The return of infamous Austrian black metal horde Abigor, after six years of near silence. The band broke up briefly in 2003, but reformed last year, with an almost entirely new lineup, but their sound continues pretty much right where their last full length Satanized left off. Abigor began life as grim epic buzz merchants, channeling the sound of classic Norwegian BM, but mixing it with raw primitivism and forest folkiness, all woven into a sound distinctly their own. Furious and chaotic, most songs blasting blurs of swirling blackness, peppered with confusional arrangements and epic flourishes. But on 2001's Satanized, the band changed direction, their sound becoming� more cold and clinical, more ultra technical and sci-fi, the same old buzz and blast but with a futuristic sheen...
Right out of the gate, Fractal Possession (even the title!) ups the future tech sci-fi blackness ante big time, after a brief industrial soundscape of space FX, and angular guitar, bits of metallic clatter and clang, electronic beats and weird snippets of dialogue, the band lurches into a crazy squiggly blast of super dynamic, tangled guitar squiggles and furious blast beats, like some strange Mick Barr / Orthrelm style guitarist got dropped into a stretch of futuristic black metal buzz. The band soon settles back into a more recognizable pattern of blasting fury and relentless hellish pound, but those angular shred guitars are still everywhere, soaring and slippery, serpentine squiggles in, around, over and under the various riffs and drum blasts. There are also all kinds of ultra brief interludes, short stretches of creepy ambience or some subtle folky strum, that barely have time to leave your speakers before the band buzz back into action, giving the whole sound a super seasick, start/stop ultra dynamic feel. The rest of the record follows a similar pattern, with some songs offering up gothy minor key melodies, Borknagar-like clean vocals, stretches of mathy blackened post rock, damaged chunks of bizarre effects drenched buzz, even some classic old school metal riffing here and there. It's a confusional combination for sure, but it works, it really sounds like it could be the black metal soundtrack to an Alfred Bester novel. Dramatic, mysterious, original, heavy, weird, plenty of awesome what-the-fuck moments, but some unbelievably kick ass riffing as well. Everything just oozing creepy alien otherworldly ambience...
If you can imagine some impossible (and improbable) crossbreeding experiment, where genes were taken from Emperor, Blut Aus Nord, Gorguts, Necrophagist, Orthrelm and Ved Buens Ende, then said genes were launched into space, where they were left to orbit some blackcloud shrouded planet, the genes gestating and mutating in the rays of an alien sun, returning to earth a hulking�buzzing blasting blackened alien sonic space creature, only to find the humans gone, the landscape a burning post apocalyptic wasteland of destruction and death, fire and fury, and of course, gloriously dense and complex black metal buzz.
Folks have been chomping at the bit for this one and now it's finally here. A double lp collecting older demo material from French black metal horde Angmar and AQ faves, and current black-metal-bliss darlings Alcest. And after the most recent Alcest full length, the barely metal�Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde, and with the first ep being out of print and unavailable, a new Alcest record, even if it's an -old- new record, is enough to get the AQ black metal faithful, all in a frenzy...
Angmar, who we have yet to feature on the AQ list but who we most definitely dig, offer up a handful of demos and rehearsals spanning the years 1998-2003. All the usual adjectives apply, this was long before the band streamlined their sound, so these tracks find the band raw and grim and frosty. Cold buzzing riffage, blast beats and some seriously creepy atmospheres. Every track a relentless burst of black fury, primitive and lo-fi, but all the more intense and blackened for it. The tracks are sprinkled with gorgeous bits of lilting folkiness, short stretches of dark ambience, one whole track of creepy shimmer, a gloomy piano / guitar duet, but it's the blasting buzz that define these guys, and they do it well, burning a black mark on the pale flesh of all that is holy with their beastly racket. Awesome stuff.�
But Alcest is really the reason everyone wants this so bad, and rightfully so. Neige might not be a household name, unless you live with a bunch of black metalheads in France, but it sure should be, and probably will be soon, as Neige is the man behind Alcest, the equally brilliant Ameseours, as well as a member of weirdo black buzzers Peste Noire. The Alcest lp half of this split double, is one sided and features a 2001 demo in its entirety. And for those of you whose only exposure to Alcest is�Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde, you just might be shocked to discover that Alcest were indeed a real buzzing black metal outfit at one time. This demo definitely proves it. It also demonstrates, that even way back then, Neige had a melodic flair that could just not bee denied. The insane thing is that all of this music was written when Neige was all of 15 years old. Holy shit. What were we doing at 15? Definitely not composing legendary slabs of grim melodic black metal. But that's precisely what this is, an epic slab of buzzing blackness, run through with irresistible pop melodies, streaks of jangle and shoegazey bliss, but all merely as filigree for a seriously intense black metal buzz. Howled vocals, furious blasting rhythms, jagged black riffs, all woven into long stretches of midtempo moodiness, epic and minor key, and grim grim grim. But amazingly, without ever losing that mysterious melodiousness that would come to define Alcest's constantly evolving sound.
Gorgeously packaged. Super thick, full color deluxe gatefold sleeve, pressed on nice thick vinyl. And extremely limited. ONLY 500 COPIES PRESSED,�each record hand numbered on the spine. We got about 30 and it's unlikely we'll be able to get more...
We weren't sure what to expect from a band made up of one part�abstract experimental postrock math metal grinders Forensics, and one part�epic sweeping soundscapers This Will Destroy You, with the word 'mosh' in their band name, and very Donnie Darko-esque cover art featuring a little girl holding hands with a man in an oversized, raggedy bunny suit. But whatever we may have been expecting, it wasn't this...
The first descriptor that comes to mind would be something like�emo-ambient, each track a dark and glistening, shimmery and abstract streak of sound, some poppy and propulsive, others skittery and electronic, still others super minimal and softly blurred. But each of them gloriously fuzzy and blissy and dreamy, and a little bit emo...
From the soft focus swirling drift of "Always Oversleeps" sounding like some strange Tim Hecker / Machinefabriek / Jasper TX hybrid, to the lilting piano / guitar drift of "Dog Years", that transforms part way through into a loping Flaming Lips style groove with distorted bass and strange alien drums, to the barely there ambience of "A Bluff Carried More Resolutely Through To The Final Limit", a lengthy found sound, soft synth shimmer, like sitting on the beach, listening to a Niblock performance from a mile way. Elsewhere, "Courage & Courtesy" sounds like some lost slowcore classic, all arpeggiated minor key guitar, simple drums and a warm buzzing drone in the background, "I Love You, Please Come Back" is the greatest electro indie track, the Postal Service never wrote, equal parts Autechre skitter and Death Cab swoon pop, "The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same" is a sprawling twangscape, steel strings buzzing lazily in a wide open expanse of billowy breezy sound... the record continued to wander all over the place, every stop some gloriously warm and soothing sonic confection, before finishing off with "One Day We Will Grow Old And Forget The Things We Had When We Were Young", a dense fuzzy wash of thick layered drones and swirling muted buzz, epic and about as heavy as this record gets, sounding not unlike Nadja at their most tranquil... So good.�
As much as we love us some ultra doom, some seriously sick slowness, you know, that doooooom, that is so glacial, that the songs begin to crumble and ooze into viscous black pools. We do. But sometimes we just want our doom to ROCK. Sounds contrary but it's been known to happen. Doom can be slow and low and still rock. Take B.Son for example. Whose particular brand of doomic energy is drawn from bands like Harvey Milk, Karp, The Melvins, godheadSilo, more a sort of downtuned propulsive sludge with doom elements, than pure doom. But goddamn if it isn't just as brutal and heck, doomy...
Thick ropy buzzbass, pounding destructo drums, throaty howls, grinding guitars, all lurching and swaying like some drugged and demented superrock doombeast, all filtered through a bit of grinding screamo and some buzzed out metallic blackness.�
There are moments of blisssed� out post rockiness, and weird laid back grooves, stretched out near ambience and dense little mathy jams, but those moments just serve to keep the doomed sludge rock fury from becoming too much.�
Produced by James Plotkin. Spiffy black and gold sleeves... This seems to already be out of print as well, so this batch could very well be the last we see of these...
This '60s Swedish psych trio is pretty obscure -- they only ever officially released one record, a 7" single that came out in Finland only -- but they haven't been forgotten 'cause the guys in this band eventually went on to play with such bigger, better-known acts as Mecki Mark Men and Kebnekajse. If you picked up that Psychedelic Phinland compilation we highlighted last list, you've heard "Being Is More Than Life" the B-side of their 7", it appears here too along with the A-side "Somebody Keeps Calling My Name" and several previously unreleased live recordings from the era (1967-'68), for a full hour of music in all.
The Baby Grandmothers really liked to jam, they had a thrice-weekly (Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays!) residency at the short-lived psychedelic Stockholm club FILIPS, where much of the live material found here was recorded -- there's a reproduction of a flier in the cd booklet advertising them appearing at FILIPS with AQ faves Parson Sound (oh for a time machine!). So if you dig mostly-instrumental electric guitar oriented psych improv, dosed with plenty of feedback and fuzz, there's plenty here to turn you on, from stoned moody meanderings to freaked out solo spasms. It's all rather raw and energetically alive.
The lengthy liner notes in the photo-illustrated 15-page cd booklet tell the whole Baby Grandmothers story, from their origins in a R&B combo called the T-Boones to gigs opening for Jimi Hendrix to their transformation into the Mark II line-up of the prog-psych act Mecki Mark Men and beyond.
FYI: the Encyclopedia Of Swedish Progressive Music also reviewed this list comes with a bonus cd containing another half-hour of unreleased live Baby Grandmothers recordings from FILIPS, different material than what's on this disc.
Listen on: Deezer
This�beloved blackened behemoth from New Zealand, AQ fave Black Boned Angel, aka Campbell Kneale, takes his first shot at spreading the disease via vinyl, with this two on one lp reissue of several long out of print cd-r's. Pressed on thick vinyl, and in a super striking silver-on-black sleeve, Eternal Love and Eternal Hunger are available once again, but only for a limited time!
