the 1995 first reissue) from the CAN Solo Edition concerts in 1999. Highly Recommended!!!
Wow!! It wasn't just but three lists ago when we were lamenting that Karen Dalton's second album (and only other recording), In My Own Time had yet to be reissued, and now here we are reviewing it (thanks Light In the Attic!). And we have to say, it has never sounded better! Recorded in 1971 with a full band at Bearsville studio in Woodstock, In My Own Time has a much different feel then Dalton's spare and smoky first recording, It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You the Best. Since Dalton had so little recorded output, the differences between the two records has given In My Own Time, an unfairly maligned reputation over the years by folk purists and others due to its more contemporized feel and bluesy folk-rock arrangements. True, In My own Time, doesn't quite meet the folk majesty of It's So Hard To Tell, and there are a couple of song choices, such as the all too familiar "When A Man Loves A Woman", and the saccharine Motown stalwart, "How Sweet It Is", that we could probably do without (however, in Dalton's defense, if we had to hear either of those songs again, we would prefer her versions to anyone else's! Such is the strength of her musical interpretations.). But every other song is purest gold, from the heartbreaking opener by Dino Valenti, "Something's On Your Mind", to the traditional tunes "Katie Cruel" (covered recently both by Bert Jansch and White Magic) and "Same Old Man", where we get to hear her play her mighty 27 fret banjo. Produced by Harvey Brooks, who played bass on her first album, In My Own Time is right up there with the best folk and roots rock albums of the time put out by Dylan, The Band, The Byrds, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Featuring a 30-page booklet with lots of pictures and extensive liner notes by Lenny Kaye, Nick Cave and Devendra Banhart. Reissue of the year and of course absolutely essential!!!!
Sometimes one person's tragedy is another's good fortune. Don't know if any of you scored any good deals from Tower Records sad going out of business sale, but we were surprised at some of the finds still available on the second to last day. Of course the Rock and the Hip Hop sections were long plundered, but if you ventured into the Folk, World, and 20th century composer section, you could still find a $35 import for just 4 bucks of some obscure koto avant-jazz or take a chance on an old folkie that we had never heard of which is the case with this gem. Who is Barbara Dane? Well we thought she would be some songbird like Carolyn Hester or Texas Gladden, but Dane's voice is truly a force to be reckoned with, not a collegiate howler, like Judy Henske or Dorris Henderson but husky, low and tainted with regret. Here on her first recording on the Tradition label (home of John Jacob Niles) she delivers some of the loneliest sounding interpretations of songs from the folk cannon including the Carter Family's "Single Girl", "Girl of Constant Sorrow", and Woody Gutherie's "Ramblin'". Moonshinin', the painful bedevilment of men and standing tall on one's own are consistent themes in these songs, accompanied by guitar and banjo. Dane, who is still alive and still singing is now known for being more of a Blues singer, but she entered that particular world through these amazing folk interpretations. What a nice discovery! Fans of John Jacob Niles, Cat Power, and Karen Dalton will find lots to love here. Since not everybody was as lucky as one of us happened to be to find this at the Tower sale, we thought we'd order 'em in -- even at full price, it's well worth it!!
Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Previously the only work by Deathprod we stocked here at Aquarius was the split cd with Biosphere on Rune Grammofon in which the two artists reworked fellow Norwegian Arne Nordheim's electronic compositions. Having enjoyed that disc very much, we were pretty excited about the mysterious looking matte black four CD box by Deathprod that arrived at our laboratory recently. If the black box was evocative enough to pique our interest, the music the music contained within surely did not betray our hopes. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delay and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound -- such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence -- into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. The tracks on these four discs were recorded between 1991 and 2000, and while some of the material was released by Sten on cassette through his own label (also titled Deathprod), much of it is previously unreleased or was super limited in number. Two tracks in particular, a six minute narration from American born Oslo resident Matt Burt and a couple tracks of an organ, vibes and drum trio not unlike Sagor & Swing stick out in this four disc set. More typical are tracks which blossom out from a single cell of an idea: one chord, or one blast of noise. At times Deathprod sounds almost like an attempt at recreating Thomas Koner's soundscapes using the audio palette of Mauricio Bianchi. On Imaginary Songs From Tristan da Cunha, Sten went so far as to record tracks on a Nagra deck, transfer them to wax cylinders and then transfer them once more to digital media. The result are authenticly old and decaying tracks which are hauntingly beautiful as well. Other tracks feature deteriorating blasts of what sounds almost like a fog horn progressively decaying into grinding metal; throbbing drones and eerie female chorus -- a la Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna" from 2001 -- building with layers of feedbacky washes of sound. The four tracks that make up Sten's most recent album on the set -- Morals And Dogma -- are possibly his best works yet: icey, bleak soundscapes of drones. Any of the tracks here would make an excellent soundtrack. On "Dead People's Things", the most sorrowful of melodies is played on a theremin over a foundation of delicate, scratchy bowing of violin and a deep bass throbbing drone. "Orgone Donor" consists of a slowly shifting chordal drone of whispy violins, harmonium and saw, with each instrument leading and then resolving the chord in turn.
So weird and so wonderful! Man, if only the Krofft Supershow was still on the air Deerhoof would be the best house band ever. Sid and Marty's tweaked candy-colored tv show trips are the perfect visual match for this Bay Area band's sounds. Imagine taking your sugar-buzzed ears for a wild rollercoaster ride on which the loops and corkscrews are all twisted into such macrame knots that you lose all sense of which way is up! Delirious thrills and chills galore. Friend Opportunity continues on from where The Runners Four left off with even grander scale productions that wouldn't be at all out of place in some theatrical musical... a very psychedelic one, mind you! We heart Deerhoof!
Oooh. A real sharp reissue (deluxe, all-white slipcase packaging!) of this seminal NWOBHM classic. If you recognize that acronym, then you should know this album. That's New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, and this album by Diamond Head is in our NWOBHM top ten with the best of Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Venom, Angel Witch, etc. Just TRY not to bang your head to this heavy, rockin' tunage!! The seven songs on this, their ultra catchy and energetic 1981 debut, proved that the vocals of Sean Harris and the guitar riffs of Brian Tatler were a dynamite combo. "Am I Evil", "It's Electric", "Sucking My Love", "Helpless", "The Prince"...all their best stuff is right here. (Plus this disc also includes seven more tracks from early singles, etc.)
