Seems kind of foolish to continue to proclaim different black metal bands the "weirdest ever" or "the most fucked up we've ever heard". We're quite tempted to take that route again with this bizarre Canadian horde, but the truth is, they were barely black metal to begin with, more a sort of Jeckish, Basinskian ambient blackness that bordered on the downright dreamy. Well, if anything the band has moved even further away from traditional black metal and into a distinctly, more damaged and significantly noisier world of sound.
Fortress Crookedjaw, Obey and Opex, the trio who make up this ensemble, have taken the strange scratched, looped sepia toned smear of their first record, and torn it apart, doused it in white hot sheets of crumbling guitar and damaged feedback, offering up an even more obscured black metal, a metal turned inside out so we can see the squirming guts inside, malfunctioning electronics everywhere, coating every single riff, every growled lyric, every snatch of barely audible drums, in a crackling sparking field of sonic solar flares. Like listening to Jeck's Surf on a busted car radio, where it's mostly static, but you can -almost- hear bits of melody in there somewhere. Or more accurately, listening to some old skipping 78's on Masami Akita's custom sound system, while Malefic from Xasthur sings along.
Some tracks are almost pure noise, the riffs and drums and anything else discernible as actual music, buried beneath an avalanche of Merzbowian skree, usually the vocals hovering atop, like another harsh jagged layer of sound. But occasionally, the noise abates, and we get a glimpse of some melancholy melodic murk inside, or a brief blast of black riffing, but more often than not, those bits are quickly subsumed and the record becomes a roiling chaotic black swirl once more.
A few tracks, like "The Field Hag", harken back to the first record, with the noise reeled in, and a haunting muddy soundscape allowed to drift and shimmer ghostlike, beneath a thick layer of fuzz and grit and a glass gargling demonic screech, and theoretically, every track on Screech Owl is like that, just some are more obscured and obfuscated than others. Tracks like "Windmill" and "A Sword Becomes Red With Fury" are so distorted and blown out, that they become Pan Sonic style glitch and buzz scapes, pulsing short circuited rhythms, spare and skeletal, with almost no trace of melody, metal or otherwise. Like that busted car radio when you go through a tunnel, all distorted and choppy with only little bits and snippets able to surface through the distortion and static.
Screech Owl weaves chaotically from blown out dreamscapes doused in furious fuzz, to crumbling damaged black loopscapes, to Whitehouse style noise, to soft focus looped ambience to ultra lo-fi black metal buzz, often in the same song. Distortion, noise, processed feedback, every track a delicate balance between huge pulsing flows of fuzzed out electronics, buzzing black metal madness and dreamy fuzzy drone and whir. Baffling and fucking brilliant!
Killer picture disc reissue of a long out of print double cassette, on which each member of Wolf Eyes does a whole side solo, and then the band does a whole side together. Hard to tell whose side is whose, which sort of makes sense really, all four sides sound distinctly Wolf Eyes-ish, and all are pretty dang great, it hardly matters.
Four massive expanses of growling gloomy synthscapes, murky doom, damaged deconstructed space rock, wild cacophonies of high end skree and upper register scrape and squeal, long stretches of near orchestral noise, tranquil and ghostly ambience, moaning crumbling tape damage, humming streaks of monotone buzz and crackle, barely there swirls of surface noise and low end rumble, bits of metallic clang, creaking moaning strings, muted percussive rhythms buried in thick swaths of black ambience, a litany of mysterious ambience and post industrial experimentation. Noisy and murky and creepy and exactly what you might expect from a Wolf Eyes free for all.
Plain black gatefold sleeves, gorgeous picture discs pressed on super thick vinyl. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!! We got a handful and WILL NOT be able to get more....
Yet another mysterious missive from the dark forests of Poland (via Texas of course) courtesy of doom folk trio Wolfmangler, featuring the one and only Smolken, aka Dead Raven Choir.
