It's Stinking Lizaveta in... SPAAAAAACE?? Sort of. Named after a space age toy (the battery powered, made-in-Japan "Planet-Y" space station depicted on the cover, look for it on eBay maybe -- it's from 1968 and worth a pretty penny, several hundred dollars), this project features two guys using and abusing two (musical) space age "toys": the Casio DG-20 guitar synthesizer, and the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer. One's a plastic, futuristic-looking, guitar-shaped device, a product of the digital age (circa '88), the other a more vintage (circa '73), suitcase-sized item in a metal case with many colorful knobs and buttons. The DG-20, which really is rather toy-like, and has been put to recent humorous use by NZ's Flight Of The Conchords (try Googling it), is played by Yanni Papadopoulos, who is best known as the lead guitar shredder for the amazing instro-metal Philadelphia "doomjazz" power trio Stinking Lizaveta, whom we hope you're all familiar with as they're big AQ faves. On the Music Easel (more info: http://www.buchla.com/historical/music_easel/music_easel.html), is Charles Cohen, who rarely records but has been performing live improvised electronic music in Philly and environs for the past 20 years. Recently, though, in addition to this cd with Papadopoulos, he also has a disc out in collaboration with one of the dudes from damaged psych rockers Temple Of Bon Matin. He's also a participant in prog-folk Czech cinema tribute The Valerie Project, whose Drag City album was highlighted here last list.
For Papadopoulos, this is certainly a change of pace from his frenetic, fretboard-burning guitar heroics in Stinking Liz, but he's certainly up to the task, after all we've seen him crawling on the ground, pushing his guitar across the dirty floor of a club with his nose just to get interesting noises out of it (talk about "extended technique"!). Recorded live last November in Baltimore, this exploratory but surefooted improv session proceeds both playfully and tastefully, Mssrs. Papadopoulos and Cohen clearly knowing what they're doing, able to keep it going, keep it changing, keep it interesting for the full half-hour (well 28 minutes 45 seconds to be precise). It's like Subotnick meets Sun Ra meets Schnitzler... a totally sci-fi cosmic soundscape chock full of spaced-out drones (of course) and bleep-bloop-bleep electronic FX. It starts off with abstract alien chatter mind-melding into echoing mechanical rhythms over which the duo converse in utter outer-space vibrations, pulling delicate, eerie melodies out of the ether, amidst dubby plastic squelch and distorted atmospheres. For fans of '60s academic electro-acoustics, '70s kraut-tronica, Japan's Space Machine, even the recent solo work of Zombi keyboardist Steve Moore... Limited to 500 copies, fyi, this may be on eBay someday too like its namesake! From one of our current fave labels, Public Guilt, this comes packaged in a cardboard digi-sleeve thing that's better designed than most, with the cd's playing surface snuggly protected by a layer of foam.
We've been waiting a long time for this one. The follow up to Pluramon's 2003 outing Dream Top Rock, which is a classic AQ favorite at this point. These days Pluramon sound almost nothing like their earliest incarnation when Markus Scmickler was making somewhat abstract electronics with stunning results. But luckily Schmickler is one of those great musicians that changes his palette often but whose results always soar to great heights. This outing finds him exploring somewhat similar terrain as was found on Dream Top Rock, with Julee Cruise on board once again on several tracks with her blissed out and enigmatic vocals. With even more upfront and unadulterated pop in these tracks this has had us thinking lots of Mojave 3 and even the Broken Social Scene as well as My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver. Such perfect shoegaze songs for the crisp cold days we've been having in San Francisco. The Monstrous Surplus is one of those great records that weaves itself into your subconscious with repeated listens. Minus one dud (we could have gone without the spoken vocal delivery of "Fresh Aufhebung") the album is pretty close to daydream pop perfection. We're pretty surprised that the last Pluramon release didn't make bigger waves as we think it was just as amazing as releases by folks like M83 and Mum which did get to a wider audience. In a year with a nice resurgence of shoegaze influenced records from folks like Ulrich Schnaus and Trembling Blue Stars we hope that Pluramon finally gets the wide appreciation and respect they so rightfully deserve!
Here it is at last. Martin Popoff has laboriously reviewed the heavy metal albums of the '70s, the '80s -- and now the '90s. What a madman. This new book weighs in at 520 pages. THREE THOUSAND SEVENTY THREE reviews. 3,073!!! Good grief. If anybody knows how hard it is to write 3,073 reviews, we do! We bow in honor of Popoff's achievement. And remember, this is volume three in a series (which, as far as Popoff is concerned, stops here, though perhaps an ambitious and/or foolish protege will take up the torch and at some future date produce a book of '00s reviews). The '70s book had 1,162 reviews. The '80s one 2,528. So this is the biggest yet.
So, what's in here, besides just about everything? Well if you're familiar with Martin's other books, you know that he's a very entertaining and idiosyncratic writer. And very opinionated too of course! As he should be, that's what makes this interesting. Just 'cause we don't always (often?) agree with him, that doesn't mean we don't absolutely love reading his reviews. And same goes for reading his reviews of albums that we couldn't care less about (which, this being the '90s book, and so big, there's plenty of in here). You'd think, from our current perspective, that this '90s volume would have tons of the church-burning wave of Scandinavian black metal, and a whole lot of the gory death metal scene of the day. Well, that stuff's in here, for sure, but so's plenty of other styles of metal and bands now less revered. You gotta remember, Martin wrote a lot of these reviews back IN the '90s, for his original Collector's Guide To Heavy Metal (before his 3-volume revision, now completed). And he wasn't that into black metal then, nor was it clear how significant that particular musical movement would become.
What was popular then (and popular with Martin) was the last gasp of the heyday of the hair metal bands. Also the rise of grunge and other forms of alterna-metal. So, although there's only one review of a Burzum album (out of their seven records of the '90s), there's reviews of such (deservedly?) forgotten acts as Mind Funk, Mr. Big, Dangerous Toys, Paw, Big Chief, Saigon Kick, Jackyl, and Mordred. You also get to read about the sad, late-career failed comeback attempts of many '80s hair metal stars, and still-strugglin' '70s acts too (there's three Nazareth reviews!).
This sounds like a criticism, and maybe it is if you're ONLY interested in "extreme metal" (as opposed, to, ferinstance, the band Extreme, which gets a 10 out of 10 for their III Sides To Every Story album from 1992). But remember, there's over three thousand reviews here. And we like being reminded of stuff like Enuff Z'Nuff and Warrior Soul and Circus Of Power and Love/Hate and Masters Of Reality and the SEVEN studio albums Motorhead released in the nineties... And don't worry, the likes of Dimmu Borgir and Borknagar and Marduk etc. all get covered -- basically if a band had an album out on Century Media or Nuclear Blast or Relapse or even Necropolis or Red Stream, it's in here. We also noticed that Martin has upped his scores (awarded on a scale of 1 to 10 for each album) for a lot of the black metal stuff since the original book -- though Mayhem's classic De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas still gets a 0, though Martin allows he would now give it a 7 but feels that the zero is almost more of a compliment to this "near-genius wretch of an album". It's like the anti-ten, that the inverted-cross crowd should appreciate.