Yup, they shoulda-coulda-woulda been "the next Zeppelin", but they never fulfilled their early promise... still this album is an all-time metal essential, and also Diamond Head should get a LOT of the credit for a band plenty more folks have heard of, by the name of Metallica. Big big Diamond Head influence there. As Metallica acknowledged by covering quite a few DH songs over the years, the originals all found here. What about Diamond Head's influences? Well, Zeppelin, and definitely Thin Lizzy -- but they sound quite different to those other Thin Lizzy influenced NWOBHM giants, Iron Maiden.
Basically, if you like metal(lica) and you don't have this album... get it! This is also the best cd edition we've seen to date. Nice packaging simulating the original autographed white sleeve, remastered sound, bonus tracks, with liner notes explaining the whole DH saga...
We've had a bright lil' burst of Throwing Muses related releases lately including a reissue of their excellent University album and an imminent solo album from Kristin Hersh. This one somehow slipped by our radar a few months back, and we're sincerely sorry it did because it is terrific! It's Tanya Donelly's fourth solo outing. This Hungry Life was recorded live over the course of two nights in an old hotel in Bellows Falls, Vermont. Apparently those two evenings were during a heatwave which appears to have compounded the dreamy delirium usually associated with both Donelly and Hersh's off kilter pop music. Much more feisty and energetic than her last solo release, 2004's stark, hushed Whiskey Tango Ghost. This maybe partly due to he's backed by an impressive lot -- her husband Dean Fisher (guitarist for The Juliana Hatfield Three), Rich Gilbert (guitar and pedal steel player for Frank Black & The Catholics), drummer Arthur Johnson (also of Come), violinist Joan Wasser (who's also played with Lou Reed and Antony & The Johnsons) and vocalist Bill Janowitz (of Buffalo Tom). As always, top notch, unmistakably Donelly, dizzying goodness.
Recorded circa 1979, this debut record from Noel Ellis (son of reggae legend Alton Ellis), has finally been reissued by the Light In The Attic label as part of their "Jamaica To Toronto" series, launched with the excellent comp of the same name. Vocalist Noel Ellis's hard to find album (originally released in '83) is really fantastic, six tracks of dubby, soulful, spacey reggae grooves, recorded at Summer studios outside of Toronto, a little bit of the West Indies in the Great White North, a place frequented by such local and visiting reggae luminaries as Johnnie Osbourne and Jackie Mittoo (both featured here). One of this album's tracks, originally released as a single in '79, is a killer version of "Rocking Universally", a song later to be covered by the Clash as "Armageddon Time". All in all, another treasure trove of rare reggae essential dug up and dusted off by Light In The Attic. Righteous.
In a digipack, with 16-page cd booklet full of in-depth liner notes and vintage color photos.
One of the first times we heard from NYC space/post/synth/psych rock combo Escapade was on a split with Acid Mothers Temple. And damn if they didn't manage to hold their own. In fact, if memory serves, their propulsive synthy space drone ended up outshining AMT's same already familiar psych rock freakout.
So here we are a few years later, with the latest full length from these guys, and we're happy to say it's just as solid. Maybe even a little bit more trippy and spacey. Which is of course a very good thing. As we've mentioned in the past, modern prog/space/psych rock can tend toward the cheesy, a very few bands manage to bliss out and rock out with out sounding like Hawkwind lite. Escapade are definitely among the elite, with their stretched out jams, and some simple motorik rhythms that definitely remind us of Circle. In fact, if you took the looped riffing out of Circle and injected some scrabbling psychedelic freakouts you'd pretty much Escapade. Throw in some buzzing sitars, some tripped out abstract This Heat-isms, some wild free jazz drumming here and there, some billowing clouds of dense space rock FX, some soaring heart-of-the-sun leads, and all sorts of droning atmosphere, and you're in for a kick ass tripped out drug drenched space rock freakout. Fans of Circle, Kinski, Acid Mothers Temple, Hawkwind and the like will definitely want to check this out...
Here's a nice new reissue of this Fahey classic (his eighth album, originally released in 1968). The iconoclastic "American primitive" guitarist is at his finger-pickin' best here, performing pieces loaded with spacious, aching, pristine loveliness, like "View (East From The Top Of The Riggs Road/B&O Trestle)", "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible City Of Bladensburg", and the title track, indeed a jaunty clipper ship of a tune. All in some ways traditionally inspired, but with a unique, creative talent to additionally experiment and innovate. Entering Fahey's world on The Yellow Princess (or via other classic albums of his like Death Chants, Breakdowns And Military Marches or The Legend Of Blind Joe Death), is to behold a wondrous architecture of beauty and meaning, held aloft by one man's fingertips, with help from the spirits of the past.
One reason that this new reissue is so nice is that they've tacked on several bonus tracks! Three of 'em, recorded in 1965 ("the lost Elektra demos"), all previously unreleased. And, appended to Fahey's own original, inimitable and illuminating liner notes in the thick cd booklet, there's new notes also from modern day Fahey acolytes/appreciators Glenn Jones (of Cul de Sac) and M. Ward.
Another amazing sonic document from the one man guitar outfit known as Fear Falls Burning, and much like the 7" reviewed elsewhere on this list, Fear Falls Burning, aka Dirk Serries is proving himself to be a modern master of metallic minimalism, not so much SUNNO))) or Earth as maybe Morton Feldman. His compositions display a similar emotional warmth while retaining quite a bit of musical restraint. Less is more, resulting in way way more.
This 10" begins sounding like Earth 2 on 45, a buzzing alien low end melody, tangled and slowly unfurling amidst an expansive backdrop of oozing low end rumble and layer after layer of buzz and whir. The whole of side A ends up sounding like some sort of string section, albeit with strings that just so happen to be downtuned and distorted. Side B jettisons side A's melody almost completely, leaving in its place a ghostly afterimage, transparent swirls of abstract glimmer, guitars that sparkle, dreamy and sun dappled, melodies exist, but they are barely visible traces and streaks in an already blindingly effervescent soundscape, like a super mellowed out Sunroof!, so nice.
