Dub is all about the bass. The darker and more cavernous the better. The more you feel it, the more your fillings rattle, the better. So it makes sense that the same would hold true for dubstep, but maybe to an even greater degree, as the sound of dubstep is even more spare and skeletal than dub, leaving nearly nothing except for the rhythm and the bass.
Soundboy Punishments collects the first 5 vinyl releases from UK label Skull Disco on cd for the first time, and while ostensibly this stuff is dubstep, it almost sounds more like Muslimgauze or old On-U sound stuff or even Spectre at times, but way more stripped down, way heavier, and with the sort of massive undulating bass that washes over everything like a thick black wave.
The first 5 12"s on Skull Disco, split pretty evenly between the artists Shackleton and Appleblim (with one track from Gatekeeper) are all epic slabs of blown out bass heavy skitter, with blurry distant synth and little Eastern flourishes, as well as the occasional dubbed out vocal, smeared into blurred ripples of reverb. Super abstract and minimal, hypnotic and groovy, the beats and shuffling and subtle, not the huge pounding of 'traditional' dubstep, or the manic grind of jungle, instead, the sound is laid waaaaaaay back. A sort of more modern digi-dub, varied percussion, tablas, hand drums, all woven into simple rhythmic frameworks, always with a rumbling low end pulse lurking right beneath the surface, until part way in, the bass DROPS, and suddenly everything has changed, what was a lazy lope is transformed into a throbbing lurch, a wall of gut churning low end, fuzzy and distorted and blown out, sounding almost like the hardest jungle track ever, slooooooooowed way down. The first disc is pretty blissed out, hard to imagine these tracks filling dancefloors, although they have been, it sounds more like music to get wasted, and sort of just lounge about, head nodding, the vibrations washing over you. With all the hype about this disc and these tracks, initially we were a bit let down, but gradually, this has grown on us like crazy to the point where we pretty much don't ever want to listen to anything else.
The second disc is where it gets weirder, and a bit harder, featuring unreleased cuts as well as non-Skull Disco tracks, including the long anticipated nearly twenty minute mix of Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" by Ricardo Villalobos. Anyone who dug that last Villalobos disc, Fizheuer Zieheuer will definitely dig this. Simple shuffling and ultra minimal pulses, stretched out endlessly, so dark and hypnotic, with slow shifting synths in the background. Our only complaint are the vocals, a slowed down mysterious voice intoning apocryphal lyrics over almost the whole song, a la Spectre or the last Plastikman record, it's a little distracting, and we have to say we probably would have liked it without, but even so, it's beginning to growing on us too. The rest of the second disc is like a supercharged version of disc one, more synths, thicker bass, stranger arrangements and creepier melodies, a lot more like slowed down jungle, with heavy beats and reverb and delay everywhere, the more laid back abstract cuts definitely remind us of the Bush Chemists, a totally druggy and dreamy outerspace dub. So good. And based solely on how much this gets played in the shop, this just might be a brand new unanimous AQ fave.
Packaged in a cool, creepy black and white cardboard sleeve that looks way more metal that electronica...
WAY recommended.
Super limited, ultra deluxe reissue of a compilation that came out last year, and that somehow completely slipped beneath our radar. Hard to believe considering how amazing this is. All you need to know is it's a tribute to Judas Iscariot, a USBM institution, and features the elite of what might be considered the second wave of USBM cover classic JI tracks: Xasthur, Leviathan, Nachtmystium, Krieg and more! Holy shit!
After 10 years, Judas Isacriot hung it up in 2002, but they still manage to influence countless legions of musical minions. Most of the bans here owe no small debt to Akhenaten and his Midwestern metal outfit, which is obviously why they're here paying their respects.
The mighty Xasthur covers "The Cold Earth Slept Below...", the result is an incredibly lo-fi, brittle washed out smear of fuzzy guitars, stumbling dirgelike drumming, the whole thing so hissy and buzzy it's almost dreamlike, with some gorgeously mournful melodies that would make it sound downright poppy if it weren't so frosty and harsh. So fucked and hauntingly pretty it had us digging out our old JI records to hear the original. AQ fave Leviathan takes on "Where the Weather Beats Incessant", nearly 12 minutes of moody depressive midtempo blackness, with some strange droney interludes, super harsh distorted vocals, and strange drawn out guitar parts, the whole thing epic and majestic and almost post rock sounding. Krieg cover "Babylon", a furiously fuzzy, ultra lo-fi burst of muddy murky black buzz, guttural vocals vomited up from the depths, blasting beats, amazing lightning speed riffing, but the melodies buried in the mix are haunting and again strangely lovely....
