If you're cravin' retro garage rawk stylings that're a little campy, cheeky, kitschy, trashy... all of the above?! Well, the In The Red label has long been a headquarters for top notch wildly good rockin' sounds, and they just keep 'em comin' with this new album from King Khan And BBQ! The oddly named Canadian band might be the ticket! In our opinion, the second half of the album is where the band really kicks the party up a boozy notch. Includes a cover of Circle Jerks' "Operation". Super fun!
Super limited, lovingly presented fan club edition of this legendary record. Long out of print (minus the briefly available reissue on DC / Intoxica, now also out of print) and heavily sought after soundtrack to Rene Laloux's 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winning animated feature "La Planete Sauvage." If the film itself is a hallucinatory masterpiece, the soundtrack -- composed by Alain Goraguer (long time arranger for Serge Gainsbourg) -- is as fitting as it is brilliant. Like an LSD dosed Isaac Hayes score, the music herein is at the same time both reminiscent of classic early seventies drama soundtracks and completely surreal and strange. Lots of recurring leit motifs recast in ever building and changing arrangements, including marimba, theremin and bird whistles as well as the standard orchestral elements, guitars and funky organs. So great!
Each time we hear that AQ pal Jeff Rosenberg has a new music project we secretly fantasize that it'll continue to push the 'out-there' dissonant envelope as many of his past ones have (the ever-expansive Tarentel, spazz-rock duo Pink & Brown, hypnotic art-folk trio Young People, and earthy instrumental duo Lumen to name a few), and shine the spotlight more on his considerable guitar talents. But even though each of his subsequent groups have definitely kept us on our toes, each one taking a new unpredictable Rosenberg direction, quite often the unassuming gent opts to humbly play the solid, no-frills support role. Such is the case with Lavender Diamond, a timorous folk pop combo who present themselves in Lawrence Welk-worthy attire, black suits and taffeta gowns, and in which Becky Stark's gentle'n'mild vocals take centerstage while Rosenberg, Steve Gregoropoulos and well known visual artist Ron Rege Jr back her up on guitar, piano and drums respectively. Maybe this is what all those jaded hipsters need these days... some wide-eyed, earnest songs of unabashed innocence. Sure seems so, 'cause folks have been gobbling this up like crazy already. You can even easily imagine the quartet doing a great cover of Coven's "One Tin Soldier" or perhaps something by The Carpenters! As for Jeff's guitar magic, alas, we'll just have to continue crossing our fingers that he'll unfurl it again someday. But for now we can happily soak in the sunny subdued country folk of The Cavalry Of Light.
Japan's EM records strikes again. Without a doubt, the coolest, weirdest, most amazing re-issue label EVER!! We could list again all the killer reissues we've carried and reviewed and raved about over the past year or two, but we've done that in pretty much every other EM review, so do a label search for EM Records on the AQ website, and prepare to have your mind blown!
Another long lost, long sought after holy grail of sorts, dug up and dusted off and beautifully presented by EM, Travelon Gamelon, a piece by Richard Lerman for amplified bicycles! Performed on stage with upturned bikes, but also, performed on the streets, the bikes mic'ed and each with it's own tiny amplifier broadcasting the various sounds of the bike rolling along streets, the metallic flutter of spokes, the sounds of passing cars, squeaking brakes, whipping wind, all woven into the organic whole. A piece of moving music, constantly shifting, obviously improvised and random, and so totally wonderful.
There are two versions of the piece, which has been performed for years all over the world, one is the concert version, which features musicians on stage, with upside down bikes, using various implements with which to strike, rub and bow the different parts of the bicycles, these are the versions that are the most gamelan like, a gorgeous assemblage of metallic clangs and percussive clamor. From dreamy and spare, to cacophonous and wildly chaotic. A sort of junkyard gamelan, definitely clattery but also strangely melodic.
But it's the other versions, the Promenade versions, that are the most exciting. These pieces are basically field recordings of cyclists on mic'ed and amplified bicycles, every sound their riding creates being broadcast through little speakers affixed to the bikes, and recorded by Lerman! So not only is this group of bikes creating this gorgeous whirring mechanical ambience, that sound is also travelling through city streets, a self contained performance of sorts, a strange little cloud of metallic shimmer and buzzing mechanical ambience performed for all passersby. It's also cool to hear the organizers' instructions, children laughing and playing, running alongside, ringing their own bike bells, you can hear Lerman giving orders to the cyclists as they prepare to begin the piece, and various warnings like "Watch out for the metal!" Street cleaners, random cars, voices and footsteps, all a sort of organic backdrop to the divine slow shifting whir the bicycles produce. Constantly shifting, and changing, depending on the speed of the bikes, the direction of the amplifiers the placement of the mics, the people or cars, amazing. It reminds us a bit of the Taj Mahal Travellers in fact, TMT's method of broadcasting their sounds out of loudspeakers, and then recapturing them with microphones placed at various distances, well, Travelon Gamelon is almost like a mobile Taj Mahal Travellers. So cool!
This collection would be well worth it for disc one alone, 5 lengthy excerpts from various performances of Travelon Gamelon, but also included is a second disc, of various other pieces Lerman composed and performed over the years spanning 1964-1986.
"For Two Of Them" is a soundscape of old records, a spring reverb, and manipulated tapes, very dark and dreamy, a fuzzy, multilayered drone shot through with streaks of metallic shimmer and sounding not all that different than contemporary noismakers like the Starving Weirdos, the Skaters and the like. In fact, most of the pieces on disc two, could just as easily come from some super limited cd-r we just managed to track down. "Sections For Screen, Performers And Audience" features the score presented as a film projected on a screen, the performers face the screen with their backs to the audience, and their improvisations are electronically modified into a gorgeous bit of twisted Twentieth Century. "End Of The Line" is a very dramatic tape piece based on the deaths of close friends, and is another piece that sounds presciently modern, huge dramatic swells, very melancholic and resonant, huge fields of drone and buzz. Even tracks like "Soundspot", a piece for amplified 40 foot Slinky, with its gorgeously resonant creaking and moaning and whistling metallic buzz, and "Music For Plinky And Straw", a piece for bendy straw and reverb, creating a dense field of abstract melodies, crystalline shimmer and percussive chimes, sound less Twentieth Century and more like any number of modern free noise abstract drone releases! This is the sort of collection we wish had been expanded to 4 discs, or 8 discs!! We want more.
But even with two discs there is plenty here to keep you busy and your ears full and happy for sure. Two hours plus of remarkable sound, a massive booklet, with tons of photos, liner notes in both English and Japanese, as well as notes on each individual piece, but also included are a rare video of Lerman performing his piece for bendy straw, as well as scores for several pieces, and a killer photo guide to building a tape delay out of two walkmans!! SO SO SO RECOMMENDED!
The perfect record to bring music nerds and bike nerds together (most of us here are both!)...
Listen up! We heart Macromantics (aka Australian hip hop gal Romy Hoffman). She rocks! We've carried her releases (Four Facets / Conspiracy Remix 7" and Hyperbolic Logic cd) for a few years now, and we're really happy to hear that more folks stateside have been gettin' hip to her hop. Case in point, the Kill Rock Stars label have jumped aboard and released her first domestic cd. Yay! Yay! Admittedly what initially charmed us about Ms Romy was her distinct vocal delivery, but there's acres more to her than an Aussie accent. She crafts tight, infectious tracks with an overriding super posi vibe. Lotsa punchy energy! On Moments In Movements though we've noticed a step or two towards considerably darker, edgier territory than that which she's traversed on her previous releases. it's an effective direction to take, broadening her scope while sharpening her attack. Guests include Ground Components and Sage Francis.
Another release in Southern Records' series of ultra limited Latitudes releases, past installments have included the Grails, Ginnungagap, Ariel Pink, Shit And Shine, Sir Richard Bishop, and others. A wildly disparate group for sure, but one that seems to suit this band just fine...
The Magik Markers are definitely one of those love 'em or hate 'em kind of bands. Sloppy and chaotic, noisy and psychedelic, free and seriously fucked up. Live they can be an explosive revelation, or an absolute mess. One show found the drummer blasting away on stage, while the quite comely guitarist clambered through the audience, climbing over audience members, dragging her guitar behind her, stirring up a seriously chaotic skree. Great to see, but not the best thing to listen to. And the band seem to know that, at least on The Voldoror Dance, not relying on any sort of unorthodox antics or wildly destructive staging the band simply unleash some seriously drug addled, psychedelic space rock bliss. Free and blown out, actually VERY free, this is like a band hurling their equipment into the abyss, and capturing every second on tape, the drums a constant splattery free jazz web, the bass (or is it another guitar) buzzing and warbling, throbbing and pulsing, wrapped in dense little tangles around the relentless drumming, while over the top, vocals drift and hover, ghostlike, barely audible over the din of the main guitar, a squirming, squealing sonic supernova, spewing wild peals of shrieking feedback, dense sheets of corrosive skree, walls of fuzzy riffs, smeared into almost-white-noise, tons of FX, wah wah, delay, a relentless free rock, space psych blow out. Tripping wildly though free jazz, free rock, drone rock and drug rock territory, sometimes all at the same time. An ultra noisy, dizzy, stumbling, crumbling, explosive mind melting musical trip.