A gorgeous picture disc on nice thick vinyl, both sides close up images of the bridge of an electric guitar, packaged in a thick plastic sleeve with a printed color sticker (complete with liner notes) sealing the sleeve shut.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
It was definitely tempting to toss Fear Falls Burning into the pit with all the other guy-with-a-guitar amp-on-ten-slow-sludge-drone outfits that have been popping up like crazy in the wake of the SUNNO))) / Earth dirgedronedoom explosion. But the more we hear, the more we realize the music of Fear Falls Burning, while sharing some sonic similarities with his downtuned dirge brethren is actually exploring completely different territory. This is not just amp against the amp feedback, or heavy metal riffs played as slow as humanly possible, instead this is an exploration of the electric guitar, of the amplifier, of distortion and feedback as tools of modern minimalism. So much so, that much of the time, Fear Falls Burning almost sounds like Morton Feldman composed for electric guitar.
On the two tracks on this 7", recorded live in 2006, FFB crafts two chunks of modern minimalism, from thick sheets of guitar, and a rumbling low end, managing to deftly arrange each into whispers and shimmers more than any sort of metallic crunch and pummel. Side A is delicate and abstract, glistening peals of high end, warm swells that expand like some slow motion super nova, underpinned by the thick rumble of controlled amp buzz, a dense and thick whir spread out beneath a sky of shooting stars. Side B, is similar, but much more lyrical, haunting melodies, played out amidst and within huge swirls of abstract guitar texture and slow, floating steel string abstractions. So gorgeous.
Packaged in beautiful, textured paper sleeves, printed in a barely visible gloss ink, and pressed on thick clear vinyl!
And of course, super limited, only 500 COPIES!
Another gorgeous missive from the ever expanding world of modern freak folk, this time from Philly based singer, songwriter, guitarist, cellist Margaret Wienk, who with Music For Witches and Alchemists has crafted a darkly dramatic gem of moody mournful melancholia. Equal parts Pentangle, Incredible String Band, and of course some of her more modern sonic compatriots, Brightblack, Vetiver, Espers (Greg Weeks and Meg Baird both play on Music For Witches and Alchemists) and the like, Fern Knight is most definitely modern folk, but at the same time sounds so classic, the songwriting, Wienk's voice, the arrangements, a perfect combination. But the band manage to take that classic sound and infuse it with some sweet sonic mystery, due in no small part to the unlikely instrumentation, the sweet moaning cellos, dreamy swaths of harp, alien melodies on the singing saw, the twang of the Jew's harp, the wheezing harmonium, but unlike most bands, those sounds don't define Fern Knight's sound, merely add to the texture and mood of the music, which even stripped to its bare basics would still sound as sweet.
Following up their debut cdep, last year's Pacemaker EP, these sprightly SF popsters continue to keep things short'n'sweet on their second release. This 7" features two snappy pop numbers with buzzing guitars, crisp drumming and emotive female vocals from Ms Carly Schneider. When they slow things down a bit on the b-side "March Into The Flames" they bring to mind a more brooding Sleater-Kinney. More please!
Limited pressing of 300 on ultra pale green clear vinyl.
Before all you Forgotten Woods fanatics freak out the way we did when we first saw this, let us say that most of this disc IS included in the still available Baklengs Mot Stupet 1992-1996 triple cd set. But don't stop reading, there is definitely still a good reason to pick this up, even if you have the 3cd set. There are basically two possibilities for wanting to own this, a brand new reissue of Sjel Av Natten. Either you're a newbie, who wants to check out FW, but doesn't want to drop $25. Although we can pretty much guarantee, that once you wrap your ears around this you WILL want everything you can get your hands on. Or, you already own the set, but desperately need every bit of Forgotten Woods there ever was, and the fact that this disc contains two exclusive, unreleased FW jams is enough to send you scooting toward the buy button.
For the newbie, let's explain the wonder and allure that is Forgotten Woods (we'll get to the extra tracks in a second):
So...what's the big deal you ask, why are these Forgotten Woods so unforgettable? Well, first off, and at first listen, this will definitely appeal to the whole raw, old-school, Nordic forest black metal necrocrowd. Really good grim stuff in the unholy spirit of classic Darkthrone and Burzum, but with that extra kinda inept, Benighted Leamsish fuckedupedness to it that of course makes us love it all the more. And, additionally and importantly, there's also always a strange, unexpected sort of poppiness underlying everything. As a friend (who also likes this band, and is a member of Thuja, the Blithe Sons, Buried Civilizations, the Skygreen Leopards and a bunch of other Jewelled Antler acts) put it, "man it's good...completely inept, like they're barely pulling it off, total 13-year-old-metal-kid-in-the-basement drums." So, this is most definitely the kind of black metal (like Benighted Leams, Xasthur, Lugubrum, Leviathan, Abruptum, Meads of Asphodel, Ved Buens Ende, and Sigh for example) that we have to recommend to all of our customers who are into (not-necessarily metal) weirdness.
So for the rest of you, the ones who already love and cherish their Forgotten Woods discs, there are indeed two unreleased tracks (three, if you count the weird 10 second spoken word outro), both incredibly raw, some sort of rehearsal or practice space recordings, but even in that form, maybe especially, they completely kick ass, heavy and stumblingly brutal, but with an incredible pop sensibility buried right below the surface. The second track has a definite Slinty Ved Buens Ende vibe, but both are amazing, proving that besides being grim and true, these guys, whether they realized it or not, were incredible songwriters as well. So recommended, as is the triple cd set (maybe even more so!).
Dude! It's about time we had some Frijid Pink here at the store! Just do a keyword search on our website for "Frijid Pink" and you'll find a small handful of references we've make to this somewhat unsung late '60s Detroit R&B infused hard rock combo, in the context of talking about some other psychedelic, "proto-metal" and stoner rock discs, among them AQ faves Flower Travellin' Band ('cause both bands did covers of "House Of The Rising Sun" -- in Frijid Pink's case it was their biggest, and pretty much only, hit.)
At last a nice new reish has come along, of FP's self-titled 1970 debut, where you'll find "House Of The Rising Sun" along with a bunch of other great, boogying bluesy garage psych tunes, played by a band partial to the fuzz and possessed of a lead singer with powerful rawk pipes, Kelly Green The "Sunshine Of Your Love" styled fuzz monster "Crying Shame" is one standout (heard also on the Cherrystones Rocks comp a while back). "Tell Me Why" is another extreme fuzz attack. Frijid Pink has a gentle side too, there's some (charmingly dated?) hippy mellowness on here for sure. And when they're heavy, be aware it's more of the '60s variety than the '70s (more Vanilla Fudge than Black Sabbath!) but the aforementioned fuzz levels are up there with Sir Lord Baltimore and we'd certainly say that Frijid Pink deserve to be mentioned alongside them and also likes of the James Gang, Cactus, Iron Butterfly, and other proto-proto-metal contenders! And for sure they shouldn't be forgotten when considering the legacy of '60s Michigan rockers like the SRC, Amboy Dukes, and the MC5.
