The cover photo on this digipack release shows placid waters, probably some sheltered harbor near Boston, from whence this guitar-drums two-piece hail. The photo on the interior gatefold also depicts relatively calm seas. But the sonic waves that 5ive stir up are something else, bigger and meaner! 5ive's relentless and riff-repetitive, mostly-instrumental music is HEAVY all right. And thus, floats our boat, even as it tosses said boat about upon its stormy waves.
We've been waiting for some new 5ive for quite some time. This is their first full-length of new material in forever. 2006's Versus ep, featuring a couple remixes by Justin Broadrick (Jesu), only left us hankering for more... so we're glad to report that this new 5ive is finally here and it's got what we want. Thick n' distorted stoner rock meets post rock jams, full of loud soft dynamics for maximum sludgecore beauty and power. Tracks like "Heel" and "Big Sea" have plenty of rollicking psychedelic swing to 'em, after the pretty parts that set you up for the heavier hitting... and while the likes of "News II" gets up into the 12 minute range, even the shorter tunes here manage some epic, hypnotic heft. Fans of 5ive won't be disappointed, and if you haven't heard 'em before check this out if stuff like Pelican, Kinski, godheadSILO, Isis, Old Man Gloom, etc. is on your personal playlist.
Previously released as an LP on the Eclipse label long ago in 2000, then on cd by Swordfish in 2001 with 2 bonus tracks, this album has been out of print for some time now, which is a shame 'cause we always want to recommend it to folks looking for the AMT essentials. Thankfully now at last Swordfish has repressed it!
La Novia is a dark and droning take on the usual Acid Mothers Temple mix of hippie freak rock and experimental psych weirdness, with lots of faux-throat singing! Apparently this is based on traditional "Occitanian" folk music, which from the album graphics would appear to be a region of France. Hmm? (Later AMT projects have continued to make this particular, peculiar ethnic connection.) In any event, it's a heavy, forty-minute trip-out mixing everything from distorted guitar and spacey synth to violin and bouzouki. Plus another twenty haunting minutes, via the bonus tracks. Really great, heavy duty stuff. One of our all-time-favorite AMT discs -- and that's saying something, since there are now so many, and most are so good. On La Novia, Makoto Kawabata and Co. (this album including erstwhile member Cotton Casino) certainly furthered their quest for ultimate psychedelic world domination!
This should have been a highlight, but check out the price. Oof! Apparently Northerh Silence pressed up 3000 cds, but Alcest's new label forced them to destroy ALL but 500. Not sure what the problem was, but they only allowed NS to keep the 500 in order to recoup some of the money already spent on the now destroyed cds. Thus, NO copies of this were sold wholesale, as the label needed to make as much money back as it could. Thus we got a handful. The label let us have 10, but they were expensive, and figure in the exchange rate, and the shipping, and well, there ya go. $39. It is fantastic though, many of you bought the lp version. This is the cd version. We have 10 copies, that's it. SOrry, but at least a handful of you will get a copy, even if you have to cough up nearly forty bones. Here's our review of the lp version when we first listed it:
Folks have been chomping at the bit for this one and now it's finally here. A collection of 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.
As the title states, this cd is a collection of Alias remixes! Over the years along with his own compositions, Alias (alias Brendon Whitney) has also meticulously sliced, diced and craftily reassembled tunes by the varied likes of LaliPuna, Lucky Pierre, John Vanderslice, Sixtoo, 13 & God, Boy In Static and Giardini Di Miro among others. Processing their dream-tronica, hip hop and indie pop originals in richly contrasting shades, he brings bassy funkiness to the breezily poppy, washy atmospheres to the cleaner beats, and defined melody to the more abstract tracks. Came out last year, but just as nice now.
American Music Club's Mark Eitzel and Vudi are back with some new bandmates in tow, rhythm section Steve Didelot and Sean Hoffman. Golden Age marks this veteran SF/LA band's ninth album and it is perhaps their most elaborate and expansive to date! With freshly stoked fires, it overflows with burnished, well crafted earthy country pop/rock songs. The lushness of the vocal harmonies and arrangements is remarkable and unheard of prior to this album. They complement Eitzel's dusky vocals and words. Perpetually overcast in mood with a fevered furrowed brow, he cuts right to the heart... and to the heart of the matter with lyrics both politically insightful and intimately poetic. Recommended.