While Wolfmangler have been know to lay down some serious doom (c'mon, they shared a split with Moss!!) albeit in their own uniquely skewed fashion, these two tracks are not so much doom as they are doomy, the band embracing their foresty folk side, but shot through with a healthy dose of mourn and misery.
The sound here is some sort of funereal campfire folk, simple plodding percussion, moaning violin, fluttering flute, very tribal, and primitive, almost old timey, like some strange pirate sea shanty. Growled ghostly vocals crawl menacingly over what at times sounds like a very gnarled and twisted version of Peter And The Wolf.
The second side is a bit slower and creepier, even darker and more lugubrious, the flute, instead of flitting and fluttering is stretched into long drawn out melancholy melodies, the vocals a ragged whisper, the strings now weaving a surprisingly lush minor key backdrop.
A nice little slab of creepy crawly doom folk for sure.
Packaged in super swank silkscreened sleeves. he cover image, a wolf and what appears to be a river of blood, and a drowning body. Nice!
The last we heard from Wolfskull was a super limited cd-r on Campbell Kneale's avant metal label Battlecruiser, a stumbling slab of Jandekian doom metal drone. Since then, there's been a split with Polish (by way of Texas) black folk ensemble Wolfmangler, and not much else... until now.
Tannasg is the latest installment from this New Zealand based outfit (we're thinking there's a distinct possibility that Wolfskull is in fact either PseudoArcana's Anthony Milton, or BCM's Campbell Kneale...) and begins like a page out of SUNN)))'s doomdrone playbook. A very Black Boned slow motion downtuned riff-fuck, glacial and thick, huge moaning notes and chords crumbling into black rumbles...
Track two though harkens back to the Battlecruiser release, with shuffling abstract percussion, wide open reverby room sound, simple acoustic guitar strum, a sort of super super mellow Dead C jangle jam, that never really goes anywhere, just sort of drifts and eventually fades out.
But that's the only calm in this storm, the rest of the tracks are variations on a crushing minimal sludge theme. From muted throbbing pulses, to hissy lo-fi Skullfower guitarscapes over practice space drums, to the 16 minute sludge pummel of "Shred Your Axe", with pounding drums, shrieking feedback, all over a fuzzy rumbling riff so distorted it almost sounds like a streak of blacknoise, to the final 4 minute finale, a blown out guitar drone, muter feedback, twisted into stuttering rhythms and throbbing pulses. Some seriously heavy shit for sure. Essential listening for the doomdronedeathdirge obsessive among you...
LIMITED TO 79 COPIES!!!
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There's some sort of competition going on in the cassette tape underground. There's nothing new about elaborate packaging, the weirder and wilder and more extravagant the better, but things are getting, well... dangerous.
Recently we reviewed a tape by UK doomlords Moss, each one packaged in a huge metal sculpture, most adorned with nails and chains and gears and all manner of sharp metal bits (don't ask, those are LONG GONE). Somehow though, the packaging fit the music perfectly.
Now we have the latest from the strangely monickered Work/Death, the brilliantly titled Teenage Heavy Metal Revisionism, and the packaging, well, it manages to outdo the Moss in one important way, it's MUCH SHARPER. We mean it, the first time we picked one of these up, we sort of started and dropped it, unprepared were we for the strange sensation of nails on the soft skin of our hands. It's a regular old tape, in a plain old tape case, but each side has a little mini-bed of nails, really sharp nails, tied up tight with twine. Very imposing and threatening looking. And again, somehow, the sharp and twine-y outer shell suits the music within.