Eternal Love is not�quite as overtly metal as BBA's Supereclipse cd, and thus starts off much more sonically aligned with Kneale's more ambient exploits with BCM. Things start to go south (as in South Of Heaven) a few minutes in with the introduction of creepy crawly gothy bass lines, drifting through the abyss, bass riffs begin but are abandoned part way through only to resurface moments later, like the skeleton of Joy Division, reanimated and lurching drunkenly through the scorched and barren underworld. Eventually this haunting bass line slips off the edge and into a suffocating blackened swirl of downtuned ultra distorted bass, grinding slow motion metal guitar, and plodding industrial percussion, a head crushing plod offering some sort of rhythmic guidance through Eternal Love's hellish tar pit trawl.�
On the flipside, Eternal Hunger�is�a serious blackened pummeling, huge roiling washes of downtuned black tar riffing, swirled and smeared into epic waves of darkdarkdark ambience. Bookended on both sides by some Birchville style shimmery dronescaping, but those merely serve to ease you in, and ease you out, of this bottomless black pool of corrosive suffocating heaviness. Twenty minutes long, a single side long track, nothing but punishing blackness as far as the eye can sea. Nothing but rumbling crunch as far as the ear can hear. A never ending metallic drift into a swirling black hole of gloriously brutal doomdronedeathdirgesludge.
The follow up to their great debut from a couple years back does not disappoint AT ALL. More solid and lively instrumental funk informed by all the great sounds: Afrobeat, Ethiopiques and down home soul. Great to hear modern day players with such a fine ear for cranking out classic jams that capture the raw and impassioned spirit of vintage funk, and exciting that those modern funk folks still know how to find a groove and make it shine. Very inviting sounds and further proof that Daptone has their fingers on the pulse of riveting soul and funk done right.
Our favorite modern-day GRUNGE band returns! On big label V2 no more, however... are they still touring arenas? Apparently the Audioslave crowd didn't pick up on 'em like they should have. But we still really dig the Burning Brides, who remain, soundwise, tough and catchy, more metal than ever in parts this time 'round (we hear some Sabbath, no surprise, but also a hint of Slayer??). But basically, most simply put, this is grunge like you used to love it (and c'mon, you still do): flannel wearing, garagey, heavy, hooky, and of course dwelling on dark thoughts from drizzly days. They're not from Seattle though, these guys & gal are from Philly and now based in Los Angeles. And they seem more partial to black leather than flannel. But the sound is grunge for sure.
First in a three part series from C. Spencer Yeh and his Burning Star Core. The last BSC we made a record of the week, as Yeh began to harness his noise into something way more compelling and cohesive, a propulsive melodic droneworld of sound. And this shit just keeps getting better. And this is one of those singles that's so good, it most definitely should have been a full length (and will merit much in the way of repeat plays).
Side one is a dense blurred of processed strings, guitar, violin, it's hard to tell, let's call em guitars, but the buzzing and reverberating strings are smeared into a densely layered Niblockian soundscape of pulsing looped guitars, hovering beneath squiggles of psychedelic scrawl and streaks of effulgent feedback.
The flipside is way more laid back and tranquil, a sort of Tangerine Dream-esque muted synthesizer workout, minor key tones fluttering and whirring, peppered with swooshes and space age bloops, while atop this slow moving stream unfurl melancholy melodies, stretched into long smears of warm shimmer, all coming together in a chaotic crescendo at the end, reverbed voices tangled up with the guitars, everything becoming more and more blurry and fuzzy.
Sounds just as good at 45 as it does at 33, packaged in a super spare black sleeve, on Hospital Productions.
After numerous releases as Caribou (as well as his previous moniker Manitoba), mainman Dan Snaith has shifted gears from densely packed dreamy pop-tronica to densely packed upliftingly melodious songcraft. Quite a startling change, but a most pleasant one! We always welcome music that helps us stretch out the summertime good feelings a little longer into the autumn months. Caribou's latest album fits that bill perfectly. It sounds to us as if Snaith has been intently studying the works of The Beatles and Brian Wilson in his pursuit of pop bliss. Can't blame him! Who better to be a role model than those folks? Anyways, Andorra is a delirious trip that soars from swirling blown-out pop that also recalls Flaming Lips and Olivia Tremor Control to late '60s harp stroked, tambourine tapped party pop a la Free Design. Like an ice cream cone on a sunny day, as the album progresses it melts slowly, changing form into a pastel puddle of shoegazerness. Songs such as "She's The One" also spurred imaginings of Snaith as the male counterpart to Julee Cruise. Ooooh, so sweetly splendid.
Never heard of the Cherry Blossoms? Neither had we, but some quick digging around revealed that they are a damaged abstract free folk jugband from Tennessee, and that for this here disc, they were joined by none other than folk songstress Josephine Foster for a dizzying, tripped out experimental folk freeforall. Foster fans should be well prepared to not expect only gentle strumming, dreamy torch songs, and Appalachian fingerpicking, while some of that stuff is present, Foster spends as much time wading through dizzying folk flecked soundworlds that have way more in common with the No Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand Of The Man or Avarus. But even compared to those far out cats, some of this sounds pretty dang unhinged.
Thee opening track is a minimal chaotic swirl of random clatter, detuned guitar strum and scrape, and a dense cloud of tangled voices, a druggy psychedelic choir, voices all intertwined, crooning and cooing, careening back and forth, wild and confusional, eventually coalescing into a drug folk lament right at the end, before drifting into the next track, a wandering atonal folk jam, the guitar stumbling and detuned, jaw harp, more kitchen sink clatter, and those vocals again, not your typical harmonies, ghostly and mildly atonal, the main male vocal, a lazy drawl, wandering through a forest of feminine chanting and falsetto ooh's and ahh's. A lot of this sounds like genuine old timey music, that became corrupted as it was transmitted forward through time from the old days, everything coming through slightly twisted and tweaked, the vocals wavery and haunting, the guitars slightly out of tune, the drums more a splatter of percussion than actual rhythm, the whole record wavers druggily from dreamy damaged folk to abstract drone and strum, back and forth, often multiple times in the same song. On first listen, it's definitely strange and off putting, but a few songs in, we couldn't help but be carried off, lulled into a strange trance, by these mesmerizingly off kilter lullabies.
Vic Chesnutt's collaboration with a number of folks on the Constellation Records roster (aka A Silver Mt. Zion and a list of friends which includes Fugazi's Guy Picciotto and members of Hangedup, Frankie Sparo, Esmerine, The Quavers, and yes, Godspeed You Black Emperor) sounds *exactly* as you would expect... bleak and immensely moving. They keep such perfectly dour company that we wonder what took them so long to make it happen! Flooded with anguish and raw nerves, North Star Deserter is an intense frayed journey, but not without a moment or two of glimmering hope and twisted folly. Chesnutt's lyrics have always been an affecting bruised blend of the absolutely direct and the utterly cryptic. We know they're a perfect match for his own creeping, barren plain plucked guitar accompaniment, but wow, when joined by these additional like-minded vocalists and musicians the results are often times crushingly beautiful. Placed before a landscape of ominous cello drones, electrified string shards, and near-military marching drums, his weathered rasp of a voice resonates anew. The amazing breadth of this album is captured in two songs late in the album -- the thunderous roar of "Debriefing" and the hushed haunted loner "Marathon". Damn. Recommended.
As regular readers of the AQ New Arrivals list might guess, we're pretty much always in a state of simmering enthusiasm for Finland's Circle here at AQ. But our fannish obsession has gotten even more feverish this month, as our favorite band of far-out Finns is taking their amazing hypno-kraut, repetitive pseudo-metallic space rock on a rare US tour and will be playing here in San Francisco on September the 27th! And if all goes according to plan, they may also be doing an Aquarius in-store performance (we'll keep you posted). So naturally we're excited, it's always great to see them, and also it's gonna be cool to hear material from this amazing new album of theirs live and in person. New album? Yes indeedy. Their fourth this year, or fifth if you count the recent compact disc reissue of Arkades too. Prolific they are, but have yet to disappoint. So, what's the deal with Katapult? (Assuming you need to know and didn't already just "add to cart" like we guess most folks will.)
The press material that the label has been circulating makes reference to influence from the likes of seminal black metallers Venom and Celtic Frost. And we know that these boys do like their metal, witness the Steel Mammoth side project reviewed last list. But while they've always championed their own so-called New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal, they're always far from being an actual metal band (even in the case of Steel Mammoth). And Katapult brings them no closer, even as it displays a definite ease with metal idioms. Sure it's got heavy guitars and the eccentric vocals sometimes approximate a black metal rasp -- there's even a few trademark Tom G. Warrior style death grunt "unghs!" in there -- but the only people who would think this really sounds like Venom and Celtic Frost are those who've never actually heard those bands. Opener "Saturnus Reality" does start with riffing that Norwegians churchburners wouldn't turn up their corpsepainted noses at, but the use of keyboards is much more Tangerine Dream than Dimmu Borgir. Later on, you'll hear as much Can and Goblin as anything Frosty. Song titles like "Torpedo Star Throne" and "Skeletor Highway" also seem a bit metal, don't they? But what about "Snow Olympics" and "Understanding New Age"? It's Circle being Circle, the NWOFHM an unserious moniker for their own, uniquely Circle style, that here takes what they were doing on Tower and Miljard and goes evil hard rock with it. Or not even hard rock, just evil -- ferinstance, track six, "Four Points Of The Compass" is a throbbing, suspenseful instrumental totally in the John Carpenter/Zombi vein, with stabs of guitar, spooky synths, and burbling rhythms like a diabolic version of the tracks on Circle's Tower album.
Circle bassist and bandleader Jussi Lehtisalo had told us in an email that Katapult was "sixties black metal"... which he followed up with a characteristic "hahahahahaha". Sixties black metal? After hearing it, what we think he meant is that it's a mix of psychedelic space rock effects (as usual, and especially in the vein of the synthy ambient zoneouts on their recent Panic album) with a dark, heavy, maybe mystical moodiness. The rhythms have all the usual mesmerizing motorik Circle urgency, moreso than usual even. And the spiked fist of metallic chug is always gloved within an astral ambience of shimmering trippy bliss, sinister bliss. Part of the proggy psych / Nordic black metal crossover here can be ascribed to the primitive recording conditions -- they tracked it at a summer cabin in the Finnish countryside -- for an especially raw and live feel.
No other band in the realms of post-rock, modern day psych, and/or NWO-anyplace-HM sparks our imagination and instills such a gleeful response in us as much as does Circle. They've always got a left-field, extra-dimensional, conceptual something that makes us shake our heads and wonder what next? even as we press repeat again and again on their current disc. Again, can't wait to hear this live!