And at this point we know and love all of Popoff's reviewing quirks. The Canadian Content, of course. The weird idea he has that bands get BETTER with each release (when everybody knows that most of the time the first album is the best). And then there's his personal "Top 100" list. Which is INSANE. Try this on for size: Popoff's personal favorite best "Heavy Metal" album of the '90s is... wait for it... tad dah, Rhythmeen by ZZ Top! What?? Now, actually that's a pretty cool album (sez Allan) but it sure ain't the best heavy metal disc of the '90s. Heck it's not even heavy metal!!! (And it's not an ironic Chuck Eddy "Tina Marie" move either). So who let this guy write a book about heavy metal? Well if you read it, you'll understand. By the way, the #1 '90s metal album that fans picked in an internet poll conducted by Popoff is a much more sane choice: Megadeth's Rust In Peace.
Granted, this book could at least have been a lot smaller if Martin had restricted his definition of metal just a bit (does Primus really need to be in here?) but again it's written from the perspective of where the "industry" was going back in the '90s... all over the place, basically. So let's leave you with some more names of which this book will perhaps spark fond memories (or not): Sepultura, My Dying Bride, Helmet, Machine Head, Kyuss, Therapy?, Danzig, Porno For Pyros, Pitch Shifter, Skyclad, Tiamat, Monster Magnet, Crowbar, Asphyx, Last Crack, Paradise Lost, Pantera, Four Horsemen, Fudge Tunnel, Therion, Type O Negative, Annihilator... like we said, good grief, there's so much! Jesus Lizard's major label records, and five U.D.O. albums, and all the cool Earache stuff like Godflesh and Carcass and Cathedral and Entombed, and all the Iron Maiden in decline discs, and Metallica's Load albums, and Joey Belladona (ex-Anthrax) solo, Vince Neil solo too, and even Allan's favorite obscure Canadian speed metal band Dogs With Jobs! Maybe the '90s weren't the metal decade that the '80s were, but there was no shortage of the stuff (and its variants) and if you were into it then you'll get a kick out of this book that's for sure.
Oh yeah, of course this also comes with a bonus cd of "nineties rarities", courtesy the Metal Blade label, including tracks by Gwar, Six Feet Under, Skrew, King's X, Cannibal Corpse, and Amon Amarth...
We first laid our ears on New Jersey's, Professor Genius, on the great After Dark compilation that we're still playing on repeat even months after its release. This 12" features one of their tracks from that comp, "La Grotta", as well as two new songs on the 'b' side that we've been getting our robot disco on to. Think Tangerine Dream and Vangelis going out late night style with Jean-Michel Jarre and Patrick Cowley and you start to get an idea of what kind of lesson Professor Genius is teaching. Packaged in the great Italians Do It Better cut sleeve, this is wax that will keep you going late into the night. Hot!
Some of you may not recognize the name Donovan Quinn, but long time readers of the AQ list and fans of all things Jewelled Antler, most certainly will. He's one half of psych folk combo the Skygreen Leopards, and this here disc, October Lanterns was recorded way back in 2003, but was thought to be lost until now. Released by Soft Abuse as an ultra limited cd-r, we only got a handful so we won't go into too much detail. You probably already know if you need this, especially if the words psych folk, Skygreen Leopards and Jewelled Antler set your psychedelic folks senses a tinglin'...
There's a definite Dylan thing going on here, Quinn's lazy drawl and insistent strumming is at times a dead ringer, but it's Dylan filtered through seventies British folk, with plenty of fluttering flutes, jaw harp, melodica, mandolin, shimmering high harmony vocals, the sounds are sometimes off kilter and lo-fi, like Avarus or other Finnish folkies, the sounds wreathed in a haze of druggy FX, but just as often, simple, naked and stripped down. Just the guitar and the vocals, and that's most definitely enough.
Dark and personal, subtly trippy, and quite lovely.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered, hand screened, with a paste on cover photo, and paste on liner notes inside. We only got 20 copies, and will NOT be able to get more...
This Hungarian black metal act is perhaps best known for their use of the trombone -- not your everyday metal instrument, right? Of course trombone alone isn't enough to sustain a career (this is their sixth album) nor our interest for that matter (though it helps), and so it's also clearly to Sear Bliss' benefit that they have mastered the dark art of composing thunderously heavy, melodic yet grim black metal songs. The tootin' trombone just makes 'em all the more grand and majestic. Lesser bands would rely entirely upon synthesized keyboard coloration to create such moods. And while Sear Bliss do use keyboards, they also have folks playing violin, flute, euphonium, trumpet, and of course trombone, as well as sundry ethnic instruments with which we're not familiar, presumably of Hungarian origin. The folk-tinged results are slickly impressive, definitely dramatic, orchestrally progressive, yet still iron-fistedly metallic (with gruff vocals, blazing drums, and badass guitar shred). The music of Sear Bliss bears comparison to the atmospheric Viking prog of Norway's Enslaved and the eccentric cinematic symphonics of Japan's Sigh -- two AQ faves. When we can say that about a band, and there's trombone too, well that's an automatic thumbs up!
From the same label that brought us the amazing Gog records, Sounds Of Battle And Souvenir Collecting, comes this bizarre, and hauntingly beautiful slab of alien black metal. Not sure what else to call it, it's definitely black metal, but it's weirdly blissy and electronic sounding, more like Alcest or Amesoeurs than old school grimnity, but even then, it's still weirder, like it must have been played by robots or insects, or some massive black metal machine assembled beneath the surface of some mysterious moon. You can almost picture some mechanical monstrosity, pieces of human flesh, various organs, somehow built into the machine's inner workings, everything grinding and sparking all in a Herculean effort to produce this glorious droning buzzing blackness. A cloud of black buzz that will eventually drift through space and time swallowing any planets in its path, and extinguishing all life it encounters. Heck, even the cover of the record is the view from some sort of alien lander, looking out and the cold dead ground of some red planet, as if any minute some huge horrible black beast will lurch into view over the horizon, dashing all of our ideas about said planet being uninhabited.
The sound of Servile Sect is epic, and majestic, the guitars glistening sheets of sound, the surface of that sound peppered with bits of electronic shimmer, causing the long drawn out riffery to reflect and refract, tiny little sonic events occurring every second, the surface alive and constantly squirming and changing color, but viewed from afar, it's simply a blown out undulating buzz. Those guitars are digitized and processed, spread into thick smears of warm glowing whir, the riffs barely discernible beneath the constant roar of Servile Sect's sonic swirl
The vocals add just more buzz to the mix, howling and wailing, but stretched into streaks of sonic violence, and drums, assuming there are any, are buried, festering beneath layer after layer of crushing guitar fuzz, emitting noxious rhythms that don't so much blast or pound as they do explode into tiny squalls of still more buzz.