Wow. Does the dictionary definition of brutal have the words "anaal nathrakh" in it? Well it should. We've loved this brutal British band for years, from back in 2001 when their devastating debut The Codex Necro blew us away with its ultra-extreme black metal, uh, necro-ness. Well, what's amazing is that Anaal Nathrakh (their name comes from one of Merlin's incantations in the movie Excalibur, btw, if you didn't know) has evolved, from raw black metal to a more melodic hybrid of black and death metal, with some crusty punk grind etc. thrown in, maybe having to do with their inclusion of members of Napalm Death for live gigging and some studio sessions too. And yet, they've stayed about as brutal as can be, even with the clean vocals (i.e. actual singing, and not just cookie monster grunts or shrieking vokills) that pop up on some tracks, amidst the other sorts.
The blasting drums are insane, the keyboards deranged, and the guitars killer -- it's quite a piece of work they have here for those into both the necro, and the slightly more nuanced. Frenzied yet technical. Maniacal yet melodic... you get the idea. If you liked Codex's follow-up Domine Non Es Dignus, or the one after that Eschaton (which we bizarrely failed to review, though the black metal fans here all own it), then get set for another treat. And if you're a black metal dissing death metaller (if that breed still exists at this late date), well maybe this album will be the one to win you over...
Those unfamiliar with the Danish black metal band Angantyr, might be surprised to find out that the man responsible for Angantyr, is the very same man who sonically slit his wrists and bled out the brilliantly depressive Make A Change� Kill Yourself discs, as well as being the dark soul who conjures up the grim old school buzz of Holmgang.
And while our black and broken hearts may belong to Make A Change� Kill Yourself, out head banging, spike encrusted, grim kvlt souls bow before the buzzing black Lord Angantyr. Here, Angantyr forms a sinister sonic alliance with mysterious Swedish duo Nasheim, and the two offer up some seriously awesome blasting and frosty grimness�
Angantyr offer up three tracks, nearly a half hour of classic Scandinavian style old school black metal, furious bursts of scalding blackness, as well as loping midtempo Burzumic dirges, massive swaths of washed out buzz, harsh howled vocals, mournful minor key melodies draped over spikey blackened crags, plenty of MACKY's miserablism finds its way into Angantyr's mysterious black world which is a very good thing. The final track is live, and super lo-fi, but ultra intense, thrashing and brutal, you can almost hear the sweat and blood, and fire and brimstone. So great.
Nasheim counter with a single 25 minute track, an epic journey through a buzzing black soundworld, beginning with simple swooning folky strum, the tranquility shattered by a black wall of sound, a thrashing buzzing burst of gnarled guitars, hyperspeed drumming, and strange strangled howls, before retreating once again to a gentle little sonic glade, which is immediately laid flat by a colossal riff and an avalanche of pounding drum crunch, which gives way to a killer extended blackpsych jam, sounding almost like Opeth, with arpeggiated acoustic guitar under a relentless buzz, a killer melodic lead, and a loping waltz-like tempo. The rest of the record veers back and forth between variations of both, lurching at one point into a strange, almost Amrep sounding part, before resuming its epic journey, all soaring majestic guitar harmonies and chaotic drumming, finishing off with a stretch of almost Viking sounding blackness. It's sort of hard to describe such a massive and sprawling slab of sound in such a small space, needless to say, the black and buzz obsessed will not be disappointed. So many parts, so many styles and various shades of black, all deftly arranged into a single symphony of depressive buzz.
Hip hip hooray, super great news! Apples In Stereo's long out of print albums -- The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone and Fun Trick Noisemaker -- have been reissued! With such a beloved band, you might be wondering why we never reviewed these awesome early Apples In Stereo delights. We were asking ourselves the same question, then we realized that the records predate our aQ website and review writing. Yeah, waaay back before we had the invention known as the computer! Now, we get to take another kick at the can (and replace our own worn copies!), but when an album has been so near and dear for so long, it can be extra difficult to put your love into words. Fun Trick Noisemaker is one such thing! This is indie pop, pure and not so simple! Dare we say, some of the best ever made. It's the soundtrack to that perfect world where you never get a flat tire, your scoop of ice cream never falls from its cone, your record needle never skips, and your secret crush crushes you right back. Each song is its own snugglefest bursting with the peppiest energy, the sweetest melodies and the most irresistible hooks. While on later albums, main man Robert Schneider would surrender completely to the shrine of Brian Wilson, here the influence is indeed central to the band's sound, but not all-encompassingly so. If you want/need a smile-inducing, delicious pop album, look no further! Absolutely, unequivocally recommended straight from the warmed-up cockles of our hearts.