We love CJA, aka Clayton Noone, aka one half of New Zealand free rock combo Armpit�as well as a member of weirdo new wavers the Futurians. CJA releases have varied considerably in tone and texture, from dark and contemplative dreamy drone, to more corrosive free and furious noise. We weren't really sure what to expect with this, the latest from CJA, a massive double cd-r called Pink Metal, wrapped in a super goofy garish hand drawn heavy metal style handmade sleeve. We were super psyched, imagining it might be some demented Kiwi freaked out what-the-fuck blast of damaged metal, and while it is heavy at times, and could most definitely be considered metallic in places, the 'metal' of Pink Metal has much more in common with bands like SUNNO))) and countrymen Black Boned Angel. And those chunk of metallic pummel are spread out, and scattered amidst all sorts of other strange sounds and mysterious soundscapes.
The opening track on disc one starts things off in a distinctly non-metallic style, it's all dark and quiet, expansive and shimmering, guitars unwinding into lazy drawn out swoons and shimmers, skeletal melodies spread out over barely there ambience. But the second track quickly sets things right, a sort of ultra lo-fi Godflesh style industrial trudge, huge booming trash can lid percussion, over murky muddy downtuned riffing. Not so much heavy as it is intense and relentless. But before you know it, Noone switches back to acoustic guitar strum, weaving a folky little interlude before shifting into a strange stuttering guitarscape, hypnotic and repetitive. There are a few brief blasts of buzzed out riffage, crumbling and thick, caustic and dense, but for the most part, Noone veers between haunting folk flecked lo-fi deconstructed pop and abstract ambient drone music, only peppering it with chunks of grainy heaviness.�
The�second disc is a similarly dizzying sonic spectrum, beginning with a cool, super tense, weirdly dramatic solo guitar drone, but instead of low end rumble, it's crashing drawn out chords, distorted and melodic, repetitive, and overlapping, riffs pulled apart into slabs of melodic sound, before coalescing near the end into a killer hook. Then we're off again, fractured twee folk, stumbling lo-fi strum and clatter, thick swells of industrial whir, Dead C style chaotic murky noisiness, finishing off with an extended low end hiss drenched slab of grinding, growling, throbbing, super distorted pummel, complete with sludge riffing and propulsive buried in the mix�drumming. As always, awesome!
Packaged in an oversized thick paper, black, white and purple multi page booklet, adorned with awesome high school binder heavy metal / Dungeons And Dragons imagery, huge muscled demon warriors, swords and�maces, and slain foes laying heaps on the ground, strange fiery aliens, Silver Surfer like creatures firing lazers from their fingertips, spike headed beasts, samurai warriors, cloaked demons, dragons, and growling�wolf beasts, ultra violence, and decapitations, skeletons, zombies, ninjas and more. All black and white, but with all the text in a garish bright purple (or pink maybe it's meant to be), blood dripping metal font. The cds housed in plastic sleeves affixed to the insides of the front and back covers.
This came out a while ago, and� it was of course pretty limited to start with. We have a bunch, but there's a definite chance that once these are gone we won't be able to get more...
It should come as no surprise that on his extensive musical resume Dennis Coffey can boast to scoring blaxploitation films as well as session playing on numerous Motown records and other soul and funk outings from his hometown of Detroit. Big City Funk compiles tracks from his four studio albums released on the Sussex label over the years 1971-'74. His fried and fiery delivery of instrumental funk has been a mainstay with crate diggers forever. In fact over the years he's been sampled by the likes of the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and LL Cool J. When he's on, his tracks are on fire, reminding us at times of such disparate sounds as the Childrens Television Workshop and groups like Stark Reality. The overall sound and feeling of Coffey's songs would make the perfect soundtrack for a wild cop car chase or for those soft focus slow tease moments in classic '70s porn. Really fun and oh so '70s!
Tim Green is a busy fellow. Among probably many other things he runs a recording studio, rocks out with his band The Fucking Champs, occasionally sits in with fellow Bay Area band Crime In Choir, and records in solo mode under the moniker Concentrick. His past Concentrick recordings have been often serene, occasionally krautrock rhythm'd electronic soundscapes that stand in stark, revealing contrast to his rock band endeavors. So we were surprised not only to hear some blissed out guitar work, but also to see a full band's worth of musicians make an appearance on his latest release Aluminum Lake. Then, we were even more thrown for a loop when the third track burst out of our speakers! On "White Bear" Green allows his 'Champs rock side to barge its way into his Concentrick zone with some nut-bustin' electric guitar riffage and bombastic drums. From there he, along with Jon Theodore (drums), Seth Lorinczi (bass), Lorraine Rath (flute), Jackie Perez-Gratz (cello) and Adria Otte (violin), roam freely through passages hewn from prog, metal, Kraut and pastoral inspirations. Who'd have thought we'd be describing Concentrick as being dark or propulsive or heavy? Not us! Those are words we'd normally reserve for the 'Champs. Not anymore! Seems Concentrick has become Green's catch-all for his various musical whims and moods. Quite cool nonetheless.
We know what you're probably thinking: "Continuum 2? What the heck happened to Continuum 1?" Well, we're right there with you, number one seemed to have slipped right past us at some point, but fear not, we're doing some digging to see if we can't track some down for the store. In the meantime, rest assure, much like Die Hard 2, or Halloween 2 or any other famous part 2's, you don't really need to have experienced part one to appreciate the second part. But all of this talk about parts, why the hell should you care? What the heck is Continuum anyway?
Well, Continuum is the darkdronedriftdoom collaboration between Dirk Serries, aka Fear Falls Burning, and Steven Wilson, Opeth producer and leader of Porcupine Tree. Whereas their first collaboration was a much more tranquil affair, match up number two augments the duo's drifting dronescapes, with massive doom metal guitars, crumbling and downtuned, sprawled riffs spread out over epic soundscapes, imagine a DJ spinning Earth 2 on one deck and Oval on the other. A glistening glimmering sonic undercurrent, beneath a plodding rumbling behemoth.
The opener, "Construct IV", is nearly 23 minutes of the above, a massive riff, a gorgeous shimmering backdrop of distant whir and warm swell, peppered with little sparkling bits of FX and fragments of melody, that riff, endless and HEAVY, plodding and sort of melting into the sounds around it. Nirvana for the doomdrone obsessives.
"Construct V" is a bit more subtle, with nearly two thirds of its seventeen minutes, taken up by gorgeous black ambience, metallic shimmer, and muted melodies, whispered voices and distant effects, before the guitar takes over, after slowly building for almost the length of the track, less a riff as a huge glacial chunk of distorted sound, the voices growing to an urgent hiss, the track transformed into something sounding like some sort of ambient black metal, or some grim blasting buzz, with the drums removed and then slowed down to a barely moving crawl.
The final track, "Construct VI", is the dreamiest of the bunch, a loping sort of doomic post rock, a simple beat, the guitars strangely alien, drifting off in the distance, everything decayed and wrapped in distortion and delay, reverb and sonic grit, the melodies minor key and melancholy, it almost sounds what might be lurking under an Angelic Process track, once all that blown out distortion was removed, a murky muddy, Hawkwind outro as played by Low, run through Acid Mothers Temple's effects rack. Until the very end, where the track is engulfed by a wall of speaker shredding distortion, a dense cloud of damaged FX and thick squalls of crumbling sound, before drifting off into a swirling space-y fade out...
LIMITED TO 2000 COPIES. Gorgeously packaged in a full color oversized A5 book-style packaging with three full color postcards.
Similar to the way Copeland's friend Panda Bear released his own little masterpiece earlier this year while taking a break from his main act the Animal Collective, Eric Copeland has made an equally amazing solo record of his own, which just so happens to come to us on the eve of his main act, Black Dice, releasing a new album.
Hermaphrodite finds Copeland displaying major cinematic flair. There is an intensity and density to the sounds on Hermaphrodite that make the listener feel like they've been whisked away, similar to the way the masters of the silver screen are able to transport audiences. Not many people can sculpt sound the way Copeland does, always in control of the way the sounds shifts and change shape, never feeling stiff or too smart for its own good. What makes Hermaphrodite such a special record is how physical the music seems. Like the strange songcraft he's developed in Black Dice, Copeland has become so adept at taking sounds to mysterious places and transforming them into rich visceral experiences, as intriguing to the mind as they are to the body. Hermaphrodite sounds like creatures from another planet were given some run down analog equipment, a broken old video game arcade machine, a glimpse into Gamelan music and assigned to score a lost film made by Michelangelo Antonioni and Alejandro Jodorowsky. One of those records that truly takes you on a wild ride you never want to get off. We're more than intrigued with this Hermaphrodite, we think we might be falling in love!
We know the black hearted AQ legions rely on us to trawl the dark depths and the fiery pits, in search of any essential blackness, that their cursed souls would wither without. With that in mind, we have been trying, for ages now, to get a hold of these two mysterious releases from Swiss black metal horde Darkspace. Those of you in the know, probably realize, that one of the cloaked and corpsepainted members of Darkspace is the man responsible for the epic frosty buzz drenched majesty that is Paysage D'Hiver. And judging from how big a hit Paysage was around these parts, it's no small leap to think that EVERYONE who bought the Paysage absolutely NEEDS this as well.�
Whereas Paysage was one man's vision, twisted buzzing glorious epic blasts of grim black metal and extended Tangerine Dream like sythnscapes, gorgeous subterranean drones and hushed ambient shimmer, based around themes of winter and spirituality, darkness and astral projection, the music stitched into expansive worlds of sound, Darkspace is an actual band, and in many ways is WAY heavier than Paysage. The focus is on the riff as much as the ambience, if not more so, and the riffs are some of the best we've ever heard, downtuned and super distorted, minor key and crunchy, thick and dense, twisted and black, gnarled but incredibly catchy, often, the band explodes into furious wintery blasts, dense chaotic furies, topped off by huge sweeping melodies that sound like washes of keyboards (although no keyboards were used), before settling back into a gorgeously loping buzz encrusted mid tempo, a weird black groove, haunting and intense. But fast and fierce is the order of the day, and these guys are indeed true Blizzard Beasts, whipping up nearly impenetrable walls of swirling, roiling black frost. Which is sort of why the slow parts have such impact, the riff just sort of emerges from the dense black blur, to chug briefly before being swallowed up again. And whereas in most music, sound samples and snippets of dialogue from films, usually mean less re-playability, and often eventually bug more than they enhance, here are used to fantastic effect. Darkspace are futuristic black metal voyagers, the stars, planets, the universe the cosmos, the music is all about space, and it sounds like it, epic and so MASSIVE, simultaneously like a black hole sucking up all light, and a blinding supernova, the bits of dialogue are buried in the mix and delivered like some mysterious transmission from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The fast bits and Burzumic passages are balanced by tripped out ambience, crazy dub drenched interludes, long drawn out SUNNO)))-scapes, huge walls of guitar, riffs splayed and spread out over epic expanses of low end drone, rumbling murmuring ambience....