Comes packaged in a super intricate hand screened die cut fold over sleeve with a full color insert. The cover has a sticker affixed to the front and each copy is hand stamped and numbered. Limited to 1000 copies worldwide, 500 of which made it to the United States, about 25 of which made it here. So you know what that means!
All right, before we go naming the debut album from San Francisco's The Makes Nice the #1 Pop Album Of The Summer Even Though It's Barely February Already, full disclosure: we do happen to know these guys. An especially good friend of ours is guitarist/vocalist Josh Smith, whom you too probably know from some other bands of his in the past -- he used to play lead guitar in the The Fucking Champs, and also was integral to the legendary SF black metal band Weakling! So after Josh quit the Champs a few years ago, you can imagine our reaction when, eventually, he told us that his next band project was gonna be a power pop, power trio -- with him singing as well as playing guitar! That's pretty far from the instrumental metal of The Champs, or the epic evil of Weakling, eh?? But damn if he didn't pull it off!
Teamed up with Aaron Burnham (of The Mothballs) on bass and vocals, and Jack Matthew (of Harold Ray Live In Concert) on drums, Josh's new band has not only only blown us away with their live shows but now present their killer debut album, the cryptically-titled Candy Wrapper And Twelve Other Songs. The thirteen tracks here run about 31 and a half minutes -- most of 'em not even hitting the 2 minute mark. But each is crammed with so much blazing pop energy in the vein of freakbeat, psych-pop heroes of yesteryear who populate compilations like the Nuggets 2 box set (they'll tell you themselves) that it's got enough head-nodding, foot-tapping hooks for an album twice its length, and could power a full on ballroom blitz to boot.
Hopping on a White Striped bandwagon? No, not at all. What sets The Makes Nice apart from a lot of the current crop of garage rock outfits is their emphasis on Beach Boys/Beatles styled vocal harmonies and sheer songcraft. Yeah, most of these songs are totally raw and rockin' and full of high energy sonics, but also carefully arranged with vocal sweetness that would do Brian Wilson proud. Furthermore, the album is woven throughout with memorable guitar solos. Peeling off licks with tasteful abandon and doses of thick fuzz, Josh's virtuosic playing really gives The Makes Nice their unique signature and vitality. Fucking Champs fans who pick this up just 'cause Josh is on it won't find any metal, but they will hear plenty o' great guitar playing -- and in fact, Josh really lets loose with more soloing here than he ever did in the Champs! So rad guitar + sweet harmonies + utter catchiness = why The Makes Nice totally rule, basically.
And they didn't got to all that work with the vocals without giving some thought to the lyrics as well, so this thing has just got about all the angles covered, top of the pops as far as we're concerned. Definitely this disc should have a lot of appeal to fans of sixties Brits like The Who, Pretty Things, Creation, and Tomorrow up through '70s, '80s, and '90s North American acts like The Raspberries, Cheap Trick, Redd Kross and Sloan! Seriously, the toughest thing about writing this is that we still have to write a bunch of other reviews before this week's New Arrivals list goes out, but from working on this, we've got pretty much this entire record stuck in our heads right now -- and we don't want to make it stop!
Whoa, now that Menomena are on Barsuk Records are they gettin' all suitably indie rock on us?! Sure seems to be the case. They make their move with what is their most straightforward album to date. Menomena fans may be slightly disappointed to find the new sound to be less distinctly or recognizably sprawlingly expansively 'Menomena', but the group might gain a new flourish of fans of their new dreamy wintry pop. Really, this fits quite perfectly alongside labelmates Death Cab, Mates Of State, Jim Noir et al. Fans of those bands please take note!
And by the way, this disc has some of the coolest jewel case packaging we have ever seen. Super elaborate, hyper detailed cartoon drawings, with little shapes cut out to reveal still more patterns on the disc face, while on the back, little circles are punched out to allow the silver cd face to shine though the tray card. WOW!
Once again, further evidence that the Finnish underground is populated by more than freak forest gnomes and droney hypno psych-rockers...
There is a whole black underworld, a land of evil underground forests swathed in clouds of buzzing riffs, beneath the snowy peaks, and wide expanses of undisturbed woodland, there is a mysterious black cavern, peopled by corpsepainted metal warriors, spikes and leather everywhere, the trees are black with soot, and the sky is lit by firelight, where blurry blasts of black metal wreath this lost world in a hazy hellish glow.
Amidst these black warriors, lurk this particular horde, the tongue twistingly monickered Muinainen Ruhtinas, who spew a gloriously murky and midtempo, raw and primitive black metal. Raw, Finnish, black metal, that should be enough for most of you, Beherit, Uncreation's Dawn, Clandestine Blaze, Pest, that glorious raw buzzing sound, but Muinainen Ruhtinas infuse that raw buzz, with a strange forlorn melodic melancholy. As sad sounding and despondent as it is buzzing and black, minor key and mournful, strangely haunting with deep chantlike vocals buried in the mix, and a warm fuzzy moodiness that seems to wrap every bit of black buzz in thick dreamlike murk.
LIMITED TO 666 COPIES!!!!
This isn't new really, but we've been dying to review this blast of black frost for ages, and we were only recently able to get enough to list.
This German horde are not fucked, or bizarre, or damaged, they're really not all that weird actually, but man does not live by weird alone, sometimes, all it takes is a huge heaping dose of ultra blazing, super intense, grim and frosty black metal. And Negator are indeed that.
This is blurry, buzzy, dizzying and epic, majestic and mournful melodies, insane technical riffing, incredible blast beats, and a killer production that does away with the lo-fi buzz of bedroom black metal and replaces it with HUGE heaviness, a swirling black cloud of blizzard like brutality. Speaking of blizzards, Old Black is probably the frostiest, fastest, grimmest slab of icy blackness to come our way since Immortal's legendary Blizzard Beasts record. Which is saying a lot, but damn if this hasn't become one of our most listened to BM discs of late.
In fact, we hear so much ultra personal bedroom black metal, and damaged stumbling outsider black metal, and don't get us wrong, we LOVE that stuff, but it's sort of refreshing to hear some real, true, fierce and furious, classic sounding black metal. Think Immortal, Emperor, Mayhem, Dissection, Dimmu Borgir, 1349, if these weren't young guys from Germany, you'd definitely be forgiven for thinking this was some slab of blackness from Norway circa 1995. And that's a very good thing.
All bow before the new Blizzard Beasts....
We've been trying to list this for ages, but our first batch was destroyed in the post, and our second batch took its own sweet time getting here from Poland, but here we are, almost a year after we initially ordered 'em, and we can finally unleash the bizarre tech prog metal of Poland's Nightly Gale on the masses.
So yeah, this is definitely doom. Maybe even toss in a few extra 'o's, cause this is damn doomy. But it's also pretty freaking weird. Four massive lengthy epics, each with its own strange vibe.
The opener is a slow plod, epic guitars, soaring over downtuned chug, a glacial trudge but with super dramatic prog rock crooning over the top, sometimes almost slipping into a sort of yodel. Then suddenly, the rhythm lurches into a strangely technical start stop stutter, with gurgling keyboards and space rock FX, and some harsh black metal vocals. The second track is more of that strange tech-prog-doom, with fuzzy synthesizers, programmed drums, at times it almost sounds like Meshuggah slowed waaaaaaaay down, strangely technical, but as if played in slow motion, with weird processed underwater prog vocals, and some almost Viking growls. Some delicate dreamlike piano, gently placed amidst super harsh screams and massive downtuned crunch. It's like prog Cradle Of Filth at 16 rpm. Actually, we have no idea what this is like...
It's at this point that one is forced to think, WHAT THE FUCK?!? How have we not heard this band? Why aren't more people completely obsessed with these guys? WE DON'T KNOW.
Tracks 3 and 4 continue on in the same sort of schizophrenic, prog doom direction. With long expanses of swooshing ambience, moody melancholy acoustic passages, epic emotional guitar harmonies, huge cinematic synths, track three almost sounds like a doom metal Genesis, if such a thing were possible, and we're beginning to think it is! The track ends with a groovy little shuffling Nine Inch Nails sort of murky electronic dirge with hissed whispery vocals, before launching into the 15 minute closer, which initially sounds like it might be the most straight ahead doom track on the record, until about halfway through, where the band breaks down into a creepy nursery rhyme sort of interlude with bizarre production, freaky sound effects and haunting vocals, before launching back into a killer mathy jam, lurching and stuttering hypnotically before fading out into some dreamy dirgey melancholy dream doom, complete with strangely Alice In Chains-like vocals (a good thing btw) and a repeating minor key piano figure. So freaking heavy, and weird and goddamn great!