Fellow Midwesterners Nachtmystium tackle "Gaze Upon Heaven In Flames", a super loud, in the red blast of relentless buzzing black metal, the riffs and the drumming a blinding blur, until about halfway through where the song breaks down into a strange, lurching half time almost-groove with creepy melodies and a odd timed hiccuping rhythm. Frostmoon Eclipse offer up their version of "Spill The Blood Of The Lamb" the grimmest and frostiest of the bunch so far, murky and muddy, but thick with buzz and thrash, the vocals a hateful demonic gurgle, the whole thing a buzzing snarling beast. The rest of the lineup holds their own nearly as well, offering up their own varied takes on classic Judas Iscariot material. Eternity Of Darkness, Sign Of Katu, Arkenstone, Merrimack, Dead To Earth, The Black Death, Carving To Nenia, Martyr and Birkenau.
The strange thing is, that as buzzing and black, as hateful and harsh, as dreary and depressive as these tracks are, we had almost forgotten how pretty some of the Judas Iscariot stuff really was...
Comes packaged in an oversized A5 style digibook, with killer artwork, a booklet with liner notes and photos, stickers and a mini-poster. And of course, EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONLY 150 COPIES. WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET MORE ONCE WE RUN OUT!!
While we patiently await the forthcoming full length on tUMULt, here's a little super limited two song teaser from our favorite (and only) practitioners of Wooden Metal. Which is in fact, not really metal at all, instead it's a sort of folky surfy krautrock, that's maybe a bit blackened around the edges, but for the most part is more loping and stumbling than it is blasting and buzzing. And we love it.
So the A side begins like a classic Varghkoghargasmal track, a clean guitar, some strange off kilter drumming, not distorted or heavy, more sort of hypnotic, the surprise here is the band introduces a weirdly math rock element to their sound, with an arpeggiated main riff and some more complex than usual drumming. There's also some slow creep interludes and some awesomely fucked up rhythms. It's almost like blackened surf rock or a drunken Scenic performing an alternate score for Endless Summer. Only here it's Endless Winter.
If the A side was only -sort of- surf rock, the B side quickly takes care of that sort of business, with a blast of full on grin and frosty surf rock, a relentless Dick Dale style riff, some Wipeout drumming, even a weirdly playful super melodic lead over the top. Still all fuzzy and lo-fi with still more strange struggling drumming, but a total surf vibe that is impossible to deny. So what-the-fuck, but so goddamn awesome, this just might be seven inch of the year!
SUPER LIMITED TO ONLY 200 COPIES. Packaged in super swank hand screened two colored sleeves, each hand numbered.
The Dark Lord Nordvargr has been threatening us with it for ages, but as the sky blackens, and the thunder rolls in, the air grows thick, the ground rumbles and cracks beneath our feet, it is finally here, the debut from Nordvargr's grim black kvlt alter ego Vargr. And just like it says in the liner notes "Vargr plays True Black Nekronoise Metal exclusively."
We sure don't need to tell you how much we love Black Nekronoise Metal (at least now that we know such a thing exists) and there really is no better way to describe this caustic chaotic brutality here, but we'll give it a try�
Wehrmacht Satanas begins with soft swirls of sound and cold winter winds, dark and drifting and very much like much of the stuff we love from Nordvargr, but then super harsh vocals surface from within the muted drone-y backdrop and are promptly swallowed up by a massive wall of some of the harshest, heaviest, crustiest, most distorted and buzz drenched noise metal chaos we have ever heard.
Riffs are more sort of big prickly downtuned smears, drums (are there actually drums in there?) blast like a hailstorm of hiss and buzz, the vocals hissing and howling, all crumbled into a serious ear shredding rrrooooaaaar�.