This Akarma reissue comes in an extremely pink digipack, and includes two bonus tracks.
Frijid Pink, yeah!
Every once in a while we'll get a disc in the mail, that has us intrigued before we've even heard it. Take Gog for instance. Well, to begin with, they're called Gog. Or so we believed. The cover wasn't entirely clear. They could have been called Sounds Of Battle And Souvenir Collecting, which is just as intriguing. The cover art is kind of trippy, a little bit spacey, still no sure sign of what was in store musically. So we tossed it on, and wow, nice, some sort of soft drifting shimmer, like signing bowls, bowed metal, deep resonant chiming over a thick soft backdrop of deep dark ambience. Another perfect late night drift record we're thinking, when all of a sudden the 21 minute long second track kicks in and holy shit, suddenly we're in a whole 'nother place, and it's not nearly so pretty and tranquil. A huge Earth 2 like riff, sprawled out and massive, a glacial low end crush, churning, downtuned and buzzing, each chord pulsing and throbbing, just as suddenly, some strangely beautiful melodies surface, and start drifting right along side the main slow motion riff, and suddenly it's both epic AND lovely, pretty, but ominously heavy, underneath, all manner of murky sounds swirl and whirl, a constantly shifting sea of drones and muted underwater FX, then again Gog knock us on our asses when the drums finally kick in at about the 10 minute mark, and the song transforms into some sort of lumbering sludge doom behemoth, the cymbals sizzling way up in the mix, the drums pounding, the riff more corrosive and harsh, monstrous and massive doom metal that unfurls even as it launches into action, subtly blissing out, until Gog's doom is heavily laced with My Bloody Valentine fuzziness and the sunburst blown out beauty of bands like the Angelic Process and Nadja. An gorgeously blinding blast of sludgy brilliance.
The Golden Oaks are a dreamfolk duo consisting of Keith Wood (Hush Arbors) and Brad Rose (The North Sea, and Digitalis Records head honcho) who perfectly bridge the gap between soft focus free form Appalachian folk, and drifting droney abstract ambience.
Falsetto vocals, delivered mantra-like, drift lazily over delicately finger picked steel string guitars, and thick swells of harmonium, strings are bowed and buzz warmly, everything wrapped in gauzy swaths of smokey reverb.
Here and there, the druggy space rock meter gets pushed into the red, with streaks of fuzzy white hot feedback wrapped in layer after layer of undulating guitar fuzz, a dizzying otherworldly dreamdrone, an indistinct shadow of Spacemen 3 / Loop-ed space bliss, cast over a glistening expanse of crystalline Appalachia. Quite nice.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, already sold out at the label we have the last 20 copies....
The interesting thing about the cd-r underground, is that very few of the artists are actual bands. There is drone, and dreamy folk, electronic experimentation, collectives who together create folky drones, solo guitar, huge blasts of sludgy dirge, but rare is the actual band, a bunch of folks in a studio with guitars and drums and whatever else. Sure, the cd-r is perfect for the bedroom composer and home based experimentalist, but c'mon, cd-r's are the perfect way to discover some fucked up band who never plays out of their home town, or to take an inexpensive chance on some group that may or may not be cool.
Well, one BAND who have existed pretty much exclusively in the world of limited cd-r releases, is NYC's Heavy Winged, a psych rock space noise duo, who whip up a pretty serious squall of blown out guitarnoise and spastic drum sputter.
Take all the noisiest parts of the Dead C, Hawkwind, Loop, Spacemen 3, My Bloody Valentine, White Hills, Burnt Hills, and any other spaced out drug crazed combo you can think of, run those through about a million distortion pedals, record it onto a busted 4 track and you've got Heavy Winged. Originally released as a super limited (20 copies) release for Terrastock, Taking The Veil is two half hour tracks of wild and wooly, blown out, noise drenched space rock. A murky spastic sprawl, that pulses like Hawkwind on a busted car stereo with the bass all the way up and the treble all the way down, before someone flicks a switch and the band LIGHTS UP, suddenly the sound is incandescent, a barrage of psychedelic solar flares, blinding and deafening, the drums a sizzling splattery beast, spraying percussive shards in all directions, the guitar an beast unleashed, whipping from pulsing krauty riffage to exploding sky melting skree, all in the blink of an eye. And that's just the first track. The second track is like the darker dirgier side of the same coin, murky and stumbling through a dense cloud of unhinged psych guitar freakout, and drum-kit-down-the-cellar-stairs percussive punishment. WAY recommended.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be Tim Hecker's Harmony In Ultraviolet.
We often reference Hecker when reviewing records by other practitioners of a similar soundmaking process, but there's something so pure and organic about the way Hecker composes and creates, how he deftly assembles and degrades his sounds and songs and melodies. Managing to sound modern but antiquated at the same time, viewing the world through sleep filled eyes, everything soft and fuzzy, sometimes intense and ominous, sometimes even dark and downright scary, but always suffused with a shimmering radiant warmth, making all of his sounds glow from within. Each song a weather worn snapshot, frayed and dusty, comfortable and lived in sounding. It's a music that requires close listening, a subtly immersive sound, but once inside it, once the sound is all around you, only then can you pick out all of the details, hear the hidden melodies, only then can you let go, and get completely lost in Hecker's gorgeous world of mysterious sound. Some of the most beautiful music in the world indeed.