We only have about 20 copies, and we're pretty sure that since it took us so long to get these that it's probably out of print, so odds are once these are gone, we won't be able to get more...
Of all the bands we reference in other bands' reviews, the No Neck Blues Band has to be the most frequently mentioned. For a while there, this ever mutating collective had such a distinct sound, that whenever another band tried to do some sort of free, tribal, pagan, ritualistic, percussion based free jam, we couldn't help but compare them to the godfathers of the tribal drum circle Ur-drone space jam, the mighty No Neck.
Even today after countless releases, tons of tours and a whole bunch of worshippers at the altar of NNCK (Sunburned Hand, Avarus, etc...), No Neck still effortlessly outdo most of their contemporaries, a free noise, what-the-fuck folk, tribal improv juggernaut, able to spin delicate webs of soft sound as easily as a Crash Worship worthy drumjam free for all.
Nine For Victor is a live set recorded back in 2005, and wanders wantonly through all of the various sounds No Neck dabble in, deftly making them all flow seamlessly. Throbbing underwater bass, wheezing spaghetti western harmonica, electronic bleeps and bloops, fuzzed out synths, long stretches of Terry Riley like high end piano flutter, underpinned by barely there percussive shuffle and muted guitar strum, spaced out cinematic drones with keening high end melodies, weird creaking percussive clatter, angular jazz piano, dense clouds of shakers and drums, cricket like percussion, a clattery rattling near-drone, krautrocky slowjams with wild lead guitar and buzzing basslines, all tangled up and interwoven, overlapping, creating a ramshackle but surprisingly cohesive whole.
Slowly. Very slowly, the entire Nurse With Wound back catalogue is getting the reissue treatment; and in the absurdist spirit of Nurse With Wound, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which these titles are making an appearance. Originally, Rock 'N' Roll Station appeared back in 1994, as an homage to one of Steven Stapleton's heroes Jac Berrocal, the French avant-jazz musician with a occasional taste for obtuse pop. The title track on this Nurse With Wound album is in fact a cover of Berrocal's most well known song, although by now, more people probably know of the song through Stapleton's remake rather than the other way around. Similar to the way that Stapleton / Thirlwell reconstructed Brainticket's lysergic funk and how Stapleton remade Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, the NWW version of Rock 'N' Roll station is pretty faithful to the original, even if the original was pretty weird to begin with. There's a steady metronomic pulse (which Beta-Lactam have qualified as 'proto-hip-hop,' c'mon... it's a drum machine replicating the same drum pattern that Berrocal scripted back in the '70s) grounding warbled tones and Stapleton's repeating monologue about the infinite possibilities to be found within a Rock 'N' Roll Station, even if he is still "waiting for Michael." All of the other tracks on Rock 'N' Roll Station are essentially variations on the theme of the title track with a similarly laid-back rhythm acting as a foundation upon which Stapleton splatters the stereo field with distorted squigglings, gurgling vocalizations, looping snippets from Perez Prado's mambos, fingernails on the chalk board scrapes, and ghastly drones extracted from the ether. The pronounced use of rhythm on Rock 'N' Roll Station has rubbed some of the die-hard NWW fans the wrong way, but when has Nurse With Wound ever been easy to digest, even when it just might be one of the grooviest and most ecstatic albums he's ever produced? Oh yeah, there's a 'bonus' track (the "1.35 pm Remix") on this version of Rock 'N' Roll Station which was originally released as part of the Second Pirate Sessions of reworkings of the material from Rock 'N' Roll Station. Recommended!
If you've followed the evolution of ex-Elephant 6-ers Of Montreal it won't come as a total surprise when you hear the spazzed out sugar-pop songs that make up this new outing. Over the years they've slowly shed their Elephant 6 roots and dipped their feet into more dramatic and charismatic waters. Their last outing Sunlandic Twins was chalk full of instantly catchy dance floor gems. And with Hissing Fauna they've sort of turned into Sparks playing at a teenage dance party! And this is sure to be a hit with all the kids, and for good reason, it took a while but the indie rockers finally learned how to shake their asses and make music that demanded such movement.
According to Metal Archives, one of our favorite go to sites for metal info, there are at least 150 metal bands from Bulgaria!! Which is pretty amazing considering that Orenda are, as far as we know, the first Bulgarian metal band we've ever heard.
Anyway, they may be from Bulgaria, but they sound Norwegian, or maybe Polish. On the surface this is furious buzzing black metal, not midtempo, but not really blasting either, just a super fast sort of harsh buzz. Relentlessly pounding drums, droning buzzy riffs, harsh vocals, but beneath the layers of buzz in each song, lurk all manner of strange melody and fucked up sonic weirdness.
It's hard to explain exactly what it is that makes these songs stand out, it's pretty subtle, whether it's some cool seasick guitar melodies weaving back and forth beneath the surface, or some sort of bell chiming in the distance, or a stretch of feedback that sounds like the warning beep of a backing up truck, or mewing cat-like vocals, but more often than not it's just the structure of the song, the interaction between the main riff and the second guitar part, that allow unlikely harmonies to surface, giving the songs a strange emotional resonance that isn't immediately noticeable.
Plus it helps that the riffs are killer, wrapped in a thick buzzy production, the relentless buzzing blackness peppered with blazing bursts of double kick drum, some super sludgy stretches of black doom, even some unlikely poppiness. Definitely recommended!
DOOM. As per AQ tradition, we should throw some extra 'O's in there just to indicate just how doomy this is -- DOOOOOOooooooooOOOM! Not to get sidetracked, but Doom might be the only musical genre that you can deliberately misspell to indicate extra enthusiasm for whatever example of said genre you're describing. RRRRap doesn't work. Nor would you say Woooorld Music. And adding extra 'o's to Pop is a just bad idea, unless you're talking about pop you don't like. But doom, being all about being slow and low, just gets doomier when you exaggerate the spelling into doooooooooooom. The point of all this? That the debut disc from Spanish doom band Orthodox, needs, like, exponential 'o's to really get at its doominess.
Recently and rightly hailed as an Album Of The Month on Julian Cope's psychedelic drone/doom/druid rock lovin' website Head Heritage, Orthodox's Gran Poder ("Great Power") consists of three looong tracks of gloomy, glacial heaviness mixed with more chaotically rockin' parts, with one brief piano-laced interlude seperating tracks two and three. These crushing compositions are almost symphonically grand, an often exceedingly slow grind of eternally doomed drone like Earth or SUNNO))), sometimes speeding up to rock out psychedelically in the style of Argentina's Los Natas, graced with heavily tremelo-laden vocals or utterly spaced out ambience that make us think of Thrones and Yob.
Throughout this sludgey stoner soundscape, you'll hear feedback wailing like lamenting lost souls, the rumbling drum battery either nervously dodging the lugubrous riffs as they fall from the sky, or pounding in unison with the guitar and bass, sounding like the gates of an abandoned ancient cavernous cathedral slamming shut... over and over again.
We imported a whole bunch of these direct from the label in Spain because we're pretty sure that fans of the likes of Corrupted (who also sing in Spanish, after all) and Yob and Sleep and UFOmammut and all the other extra-o's deservin' dooooooOOOOoom bands that we love would want this! And if for some reason you need further convincing, please look up Julian Cope's review on his site, where he references Flower Travellin' Band's Satori and the Mediterranean paganistic roots of Catholic ritual and "Rumble" by Link Wray and much much more, his incredibly enthusiastic review almost a call to arms for doom fanatics... and he also includes cool pictures of the black-robed band members he took on a trip to their land!
Ok, here they are, the first and best three albums (reissued on cd) by "possibly Allan and Andee's all time favorite prog band" Osanna, as we boldly declared in our review of another Italian prog rock fave, Il Balleto Di Bronzo. Yep, we've got the Osanna discs now, so you can judge for yourself. Even limiting our discussion to the realm of Italian prog, it would be difficult to claim that Osanna are objectively better than the also amazing likes of Il Balleto, Le Orme, Area, New Trolls, Franco Battiato, Goblin, I Teoremi, RDM, Museo Rosenbach, etc. But, Osanna do somehow combine the key elements of what we like about those bands and prog in general into these three crazy, colorful records, and thus deserve our hype. Ripping flute and sax solos, heavy psych guitar, powerful vocal choruses, hard rockin' prog drumming, weird musical changes and juxtapositions, electronic synth experimentation... Catchy, fun, fucked up prog from five nutty Italians, who want to rock out as much as be arty and display their adept musicanship.