Hip hip hooray, super great news! Apples In Stereo's long out of print albums -- The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone and Fun Trick Noisemaker -- have been reissued! With such a beloved band, you might be wondering why we never reviewed these awesome early Apples In Stereo delights. We were asking ourselves the same question, then we realized that the records predate our aQ website and review writing. Yeah, waaay back before we had the invention known as the computer! Now, we get to take another kick at the can (and replace our own worn copies!)!
While The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone is not quite as immediately addictive as Fun Trick Noisemaker, it is sooo unabashedly sweet and effervescent nonetheless! Shhh, hear that? Is that maracas or is it the fizz in your ginger ale? Is that a cowbell or is it the snapping of your bubble gum? One can't be sure when the Apples are on the stereo! Wherever their very Beatles and Beach Boys influenced tunes go they leave a sticky candyfloss tree lined trail paved with jelly beans. It's all feel-good yum-pop, but there's brains behind the bounciness. If you're new to this band, for sure start your new crush with Fun Trick Noisemaker, then proceed along your merry way with this one!
Great timing! To go with the recently reissued pair of early Apples In Stereo albums that we've been jumpin' for joy over, you'll surely also wanna nab a copy of this incongruously titled awesome compilation of AIS rare and unreleased tunes!
Want some music that'll float your boat? Look no further! This band has enough buoyancy to keep a million seacraft riding the waves, and even if your ship sinks you'll go down with a smile on your face thanks to these gleeful sounds. From the downright silly (they have their own theme song and of course they've done music for cartoons -- Powerpuff Girls! Yay!) to the coyly romantic to the dreamily orchestral ("Dreams"), they're always sweet, sweet, sweet. Somehow they've always tread so close to the danger zone of saccharine twee without inducing cavities!
Teeter-tottering betwixt morose indie-rock songishness and purely textural, experimental soundscapery, this avant garde and all together moody international trio, consisting of Dean Roberts (Thela, White Winged Moth), Werner Dafeldecker and Martin Brandlmayr (Radian, Trapist) brings us their second album for Kranky, following up 2004's Jealousy & Diamond. Slow and steady and suffused with low-key drama, Uneasy Flowers should satisfy anyone's yen for (again) an uneasy-feeling yet smoothly executed mix of New Zealand indie-murk free noise and European glitch-drone laptoppery. The album is pleasingly bathed in a glow of wavering distortion/feedback (shortwave static style), scattered with This Heatish percussive patterns (from Brandlmayr) and fragile vocals (from Roberts). Nice!!
We won't lie, the last several years have been pretty trying when keeping up with Frank Black's (aka Black Francis) releases. There have been some serious stinkers for sure, and some that were so middle of the road that it was hard to believe they came from the same man who led one of the quirkiest and most innovative and influential bands of the last twenty years. But we do have to give the man credit, you can tell in his post-Pixies life he's just been doing and recording exactly what he wanted. While the results have sometimes been less then riveting, his integrity has remained intact. And we knew in our Pixies loving hearts that it was just a matter of time before he would drop a record, probably without much publicity or fanfare, that would actually be really damn good -- and here it is!
Maybe it's because it was recorded and mixed in just seven days, but there is an urgency and excitement to this record that we haven't heard from Mr. Francis in such a long time. The songs are short, stripped down and filled with that eccentric and quirky quality that had been missing from his more recent work. The record's opener, "The Seus", has a Pere Ubu like disposition and from there the record has no dull or throwaway moments at all. Seven songs that clock in at about 20 minutes and while it might be his shortest release in a while it's also his best in years!
The lp version of this came out earlier but we waited for the cd to come in before reviewing it. Maybe just 'cause Blues Control takes some time to digest, since they're so... different. And, we think, pretty darn cool.