As commonplace as glitched electronica is these days (even rock bands are now 'glitching things up' to sound more avant garde), a handful of these abstractionists have dedicated themselves to understanding the parameters of their tools and attempting to improve upon that which has come before. For several years now, this elite has included Fennesz and Stephan Mathieu, with Ekkehard Ehlers often exhibiting glimmers of similar electronic brilliance; however, Canadian electron wrangler Tim Hecker has come into his own with an equally strong aesthetic and a series of amazing releases. Outside his microhouse moniker Jetone, Hecker has released three records to date under his own name, beginning with the exceptional Fennesz worship of "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" and the shellshocked obliteration of Van Halen (quite literally!) on "My Love Is Rotten To The Core", however, "Radio Amor," Hecker's third album, may be even his best yet. Through an immensely rich set of reverb and granular synthesis patches, Tim Hecker has rendered the digital blip into a blissed out field of electric drones and warm, white noise. Throughout "Radio Amor," Hecker has ripped apart clustered notes from a piano and suspended them in the ether of an electricity, and occasionally the warm buzzings of analogue distortion emerge from the rippling, digitized vibrations. Half melodies, algorithmic ping-pong tones, and hard disc skips are all bathed with a radiant luster of electrified golds and coppers. Totally gorgeous.
MPEG Download: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.m3u]
MPEG Download: "I'm Transmitting Tonight" [/audio/timheckerimtrans.mp3]
We just got the very welcome reissue of Throwing Muses' excellent University album. Prior to its original release back in 1995 and following the group's first album sans co-frontwoman Tanya Donnelly, lead singer/guitarist Kristin Hersh went it alone with her first solo album Hips And Makers. Now a dozen years later, we're graced with her eighth solo effort and it's fresh, energetic and coincidentally the most 'Muses sounding to date. Mind you, it's fancied up with strings and other embellishments that totally compliment her mostly guitar and vocal based pop tunes... y'know, things that you wouldn't necessarily expect to find on a 'Muses album. Each song strikes a perfect balance of flowery and fiery. Great stuff!
Another way too limited cd-r release from the mysterious Hoor-Paar-Kraat, who we have been digging pretty heavily as of late. It's time for someone to step up and do a proper unlimited actual cd release for these guys, cuz this stuff is to dark and weird and cool to only be hear by a handful of folks. But for now, this is what we got. And what we got is the last 30 copies of this 16 minute 3" cd-r, a single track of slow moving, textural creepiness, ambient maybe, but there's a whole lot going on. Grinding distorted slow motion guitars lumbering glacially way off in the distance, murky mumbled vocals meandering amidst the tangled strands of low end buzz. Up front, still more low end, but sort of glistening and shimmering, nearly transparent, barely obscuring soft barely-there melodies drifting nearly inaudibly low in the mix.
The guitars build and build, a huge lumbering wall of slow motion riffing, the low end is gradually sucked out of the mix, leaving a snarling buzzing brittle wall of hissing fuzz and coruscating guitar grind, that becomes more and more noisy and muddy, eventually the buzz splinters into abrasive shards, and song collapses into blackness.
Easily the most aggressive thing we've heard from these guys, might appeal to fans of SUNNO))) and Birchville Cat Motel and other modern noiseniks as well as the ambient drone set...
LIMITED TO 40 COPIES!! WE GOT 30!!! After that they are gone for good....
It was never any big secret that AQ faves Hotel Alexis sounded a LOT like Sparklehorse. How could it be really. After all, both groups crafted gorgeously lush low key country soundscapes, more whisper and hum than twang in most cases, with sweetly crooned vocals, nestled among rich worlds of minor key misery and soft lonely blues. And Hotel Alexis' Sidney Lindner (brother to Flying Canyon's Cayce, who both play together as Golden Hotel) has a voice that's a dead ringer for Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse. But for every similarity, there are some crucial differences. Lately, Sparklehorse has moved on, Danger Mouse production, super star guest spots, and a new sound closer to a countrified Flaming Lips, which is great, don't get us wrong, but it's not the sound we fell in love with. Lindner and his Hotel Alexis still wander those same rain swept streets, are still lost and alone, recording by lamp light, finding solace in each lonely note. The sound is similar, but there is definite progression.
Lindner has continued to look inward, expanding his dark personal universe, getting more and more lush and expansive certainly, but without losing the hushed intimacy that made the debut, The Shining Example is Lying On The Floor such an absolute gem. If anything, Goliath, I'm On Your Side is even better, which is saying a lot considering how much we LOVED the first record.
The sound is simple: strummed steel string guitars, heavily reverbed piano, Lindner's sweetly soulful vocals, brushed shuffling percussion, occasional flourishes of vibraphone, mellotron, lap steel, but the magic is in the songs, and the arrangements. These are the kind of songs that would sound just as good plucked out on a beat up old acoustic guitar by a crackling fire as they would recorded with a symphony orchestra at Abbey Road. Maybe even better. The sound is crisp and alive, it sounds like Lindner is right there, head on your shoulder, singing right in your ear, melodies drift and swoon, sometimes thick and vibrant, other times muted and mumbled.
Every song on Goliath, I'm On Your Side is practically perfect, but the centerpiece has to bee the nearly 20 minute long blissed out FX drenched countrified space rock epic "Hummingbird / Indian Dog". Beginning with a vocal mantra repeated over and over amidst swirling keyboards, a sing songy melody and whirls of murky whir, the song eventually transforms into an ambient soundscape of backwards guitars, field recordings, running water, barking dogs, snippets of conversation lifted on the wind, hushed breathless vocals wrapped in reverb and buried in the mix, insistent atonal guitars, struggling to be hear over the muted whir, everything building into a super druggy blown out space rock drift, guitars warp and warble, buzzing and pulsing over the same swirling backdrop, splattery percussion drifts in and out of the mix, eventually fading out into a twangy No Neck sort of tribal drift, barely there vocals, simple hand drums, steel string buzz, some sort of indie twang "Revolution #9". And it's that sort of spirit, that pervades even the most straight forward song on Goliath, I'm On Your Side. What on first listen might sound like just a sweet country ditty, is more often than not, rife with unlikely melodies, strange sonic subtleties, and deep dark emotion. But then again, more often than not, most of these songs don't actually sound like just sweet country ditties, instead, instead, they tend to be lush worlds of soft focus twang, druggy dreaminess and sweet melancholy bliss.