Occasionally, the buzz abates, leaving the guitar to sway lazily, the notes ringing out, the guitars lurking in the distance, but it's never long before the lilting melody is engulfed by a colossal buzzing roar, and the band locks into another extended psychfuzzblackdrone.
Another out of left field immediate AQ black bliss classic.
Fans of the new wave of droned out dreamy metal, black and otherwise: Nadja, Angelic Process, Ameseours, Alcest, etc. will dig this, as will dronelords who like their drones heavy and loud and yeah, a bit metallic...
Before Skullflower became a blissed out free drone, psychedelic raga outfit which would eventually morph into the ultra dreamy Sunroof!, they were trolling much darker, much harsher waters. When IIIrd Gatekeeper first came out way back in 1992, it fell right in alongside its sonic brethren, Swans, Godflesh, Pitchshifter, Terminal Cheesecake, Ramleh and all of those industrial dirge rockers. Originally released on Justin Broadrick's hEADdIRT label, IIIrd Gatekeeper is definitely one of Skullflower's finest moments (and quite possibly both Andee and Allan's favorite SF record EVER), a slow murky trudge through a blinding squall of psychedelic guitar freakout, dense swirls of which lurk behind a lurching slow motion bass dirge and pounding near industrial drumming. Each track picks a riff and pounds it into the ground, repeating and repeating until you can't help but be drawn in, while white hot streaks of guitar skree and low end rumble spin around the relentless plodding. SO much heavier and scarier than almost any other record. A bit like a heavy metal Whitehouse, or a more psychedelic Swans. A muddy, filthy, drug drenched metal club to the side of the head. So fucking awesome.
THIS WAS A WAREHOUSE FIND. THIS RECORD IS SOOOO OUT OF PRINT, BUT ONE OF OUR DISTRIBUTORS FOUND A BOX SO WE TOOK AS MANY AS THEY HAD. ONCE THESE ARE GONE IT'S BACK TO eBAY WITH YOU...
Romance always seems to be in the air when this Canadian band is around! Though it can occasionally get a bit doe-eyed and squishy, the music of Stars is sweetheart pop that never loses its head. In Our Bedroom After The War is by far their most composed and lush album to date. Oftentimes, their more soft-jazz inflected pop is quite reminiscent of Sea And Cake or The Style Council (circa "My Ever Changing Moods"). Both breezy and brainy.
Note: We currently have the limited edition cd version which comes with a bonus dvd (featuring a 55 minute documentary with interviews and tour footage from their jaunts across Europe and North America in support of their last album Set Yourself On Fire).
A brand new 7" single from beloved Bay Area chap Kelley Stoltz (yeah, we know he's originally from Michigan, but he's been here so long that we're claimin' him as our own!)! Side One is from his forthcoming full length which is scheduled for a February 2008 release. "Owl Service" on Side Two is exclusive to this record! Sounds like he's picking right up from where he left off on the retro pop/rock steeped Below The Branches (2005). Always a pleasure!
Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves just why Striborg continues to be quite possibly our favorite freaked out, damaged and demented outsider black metal one man band EVER. Not that we need reminding, but with so many releases, it's easy to take his intense and intensely fucked up body of work for granted.
Thankfully, after literally years of trying to track down all of the Striborg releases, Displeased Records is reissuing them all (the ones Southern Lord didn't release), most with new artwork, and many with extra tracks. So over the next few months we'll be getting everyone back up to speed on the confusional and chaotic soundworld of the mighty Striborg. Starting with Mysterious Semblance from 2004.
For those of you who already love Striborg, then this is a no brainer, if you don't already own this, you absolutely should. It's amazing. Dark and heavy, fucked up and drone-y. But for those new to Striborg, this is as good a place to start as any.
As with all Striborg releases, it's as much about the mood and presentation, as it is about the music. A bizarre forest world of buzz and blur, of haunting synths and cryptic messages. The record is adorned with various images of the forest, the jungle, trees and leaves and vines, some photos, others primitive drawings, no band photos, at least here, just the bizarre lyrics and all sorts of images of the dark wood.
Then there are the song titles, "Sour Pale Ghostly Dawn", "Mysterious Semblance Of Spectral Trees", "Lurking The Murky Damp Forest", "Looming Black Apparition", and appropriately depressive and ghoulish lyrics to match. And while we can't get enough of all that stuff, that sort of evocative imagery, the haunting and mysterious world those images and words evoke, it wouldn't mean anything if the music was equally as dark and creepy and fucked up. And as you probably realized by now, it absolutely is.
Mysterious Semblance is one of the doomier sounding Striborg records, lots of slow plodding tempos, swirling ghostly keyboards, long drawn out droning riffs, the tracks long and hypnotic, repetitive and trancelike. Lots of extended expanses of creepy crawly black ambience, like the opening tracks, long streaks of warbly organ, and wavery synths, drifting like a black fog, little twinkle of far off percussion, but for the most part, pure swirling dark ambient creep. Up next is the sort of title track, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes, and begins with more chiming shimmer, then the guitar comes in, and its that unmistakable Striborg tone, like someone just turned on the radio between stations, or began vacuuming the house, sheets of white noise buzz, the riff so indistinct it almost just sounds like a static buzz, here the buzz washes over a gentle lilting keyboard line, very Burzumic, but even more minimal and trancelike, the song eventually breaks into some serious blasting buzz, but the sound is so washed out and drone-y it's almost impossible to tell. The rest of the disc drifts back and forth between long stretches of scary ambient whir and blown out buzz, "The Ghostly Pallid Hand Of Fear" being maybe our favorite, the drums super loud this time, a stumbling double kick, under a lurching buzzy riff, the vocals all dubbed out, with weird metallic reverb, the voice echoing into the void like some sort of demon robot. Fucking awesome.
This reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, including the 15+ minute "Lurking The Murky Damp Forest", which sounds as murky and damp as the title would lead you to believe, the guitars and drums muted and muddy, but the vocals, super effected and creepy, lots of metallic reverb again, but this time a strangled croak like a black metal Gollum (although Gollum's pretty black metal already). The other two tracks are on the ambient side, but both suffused with thick distorted buzz, all gloriously washed out and drone-y.
We're always tempted to proclaim every Striborg record as our favorite, but that must just mean they are all sort of our favorite. Which makes perfect sense really. It's like each is some grim buzzy chapter in some epic black metal tome, every one drawing from the other, able to stand alone, but way more effective in the ongoing epic tale of Sin Nanna, Striborg, and whatever murky black forest he calls home.
And while they last we'll have the Mysterious Semblance discs with the super limited silver metallic cover (the rest of the layout is revamped as well, but once we sell out of this batch, it'll be back to the non-silver cover, and everything else will remain the same).