The wonders of Italian prog have been revealed to us in a gradual process of discovery -- finding a used cd with a cool cover, or reading somwhere about another strange band, or getting a recommendation from a friend or customer. Neither of us grew up in Italy, or had a geeky older brother to hand down his PFM and Goblin LPs. In the case of Osanna, Andee's the one who came across 'em first, while travelling in Japan, actually. Rather randomly, the guy from the Boredoms-meets-St. Vitus doom/trance band Solar Anus (soon to have a mindblowing tUMULt label release) gave Andee a tape of Osanna to take home, promising him he'd like it. Well, Solar Anus dude knew whereof he spoke! Soon we were on-line, trying to track down the LPs, or cd reissues. Not long thereafter, Andee and Allan both possessed the complete works of Osanna on cd. But it took more than a few months for us to find a wholesale supplier so we could stock 'em at Aquarius and share our Osanna-excitement with you, our prog-lovin' customers... Actually we hope that self-proclaimed "prog" dedication is not necessary for enjoyment of Osanna, as we think that these discs are good and weird and silly enough for AQ-customers into whatever sort of musical extremity (experimental, krautrock, psych, metal, classic rock) to dig.
1972's Osanna album, their second, was a soundtrack to a film called "Milano Calibro 9". Working in collaboration with arranger Luis Bacalov, who is also known for his work with the New Trolls' symphonic efforts, this album incorporates strings, piano, and classical motifs. And, as befits a film soundtrack, many moods are touched upon... We don't know what the movie was all about, but it must have featured a fair amount of action, and trippy scenes. Osanna come up with super bombastic themes, high-energy instrumental freak-outs, suspenseful bits of jazziness, pretty vocal interludes, bleepy-bloopy synth fx, heavy electronic organ riff-drone, and the most heavy metal flute soloing you've ever heard. Totally kick ass. Osanna, you rock. Goblin was never this heavy.
We think the mystery suggested in the title is why this is the first ever recorded collaboration between these two giants of improvised left-field minimalist drone. Both Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, key figures in early American minimalism and the New York avant-garde of the early seventies had only performed three times together previously and since reuniting in Belgium in 2001, hadn't even seen each other in three decades. What's equally amazing is that neither one fully dominates this extended performance. Palestine's multiple crystalline organ drones graft neatly with Conrad's bowed pulsations from his modified 5 string violin, eventually intensifying with blistering shimmers and burning organic keyboard crescendos before falling into subdued space and void. There the two sweep the dust off and begin to spar with each other all over again, getting into some heated free-music territory culminating in Palestine's delayed vocal drones and Conrad's blissful undulating vibrations. Gorgeous!
Musing about the name of this dandy SF one man band, we can't help but feel that he must be referring to the pretty delicate scissor craft and not the annoyingly painful stationery-inflicted wound. The Papercuts' retro-tinged pop is a honey sweet, wistful confection. Released on Devendra Banhart's Gnomonsong label, this new album moves upwards and onwards from 2004's Mockingbird. It's decidedly more mid-fi and more psych folk leaning than those previous lower-fi chamber pop styled recordings. Perhaps a little earthiness has rubbed off on him from the folks with whom he's recently collaborated such as Skygreen Leopards and Vetiver? Or perhaps he's been spending more time out in the wondrous wilderness? Whatever it may be, the results are splendid. Can't Go Back caught us daydreaming about paddling a lil' rowboat down a gentle stream, and peering dreamily over the edge into the sundappled depths. As we gaze at a fallen leaf drifting by, the sparkly glint from an orange-gold carp catches our eye. Aaaah. This album will surely appeal equally to fans of Yo La Tengo, Low, Olivia Tremor Control and the abovementioned Skygreen Leopards. Recommended!
In the past couple months, we've gotten a pair of dvds documenting two venerable bands' recent resurrections: 'Mission Of Burma: Not A Photograph' and this one 'Loud Quiet Loud: A Film About The Pixies'. Filmmakers Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin followed the four original members Frank Black (ahem, Black Francis), Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering on their sold-out 2004 reunion trek across North America and Europe eleven years after their split. Lots of live and backstage footage reveal that despite their audiences' rabid adoration, the band members aren't exactly having a bonding experience. At times the atmosphere of interpersonal tension and alienation could be cut with a knife. Bringing the viewer into this air of uneasy distance is the fact that oddly enough it's not the band's music that furnishes the documentary's incidental soundtrack but that of Daniel Lanois! Loud Quiet Loud features some fan-thrilling live footage, but it's not a good time ride by any means.
We have been going a bit nuts for this drone murk ensemble, an offshoot of another group we're pretty gaga about, Irish drone collective Bonecloud, so we grabbed as many of this super limited release as we could get.
These guys travel a similar sonic path as legendary Japanese drone improv outfit Taj Mahal Travellers, as well as sharing sonic similarities with some of their modern noiserock brethren like the Skaters, Birchville Cat Motel and the like.
Each track is some super obfuscated smear of sound, as if inside the tangle of fuzz and grit and whir and tape hiss and reverb and distortion was a little perfect pop song, or some dreamy vocal snippet, but we're peering at these sparkling gems through layer after layer of sonic murk, colors are muted and dull, like looking at a night time cityscape through an old broken and dirty window, a cracked prismatic swirl of constantly shifting sounds. Melodies or fragments of melodies surface and disappear, drift briefly into earshot then fade away. There seem to be vocals all over Triumphant, but they are so wreathed in fuzzy FX they become nothing more than disembodied melodic streaks, brief flitting blurs of sound. Reminds us a bit of Grouper, but less lush and organic and more raw and lo-fi and buzzy. Dreamy, fuzzy and lovely.
Packaged in cool hand watercolored sleeves and of course LIMITED TO 74 COPIES!!! Don't blink or they'll be gone...
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Er, when it Reigns it pours... as you should remember, last list we reviewed the new full-length cd from one of our favorite UK post rock acts, Reigns. We're waiting for a restock of those now, but in the meantime we've got *another* new Reigns release, a limited edition 2-song 7" single. Two new tracks of their lovely, so lovely and evocative instrumental music. Shimmering and mesmeric. That would be reason enough to pick this up, but, there's more: this comes packaged with a twelve-page booklet full of text in a tiny tiny font, detailing more of the adventures of Reigns Operative B, a diary of a field recording investigation into the English countryside. Of course things get a bit fantastical and weird, and in the end it's a bit like something by Thomas Ligotti. This is totally what we think makes Reigns extra-special, that added dash of imagination and mystery, presented in a confusional, supposedly scientific yet tongue-in-cheek manner. Neat!
From the same UK label that brought us that great Hey Colossus album listed recently, here's something also really cool but VERY very different.... where Hey Colossus was brutally heavy and rhythmic, this band, Reigns, is so pleasantly pretty and placid. Utterly gorgeous, really, and mysterious. We're reminded of such artists as Stafraenn Hakon, Eluvium, Sonna, and Sigur Ros. It's that sort of gauzy, mellow, melodic post-rock, with songs constructed from gentle guitar and piano figures, operating in a zone of beautiful ambience, infused with indistinct electronic detritus. Swells of live percussion or electronic beats sometimes appear, too, but the mood remains blissful, if almost somber. But not really somber since there's a strange, very subtle sense of humor afoot, part of the weird conceptual framework that Reigns have invented for this album. Yes, it's a concept album! And a mostly-instrumental one at that, with no real singing to speak of, though you will occasionally hear voices drifting in the mix, including a computer voice (a la Radiohead) on the fourth track, "Translating".
The concept? It's intentionally vague and sort of surreal, but first off we're told that this was supposedly "recorded on location by Reigns operatives A & B". The title We Lowered A Microphone Into The Ground, taken literally, provides an imaginary scheme for the album. Each track is assigned a depth, ranging from 23 meters to 1 mile. Thus, track 2: "Corners & The Straights (102 metres)". Or track 9: "The Fattest Goose Shall Be The Soonest To The Spit (1460 metres)". Inside the handsome digipack you'll find the "Original Site Transcript" giving notes on what was encountered at each depth by the two Reigns operatives. Some examples:
"(102 metres) First subterranean voice. Operative B suffers small breakout of hives on ungloved hand."
"(416 metres) Foul smelling miasma rises from hole. Surrounding grass visibly pales."
"(1001 metres) Sudden rise in static. Recording levels unchanged. Operative B demands that A stop pinching at nape of B's neck. A denies any such activity."
More events and phenomena, both mundane and peculiar, are documented. But this is all in the liner notes -- you'll hear the voices mentioned but otherwise this isn't at all meant to -sound- like any sort of static-y, subterranean field recording...it's just very lovely music. Pretty nifty, as most more ordinary post-rock efforts don't exhibit such imagination! We like.
We're a bit embarrassed to admit we had never heard Robedoor before, heck, we'd never even heard OF them. Which is saying something as a quick internet search reveals about a MILLION cd-r's and cassette releases. Although the same search reveals very little else. All we can glean is that they are a duo, one half credited with slime, knives and distortion, the other with fire, howls and cloaks, and that they are part of the Notnotfun noise axis. The rest is a mystery. Which befits their gorgeously mysterious sound. Huge growling, glowing slabs of slow shifting low end. Slowed down riffs and long dark streaks of moaning sound, some sort of improbable mix of SUNNO))) and Skullflower. Or the gloomiest doomiest Wolf Eyes record played manually, pulling it around with your finger, a constantly fluctuating low end rumble, laced with haunting distant melodies and high end guitar buried in the murk. Fans of all thing slow and low AND heavy will definitely want one of these. We need to hear more from these guys for sure!!