Listening to Darkspace, we almost wish we hadn't used so much hyperbole in the past, or described other black metal bands as epic, or majestic, or even intense or brutal, or frosty and grim, because this is the music those adjective were designed for. In fact, we're almost compelled to create new words, a handful of superlatives, black metal specific, in order to do justice to these sounds. To explain just how fucking massive and intense this stuff is. NOW is the time for hyperbole, but it's not hyperbole if it's true right? And never has anything sounded this intense and blown out, heavy and black, we almost forgot how completely mind blowing this stuff was. But hearing it again, it makes us wonder why most black metal bands even bother...
The first album is separated into seven parts (1.1-1.7), with song lengths averaging about 10 minutes. Each one a burst of black chaos, little epics compressed into the length of a normal song, like it must be some trick of the light, as if unleashed they would expand and stretch out forever. Their second album is split up into just three tracks, two of them 20 minutes plus, with a much more ambient bent, a ten minute sprawling drone separating two lengthy black metal spacescapes, and much of those are taken up by drifting black hole ambience as well, but the metallic fury everywhere else is positively overpowering...
And�there's a reason that both these releases have the same review, besides the fact that they are both sonically similar, it's that BOTH are essential, they are two parts of a bigger whole (with a third in the works), they might as well have been released as a double cd, they flow perfectly into one another, one massive journey through the endless blackness of space... You can certainly buy one without the other, but you will quickly find that you need more and can not live without both...
As if the music wasn't enough (and it is), their aesthetic is just as intense and mysterious. The band, all in matching corpsepaint and high necked robes, look like some alien black metal priests, or cenobites even, the band's logo, simple and subtle, a pentagram within a crescent moon, the artwork, spare and sparse, just the band logo, and the name of the record, either I or II, the song titles are numbers, "Dark 1.1", "Dark 1.2", "Dark 2.8" (you can go to their website and download the first demo, titled -I for free), a barely visible alien image beneath the tray card, everything printed in bluish silver on black, very austere and space-y...
A gloriously blinding sonic dying sun, a burst of pure blackened brilliance, both discs, separate or together, obviously black metal record(s) of the year, this year, or whatever year they actually came out, maybe black metal record(s) of forever. And yeah, we're serious.�
We know the black hearted AQ legions rely on us to trawl the dark depths and the fiery pits, in search of any essential blackness, that their cursed souls would wither without. With that in mind, we have been trying, for ages now, to get a hold of these two mysterious releases from Swiss black metal horde Darkspace. Those of you in the know, probably realize, that one of the cloaked and corpsepainted members of Darkspace is the man responsible for the epic frosty buzz drenched majesty that is Paysage D'Hiver. And judging from how big a hit Paysage was around these parts, it's no small leap to think that EVERYONE who bought the Paysage absolutely NEEDS this as well.�
Whereas Paysage was one man's vision, twisted buzzing glorious epic blasts of grim black metal and extended Tangerine Dream like sythnscapes, gorgeous subterranean drones and hushed ambient shimmer, based around themes of winter and spirituality, darkness and astral projection, the music stitched into expansive worlds of sound, Darkspace is an actual band, and in many ways is WAY heavier than Paysage. The focus is on the riff as much as the ambience, if not more so, and the riffs are some of the best we've ever heard, downtuned and super distorted, minor key and crunchy, thick and dense, twisted and black, gnarled but incredibly catchy, often, the band explodes into furious wintery blasts, dense chaotic furies, topped off by huge sweeping melodies that sound like washes of keyboards (although no keyboards were used), before settling back into a gorgeously loping buzz encrusted mid tempo, a weird black groove, haunting and intense. But fast and fierce is the order of the day, and these guys are indeed true Blizzard Beasts, whipping up nearly impenetrable walls of swirling, roiling black frost. Which is sort of why the slow parts have such impact, the riff just sort of emerges from the dense black blur, to chug briefly before being swallowed up again. And whereas in most music, sound samples and snippets of dialogue from films, usually mean less re-playability, and often eventually bug more than they enhance, here are used to fantastic effect. Darkspace are futuristic black metal voyagers, the stars, planets, the universe the cosmos, the music is all about space, and it sounds like it, epic and so MASSIVE, simultaneously like a black hole sucking up all light, and a blinding supernova, the bits of dialogue are buried in the mix and delivered like some mysterious transmission from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The fast bits and Burzumic passages are balanced by tripped out ambience, crazy dub drenched interludes, long drawn out SUNNO)))-scapes, huge walls of guitar, riffs splayed and spread out over epic expanses of low end drone, rumbling murmuring ambience....
Listening to Darkspace, we almost wish we hadn't used so much hyperbole in the past, or described other black metal bands as epic, or majestic, or even intense or brutal, or frosty and grim, because this is the music those adjective were designed for. In fact, we're almost compelled to create new words, a handful of superlatives, black metal specific, in order to do justice to these sounds. To explain just how fucking massive and intense this stuff is. NOW is the time for hyperbole, but it's not hyperbole if it's true right? And never has anything sounded this intense and blown out, heavy and black, we almost forgot how completely mind blowing this stuff was. But hearing it again, it makes us wonder why most black metal bands even bother...
The first album is separated into seven parts (1.1-1.7), with song lengths averaging about 10 minutes. Each one a burst of black chaos, little epics compressed into the length of a normal song, like it must be some trick of the light, as if unleashed they would expand and stretch out forever. Their second album is split up into just three tracks, two of them 20 minutes plus, with a much more ambient bent, a ten minute sprawling drone separating two lengthy black metal spacescapes, and much of those are taken up by drifting black hole ambience as well, but the metallic fury everywhere else is positively overpowering...
And�there's a reason that both these releases have the same review, besides the fact that they are both sonically similar, it's that BOTH are essential, they are two parts of a bigger whole (with a third in the works), they might as well have been released as a double cd, they flow perfectly into one another, one massive journey through the endless blackness of space... You can certainly buy one without the other, but you will quickly find that you need more and can not live without both...
As if the music wasn't enough (and it is), their aesthetic is just as intense and mysterious. The band, all in matching corpsepaint and high necked robes, look like some alien black metal priests, or cenobites even, the band's logo, simple and subtle, a pentagram within a crescent moon, the artwork, spare and sparse, just the band logo, and the name of the record, either I or II, the song titles are numbers, "Dark 1.1", "Dark 1.2", "Dark 2.8" (you can go to their website and download the first demo, titled -I for free), a barely visible alien image beneath the tray card, everything printed in bluish silver on black, very austere and space-y...
A gloriously blinding sonic dying sun, a burst of pure blackened brilliance, both discs, separate or together, obviously black metal record(s) of the year, this year, or whatever year they actually came out, maybe black metal record(s) of forever. And yeah, we're serious.�
- MPEG stream: 2.8
- MPEG stream: 2.9
Nice single from AQ faves Deerhoof which has a different mix of "Matchbook Seeks Maniac" from their latest album Friend Opportunity and a b-side which is a charming and enchanting short track that displays their continued push towards even more vividly creative pop. A picture disc whose spinning colors match the brightness of Deerhoof's spirited sound.
Three new sonic missives from the ether, from whatever mysterious alternate sonic universe the NOTHingness label exists in. A world of bleak emptiness, massive expanses of barren rumbling tundra, of glassy black surface sonic pools... Every disc dark and lovely, creepy and ominous, haunting and super intense. And of course outrageously limited...
This one is an epic, 73 minute, single track plunge into the sonic abyss, or maybe more accurately 'descent into the void'. Long, drawn out, slow rolling soundscapes of deep swells, soft metallic buzz, and all manner of complex low end filigree buried way down in the mix, giving the track some strange inner momentum, a sublimated chaos, lurking just below the tranquil surface. Harrowing and gorgeously minor key, but the melodies here are just distant streaks, and strange smears of tonal color, everything super subtle, drifting billows of grey grainy shift and pulsing diffused light. Over the course of this expansive sprawl, random sounds surface, float ghostlike and sink back into the ether, disembodied voices, haunting clouds of high end harmonics, bits of hiss and stretched out slowed down percussion, all floating weightless above a soft blackened backdrop. So gorgeous.�
LIMITED TO ONLY 66 COPIES!! Packaged in a slimline dvd style case with full color cover.
We've been sort of tickled lately for some reason by the idea of two bands sharing a split release, when both of the bands are essentially made up of the same members or mostly the same members. It definitely makes sense, recording, production and distribution wise, a split release is way easier when on some level it's not really a split release at all. It's even better when the bands sound exactly the same. Not sure what got us on that train of thought, must have been this here split between black thrashers Dimentianon and long time AQ faves, slow motion ultra funeral doom sludgelords Rigor Sardonicous. We've been itching for more of RS's bizarre lugubrious swampy slither, and of course their array of 'most evil cymbals' (more on that in a minute), so we were psyched to discover this brand new split, and in our current state of mind, even more psyched to discover that�Dimentianon was in fact fronted by the same mangled mind behind Rigor Sardonicous (although it seems that he's since left�Dimentianon to focus full time on Rigor Sardonicous)...
Anyway, we're sort of rambling, the point is, this is a double shot of brutal blackened heaviness, the�Dimentianon tracks are a super intense blackened death metal, lurching, furious, evil and heavy heavy heavy. Nothing super mind blowing, but definitely heavy and classic enough to keep our heds banging as we waited patiently for the epic slow motion trudge of the mighty�Rigor Sardonicous...