This record is fucked. Maybe you're thinking that "fucked" is one of the best compliments we can offer for a record. But seriously, this record is fucked-up. The Sun City Girls have long been known for the devilish personas which adopted liberally from the South East Asian pop and Bollywood scores. Slowly, erratic Beat poetry, bizarrely theatrical ideas, and uncomfortable experiments began to creep into their recordings. Jacks Creek was one of the records that had long been reviled as one of the Sun City Girl's biggest red flags for a serious lack of quality control. Loosely, a 'hillbilly' album, Jack's Creek begins with the Goucher and the Bishop Brothers muttering in badly rendered, redneck drawls about the terrible odor coming from an Indian burial mound somewhere nearby. For 10 minutes three men groans and whisper their fears, for one of the more convoluted extracts from the Sun City Girls catalogue. Eventually, a back-porch improv jam of warble and strum on harmonica, banjo, and voice brings this track to a conclusion, leaving more questions than answers. The hobo freak-folk of Jacks Creek with more hoots, false starts, and faux-drunk dialogue than actual songs, would certainly turn off anybody looking for an entire album of dramatic psych-punk ecstasy a la Torch Of The Mystics (although a few meandering gems like "Fact The Business" work their way into Jacks Creek). Like we said, this record is fucked.
The magazine all about music recording (from an indie angle) returns with an other issue. In it, you can learn about what a "Music Integrated Kiosk Environment" is, read a bunch of gear reviews (and look at lots of ads for gear too), get tips about online recording/collaborating, and read interviews with both famed '60s producer Girgio Gomelsky (who talks about the Yardbirds) and bassist-turned-engineer Joey Vera of Armored Saint! Among other things.
Another Sunday is another self-released micro-edition from the British drone maestro Darren Tate, best known for his work in Ora and Monos. Here, Mr. Tate presents three lengthy tracks of analogue synth variations on a theme and one pastoral field recordings of the birds flitting around his country garden. The analogue sounds revolve around a kosmische swirl of filter-sweep minimalism dappled with oceanic, tonal glissandos which gently sway up and down for a subtle hypnotic effect. Tate weaves into these ambient modulations a chorus of sympathetic vibrations, which taken on their own could easily be confused for the glacial pacing of Eliane Radigue's compositions. The coda of birds is a nice touch, countering the navel-gazing circuitry of the electronic sound with a fanciful chorus of avian calls. For those of you who have picked up any number of those field recording documents from Sittelle, try your hand at identifying all of these birds. In any case, Another Sunday is super limited, with an edition of 100 copies. We've got only a handful!
It's been, what, three years since Swedish psych veterans Trad Gras och Stenar toured the United States? Too long anyway. If you saw 'em then, you know why we're so excited about this new DVD. This band has been around, in one form or another, since the late sixties, starting off in 1967 as Parson Sound, then morphing into International Harvester, Harvester, and finally Trad Gras och Stenar (Trees, Grass, and Stones). And they somehow have maintained their radical hippy outlook, their politics and their musical adventurousness, all these years (they were on a long hiatus from 1972 until their 1995 reunion). This band just rules. Makes us young 'uns a bit less worried about getting old.
Heavy and mesmeric, TGoS's jams are something like a more hippified version of Circle, minimalist, rhythmic, trance-inducing. For more description of their sounds, please refer to one of our reviews of their several albums. Presumably if you're curious about this dvd you've already heard 'em, and just want to know what the dvd is all about. Basically, it's like their home movies from tour (and tour-prep). It's done in a cinema-verite manner, capturing quirky detail, Trad Gras definitely interested in demystifying and debunking any "rock and roll" pretense. For instance, when at one point the plays on Swedish television, the clip from the actual TV show is never shown, just their own "behind the scenes" footage. And then there's a scene of the band out of doors, in the snow (!), trying to tune in themselves on an old TV set, almost just to be silly.
Shot by filmmaker Michael Hogstrom circa 2002-2005, this documentary follows TGoS around Sweden and over to both Russia and the United States to various gigs, playing their wonderful music and dealing with the mundane misadventures of life on the road. There's plenty of performance footage and lots of inter-band banter (with English subtitles, yay!) in the tour van or backstage. In fact, thematically this movie is almost as much about "old friends" as it is a musical document. It's almost two hours worth of the Trad Gras och Stenar experience -- not a substitute for seeing 'em live in person but the next best thing for sure (and since we in the USA don't have that opportunity all that often, this is a treat!). And, another treat: there's a few minutes of 8mm footage of the band appearing at one of the famous free Stockholm summer festivals back in 1970, a montage of various vintage clips of the scene there, all scratchy and colorful. These were silent films, so the sound isn't synched, but there's a Trad Gras album playing on the soundtrack (literally, in a preamble, we're shown the needle being dropped on the vinyl). A nice bonus!
If you're not charmed by the way the dvd begins, outside Trad Gras och Stenar's practice space at a house somewhere in the Swedish countryside, with their wizened guitarist and spiritual leader Bo Anders Persson seated on a motorcycle, trying to get the thing to start up, as the rest of the band looks on, then perhaps this excursion won't be for you. But if immediately you wish you were hanging out with those guys, helping with the motorcycle, hearing their stories, basking in their music, then you're a fan of TGoS and will enjoy the rest of the movie!!
This is the second half of legendary Norwegian pop-metal-sleaze merchants Turbonegro's denim and leather, head banging, fist pounding (pun indeed intended) one two reissue punch, the first half being their brilliant breakthrough full-length Ass Cobra. Apocalypse Dudes, recorded in '97 was the maybe-even-better follow-up. Like a Tom Of Finland drawing come to life, Turbonegro channel the spirit of Kiss and Judas Priest, mix in some Alice Cooper and stadium COCK rock, and top it all off with some big moustaches, assless chaps, tight denim pants, sailor outfits and wickedly funny songs: 'Rock Against Ass', 'Don't Say Motherfucker, Motherfucker!', 'Rendezvous With Anus'. Fucking funny and brilliant and totally rocking! Genius!
Desperately needed re-issue of one of the more amazing discs from Norway's kings of gay-sailor-leather-pants-moustache-rides-metallic-punk-rock-sleaze, 1996's "Ass Cobra". How can this band not be your favorite band?!?! They are everything Kiss should have been, and pretended to be (or not to be in terms of sexuality). Big and noisy and glammy and catchy and so fucking funny. C'mon...Ass Cobra? Best album title ever maybe? And how about these song titles: The Midnight Nambla, Denim Demon, I Got Erection, Hobbit Motherfuckers! But don't think for a minute they're some kind of joke band, although the jokes do flow freely. Turbonegro totally have the chops and they completely shred. Heavy metal meets poppy punk, all wrapped up in tight denim and sweaty, studded leather, and ready to rough you up and spank you silly.