Packaged in a plastic bag with a black and white insert and some sort of weird plastic hair. LIMITED TO 78 COPIES!!! These will be gone in a flash...
On The Amber Gatherers, Scotsman Alasdair Roberts sounds much less like a (not so distant) cousin of Will Oldham and much more like one whose been taken under the wing of Sybille Baier or Vashti Bunyan. The renaissance folk found on this his fourth full length both lyrically and instrumentally conveys much more of a period piece evoking a time long past than his previous works. Songs such as "Let Me Lie And Bleed A While" and "I Had A Kiss Of The King's Hand" conjured visions of fair maidens and jesters in courtyards, armored knights on horseback or dapper fellows taking their paces in a gentlemen's duel. Enchanting and picturesque.
In our utopian dreams of what it would be like to get off the plane and arrive in India this is what our would immediately fill our ears! It makes so much sense that the title of this album is Namaskaar, as it's an age-old traditional greeting in India. An expression used as a warm welcome to visitors and honored guests. It also makes sense that this record was supposedly produced originally as a promotional item for Air India!
Dilip Roy is an Indian composer who creates deeply inviting and warm sounds that make you feel like you've been lifted off your feet and taken to some majestic land filled with color, melody and elegance. While this record was recorded in 1983, we would have guessed it was from the late '60s or early '70s as it has that slightly tripped out sound and lush arrangement that might have been the result had R.D. Burman and David Axelrod joined forces. We can just imagine Four Tet's Kieren Hebden and DJ Shadow drooling over these sounds and wishing they had gotten their hands on them to sample and steal. Imagine the tracks those two could come up with working with this stuff!! It's was no surprise when we learned that Roy sometimes collaborated with Ananda Shankar, such amazing grooves, but what we love so much about this record is how it has echoes of Bollywood in its sound yet it's way more calm and tranquil while somehow still managing to be just as much of a bright and colorful trip. Highly recommended!
We were heartbroken after the dissolution of German black metal outfit Nagelfar (not to be confused with the Swedish e-less Naglfar). Their all time black metal masterpiece Virus West, has been a huge favorite of all the metal heads around these parts (and has just been reissued, and will be reviewed on the list soon!) but a few years after the death of Nagelfar, a new band was born out off the ashes, a strangely monickered beast called the Ruins Of Beverast. Purveyors of, in their own words, "oppressive black metal", and indeed, the sound of RoB was totally unlike the blazing Scandinavian style of buzzing black metal, instead, they offered up a sprawl of midtempo misery, as doom as much as black.
And this, their second album continues on a similar sonic path. There is of course plenty of buzz, this is grim black metal after all, but RoB have a much more expansive vision. Out of the seven tracks, five clock in at around 15 minutes (the other two are brief ambient interludes of cavernous whir and crumbling subterranean drones) and find a grim black buzz stretched waaaaaaay out into long stretches of Burzumic doom. The guitars are thick and spacious, not just buzzy and compressed, the production is massive, each song is like a journey through some massive underworld, drifting through firelit caverns, along some viscous black river. The rhythms are loping, seasick waltzes, sometimes slowing down to glacial dirges, with arpeggiated chords spread out over thick backdrops of warm blurry buzz, howled vocals, simple pounding drums, all wrapped in huge swaths of reverb, making all the edges bleed together, turning buzzy black metal into fuzzed out doomdrone metal. The oppressive blackened crush lets up once in a while, allowing brief bits of shimmer to shine through, a weird post rocky slowcore crawl, some minor key jangly clean guitar, slow building Godspeed like ambience, bits of epic synth, always returning to the relentless buzzing dirge, allowing off course for brief flurries of furious blasting black metal, but those always seem to give way to still more slow and sorrowful blackdoom beauty.
The music found within Matt Shoemaker's Spots In the Sun certainly makes for one of our favorite records in recent memory, unfortunately this ultra limited version is already out of print and will most likely not be around for long (but fear not, the regular version will follow soon after).
Shoemaker's exquisite manifestations of abstracted field recordings pushed to the point of grotesque minimalism is some of the finest that we've heard (comparable to the likes of BJ Nilsen, Machinefabriek, Loren Chasse, Philip Jeck's Surf, and mnortham), but what makes this "special edition" so unique is the packaging. You may remember many moons ago that The Helen Scarsdale Agency issued an edition of the BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa release with a copper foil cover mounted within a jewel case as the artwork. Well, Matt Shoemaker's Spots in the Sun sports similarly dazzling packaging, a corroded sheet of brass upon which the album text has been silkscreened, only to be slightly distressed in order to give it a beautiful worried quality. How limited is this edition? Fifty, of which we only got less than a dozen. So act fast, or bide your time until the regular version comes out in a month or so...
A while back we reviewed a disc by a group called Flittermice Of Eld, a sort of abstract ambient drone homage to Darkthrone, in particular their classic track "As Flittermice as Satan's Spys", which of course ended up sounding nothing like Darkthrone at all, but kicked our asses nonetheless (and rest assured, we should be getting more of those soon!).
So what do these Flittermice do when they're not pulling apart black metal institutions and reshaping the bits into their own twisted little soundscapes?
Well, actually, sort of the same thing, just without the Darkthrone bits (although we can't say for sure there are no Darkthrone bits here). But Mr. Dave Smolen, he of the aforementioned Flittermice, here strikes out on his own, and the result is very similar to the sound on Flittermice, albeit a bit more minimal and electronic, a slow burning lowercase trawl through a soundworld of electronic crackle and minimal glitch and buzz, twenty minutes of drifting static discharge, bursts of high end shimmer and shift, layers of metallic reverberation drift through spacious expanses of whir and rumble, clouds of spacey FX swirl around disembodied shards of percussion and muted rhythms. Serene and ambient, but also dense and intense, like slithering through a lightning storm, or crawling through a field of electrically charged vibrating steel strings...
Weird and quite cool...
SUPER LIMITED!!! Of course, packaged in hand screened cardstock jackets housed in thick vinyl sleeves.
You're out in space, at the bridge of a pod-shaped starship, blinking lights and cosmic sights on the viewscreen. THIS is the soundtrack. Or, you're exploring deep into inner space, in a isolation tank, or a drugged trance, watching colors play inside your closed eyelids. Again, THIS is the soundtrack. Assuming in either case you're got headphones on, hooked up to Space Machine 2!
Total kosmiche electronics action here, vintage analog synths doing their spaced-out bleepage and bloopage thing under the long-haired guidance of Maso Yamazuki, a Japanese psychedelic noisician extraordinare. This disc was released back in 2002, as part of Space Machine mastermind Maso Yamazaki's special "15th Anniversary Freakout Triplex" series, which also featured cds by two of his other acts, Masonna and Christine 23 Onna. We reviewed Christine 23 Onna's Acid Eater a few weeks ago and promised we'd get to the others in the Triplex soon, now that we're finally able to get a hold of 'em, expensive imports that they are. Space Machine, Maso's tribute to the likes of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, has always been a favorite 'round here, and right now this particular Space Machine album is the only one that seems to be in print! If you're a fan already, you know what to expect. This features four tracks, several of them quite lengthy, of wonderfully indulgent synthesizer knob-twiddling, soothing oscillations and droning textures... headphones, please!
Latest in the slow flow of dreamy sounds from this Humboldt County duo, who not counting their 20 or so unreleased full lengths, have gradually built up an amazing body of work, most unfortunately super limited, this new lp no exception.
Released on Tarentel's Root Strata label, Harry Smith is a single side long track, a slow burning cinematic wonder, a huge buzzing field of charged particles, run through old beat up guitars and a table full of FX pedals and broken toy instruments, alchemically changed from lead into a gold.
A sitar-like buzz, submerged in reverb and wrapped in dense overtones, spreads out like a melting glacier, constantly shifting and changing shape, above that drift huge washes of metallic shimmer, effulgent yet muted and murky, a subdued sonic glare, warm and wistful. These dreamlike expanses are punctuated by ghostlike pulses, bells or chimes smeared into indistinct tones, let loose and allowed to fade into the subtly churning sonic backdrop. Very dark and dramatic. And oh so lovely.
This is a one sided lp. The flip side has black and white artwork pasted right on the vinyl, housed in a clear plastic sleeve. And of course super limited...
ONLY 300 COPIES PRESSED!!!