We've already waxed poetic at great length and gushed like crazy in other reviews, check em out elsewhere on the AQ site, it's easy to see that these guys are one of our favorites in the glacial world of funereal doom. These guys are sooooooooooo sloooooooooooow, and sooooooooo HEAVY, they literally almost sound like any one else's ultradoom record, slowed even further down. The guitars are viscous and black, not so much riffs and the sound of someone dumping buckets of black tar� into your speakers, the vocals, an outrageously low demonic gurgle, more along the lines of some of the bizarre gore grind we dig so much, but it sounds perfect, draped like rotting black innards over the already oozing riffage. Then there's the drums, an impossibly slow motion plod, but with the strange distinction of having the cymbals be way louder than the rest of the kit, or in some weird way, they sound like the only part of the kit that hasn't been slowed down to a snail's pace, so the various stretches of dooooooooom are demarcated by a crashing trashcan lid, or a chain link fence clang or once in a while what sound like a gong made out of hubcaps. So we posited that they must be the most evil cymbals ever, thus theire prominent placement and the fact that they're so much louder than any of the other music. Sounds weird, and maybe like it would sound bad, but it doesn't, it's genius, it just further enhances the fact that�Rigor Sardonicous inhabit some totally unique, and ultra fucked up soundworld. And if you're like us, you CAN NOT get enough. The other thing about the RS tracks on this split is one of them, the closer, "Blood Of The Seraphim" features�Rigor Sardonicous fully rocking out, as in playing really fast, double kick drumming, almost blasting, sounding a lot like diSEMBOWELMENT actually, before crashing back down to a 2mph trudge. But it's cool to hear what something as subtle as speeding up can do to a sound, to a band, and to a band's whole identity.�Another black hole slab of glorious slow motion heaviness for the doom obsessed among you. Go forth, and doom on...
This past week was the 30th anniversary of the launch of NASA's unmanned explorer Voyager 1, and if you've ever wondered what the soundtrack would be like to floating ever further inexorably into the vastness of uncharted space, well, Dopplereffekt's Calabi Yau Space might be an imaginative approximation of the music of the spheres heard by such a void-travelling spacecraft. With this album of cosmic synth drones and muted electro beats, the mysterious entity known as Dopplereffekt (an artist related to Drexciya and numerous other equally spaced-out and deliberately anonymous projekts) now makes its debut on the Aphex Twin's Rephlex label. Featuring quasi-scientific, almost Vovoid-ian track titles like "Hyperelliptic Surfaces" and "Holomorpic n-0 Form", this atmospheric album presents an array of hypnotic, pulsing transmissions, seemingly pinging off the satellite dish looking thing on the cover, filtering down through the vector-graphics Tron-world innards of Dopplereffekt's komputorbrain. Rooted in classic Detroit techno/electro, Dopplereffekt continue to push into another dimension of ambient deep space drift, hoping perhaps for alien contact. Fans of Kraftwerk, Aphex, and John Carpenter soundtracks should make contact as well.
Talk about obscure funk unearthed, this one takes the cake! East Of Underground were a group of US Army servicemen stationed in Germany who recorded an amazing record of Soul and Funk covers in 1971 in the Armed Forces Network studios in Frankfurt. Who knew there was a soul counterpart to the beloved Monks. Comprised of covers of tracks by folks like Sly & The Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and Funkadelic, this isn't merely some servicemen who worshiped the soul and funk greats of the time, these guys had major talent of their own. Vocal melodies delivered with sweet perfection, tight and gritty instrumentation and a sense of ease and conviction that's usually absent in cover songs. Only one known copy of the original LP was kept by the Army but luckily it was hunted down and used as the master for this disc, which marks the first release on the new musical wing of Wax Poetics, the amazing magazine dedicated to all things soul and funk. A pretty great way to start their record label as East Of Underground oozes with charisma and killer chops.
Another gorgeous collection of thick glistening drones from the man known as Encomiast. Whereas his Havens record that we listed a few months back was a more varied affair, dabbling in grinding industrial soundscapes, fuzzy ambient flutter and everything in between, Espera finds him in a more minimal, seemingly more subdued musical mood.
The tracks are still varied, but they are much more static, these are deep dark drones, the variations are subtle, each track is a slow shifting glacial sonic expanse, layered and dense, most of the tracks drift long darkly, all ominous low end, with some barely there streaks of upper register harmonics, a bit like an even more minimal SUNNO))) at times, but just as often referencing Chalk and Coleclough, even Organum, massive and thick, each stretch of sound a nearly static dirge. Gloriously bleak and dreamily dark and dreary. Essential listening for the drone obsessed for sure.
And as this is an older release, that we got directly from the band, we may not be able to get many more of these once we run out...
Many moons ago Jeremy Enigk was the singer for the beloved epic emo band Sunny Day Real Estate.
Man, that band had some great songs... nailed you right in the heart. Enigk's songwriting flame still burns brightly, but these days it comes in the form akin to a lone candle or hearth. His songs are filled with a lush earthiness, warming the traditional rock instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums with piano, strings and such. The beautiful setting embraces his unrelentingly desolate, emotionally charged lyrics. Pretty darn great!
A side note: You know when you hear someone's voice and it reminds you of someone else, but you just can't quite put your finger on it? Drives you crazy, and then hours or days later it dawns on you. That was the case with this album. Apologies to Mr. Enigk if he doesn't find this to be a flattering comment, but he really really sounds like Chris De Burgh. So is this The Missing Link... to the "Lady In Red"? Hmmmm.
The grim masters of Metal Noir Quebecois return with this two song ep, hot on the heels of their full length we raved about a little while back. That record while being a primo slab of intense blackened buzz, was also notable for the song intros, old time scratchy recordings of solo violin, as the band is a tribute of sorts to the French folkloric music of North America (further referenced by the cover art, showing an old photo of a man cradling his fiddle).
For this two song follow up, the fiddles are gone, but everything else remains the same, two intense blasts of furious, classic, epic, Norwegian style black metal, relentless, nearly unwavering blast beats, dense buzzing riffage, insane double kick flourishes, and majestic melodies soaring over the grim buzz. Super intense, and nearly static in tempo, both songs seem to have only two parts, the more buzzing frosty 'verses' and the epic triumphant 'choruses', the songs looping back and forth, repetitive and gloriously trance inducing.
Pressed on thick vinyl, housed in a black and white, very Buzumic sleeve, and LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered...
First things first, we'll be frank, young SF band The Frail almost received an immediate Gong Show gong from us on the opening track of their debut ep. Anyone who samples/butchers Erik Satie's gorgeous classical piano work "Gymnopedies" in such a wanton dance-fied fashion should be strung up by their fingernails! We bit our tongue and resisted the urge to hit the 'stop' button. Needless to say, not the best introduction! Anyways, get past that first awkward moment, and you'll find this new Bay Area pop-tronic duo combining the sweet and dreamy side of pop with the comparatively harder thump of electronic rock. Their gently persistent unwavering programmed beats and boyish vocals draws easy descriptions of The Faint meets Postal Service. Definitely for fans of those bands as well as the electro-pop bands on the German Morr Music label!
We call a lot of things "psychedelic" these days... Comets On Fire, Boris, Silvester Anfang, Circle, Joanna Newsom, Residual Echoes, Acid Mothers Temple, Raccoo-oo-oon, Grey Daturas, Dark Fog, Devy B... all sorts of stuff. Psych this, psychedelic that. Loose use of the term for sure, though it gets the idea across, y'all know what we mean (right?). But once in a while it's worth remembering that "psychedelia" originally, once had a more specific, commercial, sometimes exploitative meaning in the pop culture, in re: a certain time and place. You bet your sweet bippy, that back in 1967, "psychedelic" was something like this album (now reissued on cd): Friar Tuck & His Psychedelic Guitar, featuring a cover photo of a bearded guy in a brown robe, with a Beatles haircut under his hood, crouched on a chair in front of a "trippy" colorful abstract painting. A product of the sunny LA pop scene, Friar Tuck was a gimmicky project mixing sumptuous orchestration with stinging guitar blurt, the distortion on composer/producer (and noted LA session cat, also a member of the Ceyleib People) Mike Deasy's axe being the closest thing here to the state of "psych" as currently understood. (Others from the backup band were also known as Goldenrod, an instro-grunt combo responsible for one fairly ahead of its time "heavy" album.) '60s buffs should also note that this album's lovely vocal harmonies were all arranged by none other than Curt "Millenium" Boettcher.
Side one had covers, sorta novelty songs including a version of frat-rock classic "Louie Louie" (here, "Louis Louis"), and Tommy Roe's goofy "Sweet Pea", both with vocals delivered in a laidback drawl, which weirdly enough kinda reminds us of the Black Monk Time Monks... hey what's with the '60s and monks anyway? But then on side two, it's all Deasy originals, equally orchestrated but a lot trippier and spaced-out, a flowers-and-beads rave-up in a style long gone. The whole thing exudes vintage charm, right down to the deep thoughts of the beat poetry included in the liner notes. This cd reish also includes four bonus tracks from singles by another Deasy band in a similar style, The Flower Pot.
Two long out of print albums filthy furious black buzz, now available again, on a single cd.
Dirty, necrotic black metal outta Birmingham, England from the man behind exalted British black metal band Anaal Nathrakh! Guitar, bass, drums, backing vocals, and the recording were all handled by multi-talented metal fiend Mick "Irrumator" Kenny, who in addition to being the mastermind responsible for Anaal Nathrakh, also does time in�Mistress, and runs Necrodeath Recording Studio. Sounds like one of them one-man bands so prevalent in black metal, eh? Not so fast. Actually, Frost is a trio, rounded out by The Fog (lead vocals and "foggifications") and The Shid (vocals and "necrochoir"). Dunno how they do things live, or if they do...anyway, if you like the doomy distorted screaming power of old school Scandinavian black metal, that's what Mick and crew traffic in, and what Cursed again is packed with. Mayhem and Darkthrone all the way. As "necro" as Mick's main band Anaal Nathrakh is, this goes further with that ancient feeling. Less blasting, more 'banging. These guys know that a black metal called Frost had better be good -- good n' frosty -- and they don't fail!
Talking To God is Frost's remarkably catchy, almost melodic 2nd album. Still super-necro, totally fierce and heavy, yet not without a covert pop component. Or at least, it gets as pop as any album with song titles like "Filthy Black Shit" can be. Crushing doom-stortion, trebly guitar leads, brutal drumming, weird textures and vocal parts, all surging along to some grand and magnificent end with that rare "I'm gonna listen to that again now that it's over" x-factor. Impressive.
It's been a while since we've listed some seriously ultra sick, super abstract, funereal, hundred zeroed doooooooooooom (imagine 88 more zeroes), but here we go, the latest from French doom merchants Funeralium, via Israeli label Total Rust, who in the past gave us the epic classic doom of Mourning Dawn (who share members with Funeralium) and Midwestern doomlords Wraith Of The Ropes. And while this has everything you black hearted, cursed souled lovers of all things slow and low desire, the 1 mph drum plod, the guitar tuned so low, it's like some black sonic glacier, the vocals that sound like a slowed down demon puking his guts out. It's all here, you love Moss, Khanate, Planet Aids, Bunkur, Catacombs, Otesanek, Monarch, Monument Of Urns, Nihill, Whitehorse, Stumm... well, you might as well add Funeralium to the list. This is some devastatingly slow, crushingly brutal, ultra doom. BUT...