It actually sounds bit like a Darkthrone record on DHR, imagine Alec Empire, had he grown up on Venom And Bathory� Primitive, grim black buzz, but completely blown out and in the red. The riffs are looped and cyclical, totally hypnotic, definitely for fans of the ultra raw BM like Bone Awl, Ash Pool, Beherit, Ancestors� "The Crushing Weight Of Sin" is about as hooky as it gets, with an actual melody, and plenty of space, in the context of the rest of the record it's practically a pop song. But it's quickly followed up by "Svavelsjalar" a gorgeously thick washed out blast of blackness, everything so blurred and buzzy that it almost sounds like a black metal Fennesz, until about halfway through when the sound lurches suddenly and transforms into what sounds like a radio station between stations, bits of some super lo-fi live Beherit rehearsal coming through between the jagged shards of static and white noise.
And most of the record sort of straddles that line between blasting black metal and buzzing ambience, much of this disc actually, reminds us of weirdo Canadian black metallers Wold, a twisted convoluted blurred black metal warped and wrapped in layer after layer of distortion, but where Wold was all smeared and soft focus, Vargr sharpens the edges, everything black and glinting, sharp and harsh�
Later in the record, "Total Cryptic Darkness" is everything the title would lead you to believe. Gorgeously thick and viscous black bottomless sonic pit, a near static sea of low end whir and deeeeeeeeeeeeep dark drones. A bunch of the tracks are super intense, almost techno-like looped shards of hissy crunch, almost like black gabber, while others bliss out big time, like a blackened Total, with epic ur-drones, huge swaths of metallic reverberations and warm washed out skree.
The disc finishes off with a Burzum cover, and weirdly enough it's an ambient number, one that Nordvargr, deftly tweaks into something slightly grittier and more bleak, a gorgeous slab of groaning ambient drift� very tidal and hypnotic, the perfect aural balm after the skin flaying sonic assault you've just endured�
Noisy, crushing, harsh, grim, nekro, black, brutal and fucked up. Hail the True Black Nekronoise Metal!!!
It's getting harder and harder to review that particular strain of music we love so much, the sort of abstract, meandering foresty folk, the drifting drone and shimmering soundscape. As much as we love it, and can't get enough, unless someone comes out with a whole new thesaurus will all new words, we're not sure what's gonna happen. So we were getting ready to introduce this latest disc from VxPxC with the above lament, when they go and do what we wish everyone would do, blindside us with a whole new sound, with all sorts of unexpected sonic weirdness. That's the true test of a great band, not releasing a million cd-r's a month, but to change your sound, make it new and exciting, every disc an adventure, but without losing the essence of what makes your band distinctly your band.
The opening track on this Stoned To Death is maybe the best thing these guys have done, an acid fried blown out guitar crawl, a simple melody, sort of plucked out on an electric guitar, but so caked in grit and buzz and hiss, it sounds like it's being dragged through a pit full of shortwave radios, the sound crumbling to pieces before our very ears, wrapped in halos of glistening harmonics, and muted melody, but the guitars front and center, rotting and gradually turning to dust. The effect is breathtaking, and as far as we're concerned even if there was only one song on here, if it was this one, it would be well worth the price of admission alone. But lucky for us there's 50 more minutes of cracked and stoned sonics, The rest of the disc is just as evocative, maybe not as immediately gut wrenching as the opener but still warped and damaged, gorgeous and haunting, from a weird swoonsome country sprawl, complete with pitch shifted vocals and all sorts of slippery melodies, to lugubrious low end rumbles, so distorted it's almost like the musical version of what you used to do as a kid where you held a note so long and so slow that it started cracking and making weird rhythms (you know what we're talking about), to distorted dubby jams, to weird eighties disco jams by way of Faxed Head... it's all amazing, and once again proves VxPxC might just be the underdog everyone forgets to watch while they gradually and systematically blow all the other home brewed lo-fi cd-r combos out of the water...
SUPER LIMITED of course. Packaged in an oversized handsewn sleeve with a printed insert.
This Seattle band has a name and album title ripe for an Abbott & Costello skit. Welcome! Sirs! Polite niceties aside, this is some tweaked, disjointed retro-pop that seems deeply indebted to The Soft Boys, The Pixies, The Breeders, Pavement and oh, maybe a little (or a lot) of The Beatles too. The ten tunes are played out on lanky electric guitar and loosely slung bass with singers who could almost convince us that they're the rambunctious offspring of Kim Deal and Robyn Hitchcock.