You kind of have to listen to instrumental duo Blues Control as much for what's not going on, than what is. What's missing from the equation that suddenly makes 2+2 not equal 4 in Blues Controls' unusual math. Not by that to suggest that they're a "math rock" band. Nope, the name don't lie (nor does it tell the truth), they are a blues band. Of sorts, sort of. But playing the blues in an alternate, warped universe, where fragmentary fuzz guitars are friendly with tick-tocking clocks.
Sometimes they're subtracting stuff, leaving out the vocals and other usual blues signifiers and song structures and so forth. Or sometimes they work their magic by addition and multiplication (the layered looping of "Behind The Skies" ferinstance). It's all about abstraction, repetition, distortion. Suddenly 2+2 is an interesting problem to work out. And often, a pretty one.
The title track that opens the album features echoey percussive loops over which electronic notes gently cascade, reminding us of both Moolah and Cluster. Next, "Always On Time" proceeds similarly, with a recurring piano riff as centerpiece for soloing amidst a warm and gauzy bed of sound. That's followed by "Behind The Skies", which takes the disc to its darkest, grindingest depths. And then, "End Zone" is the sort of thing that Jimi Hendrix (if appropriately dosed with dowers) wouldn't mind jamming along to. Sleepy whale call electric blooze guitar from the other side. So much spaced out ambience, which gets even mellower, or mellowest, on the lovely album-ender "Call Collect".
Following their recent successful collaboration with American doom-drone-druids SUNNO))), who could Japanese behemoths Boris turn to for another joint effort in channelling the ultimate in psychedelic heaviness? They'd already teamed up with Keiji Haino some years ago, but there's another underground Japanese psych-scene guitar hero who Boris NEEDED to get freaky with (as proven here), and it wasn't Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple (though that's bound to happen someday...). No, as you already know, it's Michio Kurihara, formerly of Tokyo retro psych legends White Heaven, currently in both Ghost and The Stars. He's also played a bunch with Damon and Naomi, and released his own solo album Sunset, also on Pedal. His West Coast '60s inspired guitar style is virtuosic and distinctive, and certain to spark something special with the Boris crew, as any Kurihara fan would expect.
On very the first track "Rafflesia", Boris and Kurihara are already in slo-mo drone bliss, with shafts of white light seemingly streaming from their foreheads, guitars, amplifiers... then the title track starts off, all quiet and gentle, Boris guitarist Wata singing sweetly, her breathy vocals over a lackadaisically krauty, Can-like rhythm -- before Kurihara's stinging lead guitar cuts in, sizzling and distorted, at about the song's half-way point. It's a soft-loud psych/pop lover's dream.
The third track "Starship Narrator" features Boris bassist Takeshi on vocals, a more rockin' tune, again overpowered before the end by the intense motorpsycho guitar of Kurihara. "My Rain" is a brief, delicate interlude, post-rock prettiness personified. That's followed by "Shine", which could be Ghost (or Can), or Boris themselves circa Feedbacker. Again Takeashi takes the vocals, going for a melancholic wail... at this point, you realize that the feelings generated/explored so far make Rainbow almost an emo album! "You Laughed Like A Watermark" is another laid-back number, again blessed with gorgeous, slow-burn Kurihara lead work. Next, "Fuzzy Reactor" is again a drifting, pulsing bliss-out, an instrumental that contrasts greatly with the next number, the balls-out, almost-funky-but-for-the-wild-tangle-of-guitar-distortion "Sweet No.1". Spent, Boris and Kurihara wind things up with the gentle, music-box coda "...And, I Want", a fitting end to a beautiful, emotive, and often more than usually psych guitar damaged album!! One that's not so much HEAVY in the usual Boris sense but a more of a varied, dreamy, almost poppy platform for their esteemed guest to crank out his Quicksilver leads...
Man oh man. After Pink and Altar and the too-limited Vein 12" and let's not forget the cd version of Dronevil, and touring over here as well, you'd think Boris would have been all done for 2006. But then they sneaked this one in too! Our copies showed up the day after Christmas. But we figure that since most folks ain't getting their hot little hands on this 'til the new year [now], it'll be an early contender for a lot of 2007 top-ten lists despite being technically a tail-end of 2006 release. And at this rate, we'd imagine the Boris juggernaut won't be slowing down AT ALL this year, but we can expect a lot of new, interesting avenues to be explored as their output intensifies.