Jesse Sykes' been making music for some time now, but most recently she's garnered additional attention for her striking vocal turn on the track "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)" from Boris and SUNNO)))'s Altar album! 'Twas a wonderfully timed appearance to coincide with the release of Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls Of The Soul, her third album. Sykes' voice is soft yet potent with a subtle rasp roughened by cigarette smoke. She's joined by guests Wayne Horvitz, Eyvind Kang and Nicolai Dunger. Painted in shades that suggest bruises and red wine, her rustic melancholia is so bleak and despairing that it begs to be enshrouded in the night. Best listened to after dusk.
Intercontinental all girl noise rock tag team match up. From right here in SF come T.I.T.S. (no idea what it stands for) an all-female troupe spewing their own skewed and venomous version of damaged psychedelic fuzzy garage rock stomp. Lo-fi brittle metallic riffing butts up against simple pounding caveman drums, haunting chant-like vocals, all with a seriously pagan primal, tribal vibe. Two whole sides of furiously fuzzed out chant and buzz, psych rock garage grrrrrrrrr....
The other disc features the UK's mysterious Leopard Leg, who are a bit like a witchier, soundtrackier No Neck Blues Band. Abstract soundscapes of bells and chimes nestled amidst prickly seas of record / campfire crackle, buzzing snarls of malfunctioning electronics, clattery tribal percussion, haunting abstract vocals, a slow drift through a dark forest, folk picked apart by hungry scavengers, leaving weird skeletal shapes and fuzzy fragments of sound, until about halfway through the second side when the band drop everything, and go all out with their haunted forest drum line, spitting out a huge cacophonous wall of Crash Worship drum damage. Woah.
Incredible packaging, super thick, glossy gatefold sleeve, colored vinyl, one white, one green, so nice...
We may indulge in some hyperbole now and then, but it's usually just because we're so excited by some new record. That's why there can be so many 'best ever's and 'greatest of all time's. But we're serious now. This is, without a doubt, and with nary a trace of hyperbole, the greatest and weirdest packaging we have ever seen. Really.
So before we get to the music (whatever... music... pshhh) let's talk about the case this disc is housed in. It was at one time, a regular old DVD case, but it has been coated in molded rubber, looking like the Necronomicon from Evil Dead, only the cover is a unicorn, all molded in 3-D complete with an actual glass eye, with various vines and flowers molded in along side the unicorn head and EYE!!! The back has the band name and more vines molded in. It smells like old tires and feels all soft and rubbery. It's got a little Gwar to it. But holy shit!!! It's so amazing to look at and to hold and to smell. Inside is an oversized screen printed booklet, with glittery eye animals, typewriter style liner notes affixed to the inside. Wow! It almost wouldn't matter what the music sounded like but the music is just as amazing. A freaked out furious grinding metallic onslaught, most songs clocking in around 30 seconds with one or two coming in around 9 minutes. 32 songs in 38 minutes. Buzzing guitars, blasting drum splatter and some seriously awesome fucked up vocals, squealing impossibly high, doused in FX, it sounds like a woman, or a guy with an impossibly high falsetto, it's almost like a grind metal Melt Banana, but with super fuzzy lo-fi fucked up production and some seriously damaged sounding guitars. Actually the vocals sort of sound like the little girl from Kiss' "God Of Thunder" all grown up and seriously hysterical. But that's not all, there's the album, a series of fucked up blasts of brilliant black metal grind fury, then a a few noise tracks, a live set, and then THE WHOLE RECORD IN REVERSE, as in backwards, fucking awesome! Everything sounds better backwards and Throne Of Blood is no exception. Then there's a few more noise tracks, then the second to last track, the record's nine minute epic, one riff repeated over and over and over and over and over. Minimal math metal genius. And then the final four minute number which sounds like it could be a whole 'nother record, with about a million tracks compressed into one 4 minute chunk, with more outrageously over the top insane vocals. Actually, it's a whole live set!!!
What more to say? The record is completely nuts, the packaging even more so. It's just too bad it's so limited. This cloud has a distinctly black lining.
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES!!! We tried to order lots more than we got, which ended up being about 20 copies, and once these are gone, this is gone for good...
Sophomore album from Oakland '70s style punkers The Time Flys, which leads off with the title track of their 'tween albums single, "Reality (Is A Rock Band)". Like their debut, this retro-rockin' disc is appropriately snotty and undoubtedly well-schooled in their chosen genre, with lotsa energy, not a lotta chords, and some handclaps, but this time 'round we're not feeling it as much... something here (the lyrics, maybe) just seems a bit forced. It's like, they're trying too hard. If you're gonna emulate the likes of the Ramones, you've gotta make it seem easy, c'mon! On the other hand, maybe we just weren't in the mood for the 'tude when we first put this on, and it's just gonna take a few more spins (and a few more PBRs?) for us to 'get'... we'll see.
Our favorite Brooklyn-based stoner space rockers are back, with their first proper studio album (the limited Paradigms cd, and the self-released cd-r we've had before were both live recordings, apparently). If you liked those, you'll like this -- though they get up to some new tricks here as well. In fact, we weren't sure we were even listening to Titan when we first put this on, as the first of the four tracks found here starts off all folky for a minute, with strumming and singing that could be Comus or Devendra... before blasting into loud, distorted, truly TITANIC heavy instrumental psych rock powered in part by some extremely proggy keyboard action. It's like ELP jamming with Comets On Fire, or Tarantula Hawk gone '70s, or a much heavier, blow-out n' drugged-up Crime In Choir! A wild torrent of amp-ed up, cosmic crunch, spiralling energetically.
The following tracks have their blissed out interludes, and droning FX, and mantric rhythmic pulses, and other bits of weirdness (field recordings of what might be crickets chirping, and a fan blowing, are mixed in at one point), but that heavy space prog riffola isn't lacking either. Definitely there's plenty here to appeal to fans of the abovementioned bands, as well as, oh, AMT, Circle, Zombi, Ufomammut, Boris, Mammatus, and MoRkObOt among others... in a word, recommended!!
Of all the weird black metal tapes we've gotten recently, this just may be our absolute favorite. So much so, that Andee was thinking about getting in touch with the band to see if they wanted to do a record for tUMULt.
The best way we can think of to describe Tomb Of... is maybe something like a black metal George Winston. Or Nortt making a record for Windham Hill. That's right. This is ambient funeral doom music, death, depression, misery, sorrow, but the instrumentation is mostly just piano and vocals! Seriously. And it still manages to sound bleak and miserable. Ominous and a little bit scary. Mournful minor key piano melodies beneath harsh hellish black metal vocals and rumbling guttural growls. Way in the distance soft swirls of faux strings or thick swells of sound, occasional guitar leads. It almost sounds like a mash up, the sound is at first so incongruous. But the more you listen, the more it sounds perfect. It makes all other singer songwriters, perched at their piano, seem totally pointless and inconsequential. This is so bleak and black and emotional. A super personal miserable missive from some dark lonely place.
Fucking awesome.
SUPER LIMITED! ONLY 300 COPIES!!!
Tragedy are the reigning kings of (underground) U.S. hardcore. Without even a website or a label behind them, they have managed to become an infamous live proposition, a band whose records sell in the thousands, with no publicity other than their devastating live shows, and with a die-hard cult of followers who are absolutely rabid about the band.
Nerve Damage is the third release from this Portland-via-Memphis outfit, whose members have formerly done time in such legendary acts as Deathreat, His Hero Is Gone, Union of Uranus & Copout so you know this is gonna be punishing stuff.
While Tragedy is known for its powerful "D-Beat" (think Discharge via Motorhead) approach to hardcore, on this record they infuse their fat chugging riffs with plenty of melody, but don't think for a second that means they've gotten soft.
The ever present feeling of despair and their furious "will to fight back" is still in full effect, in fact, it's like they've finally learned the art of "the dynamic" and are proving it over and over and over. While in the past their songs relentlessly bludgeoned the listener square in the face with a scream and a riff, Tragedy have mastered the art of subtlety, with sweeping guitars, gorgeous harmonics, and even a bit of piano here and there.
Now if only all punk rock circa 2006 was this good...
Not sure what else to say about these guys that we haven't already said. If you've somehow managed to miss our reviews of their first couple records, Forest Of Doom and Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars, as well as the Trollmann side project Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch, for chrissakes, do yourself a favor and just order all three. And this one while you're at it. Check out the other reviews for a more in depth history of what has to be our all time favorite caveman doom duo, but to briefly recap:
Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. C'mon, they're called Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg!! They have record titles like Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars and Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice and Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity and Forest Of Doom. They have a similar sounding side project called Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch! The band members are pictured in drawings on the back of the cd, one as a strange little bearded gnome/elf sitting on a huge toadstool, the other a bearded furclad mountain man leaning on a mighty axe. The gnome is named Belegur and is credited with "Cosmic keys to gates unknown." The mountain man is Thundarr, and is credited with "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." For those of you well versed in that sort of thing, you'll realize that this duo is just bass and keyboards, which is remarkable in its own right. But the fact that Trollmann play a sort of medieval Skepticism style slow motion doom sludge with just bass and keyboards it seems even more amazing.