The return of White Hills, and their East Coast Hawkwind worshipping Stooges stomp FX blowouts. Every disc has kicked our asses, each one exploring a different side of WH's spaced out psychedelic sound. From the swirling cosmic krautprog of No Game To Play, to the more straight ahead space rock of Glitter Glamour Atrocity to the recent collaboration with Bay Area noisemakers White Pee, a half hour blast of ambient spacenoize. Where does Abstractions And Mutations fall? It falls smack dab in between all of those, but it falls HARD and HEAVY. Easily the fiercest outing yet from Dave W. and his bearded and robed wizards of druggy sonic overload. Beginning with a seriously metallic riff, and some super effected vocals, the band pounds relentlessly, adding tons of melody and a wicked hook, and then a brief space-y shuffle, before the song explodes into three minutes of amp frying psychguitar destruction.
The 15 minute "Left Behind" begins by drifting through some Tangerine Dreamed outer space void, peppered with fluttering drum fills, abstract shards of guitar, and clouds of shimmering FX, before again, exploding into a relentless acid jam, the drums splattering and sputtering, pounding and thrashing, the guitars wailing and howling, everything wrapped in a dense haze of buzz and effects. The rest of the record strikes a balance between the two, the blissed out laid back haze, and the face melting psychedelic freakout, culminating in the super tripped out final track, a sort of disembodied Doors-y jam, slow and spare, vocals drifting, guitars burning in soft swells, the percussion doused in reverb, the pace seriously stoned, before the chaos rains down from above, an intense drum guitar duel, the reverb and delay joining in for good measure, a swirling head spinning blow out.
This was some sort of tour only release, we managed to get most of the remaining copies direct from the band, which means, not only are these crazy limited, but that when we run out, odds are we will NOT be able to get more. Packaged in plain white sleeves, with simple stickers affixed to the front and back...
When we first got this disc in, we had no idea what it was. We never would have guessed it was the Winterblut as the new Winterblut was supposed to have original cover art by Wrest from Leviathan. But this disc was in a plain all-black slipcover. So we slid out the jewel case, and what do you know? The jewel case was opaque and black as well, with absolutely no text on it anywhere. At this point we still had no idea what the heck it was, until we pulled out the booklet, and lo and behold, there it was, Wrest's artwork, some seriously demented painted shapes grappling, a nude woman, a demon, way too many clawed hands...
It's been four long year since we last heard from Winterblut, and at the time, the album Grund Gelenkkunst had just been released and found Winterblut totally transformed from a grim buzzing Nordic style black metal beast, into a twisted, convoluted SST meets Voivod sort of black prog combo, having more in common with Ved Buens Ende than Darkthrone, with a punk rock production, gnarled Greg Ginn riffage, super strange arrangements and some very un-black metal elements. Which of course meant we dug it like crazy. And played it to death, always expecting to hear more from Winterblut sooner or later.
So it ended up being later, but finally here it is, Das Aas aller Dinge, and while a lot has changed in the last 4 years, much of the prog has been purged, and not all the riffing is angular and obtuse, Winterblut hasn't merely reverted to classic Norwegian style black buzz, although much of Das Aas aller Dinge is more blasting and buzzing than anything on Grund Gelenkkunst, instead it's apparent from the very first riff, that L. Hiver, the man who is Winterblut, still has a distinctly skewed take on black metal, with the tempo firmly set at mid, and plenty of Voivodisms still in place, right down to the vocals, in fact one can almost imagine this is what Dimension Hatross would have sounded like had it been a black metal record, lurching and mathy, woozy and sort of seasick, everything shrouded in reverb and black black distortion a killer groove, complex drumming, the guitars skeletal and spidery as much as buzzy and black. Even the second track sounds like a blackened Voivod, and part way through when it kicks it up into full on blast, the melody and riffing is still haunting and minor key, with a subtle sci-fi edge. The next few tracks are definitely heavier on the buzzing and the blackness, and more old school classic Norwegian style, but still the riffs are completely atypical, gnarled and just a little bit off. In a good way.