We're not sure how limited this is or not, it is a Japanese import though so when/if (who are we kidding, when not if) we run out it might be a while before we can get more. In a jewel case, the cd cover featuring nice metallic ink printing on fancy paper, with vellum inserts.
It's hard to believe it's been six years since Title TK, the Deal sisters last "comeback" effort that polarized longtime fans into either defenders or dissenters. The unpolished production and sometimes awkwardly strung out delivery of that record left many people cold at the time. Yet as time moved on, more and more folks have warmed up to its rough sheen (or at least they are now admitting it!). There's always an air of dubious speculation and scrutiny around a Breeders release that you don't find with, say a new Black Francis album. Perhaps it's due to their scant discography (only 4 records in 18 years, 5 if you include the one-off Breeders-in-drag side project, The Amps), rotating line-ups, problematic drug habits, or the hopeful but unlikely chance that they'll outshine their 13-year-old breakout hit, "Cannonball". (They don't btw, but really they've long moved on, can't we?)
So here we are with a brand new Breeders album, the best work they've done in ages, but one with scars still on full display. Using the same line-up as Title TK, the arrangements are still raw but with a richer envelope of production around the edges (especially with the vocals) that harkens back to their classic sound. There are plenty of driving rock numbers, "Overglazed, "Bang On" ,"Walk It Off", tempered with softer, majestic tracks, such as "Night of Joy", and "We're Gonna Rise". At the same time, they attempt to break new ground with various song forms, not all of which are equally successful. The Eastern trance atmosphere of "Istanbul" is stunning, but the Kelly-sung Spanish ballad, "Regalam Esta Noche" delves a bit too far into Linda Ronstadt territory for us. Overall, it's a great record but one with flaws. The first half of the record is nearly perfect, but stumbles through the second half where the flow is weakened by too many meandering changes from slow numbers to faster ones. The biggest weakness being the last song, which also happens to be the title track, trailing off into a long whimper without a definable ending, when they had much stronger songs to end with. But it's really not that the songs themselves are bad, they aren't. It's just that the order of the songs adversely reveal their faults instead of highlighting their strengths. We recommend listening to this on shuffle for best overall effect. Still, a new Breeders record is always welcome, and we'll listen to it to death because they'll always have those songs that make us achingly happy, even if we can't help picking them apart. Because when it comes down to it, we'd rather listen to the worst Breeders record than the best Black Francis record any day (although his new record might have us rethinking that)!
Chalk and Daisuke Suzuki have known each other for many years now, as Suzuki runs the Siren label out of Japan and had released Sumac, Chalk's masterful collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough. Suzuki is also responsible for one of the very few published interviews with the somewhat reclusive Chalk. Their friendship certainly runs deep, and out of this friendship came the impetus to collaborate once again (both Suzuki and Chalk had contributed to the now defunct Ora project well over a decade ago). Slippery drones open the album, declaring that Andrew Chalk is definitely a principle author of this album and mimicking many of the fog-enveloped sounds that Chalk brought to Mirror's Eye Of The Storm. While these sounds quiver like a distant mirage out on the open desert for a passage of time that could be 5 minutes or it could be 25, the long-string drones begin to separate into a series of alien plucks which bear more than a passing resemblance to the expressionist poetics of Keiji Haino at his most introspective. Echoes and vibrations of these plucks ripple underneath in the shadowy reflection pool of echo and shimmer. As the album progresses, the enveloping opiated drone wrapping around cold, cold, cold field recordings of arctic winds racing across a seashore becomes the center piece, reflecting just how good Andrew Chalk's sounds are. Lo and behold, it's another excellent Andrew Chalk record.
Outside the Os Mutantes catalog, no other Tropicalia record gets as surprisingly and gloriously unhinged as Gal Costa's second record from 1969.
Arranged by Rogerio Duprat, and aided by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Jorge Ben, Gal Costa is in full psych (psychedelic AND psychotic) mode. Long a star in Brazil, her soft and sweet vocals have graced dozens of records including her and Caetano Veloso's recording debut from 1966. But here that softness is gone, replaced by a howling urgency backed by fuzz guitars, distortion and furious rhythmic arrangements. No other Gal Costa record is quite like this one. The star track is "Tuareg", a Jorge Ben written number that seduces with beguiling Middle Eastern come-ons before rocking full throttle. Definitely a party classic and easily an essential record for Tropicalia fans. Highly Recommended!