A few lists back you might remember that we highlighted the elegant and moody solo 4-track recordings of J.P. Shilo. As we mentioned before, he had last been heard from in the late '90s with this group The Hungry Ghosts. Known as John Brooks during that time, he along with his two bandmates were responsible for one of the better and most overlooked records of the '90s. Sharing a similar sound and scope as their neighbors The Dirty Three, these are instrumentals that speak volumes about isolation, yearning, vastness and beauty. It makes you feel like you are out in an endless open field with Ennio Morricone carefully creating musical tension out on the horizon. The perfect late night driving record. Sweeping fender guitars, splashes of organ, fiddle, accordion and varied tuned percussion. A record that sounds just as Australian as it does like the old west or even Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian. Ten years later and Alone Alone still makes us freeze in our footsteps every time we hear it. Something so pure about its sadness, about its hope and about its beauty. Time has come for this record to get its well deserved moment in the spotlight!
We first discovered Isungset, via Andee's obsession with Sweden's Ice Hotel. Each year, artists, build an entire hotel, complete with bar and wedding chapel, entirely out of ice. The walls, the floors, the ceiling, even the beds are all made out of ice. The whole thing is lit by candles and firelight, or by the moon shining through the transparent walls.
Coinciding with said ice hotel is an annual festival, of food and music, art and celebration. One of the activities is creating actual playable instruments out of ice, various bits of percussion and frozen horns, that can be struck or blown, creating some truly haunting an beautiful sounds. The ice percussion sounds like a more muted vibraphone, deep and resonant, rich with subtle overtones, the low end is dark and expansive, the high end tinkles like chimes. The ice horns sound like blowing on jugs, as much breath as there is tone, sometimes the players sputter and buzz making strange and alien sounds.
The vocals play a much bigger part on Two Moons as they did on Isungset's earlier album Igloo, although the sounds is still predominantly the sound of ice being blown or struck or scraped. The foundation of each track is the ice percussion, weaving dense tangles of muted melody, that occasionally spread out into abstract fields of drifting low end notes, very dark and dreamy, moody and atmospheric, the horns surface here and there, sputtering sometimes, moaning loudly at other times, some tracks are peppered with little bursts of high end clatter, rattling like a handful of icicles, the vocals vary on each track, drifting from world music croon, to guttural grunts and growls, to strange haunting animal calls, to full on primitive war cry. Two Moons almost plays like a lost field recording of some long extinct Northern tribe, very ritualistic and primitive. The whole thing is recorded in some huge, all ice igloo like ice-recording studio, which lends the recording a massive amount of natural reverb, thick with shimmer and expansive room sound, the various tones drifting briefly weightless before settling back to the ground. So gorgeous.
And like Igloo before it, Two Moons also boasts some of the most amazing packaging EVER. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of the moon and skeletal branches in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, the front with a hole cut out allowing the moon in the booklet to show through, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and turned into ice instruments!
Massive collection of four epic live performances from the ever shifting Jackie O Motherfucker collective. Recorded in various venues and conditions, live on stage, live in the studio, live on the radio, with various guests and collaborators present. All four tracks are epic in length, the shortest nearly 20 minutes, each one a long and winding road that meanders through pretty much ever sonic nook and cranny the band have ever explored. And all four tracks some of the prettiest and creepiest stuff we've heard from these guys.
Raw stripped down blues guitar, abstract free folk flutter, drones everywhere, buzzing strings, and simple scattered percussion, mysterious vocals, strange samples and lots and lots of turntable. In fact, more than any JOMF recording we can remember, the turntable is one of the main elements, mostly maintaining a rich textural backdrop, but just as easily spitting out some Paul Hardcastle style stuttered loops, or offering up all manner of slippery scratchy rhythms. All very subtle and smoothly integrated into the ever shifting whole. Epic and cinematic, dark and dramatic, it sounds a bit like a dream jam between the No Neck Blues Band and Godspeed You Black Emperor mixed by DJ Shadow. When the guitar enters the fray on the second track is sounds like some slowcore post rock band suddenly decided to sit in. But it fits perfectly. The third track recorded live in Minneapolis, is the heaviest and most 'rocking', a cacophonous blast that ends up sounding like some long lost Krautrock jam, revived and brought back to life right there on stage, while the final twenty minute piece, recorded in the UK, unfurls lazily, bringing the nearly two hours of America Mystica to a close, with an epic spaciousness, underpinned by murky synths, fuzzy psych guitar buzz, splattery disembodied drumming, and a strangely funky fade out.
Massive collection of four epic live performances from the ever shifting Jackie O Motherfucker collective. Recorded in various venues and conditions, live on stage, live in the studio, live on the radio, with various guests and collaborators present. All four tracks are epic in length, the shortest nearly 20 minutes, each one a long and winding road that meanders through pretty much ever sonic nook and cranny the band have ever explored. And all four tracks some of the prettiest and creepiest stuff we've heard from these guys.
Raw stripped down blues guitar, abstract free folk flutter, drones everywhere, buzzing strings, and simple scattered percussion, mysterious vocals, strange samples and lots and lots of turntable. In fact, more than any JOMF recording we can remember, the turntable is one of the main elements, mostly maintaining a rich textural backdrop, but just as easily spitting out some Paul Hardcastle style stuttered loops, or offering up all manner of slippery scratchy rhythms. All very subtle and smoothly integrated into the ever shifting whole. Epic and cinematic, dark and dramatic, it sounds a bit like a dream jam between the No Neck Blues Band and Godspeed You Black Emperor mixed by DJ Shadow. When the guitar enters the fray on the second track is sounds like some slowcore post rock band suddenly decided to sit in. But it fits perfectly. The third track recorded live in Minneapolis, is the heaviest and most 'rocking', a cacophonous blast that ends up sounding like some long lost Krautrock jam, revived and brought back to life right there on stage, while the final twenty minute piece, recorded in the UK, unfurls lazily, bringing the nearly two hours of America Mystica to a close, with an epic spaciousness, underpinned by murky synths, fuzzy psych guitar buzz, splattery disembodied drumming, and a strangely funky fade out.
Of Beauty Reminiscing is the debut album for Vikki Jackman who had previously contributed the evocative if very minimal clusters of piano notes on Andrew Chalk's Goldfall LP from a few months back. So taken was he by the results of that source material, Chalk offered Ms. Jackman an album of her own, which he would produce and release through his Faraway Press imprint. The piano that Jackman uses could never be confused for a concert piano as the antiquated instrument offers forth slightly askew if thoroughly elegant notes; and Jackman certainly emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of that piano through her fragile, open-ended and sparsely laid out melodies, which hold some similarities to Erik Satie's or maybe even Morton Feldman's piano compositions smeared with a decaying Victorian gracefulness. One side of this LP features Jackman by her lonesome, and the other appears to exhibit the hand of Andrew Chalk blurring the edges of many of her tones into a wistful fog of drifting dronescaping. Super limited to a tiny pressing of which we will probably get no more than the pittance that we have received. Which at this point is FIVE copies. Gone in no time of course. Prepare to be disappointed. Sorry. Highly recommended nonetheless.