These guys add some of their own peculiar flavor, the hysterical hellish shrieks become downright melodic at times, strangely lovely in fact (in a horrible hellish way of course), and the guitars occasionally bliss out, clean, minor key chordal strum, still slow and spread out, the drums an occasional thud, the vocals a tortured howl, but all draped over lilting slowcore strum, making it sound like Galaxie 500 or Low covering Khanate or something, in fact, the whole first half of "Let People Die" sounds like some super sad, gorgeous chunk of creepy blackened slowcore, and the whole of record closer "Nearly The End", minus the black metal vocals, could be mistaken for some gloomy minor key late night goth moodiness, but those moments are of course balanced out by the rest of the record, a glorious black sprawl of head caving, soul splitting trudge and pummel.
Latest chunk of noisy bliss from Antony Milton, head honcho of the Pseudo Arcana label, the man behind Mrtyu, the Nether Dawn and others, as well as a member of The Stumps, With Throats As Fine As Needles, Street, Claypipe and about a million others. Glory Frckn Sun finds Milton teamed up with Ben Spiers (from Empty Mirror) and�improv percussionist Simon O'Rorke. The three form a phalanx of sonic solar warriors, wielding an arsenal of noisemakers including�guitars, violins, electronics, percussion and gongs...
Beginning life in 2003, this disc has been over two years in the making, and sounds like it, in that it sounds like a super saturated slooooooooooow burn, the sound of the birth of a universe, a blinding glistening supernova of sound, the guitars are white hot, blinding sonic glares, that just drift in long solar flares, woven into huge expanses of constantly shifting soft drone, over the top, shimmering billows of reverberating melodies crash like waves, this is some impossible drift through alien skies, navigating black holes and clouds of whirring glimmering particles. Cacophonous squalls pepper the mostly tranquil stretches, with the occasional jagged streak of feedback or spatters of metallic percussion. The opening track is massive, a 30 minute trawl though the heart of the sun, everything melting into buzzing smears all around you. Imagine SUNNO))) of Fushitsusha set up on the surface of the sun, now imagine a field recording of those bands being consumed by fire, amps melting into thick viscous black puddles, guitar strings becoming strange serpentine shadows, flesh and bone fusing into twisted shapes before transforming into thick clouds of living sound.�
Track two sounds like the recording of whatever infernal machinery lies below the surface of the sun, the mysterious factory that keeps it burning, feeding the flames, a grinding cacophony laced with long low slow stretches of buzz and whir. The final track a gorgeous languorous outro, a bit of shuffling percussion strewn atop a long soft stretch of blown out ambience, minor key melodies buried in the murk, giving the strange sleepy shimmer a warm ominous glow. Epic, intense and beautiful.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Packaged in a hand screened, cd-sized, perfect bound book, the cover, thick textured paper, very spare and striking, the booklet inside, a series of photos, graphics and diagrams of the sun, from super technical to completely abstract, the cd in a sleeve affixed to the back cover, each copy hand�numbered.�
The return of the peculiarly monickered Gog, a one man practitioner of the dark musical arts, able to whip up huge swaths of drifting droney shimmer as easily as a crushing avalanche of corrosive slow motion riffage. More often than not some glorious grey area right in the middle.�
Here Gog is teamed up with the unknown to us Apparatia, who proves to be a worthy match up.�
Gog begins the proceedings with a 25 minute epic, blown out and buzzy, recorded SUPER hot and way in the red, a strange creepy soundscape of metallic clang, and huge reverbed guitar, not riffing, just sort of shimmering and vibrating, everything suspended amidst a barren sprawl of decay and delay, until everything explodes, and the track is transformed into an impossibly distorted, barely moving glacial wall of sound, the production so hot, the speakers seem on the verge of collapse, a massive spacious dirge that like other Gog stuff, manages to be lovely amidst all those jagged edges and crumbling chaos. Partway through, the guitars blur into just a long stretch of distorted whir, while beneath, the bass and drums continue to plod along, a strange slowed down groove buried beneath roiling clouds of fuzz. Gog finishes off his half the split with a little minute or so long chunk of random sound, peppered with vocals, a haunting little fragment of creepy ambience.�
Apparatia are in fact a grim buzzing black metal behemoth, who right out of the gate, first song, launch into some seriously grim blasting, super distorted and ultra sick, the vocals a demonic croak, the guitars a blurry buzz, the drums another static roar buried in the mix. But the band do mix it up, weaving haunting clean guitar interludes, with the harsh super affected vocals crooning hellishly over the top. Raw and primitive, and gloriously intense and brutal, the�vocals and guitars in a constant battle of the buzz, the recording quality sort of damaged and lo-fi, making for some Faxed Head like audio damage. Pretty fucking cool for sure. Definitely need to hear more from these guys. But for now, this is a seriously killer one two punch, one part slow motion sludge, one part grim, buzzing fury.�
AMAZING PACKAGING. A printed sheet of metal, black on silver, super heavy, like the music inside, text and images affixed to the back, the cd housed in a black and silver metallic paper sleeve, with mysterious blurred images and liner notes. Sticker on the front,�LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!! Each one hand numbered. We got 40 and that's it. Once these are gone, we will not be able to get more...
What a nice surprise this record turned out to be. It's on legendary Finnish microlabel 267 Lattajaa, but these fellas are in fact American, and while they do traffic in a similar style as many of those forest Finns we love so much (Avarus, Anaksimandros, Kemialliset, Islaja) they seem to hew closer to the drifting murky, field recording flecked nature folk of the Jewelled Antler collective. But all that makes them sound super derivative, which they definitely are not. Three songs, all woven into one gorgeous sonic patchwork, tangled and gloriously blissed out, beginning with a soft bramble of acoustic guitars, hovering on a bed of blear eyed FX, over the top, sing-songy falsetto vocals coo and croon, sounding not unlike Glenn from Skygreen Leopards. The second track is a strange lo-fi rhythmscape, focused around a martial drum beat, pounding tribal and insistent over a swirling morass of processed vocals, bits of shimmering feedback, murky ambience, and thick swells of subtly melodic whir. The final track, which at 17 minutes makes up the bulk of the record, is a sprawling epic, that traverses all sorts of different sonic territories, managing to make them all sound wholly interconnected. A burst of hiss and damaged FX, synths and feedback, gives way to deep resonant stretches of metallic buzz, which in turn give way to some aggressive acoustic guitar strumming and muted percussion, a creepy haunting Comus-like ritual, before morphing into an ever changing soundscape of glistening melody, rumbling low end, fractured folk, and smeary soft focus abstract ambience, finishing off with an almost peppy sounding outro, all major key guitar, strange percussion, a simple barely there rhythmic pulse, and slithery strands of glimmering fuzzy melody. Wow.�
The bad news is... we only got a handful of these, and we're not entirely sure we'll be able to get more. But give it a go, fans of dreamy abstract free folk do NOT want to miss out on The Grand Hotel...
Everyone went nuts for the last Gromm full length around here. And it wasn't just because it was called Happiness - It's When You Are Dead, although that was a big part of what we wanted to hear these guys in the first place. That record was a gorgeous blast of Ukrainian black frost, rife with buzz and howl, blast and roar. Hailing from the same area as other AQ black metal faves such as Nokturnal Mortum, Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra, Drudkh, Hate Forest and others, Gromm share some similar sonic traits, if there was a 'Ukrainian sound' (which we do believe there is) then Gromm do fit right in, but as with most black metal we dig, especially the aforementioned Ukrainian ones, Gromm definitely had their own take on things, strange production, unique vocals, and of course their own brilliantly twisted and blackened riffs.
Cold Old Thorns (another great title) collects all the old demos, as well as a new song and an unlikely cover.
The first half of the disc is the Ferro Ignique demo from 2001-2002, originally a tape limited to 300 copies, which finds the band way stripped down and primitive, but no less ambitious, the sound is murky and lo-fi, the blasts seems to be played by a machine (or a very machinelike human), but the songs are still completely epic and fucked up, super dense convoluted arrangements, plenty of atypical not very black metal song structures, super dynamic, lots of start and stop, the vocals are even more tweaked than they are now, raspy and demonic, gnarled and super creepy, the guitars rip, incredible riffing, emotional and minor key, majestic but furious and fierce, all wrapped in a muffled muted production that makes the whole thing sound just that much more grim and gorgeous.
The second half of the disc is made up of the Nails For Gods demo from 2003, also originally a limited-to-300-copies cassette, this time, the sound is a bit more high fidelity, but the mix is insane, the opener "Black Madness" is totally unhinged, the guitars and drums blasting blackly along, pretty low in the mix, while the vocals shriek and soar WAY UP FRONT, it almost doesn't sound like a voice, it's like a strangely musical scraping, steel on steel, and here and there, another guitar part, more melodic and moody joins the fray, also way louder than everything else, making the sound so strange and creepy, but so cool. And those vocals, holy shit! The whole demo is like that, a blanket of buzz over which those crazy inhuman vocals rasp and scrape and various melodies surface and drift. Fucking awesome.
As if that weren't enough, there's a new song from last year, dense and fuzz drenched, midtempo and Burzumic, the vocals buried in the mix, just another layer of raspy buzz, four and a half minutes of loping droney black buzz, and a killer cover of Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls", the classic thrash prog epic transformed into a totally necro blast of grimness, the vocals harsh and super distorted, the whole thing blurred into a relentless black blur, except for the chorus, which ends up sounding like the catchiest Darkthrone part Darkthrone never wrote.
Liner notes, lyrics, photos, and an awesome black and silver, shiny reflective sticker included...
Wow! This is a blast from the past. And we do mean blast (just listen!). Ground Zero was the crazy sampling + free jazz + noise rock outfit led by Japanese turntablist/guitarist Otomo Yoshihide. Hopefully you know 'em, they were right in there with Boredoms and Ruins and Omoide Hatoba and Altered States etc. for noisy underground Japanese avant-rock insanity back in the early '90s. Their now out of print, self-titled debut album from 1992 sounded something like John Zorn's Naked City, all chaotic jump cuts and skronking sax, and in fact featured the inimitable screaming vocal stylings of Eye Yamataka of the Boredoms, who also guested with Naked City. Eventually they turned into a drone-jazz behemoth, and also did a fantastic album of "standards". Since the dissolution of Ground Zero, there's been plenty more cool Otomo projects, from the Eric Dolphy tribute of his New Jazz Orchestra to his minimalist "onkyo" experiments in Filament and ISO to a variety of other interesting soundtracks and solo recordings... but the Ground Zero discs will always be a crucial swath of his discography. And a favorite of ours!