Phew, there's more of course, but that's it in a nutshell. Not only are they mysterious, and weird, and possessing a what-the-fuck quotient that's through the roof, the music is fucking amazing! This is not that so weird it's good, or so retarded it's amazing kind of thing, this is absolute genius. Dark and creepy, heavy and sloooooooooooooooow, minimal sludge soaked abstract ambient doom. Or something. Just bass and keyboards, spewing an unholy flow of low end throb, and grinding downtuned slither. The keyboard drones and spreads out in a fuzzy blur, only occasionally offering up some sort of melodic counterpoint to the bass, as it trudges sluggishly onward.
Of all the Trollmann records, Dark Clouds is probably the heaviest, the meanest, the least melodic and the most intense. The first two tracks, both shockingly under 3 minutes, set the tone, the first, is some sort of slow motion post rock drift, a thick wash of grinding low end sludge beneath garbled demonic whispers while above drift absolutely dreamy slow drifting harmonics. The second track is a stunner, almost 'rocking', at least by Trollmann standards, some sort of primitive caveman hardcore, huge throbbing, ultra distorted downtuned buzz, with fuzzed out Butthole Surfers-ish guitar leads, and super distorted death metal grunts a stumbling hyper aggressive pummel. But after that, it's back to business as usual. Long slow extended doomy drifts. Average track length hovering at about 15 minutes, the bass a throbbing, glacial presence, the riff stretched out into eons, each note reverberating and pulsing into oblivion before the next kicks in. The keyboard just adding another layer of buzzing sludge. The bass sometimes starts to stutter and pulse, creating some sort of super blown out low end rhythm, stumbling over a thick wash of keyboard buzz, before settling back down into its glacial groove.
Epic and massive and bewildering, hypnotic and bizarre and fucking brilliant!
We were WAY over glitchy laptronica when Tuk's Shallow Water Blackout knocked us upside the head a few lists back and demonstrated that just cuz some sound was played to death, didn't mean that amazing things couldn't still be done with it.
That Diskont itch that seemingly only Oval could scratch, had been getting itchier without us even knowing it, who would have realized we had been secretly hankering for a gitched up stuttery underseascape of burble and skitter, of muted rhythm and haunted melody. Well we were and Shallow Water Blackout hit she spot, and good! So much so that we figured we oughta track down Tuk's previous record, Proud Princess Of A Brand New City, and dang if it ain't just as purty!
In fact, it might even actually be a little bit prettier, definitely more serene and subdued, a little bit more musical. The rapid fire chop and splice and reassemble of Shallow Water Blackout is still present but in smaller measures. There's a bit more of a minimal angle, it's much more melodic and dreamy, rife with low drones and mumbled melody, and more actual instrumentation. It's got a fuzzy sort of sheen that has us thinking even more of groups like Jasper TX and Machinefabriek than the new one did.
Our favorite track might just be "German Holidays", beginning with a simple sad, guitar line, it's quickly surrounded by bits of glitchy ambience, clouds of record crackle and weird disembodied buzz, but it's about halfway through where it gets really good, suddenly, in comes some distorted guitar, eighties cop show, made for TV movie music, looped into a super Circular rhythm with breathy background vocals and streaks of glistening feedback, it sort of krautrocks along before it begins to deteriorate, the riff getting more and more distorted, the melodies beginning to crumble, beautiful and haunting, and surprisingly super catchy.
Those sorts of unlikely musical moments continue to surface throughout the record, suspended in Tuk's wide open fields of blissy glitch and whirring warble, making us want to just curl up and drift off...
It's just a matter of time before one of SF's best kept hip-hop secrets becomes a household name. Unagi has proven to be one of the most consistent and challenging producers of forward-minded hip-hop, replete with nods to the old skool. His latest offering split pretty evenly between warm instrumentals and guest MC tracks that all fit together perfectly as a totally coherent album with NO filler. If you found yourself a little underwhelmed with the latest offerings from Blackalicious and DJ Shadow this might be exactly the record you've been waiting for.
Universal Indians are a long lost noise rock behemoth, from way back in the nineties, featuring Mr. John Olson of the Wolf Eyes on the drums, these guys whipped up a serious blast of blown out super distorted garagey psychedelic noise rock. The opening track is heavy and thick, pulverizingly aggressive, drums totally in the red, guitars crumbling and white hot, the whole recording doing much damage to the speakers, vocals that are sort of sung/spoken, the whole thing sounds very Brainbombs actually, which is a VERY good thing. Come track two though, and the production drops about a hundred notches and suddenly we're in old school noise rock, tin can and twine blow out territory, which is still good, just different, and a surprise after the ultra hot opener. But the rest of the record proceeds along with some serious Dead C worship, mumbled vocals, angular guitars, barely audible drums, recorded in an airplane hangar or a cave somewhere, with some damaged Dylan-y strum and warble mixed in, everything wreathed in lo-fi hiss and tape recorded warble. Gloriously ramshackle... Side two is a single sidelong epic, a sparse, outrock jam, simple strummed guitars, spacious stumbling drums, almost sounds like some long lost old Sebadoh practice tape, albeit run through with some extra noisy ambience and fucked up weirdness. Cool stuff, almost like some sort of super poppy Wolf Eyes... a stumbling, damaged, noise drenched spaced out psych pop...
We love us some black ambience, whether it's the self flagellating soundscaping of Abruptum, the strange piano based minimalism of Tomb Of..., the cinematic creeepiness of the Vomit Orchestra, it's bracing to discover a world of ambient music, of spare and sparse soundscapes, that are as ominous and dark, as brutal and as black as any of the more riff based musicks.
Thus we have this tape from the very mysterious Uno Actu, so mysterious in fact we haven't really been able to find out much about them other than the fact that they are Canadian. Uno Actu offer up a dense and varied occult alchemical ambient ritual. Bits of black metal surface here and there, with growled guttural vocals, and downtuned rumble, but the core of Inexistence is a drifting shimmer, slightly metallic, a deep resonant reverberation, that slowly slithers through some dark sonic underworld, disrupted by bursts of speaker shredding low end buzz, creaking industrial percussion, thick swaths of crumbling low end drone, strange looped rhythms, it's ominous, and dark, and creepy, but also strangely pretty, even at its most abrasive, the sound is very dreamlike and abstract, muted and murky, mysterious melodies drift amidst thick peals of feedback, disembodied voices float and flutter before sinking into the morass, tribal drums beat out a pattern over a fuzzy cinematic backdrop, huge moaning foghorns spin thick murky webs of sound over the muted crash of some imaginary surf...
Very intense and lovely, dark and dreamlike, black and blissful. A new black ambient favorite for sure...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!!
A really nice collection of vintage roots, dub and reggae produced by the oh so smooth Bunny 'Striker' Lee. With his studio band, The Aggrovators at his beck and call, he recorded some of the best and brightest artists in the 70's reggae scene at King Tubby's legendary studio. With folks like Horace Andy, Linval Thompson, Cornell Campbell, Johnny Clarke, etc, you can be assured this is a really solid collection with a cohesive sound and mood thanks to Lee's stellar production. Most of these tracks had only ever been available on 10" vinyl before finally making it to cd (and lp!)...
Revitty? Might that have something to do with Martin Rev? It's hard to say if the word means anything other than simple being a title for this solo project from Mika Vainio, one of the two shockheaded Finns behind Pan Sonic. As the electron wrangler for Suicide, Martin Rev has clearly been a major influence on Vainio's work, especially in how to extend electronic sounds through dynamic usage of pattern, repetition, and variation. Both Pan Sonic and Suicide have always been known for the rhythmic pounding of their scalding electric minimalism; yet in most of Vainio's solo work, the rhythmic structures are merely hinted at through nuanced implications or entirely done away with in the spirit of grand abstractions. What's left for Vainio's sound sculpting is raw energy often recklessly unleashed in radioactive bursts with only ghostly hints at a pulsing electricity within. So maybe we're grasping at straws to add some context to this work, but it's still a mighty fine piece of Finnish electronic abstraction, chock full of bleakness and aggression.
Last year was a pretty great year for Tropicalia. With a reunited Os Mutantes touring all over the world, a killer Soul Jazz compilation that helped more ears fall in love with the thrilling sounds coming from Brazil in the oh so turbulent late '60s / early '70s. So it makes so much cosmic sense that one of the founders of Tropicalia, Caetano Veloso, starts off this year releasing one of his best and most rocking records in years. While his last few outings have veered towards the easy listening schmaltz side of the sonic spectrum with far too many ballads, Ce finds him all stripped down and exuding a youthful energy that we haven't seen or heard for years. Such vibrancy and color! It's so hard to believe he's 64 years old, and we'd be hard pressed to think of many other people his age still making music as compelling as the sounds on Ce, as this blows away anything folks like Bowie, McCartney or Young have made in recent years. Worth it alone for the opening track "Outro", a scorching almost indie-rock sounding anthem, which has our vote for one of the best songs of the year. The album as a whole is so solid and listen after listen we keep falling in love again and again with Veloso's song writing prowess. Recommended!