There's two things that even people who haven't heard Jandek's music, but have heard of him, know: the mysterious Texas-based "singer/songwriter" is (or, was) even more reclusive than J.D. Salinger, and is VERY prolific, issuing recordings every few months on this own Corwood Industries label, going way back to the late '70s! But now that he's come out of his shell just a bit and taken to actually playing live shows, the former quality of reclusiveness has been shaken (just a little bit), yet on the other hand he's easily able to add even MORE to his already vast discography, by issuing live albums of course. This is his fourth live album, and 48th release overall! Austin Sunday is a double disc documenting his performance at the Scottish Rite Theater in Austin, TX on August 28th, 2005. "The representative from Corwood" (as Jandek likes to be billed) played electric guitar and sang, in his usual unique style, and was accompanied by a pick-up band of local musicians from the indie/improv scene: Juan Garcia on bass and two drummers -- Nick Hennies (of Weird Weeds) and Chris Cogburn. Jandek brought new lyrics along, and then (we assume) he and the band improvised. It gets into some fairly "rockin'" territory, by Jandek standards, if we can even say that about something this haunting and abstract sounding... creepy and weird. "Run away, run away, and don't like me."
Music nerds are always fantasizing about the ultimate collaboration. And of course we're no different. We're always thinking about how cool it would be to have Necrofrost collaborating with some North American Frogs, or the Conet Project and the Thai Elephant Orchestra hooking up, or maybe Belle and Sebastien and Darkthrone... ok, maybe we're a little different. But the possibilities are endless... Even so, it never really even occurred to us to imagine two of our past record of the week honorees teaming up, but here it is! Jasper TX and Machinefabriek, each responsible for one of our favorite discs of 2006, and together, well, it's just as subtly beautiful as you might imagine.
Slow chiming harmonics drift along slow warm swells of rich chordal hum, very dramatic and intense, building to a dense reverberant shimmer, barely there wintery whirs over distant steel string buzz and tiny bits of glitch like rain drops, gorgeous smears of cloudy ambient pop, drifting bell like guitars chime out over a slowly twisting bed of shuffling percussion and muted low end rumble, gauzy expanses of dreamlike reverb and insectoid buzz wrapped around mournful and melancholy bits of piano, lo-fi glitch and fuzz underpin, simple far away drumming, melodies materialize from the ether, but only just barely, huge swells of fuzzy guitar and deep resonant choral vocals, drift and swoon, like some otherworldly liturgical ceremony, all washed out and blurred into gloriously indistinct smears of spiritual sound, while in the distance, high end sparks flare and streak across the sky, like shooting stars. So lovely.
Package in a beautifully designed oversized cardstock folder. We got these direct from the two bands, and we got the last copies from each, so we ended up with about 50 copies, which will not be around long...
Bay Area band Judith And Holofernes take traditional Portuguese fado music and give it a gentle twist. Gracefully picked guitar flourishes are accompanied by male and female vocals that actually bring to mind those of Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker (particularly on their last album The Great Destroyer). In fact, at times, Judith And Holofernes seem to be not so distant rural cousins of those somber slowcore faves. Pressing the comparisons even closer, electric guitar drones thicken the album's atmosphere and give the proceedings a bit more gravity. May we recommend that Abraca A Tristeza be listened to by candlelight? Yes! Enjoy these moody beauties as they glimmer in and out of the shadows.
Who would have thought that there was a world of black metallers out there bowing before the Lord, and no, not the Dark Lord, the, um LORD Lord. You know... Jesus Christ. God. It's true, there's a whole world of UN-black metal out there, white metal, with all the buzz and blast and then some, but none of the evil. Up until now, the spirit of these bands while not a secret, tended to be more subtle. With titles like "Goatcrush", "To The Unholy", "Unblackened", still sounded pretty evil, and band names like Agathothodion, Glaciial, Flaskavsae, if one weren't paying attention, one might be forgiven for thinking these bands were indeed true grim black metal.
But now we have the latest from Light Shall Prevail (get it?), whose new cd-r pulls no punches, especially with the title: "Defeat The Reign Of The Horned One Through The Light Of Christ." Okay. This is some seriously, spiritual, totally positive, but still extremely harsh and buzzing and ultra fucked up Un-black metal. Those of you who remember our review of Light Shall Prevail's last ep, might just remember us hailing the song "Goatcrush" as maybe the best black metal song EVER!!! And this disc has about ten contenders for the very same honor.
When you actually think about it, these bands are indeed true, and not even just in a religious sense, they are true to their vision, and their ideals. Although we're not exactly sure what it is exactly that makes white metal so completely and amazingly twisted and tweaked. But we like it! As grim as any black metal band you can name, in fact, if anything the sound of these bands, Light Shall Prevail especially, is more grim and true, unique and fucked up, way more individual and out there than the majority of the cookie cutter black metal bands we hear every day. Light Shall Prevail is the work of E.H. who also runs the mighty E.E.E. label and who has been releasing amazing and totally brilliant unblack metal for a decade now. We've reviewed records by Glaciial, Light Shall Prevail, Agathothodion, but there's tons of other amazing white metal bands, Bedeiah, Whispers From A Dead World, Drommer, Offerblod, Dark Procession, Wrathful Plague, Aristaeus, Nahum, Flaskavsae, With Fire, Elgibbor, Moiriah, we can't keep up. We've discovered this whole new trove of mind blowing (un)black metal and we can not get enough!
Light Shall Prevail might be the closest to sounding like a classic Norwegian style black metal band, however, there are plenty of elements that will have you alternating between scratching your head, banging it wildly and bowing it in reverence. The drums are a machine, and thus do some fucked up things no human drummer could (or would) do, whether its' stuttering impossible fast and machinelike, or sounding processed and overblown way down in the murky buzz, then there's the recording, super lo-fi, so much so that the blown out in the red distortion and tape hiss and all the various recording inconsistencies are as much a part of the sound as the riffs or the vocals, and holy shit, the vocals, from alien sleestak garble to weird anguished howl to demonic shriek. And the songs just rule. killer riffs, convoluted arrangements, trippy psychedelic breakdowns, fucked up dubbed out drum parts, guitars that go from weird processed stutter, to insectoid buzz to reverb drenched twang, usually within the same song.