Speaking of Ass Cobra, one of Cup's fondest (!?) live show spectacles was seeing Turbonegro at the old Chameleon bar here on Valencia Street back in '97. They pummelled the eyes and eardrums of all in attendance with their unique stage presence. The bizarre pinnacle of the eve came when we heard the crowd gasp (yes, it was audible above the din of the band). We looked up at the stage just in time to see the lead singer turn around, bare ass to the audience, with a bundle (not just one or two) of lit roman candles... er... in there. Jaw-dropping and absolutely unforgettable.
Norway, home to so much damn fine music that we love love love... from the blissful pop lads in Kings Of Convenience to the bleak experimental dronings of Deathprod to the blackest metal of Enslaved, Immortal and Satyricon to the self-proclaimed deathpunk of Turbonegro.
Darkness Forever is one of the five new reissues from that mighty band. It's their live album from 1999. The other reissues we have are Apocalypse Dudes, Ass Cobra, Hot Cars & Spent Contraceptives, Never Forever. While 1998's Apocalypse Dudes and 1996's Ass Cobra are definitely our faves, this one sure captures the band's trademark live lewd looseness.
Here's what we said the first time around: In the eternal quest of the best stoner/cock rock lyric, Turbonegro's Neanderthal lyricism may actually match that of Monster Magnet: "I gotta headache in my pants" vs. "it takes a fistful of medication just to keep it in my pants"... I don't know, you be the judge. Yet beyond their wordsmithery, Turbonegro's cock rock is cock rock made by men who love cock. The Scandinavian Village People of Hard Rock drive through heavy heavy heavy Sabbath riffs and stoner grooves that Man's Ruin would kill for.
Psst, the other reissues we have are Ass Cobra, Apocalypse Dudes, Hot Cars & Spent Contraceptives, and Never Is Forever.
Along with our two favorites, we've got a couple more Turbonegro reissues for you to get down with!
This one's their 1992 debut album. It shows these Norwegian death punk hellions in their infancy. So much looser and more grunge-y than what they would eventually become. 'Though it is their first album, it isn't where we'd recommend you start your Turbonegro schooling if you've never heard them before. Hop on their jet-fueled rawk(et) launch pad with Apocalypse Dudes or Ass Cobra first! This reissue includes four bonus tracks.
Psst, the other reissues we have are Ass Cobra, Apocalypse Dudes, Darkness Forever: Between The Lines In Hamburg And Oslo, and Never Is Forever.
More turbo! More negro! The reissues of this wild band's albums keep on coming! This is 1994's Never Is Forever. On the opening track they try to trick us with the sensitive guy ploy (heh heh, like any self-respecting badboys), but then they punch the rock button, and awaaay we go... Aaaiiieeeee! isn't it funny when a song by one band will stir fond familiar fuzzies in your heart for another band, but that's what happened with the third song on this Turbonegro album... it made us yearn for Rocket From The Crypt! Y'all know that our penchant for all things Norwegian and blistering yet catchy rock bands is pretty darn strong, and if you whip 'em all together with a twisted sense of humor like that, well, that pretty much seals the deal. If you're a Turbonegro neophyte, we'd recommmend checking out Apocalypse Dudes and Ass Cobra albums first. Then once you've been indoctrinated, head over this-a-way!
This reissue includes three bonus tracks (one alternate mix and two studio outtakes).
Psst, the other reissues we have are Ass Cobra, Apocalypse Dudes, Darkness Forever: Between The Lines In Hamburg And Oslo, and Hot Cars & Spent Contraceptives.
We first heard of Japanese psych band Up-Tight back in 2004 when their Five Psychedelic Pieces cd came out Stateside, 'round about the same time we also discovered their quite similar countrymen LSD-march, and hailed 'em both as two of the best young bands in the "Tokyo flashback" tradition. But that wasn't actually Up-Tight's first album, the sensibly titled First Album, which has now been reissued (in typical deluxe and limited fashion) by the aRCHIVE label on this Early Years disc.
Originally released on cd-r back in 1999 (btw, remember when that seemed like such a futuristic date??), this too could have been called Five Psychedelic Pieces, as this 5-tracker sees Up-Tight fully launched into the slowburn shoegaze-'til-amplifier-fire trajectory you already know and love 'em for... some songs drift lazily by, with quietly melancholic atmospheres and morose echoed vox. Usually that's just a part of it though, before pedals are stomped, drums begin to pound, and storms of electric guitar overload are unleashed. Heck, you know what we're talking about if you're curious about this, you've heard Up-Tight before, or LSD-march, or their sunglasses-at-night grandaddies Les Rallizes Denudes.
In addition to the approx. 48 minutes of First Album, aRCHIVE has added on two previously unreleased bonus tracks, one studio, one live, dug up from even further back in the band's early daze, circa 1994... another 18 minutes or so of primal psychedelic pulsation and delicate dronefulness.
Everything's been "slightly remastered", it's packaged in folding glossy cardstock sleeve, and is indeed LIMITED to 600 copies and unlikely to be around for too long!!
Dust To Digital is the new Smithsonian Folkways, every one of their releases fantastically complete, meticulously researched, gorgeously presented, often in a way that has you digging music you might have assumed you wouldn't otherwise.
In the past they've given us the Goodbye, Babylon collection of gospel music, packed in a silkscreened wooden box and snuggled up next to clumps of raw cotton, the Fonotone Records collection, old time bluegrass, blues and folk, housed in a cigar box, with a hardcover book and a bottle opener, the I Belong To This Band compilation of Sacred Harp Recordings, and now this, The Art Of Field Recordings, a 4 disc set, culled from 5 years of field recording, collected by archivists Art and Margo Rosenbaum, and collecting all manner of musical Americana, blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, country, gospel, spirituals, religious hymns, ballads and almost anything they stumbled across.
If you LOVE Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music set, and have been hankering for more, this will absolutely hit the spot. Or if you always think about buying the Harry Smith box for someone and wish they didn't already have it so you could, well here's the answer to your problem. The recordings are amazing, super intimate and personal, many of them a cappella, lots of them including the various bits of conversation that took place before and after, making it feel like you were sitting right there on the porch. The discs are separated onto four discs, each with a particular focus, instrumental and dance, blues, religious, and one disc that is a sort of sampling of all of the above and more, even including some Mexican folk, a German traditional, and other songs that maybe didn't fit perfectly into those genres.
Includes a massive book, with a huge essay and tons of notes on every song and each performer.
The packaging is a little strange, maybe not up to the D2D standards we're used to. A super nice thick box, housing a big perfect bound book, but the cds are in paper sleeves, and laid on corresponding colored squares, separated only by a weird little foam 't' adhered to the bottom of the box. But it hardly matters as the music inside is so completely fantastic. Recommended bug time. And pretty much the ideal gift for your blues/folk/country obsessed loved ones (especially the ones who own and love the Harry Smith anthology)!