It's on "Das Aas (Erloschen)" where the band get all weird again, a super slithery, slippery stop start groove with a main riff that warbles drunkenly up and down the fretboard, with big wide open spaces between chords, the drums a simple framework for the guitars to tangle themselves up in. A track or two later, there's the 15 minute epic "Das Aas (Sehnsuchtig)" a loping waltzy Burzumic dirge, that partway through transforms into a furious blast, and then unwinds into a killer serpentine progscape with impossibly off-kilter drumming, and strange tempos, everything still bathed in black, the vocals a raspy growl, but all strung along a lurching mathrock rhythm, the riffs following suit, a whirling relentless black space prog jam. The record finishes off with "Das Aas (Egnid Rella)" another track that meshes classic black with the twisted riffage and octopoidal rhythms that made us dig Winterblut so much in the first place.
Obviously amazing, and essential, but even considering everything we just wrote, if you're anything like us, it could have been summed up perfectly in 4 simple words: "black metal Dimension Hatross."
As mentioned above, packaged in a black opaque jewel case, in an all black slipcover, the booklet inside and the disc face features killer artwork from Wrest, the booklet also includes some seriously creepy band photos, as well liner notes and lyrics.
Another new Wire magazine, which of course means another amazing big ol' batch of new (and not so new) modern music. This month on the cover Detroit Techno technicians Underground Resistance, inside: hip hopper Flying Lotus, guitarist / bagpiper David Watson, sound artist Daniel Menche, Global Ear on Addis Ababa, sound / performance artists Juneau/Projects/, Invisible Jukebox with JG Thirwell of Foetus, musician, noisemaker and label honcho Russell Haswell, guitarist Loren Connors, jazz legend Sonny Simmons and as usual pages and pages of reviews (cds, lps, 7"s, shows, performances, installations, happenings, books, films, DVD's) and finally a back page Marx Brothers gospel (?) epiphany from Howard Mandel.
We shouldn't have to say very much at all about this brand new 7" from beloved local dronerockers Wooden Shjips, considering how many of their recent full length we sold, same with the self released 7" and 10" (which were included as a bonus disc on the first pressing of the Holy Mountain full length, all gone now, sorry). It seems like we could just whisper the words 'Wooden Shjips" into the internet and all of these 7"s would suddenly just disappear, only to re-appear moments later on turntables around the world. Which, when you think about it, is basically what is about to happen right now.
"Woooooooodennnnnnnnssssshhhhhhhhjjjiiiiiipssssssss��"
The A side is classic Wooden Shjips, taking all of their influences and whipping them into a droney druggy blur. Whooshing distorted riffing, heavy on the phaser (so heavy at times, it sounds like maybe it's not just the guitar, like they ran the whole record through a phaser), some warped Stereolab style organs, simple krautrocky drumming, and those hypnotic Jim Morrison / Nick Drake deep crooning vocals. Think a super psychedelic Sabbath, or a heady mix of Flying Saucer Attack, Spacemen 3 and Loop. Cyclical and hypnotic, with a strange almost new wavey chord change / breakdown smack dab in the middle.
The flipside is way more poppy and less droney, a slow psychpop drift, with serpentine guitars, and a gradually increasing tempo, the guitar getting all tangled up with the whirring organ, the whole thing fuzzy and softly propulsive, but with a surprisingly garage-y vibe, reminding us of a more drugged out Sonics, or a more spaced out Fuzztones, especially in the main melody and the higher than usual vocals. Both new tracks are pretty kick ass and fans will most definitely not bee disappointed. And even though the full length on Holy Mountain has only been out for about two months, these new tracks already have us chomping at the bit for another new full length! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Yikes, indeed! If you enjoy effects heavy, fuzzed out, fucked up, rudimentary rawk freakshows, this new Yikes is for you! John Dwyer and co. launch a boil-popping noise barrage that barely leaves any room for the squawked and shouted vocals. If you've been keeping tabs on Dwyer's sonic activities, you might be please to discover that his latest exclamation fits right between his old bands Coachwhips and Pink And Brown. Tho' we can also say that on songs like "The Wick" he sounds like a dyspeptic Robert Pollard. The assault is short if not sweet; the seven songs clock in at just under fifteen minutes!