So, it's pretty exciting to get to hear this long-lost live show, from a old tape that Otomo recently rummaged out of his closet. The liner notes include this from him: "All I remember for sure was that it was a really good gig... The recording quality is terrible, but the recording, including that quality, really captures the atmosphere of the time." He's right, the sound is raw, but it suits the music perfectly. This is INTENSE. The lineup consists of Otomo (guitar, turntables), Hirose Junji (sax), Kato Hideki (bass, voice), Uemura Masahiro (drums), and Eye Yamataka (vocals). All five of 'em make a LOT of noise. Imagine the Eye-fronted Naked City falling down the stairs, in the throes of a violent seizure. This performance dates from just prior to their first album's release and shares its punked-out energy, as well as a few of the same "songs". Two additional tracks at the end of the disc are studio recordings, previously unreleased material from the sessions for that debut album. As the Doubtmusic website says, "this is remembrance of fresh / poisonous earlier Ground Zero after 15 years."
This comes in typically fine Doubtmusic packaging, a handsome digipack design, and is basically essential for all hardcore Ground Zero and/or Eye Yamataka fans! And its value as an archival release is enhanced in light of the fact that you can't get their first album anymore anyway.
If there was an heir to whatever throne Japanese psych rockers High Rise occupy, probably one made out of Marshall amps and broken guitars and piled sky high, it would be US power trio Heavy Winged, whose mangled blown out take on wild eyed psych and throbbing proto metal, gets filtered though the modern avantnoise aesthetic and comes out a gloriously garbled white hot blast of propulsive grinding freaked out throb.�
Half the time the band are so supercharged, it's almost impossible to hear what the heck is going on, it's like sticking your head inside a particle accelerator, just a face melting ear shredding cloud of chaotic skree (and we won't even begin to guess how the fuck they get such a brutally beautiful guitar sound), but here and there, the band slow things down, and lumber Harvey Milk style, all stumbling low end and slowed down riffage, into a corrosive landscape of sonic wreckage and swirling fuzz and hiss, usually only to explode moments later into a black spray of deconstructed buzz drenched,� art rock damage. Phew.�
Blacc Lust collects two insanely limited out of print cd-r's, just about an hour glorious soul crushing sound, which is just about an hour more than most mere mortals can handle. Fucking awesome!
Packaged in a cool, origami like folded cardstock sleeve, printed in black inside and out, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one numbered, and seemingly already out of print, so these will probably be the only copies we'll ever be able to get...
This triple cd set in a fat ol' jewel case combines two previous Captain Trip releases of rare live Heldon material that we'd previously reviewed -- those were the Live Elektronik Guerilla: Paris 1975-1976 cd and Well and Alive: Live in Nancy 1979 2cd. It's a lot cheaper to get 'em both together in this 3cd package, though you're missing out on the miniature lp style sleeves.
Here's a conglom of our reviews of the two:
The disc that collects the 1975-'76 live recordings consists (in contrast to the rhythmically precise spaciness of the later '79 material) of looser, stoned, rockin' jamming. Indeed. Of course, still pretty darn spacey. This wasn't recorded by electronic robots by any means. Sounds more like mellow Hendrix-digging freaks doing drugs and getting off on droning acid rock guitar. We can't exactly argue with that, though. Be warned that sound-quality-wise, this is fairly hissy and lo-fi. Not a pristine studio recording, that's for sure -- but it really works with all the fuzz, effects, and feedback, akin to a Rallizes boot. Still, not the place to start if you're utterly new to Heldon.
Then on to the two discs from '79...what a difference a few years made! The '79 stuff kicks so much precision ass. Awesome! On the first disc, the band effortlessly locks into hypnotic rhythmically complex cycles driven by Francois Auger's incredibly tight yet dexterous drumming. Some stretches are austere, atmospheric and almost soothing, while others possess a mysterious dark force that'll thrust you back in you seat, and still others' synthed-out spaciness might have you tripping your pants off. Mind-melting. The second disc is less kinetic, more along the lines of frontman Richard Pinhas' later solo guitar and synthesizer drone explorations (think: more Tangerine Dream, less King Crimson). Please note: be forewarned that the recording quality is less than stellar (somewhat murky at times), but also keep in mind that these are previously unreleased tracks. Personally we feel the pros outweigh the cons in this situation, but of course you'll have to decide for yourself.
If you're new to this group, allow us to simply proclaim: late '70s Heldon = psych-prog / electronic rock at its finest. Prior to entering the live Heldon arena, we'd highly recommended checking out 1977's Interface and 1979's Stand-By. Fierce, menacing and propulsive.
Latest from one of our favorite sound sculptors, drone designers, and minimal soundscapers, Anthony Mangicarpa, aka Hoor-Paar-Kraat, who's been responsible for a clutch of gorgeous limited and meticulously hand assembled super limited cd-r releases over the past few years. The latest comes�in the form of this super limited lp, which consists of the groups most personal and emotional work to date, as it was all conceived, written and recorded in the shadow of loss and sorrow and death. But some of the most moving art is born out of tragedy and this slab of gorgeous sound is no exception. Previously released as two ultra limited microedition cd-rs, these two movements couldn't sound more meant to be together.�
The sounds as always, is deep and dense, long drawn out drones, but here, that swirling black soundworld is augmented by cricket like clicks, soft melodies and crumbling distant distortion, haunting spoken word buried in reverb and draped with feedback, while the whole time a buzzing guitar slowly builds into shimmery sheets of distorted rumble, the chords spread out like ripples in still water, everything blurred and indistinct, until finally, the guitar erupts into a corrosive, aggressive slow motion psychedelic dirge, finishing off with a wild squall of squealing feedback, and speaker shredding high end, intense and cathartic.�
The flipside is just as intense, billowing cavernous guitar swells, random bit of clatter, scrape and feedback, all smeared into an expansive sprawl of seasick ambience, melodies are muted and washed out, the distant pulses, and warm languorous swirls all woven into entrancing tidal like sonic swells. So good.�
And as always, gorgeously packaged. Hand screened lp sleeves, signed and numbered (LIMITED TO 281 COPIES!!), the lp too is signed on the label, and each one features AM's fingerprints...�
Last year one of our favorite records was one of those limited edition Latitudes eps from Paradise Island. Sadly that great ep is now out of print but luckily Jenny Hoyston, who is Paradise Island, and a member of the great Erase Errata has unleashed her first full length solo recording, sonically similar, just now under her own name.
Isle Of is everything we've come to love about Jenny's music. It's eccentric, impassioned and so fully engaging. From anthemic blood rushers like "Spell D-O-G" and "Bring Back Art" to twangy numbers like "Even In This Day And Age" and "Send The Angels" to the Mary Timony/Helium like "Novelist" to late-night burners like "Ruff Ruff/Rainbow City," Isle Of is a record filled with unpredictability but with a common thread of honest delivery and colorful expression. While most people treading such wide ground would most likely trip up at some point, Jenny is able to get all those sounds and songs to make perfect sense. Her range and great taste comes shining through brightly, bringing the same kind of intensity that she's perfected in Erase Errata, yet without any of the usual band boundaries.... We love the free and loose sounding Jenny, singing any kind of song she wants, and doing so with a conviction and flare that's impossible not to fall for. Liberating, exciting and totally infectious. Isle Of is highly recommended!
Imperial Teen are back with what might be their brightest, bubblegum-iest album ever! All the familiar faces are back in the fold -- Roddy Bottum, Lynn Truell, Jone Stebbins and Will Schwartz! You probably know that the latter has been keeping busy during the band's five year hiatus with his fun-fun-fun dance party Hey Willpower! He might've been workin' it on out on the dancefloor, but he's not gonna get much rest with the equally energetic Imperial Teen. Packed with crunchy electric guitars, boy/girl vocals, snappy drumming and hooks galore, this is some jubilant, ultra carefree pop! It begs for an endless supply of exclamation marks!!!!! Go on, whatever age you are, take a gleeful sock-footed bound around your living room! And like any kind power pop band should, Imperial Teen give you a sweet slower closing number for you to cool off to! For fans of Redd Kross, Tralala, The Go! Team, and The Rondelles.
Sure it's lame calling bands supergroups, but we haven't really thought of another word that has the same connotations. I mean, how would -you- describe a black metal band that featured members of Dimhymn, Ondskapt and Zavorash, and was recorded by one of the guys from Marduk? Exactly. So for now, we'll have to stick with super group. But since this is evil black metal, maybe we should try something like ultra-horde, or mega-kult... ummm, well, maybe not...
Anyway, it's pretty tough to fuck with a band with this sort of pedigree, and while the label describes this disc as "a dirty piece of Black 'N Roll" which had us fearing the worst, this is actually way more fierce and buzzing and black than that description might lead you to believe. The band photos don't help much either, the band all walking along the railroad tracks, or looking all tough in front of a barbed wire topped chain link fence, tank tops, bandannas, and even a ski mask in effect! But fuck it, it's all about the music, and the music here is pretty awesome. Mostly midtempo, downtuned chug, with raspy howled BM vocals, pounding drums, occasional flurries of double kick drum, massive throbbing bass, but all with a serious streak of classic eighties metal running through it all, huge sweeping epic melodies, reminding us a bit of maybe At The Gates or Dark Tranquility, even some punky stomp a la Turbonegro. And actually, the more we listen, it definitely has that Khold vibe, sort of groovy and thick, like a pop song blackened and buzzed... Minus the occasional too obvious movie sample, or brief spoken word part, this is pretty relentless and rocking, with haunting interludes of choral cathedral keyboards and monklike chants separating crushing slabs of hooky heaviness.
Also includes a video playable on your computer, that while pretty striking, looks like it was filmed with a camcorder and s single flashlight. Pretty cool.�
Another entry in the ever expanding brooding epic post rock sweepstakes, and another winner. What can we say? We love this stuff. This one comes from the band Jakob, hailing from New Zealand of all places. And here we were thinking that New Zealand was all abstract noise, jangle pop and droning sludge. But these guys are none of those. Instead, they follow in the deeeeeep sonic footprints of bands like Mogwai, Isis, Godspeed and the like.