Just when you thought you'd heard everything, in comes Sublime Frequencies to fill in the gaps you never thought existed. How many CDs of Iraqi pop do you have in your collection? Until now we certainly didn't have any, let alone anything remotely traditional from Iraq. For a country that's so important to our war mongering presidential administration it's perhaps a little surprising that more interest hasn't been piqued about the culture of Iraq. But then again, everyone but W seems to understand that the real reasons for plundering this nation wasn't to "liberate" anyone. In fact, W would probably rather that no one even pay attention to any of this music, which has the awkward fortune to have been produced almost entirely (with the exception of three early 70's tracks) during the reign of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime ( tracks here range from 1980 on up to 2002!). In spite of his -- well deserved -- reputation as a cruel dictator, he was also an avid supporter of both education and the arts -- such are the complexities of life W would rather not acknowledge -- and for better or worse, kept the fabricated nation state as stable as it has ever been. Hussein promoted secular arts and music, starting cultural centers for both, and even dubbed singers the "eighth division" of the armed forces (his nation had seven military divisions) -- not to paint too rosy a picture of Donald Rumsfeld's former pal and business partner, who was also a sadistic tyrant after all. Compiled by Mark Gergis (I Remember Syria, Molam, Cambodian Cassette Archives), Choubi Choubi is a collection years in the making. Gergis scoured the earth for the source material on this disc, travelling through Syria, Europe and the Iraqi neighborhoods of Detroit, Michigan. The anthology starts off with a folk rock track from '70s Socialist singer Ja'afar Hassan, a song that could easily compete with the best psych tracks on Hava Narghile or Turkish Delights for the crown of Middle Eastern psych champ. But if you're expecting another psych compilation, you're going to be disappointed as Choubi Choubi is much more than that, way more. Most of the recordings on the album have no western instruments on them, nor hardly any western influence. These tracks rock out much harder with no electric instruments, but with huge string sections, pounding drums, and monstrous oud playing. Maybe it's also the super bluesy sounding (to the western ear) melodies, it's no wonder that it sounds so fresh and familiar to us. It really is weird, when I (Byram) first listened to this record I could have sworn there were more songs with electric guitars on it, but there aren't that many. It just sounds so fucking heavy, and rocks so hard that I remembered it as being a "rock" record. Really, really, really fucking great!
French label Crier dans les Mus�es hits the ground running as it unleashes its first release, Cris et Chuchotements (in English, Cries and Whispers). On here, you can expect to find 14 tracks that range from hippie-psych freakouts to pure, brutal, fucked up noise chants. Although there are a few familiar names - White Rainbow, Valerio Cosi, and Aaron Martin among them - the comp offers a handful of less-known, more obscure artists. One of those projects is Enfer Boreal, the solo project of Crier dans les Mus�es! label owner Maxime Primault. Primault's space on the record is a faithful replication of the aesthetics of early industrial music, which means that if you like anything by SPK or Robert Rental you will be completely and totally pumped. Another notable presence is that of Ravi Padmanabha, whose music can be described as the bastard child of Hella and Sun Ra on both valium and acid. Still, the good ol' stand-bys on this record don't fail to deliver either. Valerio Cosi kicks things off with a Droney raga piece - "Music for Flying Carpets" - that could have been made any number of ways, with any number of pedals, but all we know is that it sounds perfect. This is like La Monte Young and Brian Eno sitting down and giving us a five minute snippet of some supra-celestial jam session, especially the Eno thing when you consider the title. Not too long ago we were jammin' that Aaron Martin and Machinefabriek collaboration. Well, Cris has just a little more Aaron Martin for you before his solo debut comes out, and this track convinces us that it will be worth the wait. Just imagine if Vangelis had been commissioned to write the Lone Wolf and Cub soundtrack with only a windchime and one synth. One of the greatest heights is when Black Forest/Black Sea invokes the spirit of the blackest Black metal with a piece that sounds like a room of PA speakers performing some pissed-off Satanic ritual. A solid release for a fledgling label, definitely recommended!
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Some folks love it, some folks despise it. The latter have to grin and bear it 'cause it's pretty inescapable this time of year. We're talking about holiday themed music. The folks at Yep Roc have corralled a dozen members of their colorful musical family for this decidedly less conventional Christmas compilation -- you need only check out the song titles (example: "Your Christmas Whiskey" and "Something Funny In Santa's Lap") . to figure that out! Lots of garage rawk, Americana and pop levity from the likes of Los Straitjackets, Marah, Reverend Horton Heat, The Minus 5, Cities, The Moaners, and The Apples In Stereo and more!
Sometimes it seems there's so much old music to be rediscovered, what's the point in even making more? Well, maybe so folks 100 years from now can put out an amazing archival boxset of black metal, or doom, or freak folk. But we digress.
Murder ballads, true life tales of sorrow and sadness, tragedy and death, loss and misery, set to music, songs designed to help mourn, to pass on tales of lives lived and lost, a way to celebrate life, and fight off our fear of death.
For over a hundred years, these songs have existed, probably longer, the music and lyrics like tabloid newspapers, sensationalistic, bold and explicit, never designed to be popular, or mainstream, instead they existed for the people, who were hungry to hear about disaster and mayhem, just like slowing down to look at a car wreck, these songs would hold the listeners in thrall, not only designed to tell a tale, but maybe teach a lesson as well.
This collection is massive, gorgeously presented, extensively researched, and beyond all that, just an amazing collection of fantastic songs, most culled from old 78's, dusty and scratchy, hissy, pops and crackle, adding an appropriately old timey patina, country, rhythm and blues, the subject matter appropriately dark, and sinister, as if those musics weren't already primarily focused on death and dying, broken hearts and murdered sweethearts.
The sounds range from campfire country to stripped down blues, to bouncy rhythm and blues, to mournful ballads, to twangy honky tonk and every variation in between. Men, women, young, and old, all recorded between 1913 and 1938, spinning their tales, around the campfire, behind a bottle of whiskey, on a street corner, anyway there were folks in need of a good, and tragic story.
The packaging is amazing, a clothbound hardcover book the cds in little pockets on the inside of both the front and back covers, a huge book, a introduction by Tom Waits, a brief history of the genre, and then super in depth notes on each artist and each track, tons of photos, and not just the performers, but the various accidents, wrecks, mishaps and tragedies that inspired these songs (not least among them, the sinking of the Titanic!).
We've been meaning to start stocking stuff from the Urck label for a while now. They had sent us a bunch of discs by a band with the strange name of Hop-Frog's Drum Jester Devotional, and to be honest at first we were fearing the worst, yeah we know, don't judge a book by its cover or a band by it's name, but we often judge band's by their names and it usually works out pretty well for us, Bathtub Shitter, Fuck I'm Dead, Pocohaunted, we could go on, but to be totally honest we were sort of expecting some sort of hippy jam band, you know hackey sacks and dayglo jester hats, but thankfully, we couldn't have been more wrong. The sound was devotional for sure, and the focal point was certainly drums, but the sound was more tribal and ethnic, spiritual and dark, more along the lines of Muslimgauze, lots of samples and voices, intricate rhythms, hypnotic and trancey.