Folks had been bugging us to track down this disc for ages, Black Magic Recordings by none other than the "wickedest man in the world" (at least when he was still OF this world), but we hadn't been able to figure out where to get them. We assumed it must have been released on some tiny obscure microlabel, or maybe it was a bootleg or something, but lo and behold, it was right under or noses, released on good old Cleopatra Records. Home to much modern goth and industrial. And while we can definitely see how this stuff might appeal to the industrial goth kids, it is evil after all, and black magic, but it seems to us the folks that would be way more into this, are aQ customers, fans of the obscure and mysterious, found sounds and field recordings, this would fit perfectly between your Conet Project and your Ghost Orchid disc of EVP recordings (depending, we guess, on what strange alien alphabetization you use).
These recordings have been available before in various quasi bootleg editions, probably most notably as 1910-1914 Wax Cylinder Recordings released on the Transparency label. But they are the same recordings, since these are the only recordings of Crowley in existence.
It's been a while since we listened to the Transparency disc, but these tracks definitely sound a little cleaned up, which is almost too bad, but fear not, there's still plenty of hiss and crackle and warble and buzz and fuzz, it's taken from wax cylinders after all. Basically, this is a collection of Crowley recording various stories, poems, writings, incantations and magical spells. His delivery very songlike, chantlike at times, fans of the Doomsday Cult recordings will also probably love this. The highlight probably being the Call Of The Aethyr tracks, each delivered both in English, but also in Enochian, a magical language supposedly discovered and used by John Dee, magician to the court of Queen Elizabeth. It may sound like speaking in tongues, but it is in fact a real language, with grammar and syntax, rumored to be a degenerate form of the language spoken in the lost city of Atlantis.
Comes in one of those new fangled rounded-corner jewel cases, includes extensive liner notes, nothing about the recordings, but a fairly comprehensive history of Crowley's life. And while they last, it also comes with an Aleister Crowley patch AND pin!
It's been a bit of a Elliott Smith revival time here at AQ for the last several weeks. With the vinyl reissues of XO and Figure 8, we've been spending lots of QT with one of our favorite singer songwriters of all time. This new book of Elliott Smith photographs by Autumn De Wilde is helping fuel our revival fire. The beautiful hardcover book is not only filled with De Wilde's great photos of Smith from over the years but some great interviews and conversations with many of Elliott's friends and colleagues (Beck, Chris Walla, Ben Gibbard, Jon Brion, etc.). The book also comes with a cd of five live tracks of Smith playing a solo show at Largo in LA, where he often would hang out and play unannounced shows while he was living down there. A really cool document for Elliott Smith enthusiasts.
Last year when we reviewed this Louisville band's debut ep, we said we'd delay discussion of the whole "false/hipster/irony metal" thing until a later date, if/when they unleashed a full-length. Well here it is. So here we go. Some "true metal" folks on poseur patrol are gonna balk at a band playing '80s influenced thrashy metal with high pitched vox, that happens to include dude from Slint and Tortoise in it (Dave Pajo, no stranger to this issue 'cause of his stint in Early Man), plus others of similar indie rock pedigree... but we think that's kind of cool. IF they're not just taking the piss, but are in fact saying "hey we really do like metal, maybe we were too 'alternative' for it for a while back there but now we realize the folly of our ways and we're gonna fuckin' rip!!"
What we can agree on is that it would be annoying if a band like Dead Child got popular 'cause of their non-relevant, non-metal scene connections, while other bands playing the same style of music can't get the time of day. (Like, if this starts selling, folks also better start coming in looking for Slauter Xstroyes reissues...) But then again, why bands get popular often has very little to do with merit anyway! We went over some of this ground in our recent review of The Sword's Gods Of The Earth. And Dead Child aren't even popular like that, yet. So, let's judge stuff by what it sounds like, not what bands people were in or who goes out to their shows.