Darkly mesmerizing, slow building, melancholy and moody, slow shifting epics that build into explosive sonic climaxes. Jakob are not one of those metal / post rock hybrids, but they do get heavy, although instead of relying on just distorted guitars and downtuned chug, their heaviness results from melody and intensity, huge walls of chaotic guitar, dense with spaced out FX, whirled into roiling clouds of psychdrone freakout, a logical extension of the riff or melody that has been growing in intensity from the songs' very first hushed whisper.
To be totally honest, nothing here is mind blowing or never-heard-before, but these guys are so good, these songs so emotional and intense, the instrumentation so subtle and precise, the long builds so tense and harrowing, the explosion of sound at the songs' climax so furious and white hot, it almost does sound like something you've never heard before, these guys manage to make these sounds new and fresh, exhilarating, intense, epic and majestic....
Which is really all that matters.
We've been hearing quite a lot of buzz and hype surrounding this New York outfit led by Joan Wasser, who has been playing music in one form or another since she was 8 years old. Along the way she's paid her dues playing in the Damnbuilders, and some lesser known bands in the '90s who featured some soon to be big name indie rockers like Mary Timony and Al Larson (Shudder To Think) and she has played violin for everyone from Antony & The Johnsons to Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed to the Scissor Sister and even Sheryl Crow. The combination of those folks' music gives a sort-of-snapshot as to what to expect from Joan As Policewoman. Sounding a little bit like a more sweeping and orchestral version of Feist, this is a record sure to have a wide appeal and with good reason. With a very likable voice and strong instrumentation this will for sure hit the spot for folks waiting god knows how long until Fiona Apple comes out with another record. Oh and keeping up his very busy guest appearance schedule, Antony (of Antony & The Johnsons) adds his always stunning voice to one track on Real Life as well. And the first batch of these we got comes with a bonus disc of b-sides which includes a Bowie cover and a song dedicated to Condoleezza Rice. Weird.
Since the late '60s Joyce has been a major force in Brazilian music. She has recorded over twenty solo records and has collaborated with Antonio Carlos Jobim as well as making some amazing music with Nelson Angelo. Passarinho Urbano originally came out in 1977 and finds Joyce at her most breezy and heart melting. Summery songs with sparse yet very seductive instrumentation. She reminds us of the more subtle and casual moments of early Gal Costa. Passarinho Urbano is one of those perfect early morning records... So open the windows, let the fresh air hit you and soak in the refreshing warmth of Passarinho Urbano.
Japanese psych nerds alert! Here's a cd AND dvd package from aRCHIVE of anguished, punishing, distorto psychblurtblowouts to the max from these legendary dwellers in the darkness, Kousokuya. They were Tokyo psych scene stalwarts for many, many years (from the '70s, until the recent passing of guitarist Jutok Janeko), part of the Rallizes-worshipping, sunglasses at night posse along with Keiji Hanio's Fushitsusha and High Rise and more recent torchbearers Up-Tight and LSD-march, amongst other flashbackers. They've never been that heavily documented, so it's a red letter day for fans to get this 42 minute, 3 track live cd recorded at a show in Osaka, 2001 along with a bonus DVD vid of that same performance, in suitably ghostly-effected black & white.
It's sort of music that makes even our Christine in mailorder feel like a grandmother from the Midwest. Just doesn't get it. Is it Halloween? Why is the lady crying? Can't they turn it down? This rock n' roll stuff is scary.
But while Christine's not gonna buy one, that's just all the better for the rest of you who thrive on this sort of stuff, since it's limited to 700 copies, of course lovingly packaged (silkscreened in metallic silver and gloss varnish on heavy black cardstock folder, complete with sillkscreened obi bundling the envelopes holding the two discs) in the expected aRCHIVE style.
The return of KTL! Maybe our favorite of the many satellites circling the Sunn 0))). One half of that dynamic doomdrone duo, Stephen O'Malley, hooked up with Austrian noisemaker Peter Rehberg (aka Pita) a year or two back, and the result was the godlike s/t debut, the soundtrack to a performance art piece (of which this also contains elements), which we can only assume was dark and creepy, considering the music on that disc was a black hole slab of expansive subterranean drones and damaged digital buzz. KTL managed to create an intense chunk of dark art, in the midst of a million bedroom drones, so while we played that disc to death, we secretly hoped it wouldn't be the last we'd hear from these two.�
Not a year later, and KTL are back, with another sprawling journey, trawling through the bottomless depths of some hellish underworld and drifting weightless through a starless black sky. A bleak, but occasionally jarring landscape of sonic mystery rife with plenty of drone and buzz.�
The opener is a bleak expanse of claustrophobic sound, the sound of waking up in pitch blackness, wet, cold and alone, wandering blindly, feeling your way, hands rubbed raw from sliding along rough stone, the tiniest sounds magnified into some lurking beast ready to pounce, gusts of warm wind rush past, as do strange slithery shapes underfoot, you can hear the wide open space towering overhead, but you can feel the walls closing in, suffocating. Gorgeously dark and bleak, ominous and so creepy. The perfect music for being buried alive, miles below the surface of the Earth. As the first track dissipates, a strange percussive thump gradually surfaces, a heartbeat maybe... a dense layered backdrop of shimmering low end and muted pulses undulates beneath the murky throb, very slowly building in intensity, as streaks of high end grit and buzzing glitch, and strange high pitched melodic fragments begin to materialize all around, like suddenly finding yourself inside a lightning storm, it's almost pretty, but still sharp and jagged. As the upper register peals intensify, they suddenly coalesce into some sort of deafening angelic chorus, a gorgeous layered textural wall of dreamlike skree, some demonic string section, surprisingly melodic beneath all the sonic barbs and white hot buzz. Hard to describe other than to say it's a bit like Nadja or Jesu, run through a bank of alien FX pedals and broadcast through a million tweeters. So intense and gloriously blown out.�
The next step in the journey involves visiting the "Abattoir" (much of this disc was in fact recorded in an actual French Abattoir) , and it sounds just like you'd imagine. A bit like O'Malley's Sunn 0))), with layer upon layer of constantly shifting coruscating guitars, a drone metal Niblock maybe, stretched out and hypnotic, the texture of the guitar constantly ever changing, going from smooth and washed out to rough and sharp, a bit like Spacemen 3 or Loop at it's most propulsive, a sort of churning distorted chordal whir, and a lot like Sunn 0))) at its most static. But all throughout, the rough raw shimmer is disrupted by all manner of textural disturbances, bits of grit and muted glitch and subtle shards of fragmented melody.�
Finally, the record winds down with an extended coda, thick shards of glistening guitar suspended in gauzy clouds of electronic flutter and swirls of soft sonic snow. Eventually the sharp edges are worn away leaving a strangely haunting slightly degraded Basinski-esque drift that is smoothed even further out, into shimmery spacey synths and sweet chordal swells that drift away leaving nothing but static.
A couple years ago we were swept off our feet by Jardin Interior, the debut full length by a collective of artists and musicians from Bogota, Columbia known as Las Malas Amistades. We've been hungry for more of their colorful DIY pop, which reminded many of us of some strange blend of Young Marble Giants and a great lost Smithsonian Folkways record. Their follow up does not disappoint one bit. While it's a little less eclectic and quirky than Jardin Interior it's still brimming with a unique charm that is all their own. This time the sounds had us thinking of early Devendra Banhart playing Congregation covers in a friend's bedroom. Channeling the best South American psych-pop of the past with a crafty and playful disposition and a great timeless quality, you could totally imagine this coming out in 1982 as easy as today, the sounds are classic and timeless. Unfortunately their current label the great Honest Jon's (home to everyone from Tony Allen to Moondog) has lost their U.S. distribution making this a pricey import affair, but luckily the great music and beautiful packaging complete with English translated lyrics make this one well worth splurging on!
By now, it should be painfully obvious, that around these parts we seriously love our damaged and demented, fucked up and freaky music. The weirder the better, be it strange production, inept playing, shoddy recording, or truly inspired madness, we can't get enough strange sounds. The sad thing is that many of our favorite strange sound makers, gradually evolve, which is not always bad thing, but often means as bands get�better, as the recordings get tighter, the production more polished, the songwriting less haphazard, well, often a band begins to sound more and more like the rest of the regular bands, and less like all the things that made them so unique and special.�
Thankfully, such is not the case with king of the unblack scene, Light Shall Prevail. This is the fifth or sixth release so far from this one man Christian black metal band, and most definitely the tightest and most polished, but just as far out, fucked up, brilliant and blackened as any records past. Sure some of the older stuff benefited from insane production, turning black blasts into buzzing smears of what the fuck, or making blurred frosty riffage sound like alien house music, and on Goatcrush, he may have crafted the greatest chunk of buzzing blackness EVER, in the title track, be it black, unblack or whatever... But�Unearthen Hymns Of Revolt is another glorious step in his songwriting evolution, and a definite step up in production and we're loving it. No matter how much we dug all the fucked up weirdness in the past, at the heart of all of those tracks, every one, was an amazing riff, and a killer song. Now it's just easier to hear them.�
Three songs may seem like an ep, but these three looong tracks add up to almost thirty minutes. And as usual, every inch is packed with roiling buzzing fuzzed out blasts, insane programmed drums, bizarre super effected vocals, all tangled up into super complex and convoluted arrangements that manage to be trancelike and droney at the same time. We've gushed like crazy about LSP, the E.E.E. label, all the other unblack bands, check the AQ site for more words and sounds testifying as to the baffling brilliance of this stuff. Needless to say, if you're already a convert, you need this one too, and if you've yet to be baptized in the unblack waters of Light Shall Prevail, this is as good a place to start as any. In fact, it might be the best place to start, as these three tracks sound the most like classic grim black metal out of any of the previously released LSP stuff. But what makes it all so great, is that the weirdness, the fucked up-ness still lurks right below the surface, revealing themselves more and more on subsequent listens. Trust us, some of the best (un)black metal you'll ever hear. Check out the last few minutes of the 15+ minute closer, as the guitars begin to digitally crumble, the drums splintering into clouds of sizzle and skitter, a weird blackened meltdown, so bizarre and so fucking awesome. And how about the best (un)black metal song title ever: "Bonded By (His) Blood". Needless to say SO RECOMMENDED.�
And while you're at it, order ALL the E.E.E. stuff, not only is it all amazing, but the label recently had their headquarters broken into and burgled, losing tons of money and equipment, instruments and computers, they're amazing folks, making amazing music and could use the support!!