Very few bands have as convoluted and controversial a back story as Portland's black metal weirdos Velvet Cacoon. First the name, Velvet Cacoon. Spelled C A C O O N. According to the band "The name originated back in 1996 when we formed the band. Velvet is one of many names applied to the chemical dextromethorphan, and CACOON are the initials of a catacomb just outside Portland city limits where we usually go to write music." It also happens to be the seed from some tropical vine. But let's continue. There was also the band's political alignment, supposedly they were some sort of super reclusive, "eco-fascist" collective. Okay, sure. Then there's the sound. And it's the sound that really matters. And oh what a sound, an impossibly lush orchestra of black buzz, thick and mesmerizing and blurry, the fuzziest buzz we had ever heard. But how does a band achieve that sort of impossibly glorious buzz? Well, by inventing and playing an instrument called a "dieselharp", a sort of diesel fuel powered pick up driven fuzz-drone-guitar thing. So okay, how could we not love them, the sound was black buzz nirvana, and they were some weird eco forest freaks. Supposedly.
A little time passes, and it comes to light that it was all a scam, not the music obviously, but everything else, the politics, the dieselharp, all designed to fuck with the black metal community. The band is revealed to be one guy and his girlfriend. He's got short hair, they listen to Nina Simone and drink tea, and black metalheads are pissed. We of course think it's hilarious, and while we were duped as well, so what, it's a great joke, and fuck, the music still totally destroys. At one point if you went to the VC website, all you got was a link to an Air MP3?!? And still the only photos are of a woman in candlelight (presumably the girlfriend). And there were various reports that some of the songs were stolen from another artist who was uncredited and not compensated.
Phew! It's the sort of story that would ALWAYS be on the cover of the black metal version of US magazine!! If there was such a thing (oh why oh why is there not?!?!)
So here we are a few years down the line, the band is working on a new record, sans dieselharp of course, and while we wait, we have this massive double disc document of the band's early years, the music that started it all.
The first disc begins with a dreamy bit of pastoral ambience, before bursting into some ultra fast, blown out black buzz drenched black metal. Melancholy and moody, but swathed in super thick swirls of BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ. If anything, the stuff on Dextronaut sounds a bit more traditional than either of the other two releases, but a more traditional VC is still leagues weirder than most other BM outfits. Most of the tracks are blurry smeary buzzscapes, the melodies and drums and vocals, smothered under gloriously suffocating layers of, yep, still even more BUZZ!!! The best track, and also the weirdest, is the loping midtempo "Perched On A Neverending Peak". A blast of Burzum-worthy buzz, the guitars dense squalls of blown out fuzz, and all of this buzz and fuzz wrapped around an impossibly sad melody, but with a series of strange drop outs, where all the fuzz abates, only briefly, giving us a brief glimpse behind the veil of buzz, before it's quickly swallowed up again by the black wall of fuzz.
The second disc is three loooooong tracks, epic black ambience, gorgeous and darkly mysterious. The first a lazy looped low end gurgle, very Marclay or Strotter, an hypnotic muted underwater Oval sort of drift. The second is a cavernous drone, rife with distant buzz and some weird Trollmann like melodies. the final track is a slow burning expanse of soft focus shimmer, warbling and warm, soft and serene, and it wouldn't be VC if they didn't subtly interject some strange guttural demonic vocalizations right near the end...
Our only complaint is the ultra ghetto packaging. A single square of paper in lieu of a booklet, the tray card beneath the hinged double disc tray is blank, the artwork all over is pixelated and blurry, but knowing the band it could be part of the concept, either way, for a record as massive and weird and fucking amazing, the packaging is a bit of a let down. Regardless, once these discs are in your stereo, you'll be in a buzz drenched nacoticized black haze so deep and deadly, shoddy packaging will be the least of your concerns...
It seems like only yesterday... well, hell it was actually on the last list, when we listed the first proper full length release from strangely named East Coast audio ambient terrorists Vomit Orchestra, and here we are not two weeks later with a BRAND NEW full length.
It's sort of unclear why VO gets lumped in with the metal crowd, or even the black ambient crowd, the name maybe? The misanthropic intent? The blackened past? Whatever it is, it's a bit misleading, because the sound of the Vomit Orchestra couldn't be further removed from metal. And it's not really all that mean or frightening. It's dark, sure, mysterious and ominous maybe, but hardly overtly evil sounding. If anything, it's more of some sort of fuzzy abstract ambience, there are guitars here and there, but they mostly pick out simple sad melodies or are smeared into blurry streaks. For the most part, the world of VO is a dark deliriously dreamy, electronic organic hybrid, haunting soundscapes that veer from whispery drone and whir, to caustic abrasive crunch, but spending most of its time in the former.
The record opens with a maniacal mechanical toy orchestra intro, that quickly gives way to a dreamy looped ambience not unlike Jeck or Basinski, with a distinctly fuzzy sepia toned old timey feel. The rest of the record plays like a midnight wander through some strange funhouse, room after room of bizarre sights and strange sounds, disembodied female vocals drift and hover over snippets of a man speaking, her voice like a Theremin, weaving minor key melodies in a wide open black space, stabs of atonal organ, warble and whir amidst a fluctuating field of reverb and damaged delay, a downtuned guitar and what sounds like a harp play some sort of angular funereal duet, lovely but slightly off sounding, fuzzy guitars are looped into odd harmonies and hypnotic rhythms, the record finally closes with an epic 23 minute trawl though a dark tunnel, surrounded on all sides by creepy sounds, obscured melodies, buzzing noise, jagged shards of crumbling drone, mysterious fragmented riffing, with occasional stretches of simple strummed tranquility, lasting only seconds before some other ghastly sound or soul stirring sonic spirit wraps its bony fingers around your neck...
So great!
The first Vulture Club cd-r was the ultimate man vs. machine battle royale, with the machine winning. A record where the instruments called the shots, an army of guitars and amplifiers, marching across a blackened bloody battlefield littered with the corpses of musicians, the masters now bone and blood, the guitars and amps allowed to ring out, reverberate, to unfurl epic swaths of rumbling, crumbling feedback flecked drone. And we loved it!
The ultimate doomdrone sound, no riffs, no rhythms, just the sound of steel strings vibrating, amplified, played back at incredible volume, in turn causing the strings to vibrate, and the cycle continued... Another one of those sounds that is practically perfect unadorned, we could listen to an E chord ringing out through a wall of Marshall stacks FOREVER. But at some point, the amps and guitars that make up Vulture Club, decided more could be done with their buzz and drone, so they did the unthinkable, they recruited players, musicians, they chose not to give up their freedom, but to work together with their former masters, to create a new world of sound, a world where the guitars and the amplifiers were still in control, but the musicians were able to coax certain sounds from the guitars, to gently bend necks, stretch strings, fret certain notes, and thus, we have Live Young, Die Fast And Leave An Exquisite Corpse. The sound is still dronedirgedoomsludge but just like the debut, that sound is stretched to its absolute limit, a soundworld where notes and chords mean less than timbre and tone, melody is supplanted by power, you can feel the sound more than hear it. BUT, for this new disc (a real cd this time), the action ante has been upped just a bit. Instead of letting the guitars just buzz endlessly, the droning distortion is more dynamic, with percussive attacks, and extended decays, notes and chords barely visible in their flatlined form, the sound pulsates and throbs, creating unintentional rhythms, guitars unleash simple tones which are wrapped in layer after layer of distortion, and allowed to slowly crumble to bits, revealing all the secret tonal color inside. It's all very subtle, this still sounds like a room full of amps cranked to ten, with guitars run through distortion pedals and leaned up against the amps, the sound a glorious low end cacophony, but repeated listening, deep listening, reveals an amazing amount of subtle sonic variation beneath the glacial whirs and buzzing blur. Vulture Club is the sound of SUNNO)))'s and Earth's colliding, the music of black holes, the sound of guitar and amplifier joined in the unholiest of unions, an absolutely glorious sound indeed!
It's that time again, more Adventures In Modern Music from UK music mag the wire. This month, Seismic Performances, 60 concerts that shook the world, including Faust, Nico, Merzbow, Sun Ra, Swans, Royal Trux, Stooges, Stars, Jandek, Laibach, Nina Simone, My Bloody Valentine, The Roots, Sonic Youth, The Fall, Birthday Party, Tony Conrad, Ascension, Big Black and a bunch more. Also in this issue: Infinite Livez, Richard Skelton, artist and Puzzle Punk Shinro Ohtake, invisible jukebox with Bert Jansch, an Adrian Sherwood primer, as well as the usual batch of record, book, performance, book and DVD reviews and so much more...