A couple of our customers absolutely refused to pick up any of these unblack records, they were seemingly offended by the idea of unblack black metal, but ultimately it's their loss. We'd venture to guess that 99% of black metal fans (and probably bands for that matter), aren't actually Satanists anyway and very probably like the music FOR the music, not for the corpse paint or the spikes or the faux scary grimness, and as cool and fun as it is to get into the whole theater of it, the mysterious forest born black metal, the corpse-painted wraiths spewing hateful sounds direct from the depths of hell... ultimately, this is MUSIC, pure and simple, dark, mysterious, fucked up, passionate, buzzing, brutal, grim, blackened, brilliant music, and Light Shall Prevail are most definitely all of those things and more....
Seems there's been another spate of outcroppings from the Godspeed You Black Emperor musical empire recently -- notably the Fly Pan Am offshoot Feu Therese and this duo of drummer Justin Small (also of Do Make Say Think) and bass player Katia Taylor. Hmmm, we suspect that this Lullabye Arkestra will fail oh so miserably at the task of sleep inducing, but it will succeed formidably at kicking the thermometer up a degree or ten. Their aggressive sound is markedly different from the rest of the GYBE clan. It might be the most trashy, garage rawky, angstful, swampy blues boy'n'grrrl punk edged thing we've ever heard from the Constellation Records label (home to Godspeed, Fly Pan Am, Silver Mt. Zion, et al). The fury churned up by the two core members is further fueled by horns, Hammond organ and violin contributed by their skilled musical brethren including other members of DMST. A fevered good time!
We love us our twisted, serpentine, ultra complex black metal, the weirder and more demented the better, truly wacked stuff. We love it epic and majestic, sludgy and creepy, but sometimes you just want it simple. Stripped down and furious. A single riff played over and over. A blasting drum beat that just bores full speed ahead.
Thus we have France's Malveillance, who manage to take what could be boring and generic and turns it into something fierce and fucked up and kind of frightening.
We're beginning to think France is to black metal, what Japan is to pretty much all other music. Whatever it is, twee pop, space rock, take a Japanese band and they can do it better and weirder. Same with France and black metal. Grim buzzing blackness? Find some weird French guy and he can make it sound like a black metal My Bloody Valentine or a blast of barbed white noise. Give them some simple punky black metal and they can turn it into a black spiked juggernaut foaming at the mouth, furiously trampling everything in its path. Malveillance are just that, simple, punky, D-beat black metal, but infused with such fury that it becomes a droning black beast. It helps that every song is in the same key and played at the same tempo. It's like one hour long song split into 22 parts, or the exact same song played 22 times in a row. Totally repetitive and hypnotic and so mesmerizing. Ultimate black bliss achieved through pummel and repetition!!
Plus how can you resist a record called Just Fuck Off, with a record cover of some guy in the shadows giving us the bird, with a note inside to the listener that says:
"Just Fuck Off... yeah yeah of course but keep one thing in mind; this "fuck off" is for all misanthropic losers holding this cd."
Holy crap this band SLAYS. What (the death metal band) Nile are to Egypt, this black metal outfit is to Iraq... That is, Melechesh consider themselves to play "Mesopotamian metal", lyrically focused on the mythology and mysticism of ancient Sumer. Except that, moreso than Nile, the music of Melechesh more fully incorporates influences from the traditional folk musics of the Middle East. So they're kind of an extreme metal version of the '60s Turkish psych bands we love so much, the garagey fuzz guitars replaced with downtuned distorted METAL guitars, making bellydance music with blastbeats. And, unlike Nile who are Americans, the guys in Melechesh actually all originally hail from the region (they're Arabs, emigrated to Europe). Well, they used to have a Texan in the band, the illustrious occultic drumbeast known as Proscriptor (of Absu fame) but on this album he's been replaced with a new drummer, Xul. Proscriptor's a tough act to follow but this Xul guy manages to do so quite well! Wow.
We've raved about 'em before, so hopefully you've already got some Melechesh in your collection and are as excited as we are about this new release, which is from the get-go a raging maelstrom of vicious riffage and masterful metal composition. Crushing AND catchy, technical, and very very METAL, yet with that extra Middle Eastern X-factor that makes it even better in our book, and allows the band to slow down for extra-ethnic, atmospheric interludes like "The Scribes Of Kur". Really, there's nothing we can find fault with here at all. A seriously great Middle Eastern metal assault, which even includes a cover of a song by a (Middle Eastern influenced) Canadian pop band, The Tea Party, weirdly, and cooly, enough. It's a shame that it's impossible to think about the ancient cultures and traditions of Middle East, and Iraq in particular, that Melechesh drawns such inspiration from, without of course dwelling on the current fucked up situation there, which sadly hasn't gotten any better since the release of Melechesh's last album back in 2003...
Antony Milton is one busy man, not only does he run the amazing PseudoArcana label, but he also makes tons of music as A.M., Mrtyu, in the Stumps, the Nether Dawn and more. Did we also mention he's a postman?
The End Of This Short Road is the latest from this underground dynamo, and is most definitely the most song oriented. We know full well Milton is capable of weaving gorgeous expanses of droney bliss, as well as monstrous slabs of downtuned brutality, but who knew he had such a deft hand at delicate songsmithery, but he does, and pretty much every track on The End Of This Short Road is a gem. Fear not, the weird lo-fi warbles and buzzy drone drenched whirs are still present and accounted for, but they tend to be beneath bits of jangle and croon, instead of on their own (although that does happen here and there).
The quieter pretty songs sound a bit like a more lo-fi Sparklehorse, with a little Alastair Galbraith mixed in and maybe with Roy Montgomery on guitar. Soft whispery vocals over delicate melodies, all filtered through that distinctly NZ filter. While the more rocking songs, are super psychedelic, with aggressive strumming, lost of reverb and delay, intense little squalls of minor key jangle and crunch, that manage to be both noisy and pretty, intense but strangely sad and wistful. Recommended for soft hearted noisies and noisy hearted folkies...