So we will eventually review a record proper from Hop-Frog's Drum Jester Devotional, but we figured an even better place to start would be this brand new double disc compilation, featuring lots of bands on the Urck label, as well as a whole bunch of bands we already dig.
The comp is called Post-Asiatic Lost War Dream Music and is subtitled A Compilation Of Eastern Influenced Experimental Music, which pretty much nails it, but within that fairly broad descriptor, the bands veer into all sorts of varied sonic territory.
Right off the bat, there's a handful of bands who would have made owning this comp worthwhile all on their own, Amps For Christ, who offer up a gorgeous sprawling nearly 11 minute long jam, folky and lilting, guitars and sitars woven into drifting dreamlike harmonies, the melodies sunny and wistful, all very free and abstract, but gorgeous and we would have been happy to hear this track stretched out to fill an entire record. Muslimgauze does a stripped down, pure rhythm track, shuffling skittering drums, looped and cyclical, very hypnotic, and very very abstract. Neung Phak deliver a blissy slab of laid back psychpop, whirring organ, simple subtle drumming, twangy guitar, all wrapped around a super catchy Eastern melody. Experimental guitarist Bill Horist delivers some super spare squeak and scrape, chime and clatter, shimmer and swell, eventually that minimal guitar is joined by some sort of fiddle, wailing out a lonesome tune. Z'ev joins up with someone called Ramona Ponzini, for a haunting metallic scrapescape peppered with tribal drumming and with creepy disembodied vocals. There's also several tracks from that amazing Indian Soundscapes record we reviewed a while back, as well as tracks from Soriah, Metal Rouge, Moe! Staiano and F-Space. But the bands we hadn't heard of are just as exciting as those we were already familiar with.
The aforementioned Hop-Frog's Drum Jester Devotional unfurls a drum heavy ceremony, all pounding tribalism, and buzzing steel strings, sounding very East Asian, another track that we would have loved to hear stretched out to fill up the whole disc. Venerable Showers Of Beauty Gamelan, is just that, a DIY gamelan, chiming and resonant, the melodies definitely Asian influenced, but also a bit Western, with many of the tones allowed to drone on and on, giving the track a slightly ominous buzz. C.O.T.A. weave a dark slab of tribal dark ambience, lots of rumble and buzz, a thick bassy pulse and shimmering sitar like strings. We definitely need to hear more from these guys. And we could go on and on and on. This is after all two discs packed with all sorts of amazing music, and a whole clutch of new bands to discover and probably knowing us (and you we'd imagine) decide we need to hear more of. Recommended for fans of any of the above mentioned bands obviously, or anyone looking for into dark, dreamy, buzzy, blissful, tribal sounds. Everytime we play this in the store, someone comes up to ask what it is. Obviously, way recommended.
Packaged in a super thick mini gatefold lp-style sleeve, with liner notes and credits inside.
Wow! Wow! Wow! This is for sure gonna be at the top of quite a few wish lists this holiday season!
The title is a bit of an overstatement. "Of The Last Millenium"?! Not quite, how 'bout "Of The Last Decade And A Half Of The Last Millenium"? Uh huh, that's more accurate. Anyways, nitpicking aside, this box set contains four cds packed with 78 songs total plus a big 80-page booklet! So many old favorite UK bands -- many of which had shamefully slipped through the cracks in our memory until now!
Disc One features The Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Felt, Shop Assistants, Mighty Lemon Drops, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Primitives, The Wonder Stuff, The Sone Roses, The Charlatans UK, Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, Inspiral Carpets, The Trash Can Sinatras, The La's, and The Sundays.
Disc Two has Ride, Pale Saints, My Bloody Valentine, Lush, The Telescopes, Chapterhouse, Catherine Wheel, Bleach, Curve, Five Thirty, Moose, The Family Cat, The Dylans, Thousand Yard Stare, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Birdland, Manic Street Preachers, and Teenage Fanclub.
Disc Three includes Suede, Swervedriver, Eugenius, Superstar, New Order, James, Nick Heyward, The Boo Radleys, Saint Etienne, Stereolab, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, These Animal Men, Mega City Four, Echobelly, Gene, Menswear, Supergrass, Cast, and Elastica.
Disc Four closes out the box with Dodgy, Ash, Sleeper, Marion, Kula Shaker, Ocean Colour Scene, Babybird, The Bluetones, Super Furry Animals, The Divine Comedy, Cornershop, Silver Sun (YAY!!!), Spiritualized, Mansun, Hurricane #1, The Verve, Rialto, Catatonia, Placebo, and Gay Dad!
Plus for those of you (and us!) who are geeks for special packaging gimmicks, the 6"x12" box comes tricked out with a little light that illuminates not only the telephone booth sign on the outside front of the box, but also a mini stadium stage inside. Yes, batteries are included!
Okay, it might seem too easy to say with this new volume of the Zanzibara series that if you dug the first and second you're gonna love the third, but it's true. Zanzibara 3 is another terrific compilation from the Buda Musique label (the folks behind the awesome Ethiopiques series). If you're new to the series, we'll let ya know that the spotlight shines a loving glow on the coastal music of Eastern Africa. As the title tells, this time it's from Tanzania in the '60s -- seventeen tracks from Jamhuri Jazz Band, Nuta Jazz Band, Atomic Jazz Band, Morogoro Jazz Band, and Dar Es Salaam Jazz Band! Although the names of the five groups featured here all have the words "Jazz Band" in them, holding them to that genre's commonly thought of parameters is far too limiting. Performed on guitars, horns, percussion, bass, and some amazing voices, these songs also possess a bright brassy shine akin to Caribbean Calypso music and gentle lilting rhythms like those of many Latin American artists of the same period. Wonderful!
You gotta love Joe Meek! If you don't yet, what's your problem?! If you're unfamiliar, check out the genuinely inspired and advanced I Hear A New World (recorded in 1960, but 'lost' for years!) immediately! This mad genius/mad man artist/producer's fascinating and bizarre life story is too long and detailed to go into here, especially when we've got a brand new twelve disc box set of music he produced! Each cd features a Meek-produced solo artist or band's four-song EP, and is presented in a cardboard sleeve printed with its original cover art. Artists include Mike Berry, Houston Wells, The Flee-rekkers, The Packabeats, Heinz, Don Charles, John Leyton, The Blue Men ("I Hear A New World", perhaps his masterpiece), and The Tornados, but the real star is Meek. Seriously folks, he was a one-of-a-kind recording innovator!