A dark, rumbling, scraping and creaking cavernous journey through some post industrial low end wasteland. Sort of ambient, but also brutal, and aggressive, harsh and harrowing. Metallic percussion peppers a snarling swirling black soundscape, streaked with shards of feedback and crumbling black melodies. Thick blown out fuzz churns and roils, as if Wolf Eyes and Black Boned Angel were boiled down and placed in a huge black iron pot to simmer. Or like some sort of caveman Einsturzende... a million black suns slowly dying and spreading out, coating everything in thick, viscous blackness...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We got about 15, and be warned, it's VERY SHARP, so if you do damage to yourself, we are not responsible, and if you order this with other stuff, it will have to be properly padded and secured to keep it from damaging any of the other items in your order, and in some cases that might bump up you shipping a tiny bit, but it's so worth it! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
The current incarnation of sixties-spawned free jazz & acid folk label ESP has been doing more than just reissuing their old n' obscure classics. They've also been signing up some new bands from the NYC jazz underground (which we have yet to really check out), and, perhaps better yet, have also dug up some hitherto *unreleased* vintage recordings from artists in the ESP orbit. Such as the music on this disc, which barely contains the energetic maelstrom stirred up by tenor saxophonist "the Reverend" Frank Wright and his band, live at Germany's Moers Jazz Festival in 1974. There's two long (almost half-hour tracks) here, full of frenzied blowing from Wright, who after all was inspired by Albert Ayler to take up the sax in the first place, and was discovered by ESP boss Bernard Stollman while sitting in with John Coltrane's band in '64! The other cats on here are certainly up to the challenge of expressing themselves alongside Wright -- you've got Alan Silva on bass, Bobby Few on piano, and Rashied Ali's brother Muhammad on drums! Together they made some truly vital, exciting music that night, and you can hear the crowd at Moers really getting into it!
The band known as Youth Group makes for a surprising indie pop addition to the eclectic Anti Records stable of artists (who include Tom Waits, Neko Case, Daniel Lanois, Jolie Holland and The Coup). They bring with them no big bells or whistles, just willowy, touching melancholia. Although we do have mixed feelings about their cover of Alphaville's "Forever Young" (which has already surfaced on the TV show The O.C.), the rest of the album is oh-so-comforting goodness like a cup o' cocoa on a drizzly day. Nice!
Yet another release in Tiliqua's Erotic Oriental Sunshine series of Japanese erotic music from the sixties and seventies. We reviewed Kokotsu No Sekai from Japanese sexy action heroine Ike Reiko a few lists back, as well as a long lost release from seventies bondage / S&M queen Naomi Tani, whose record was issued to commemorate her withdrawal (ahem) from the world of porn.
Now we have another gem, this time from Japanese "Play Girl" Kuwabara Yukio, who in addition to starring in a handful of films, and posing for various fashion and nudie magazines, made her mark most notably as the star of the erotic action series "Play Girl" which ran for 5 years and nearly 300 episodes! Yowza! That's a lot of erotic action for sure.
Yukio only released a single album, this one, in 1971, another titillating example of Iroke Kayoyoku, a bastardized version of a more popular Asian music of the time, sexed up with chanteuse like crooning, and most important of all, an amazing array of moaning and groaning and cooing and giggling, as if in the throes of EXTREME passion.
On Kuwabara Yukiko to Anata, Yukio coos and purrs over a lush bed of Lawrence Welk strings, sexy smokey sax, playful vibraphone melodies, and flamenco melodies. Soft and easy, swinging from big band jazz ballads, to spaghetti western twang, to champagne bubble waltzes, with soaring strings and shuffling percussion, muted Wes Montgomery-like guitar and that slow moaning sax.
Much like the Tani disc, Yukio, lays way back, spending as much time lounging quietly as she does whispery sexily in our ears. Only occasionally does her kitten-like purr escalate into downright moaning and groaning, instead, she spends most of the time, doing her best Birkin or Bardot, sing speaking what can only be sexy tales and subtle come-ons.. Oh la la!!!
Wonderfully wild and kitschy, and oh so sexy!
Packaged in a super deluxe Japanese miniature gatefold style cd sleeve, with a printed obi, saucy nude photos of Yukio on the cover, and extensive liner notes in English and Japanese!
ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 1300 copies pressed. Already almost sold out, these will most likely be our last copies...