More "True Black Nekronoise Metal" from our man Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk! Vargr is HNB's one-man black metal outfit in the grand tradition (from Burzum through Xasthur), bringing grim guitar buzz to the fore, although it often sounds as if his raspy vocals ("nokturnally recorded in Swedish Swedish forests"!) are accompanied by vacuum cleaners or industrial grinders instead. Grim and buzzing NEKRONOISE it is regardless. No surprise since Vargr's HNB aka Lord Nordvargr was known to us originally as an experimental drone artist, a member of such dark ambient industrial outfits as Folkstorm and MZ.412 and a collaborator with the likes of Merzbow. He made his first foray into "true" black metal realms with the Vargr disc Wehrmacht Satanas reviewed here just a couple weeks ago, and this new one, released by the ever-reliable 20 Buck Spin label, is in much the same vein of extremely-noisy-even-for-the-genre black metal, a noise album in black metal guise. Or should we say, in wolf's clothing? That's what Vargr means, Wolf. The logo was done by Jazkamer's "Count" Marhaug, and there are guest guitars on track (excuse me, "hymn") eight from HNB's old collaborator, Drakh.
It's hard to say if all the Christ-hating conceits of this album are sincere, or included simply as signifiers of the black metal concept being celebrated and/or subverted... but since when was that really an issue? It certainly seems serious. Howling distortion is a language spoken in both the genres of metal and noise, and with all the the eerie isolationist ambient elements -- disembodied voices, electronic drones, echoing bootsteps -- this certainly sounds like it could come from the most dark and demented depths of the black metal's caverns of chaos, wherein dwell the likes of Abruptum, Striborg, and Wold.
Not to be confused with the double e'd Midwestern punk rockers Vee Dee, this is the triple e'd Veee Deee and are American expats living in Japan. Well, at least one of em. AQ customer and long time pal Clay, most well known around here for sending us scathing (and hilarious) anti Keiji Haino hate mail, doing his very best to get Allan all riled up, much to the snicker delight of Andee (another misguided Haino hater).
Anyway, this is all sort of funny, as the sound of Veee Deee is not all that far removed from Haino's white noise psychedelic squall. Whoever is handling the ax duties here, could probably meet Haino on the sonic field of battle and hold his or her own. Dense flurries of rapid fire runs, weird moaning chords, bits of reverbed soft strum, all wound around some fierce and furious drumming.
While there are some Haino-ish elements, this falls way closer to modern freaked out spazz rock a la Strom And Stress, Coptic Light, Hella, Lightning Bolt, especially on the first track, with the band locking into hyper complex convoluted grooves, occasionally slowing things down for some tripped out drift, other times erupting into full on distorted crumbling NOISE. Someone must be manning the recording deck, as there is plenty of fucked up glitch and production weirdness. The second track (of three) is much more rock, with a seriously angular riff, wailed emo vocals, the drums still a chaotic clatter, sounding a little bit like Drive Like Jehu, slowing down for some minimal groove a la Stinking Lizaveta.
The final track mixes the disparate sound of the first two, a definite post rock post punk groove, but here muted and muddy, buried in a sludgy mix, emerging from a cloud of glistening atonal guitar splatter, and throbbing bass, tinkling chime like ambience and what sounds like croaking frogs, and finishing off in a flurry of buzzed out distorted skree. Cool stuff. Can't wait to hear more...
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Even being the sort of person who knows almost nothing about drugs, I do know the usual preferred delivery method for pot is inhalation, not ingestion (to the lungs, not the stomach). Not that you can't cook it up in a brownie, but the guys in Weedeater sound like they just shovel handfuls of weed straight into their gaping jaws, like some sort of drug crazed harvesting machine, or like a stoner rock engineer dumping coal into the engine of a locomotive, which makes sense, as it's obvious these guys need enough weed to power the relentless, downtuned, full bore stoner metal crush found on God Luck And Good Speed.
A relative stoner rock institution, Dixie Dave and company have been spewing their filthy, crusty, blown out, drug rock for going on 10+ years now, and before that Dixie fronted the equally heavy and even crustier Buzzov-en, so this man knows his way around a stoney riff and a druggy groove, and this shit sounds just as good now as it did a decade ago, and I don't even smoke pot. So I can only imagine how amazing this must sound high�
But even NOT high, Weedeater destroy! Like some impossible crossbreeding experiment gone hellishly wrong, one part Eyehategod, one part Sleep, one part Corrosion Of Conformity, one part Bongzilla, guitars tuned so low the strings drag along the ground, amps stacked so high, they need a ladder to crank those knobs to 11. The vocals a harsh demonic mewl, almost more black metal than stoner metal, the drums simple but massive.
Recorded mostly by Steve Albini, except for one track by CoC's Mike Dean, and that track is the weirdest of the bunch, just bass, banjo and baritone crooning, a creepy stoner country ballad, which somehow sounds right at home amidst the crushing low slung heaviness surrounding it on all sides.
Plus song titles like "Wizard Fight", "Weedmonkey" and they even cover Skynyrd's "Gimme Back My Bullets"!
Packaged in a cool mini gatefold lp-style sleeve, the art embossed and printed in gold metallic ink, with a little hymnal inside with all the lyrics, just like a mini stoner bible.
We missed out completely on the cd version of William Elliott Whitmore's installment of the Latitudes series. We maybe got one or two copies way back when but those are long gone. So we figured we oughta list the vinyl version since we managed to get a handful of these. And if they're anything like the rest of the Latitudes lps, they'll be gone in a flash, so act fast.
We've never actually reviewed any of WEW's records proper, the only one we've listed is the collaboration he did with Erase Errata's Jenny Hoyston, which we dug a lot, his raw raspy voice complimented hers perfectly. But we had yet to get a good listen to him on his own, but man does this guy have a voice. Hard to believe that voice comes out of a tattooed 30 something white guy. Bluesy and deep, raspy and raw, ragged and soulful, the arrangements just guitar or banjo, super simple and stripped down. The songs are intense, and emotional, the voice saying as much with it's tone and timbre as with the actual lyrics. We definitely need to hear more from this guy.
Like all the Latitudes lps, packaged in that instantly recognizable black and white diecut 12" sleeve, pressed on red vinyl. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, we have less than ten...
It's the Christmas edition of everyone's favorite new music mag. But you wouldn't necessarily know it from the cover. Just the same awesome collection of weird and wonderful new sounds from all over. On the cover, Pram. Inside: experimental house producer Bruno Pronsato, composer Lionel Marchetti, Iraqi musician Amir ElSaffar, Global Ear On Buenos Aires, visual artist David Ellis, Invisible Jukebox with Michael Gira (Swans, Angels Of Light), AQ faves Burial, an essay on Roxy Music, primer on Harry Parch, and the usual selection of reviews: records, cds, dvds, books, films, installations, performances and more. And on the back page, and old school jungle Epiphany.