As to that (what it sounds like) well it IS metal. Heck the singer sounds a lot like Gerrit Mutz of Sacred Steel (yelping with that same Jello Biafra warble in there somewhere) and you can't get much more metal than that. Their songs are ultra-riffy, almost monotonously so, but crunchy and catchy enough, and the singer's got style to help 'em stick in your ear. They reprise one track from the ep ("Never Bet The Devil Your Head", our fave from that disc) and come up with a bunch of other similarly wicked tunes. In the hipster metal debate, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and headbang away without further worries.
We also realize that if Dead Child were a "NWOFHM" band from Finland, the work of our pals in Circle, like Steel Mammoth or Tractor Pulling, we'd have no qualms at all, and be quite impressed, though of course they'd also be a lot weirder. The song titles here certainly align with that sort of thing: "Black Halo Rider", "Rattlesnake Chalice", "Wasp Riot"... could easily be something Krypt Axeripper would think up.
It's been a long time since we've heard a full on solo outing from Del. When he first hit the scene in the early '90s he really helped ignite the renaissance of West Coast underground hip-hop which would soon spawn the likes of Jurassic 5, Souls Of Mischief, Dilated Peoples and Blackalicious. While it's been about 8 years since Del released his first solo joint, he's been keeping busy collaborating with Dan The Automator and Kid Koala for the awesome Deltron 3030 project, as well as doing guest spots for the Gorillaz.
Eleventh Hour is a really nice return to form for Del. His first outing for Def Jux flows so sweet as his beats and rhymes come out so effortlessly and with flair. While so many modern day hip-hop albums boast only few good songs amid so much filler and tired skits, it's so nice to hear a record that is super strong from start to finish. Fresh for '08!
It's really exciting to be digging a band just as they are hitting their special 'moment in time.' Such is the case with San Francisco's The Dodos. We've been championing the work of Meric Long for the last couple years with his self-released records, released under his given name, also as The Dodo Birds and finally as The Dodos. With Visiter, The Dodos are no longer our little secret, as the rest of the world has finally taken notice of Meric and Logan Kroeber and their fantastic debut for French Kiss. We love when every once in a while a band who truly deserves the hype and press, actually gets it. From the opening seconds of this record you can hear and feel that this is a record that they poured all of themselves into. Their is an immediacy and urgency in Visiter that draws you right in and makes you want to listen again and again.
The instrumentation is so well thought out and the recording keeps things punchy and tight but never too glossy or slick. We hear the influence of recent Animal Collective, the rich back catalog of the Elephant Six collective, Polvo, the more rocking elements of Vetiver and we also are reminded a lot of a way underrated band from Boston from the late '90s / early '00s called The Wicked Farleys (yes bad name but they were so rad!)
What really sets The Dodos apart from the indie rock herd is what a great vocalist Meric Long is, he has a truly beautiful voice that he isn't afraid to actually USE, but is also never too precious with, even occasionally letting out some exhilarating screams as well. And while other bands who have a great vocalist usually lack, and tend to bore with their instrumentation, The Dodos truly have the entire package. Musically they are so charged and varied, creating sounds that get you to stand tall at attention as they make your heart beat a bit faster and give you goosebumps. Whew.
Highly recommended!
Oh how we wanted to hate this band. The hype. The blogs. The cheeky name. The fact that they were signed to a huge record deal based on two MySpace tracks. We're sure there are more reasons, but for now that's plenty. The glut of total dancey electronic bullshit, overhyped blog-house, it's killing us. Not to sound like old men, but remember when bands played instruments and wrote songs, and spend months, maybe years working on albums, recorded in studios? Yeah, we don't either actually.
But fuck it, we wanted to hate it, but it would be foolish not to just accept the fact that this record rules. We can't stop listening to it. The opener is a dancefloor destroying banger. Huge fuzzy synths, lots of squelch and grind and buzz, tearing a page straight out of Justice's playbook and scribbling all over it with dayglo crayons. But that's the only track on the record that sounds like that. The rest of the disc is all over the map, angular dancepunk, total cotton candy synth pop, and in fact, most of the disc is much more song-y, verses choruses, crunchy guitars pounding drums, wild howled vocals, and HOOKS everywhere. But fear not synthies, there is still plenty of electronic weirdness and synth overload, but that stuff is deftly woven into actual songs.
The second track is a killer as well, super grindy guitars, funky propulsive drumming, howled vocals, super proggy arrangements, swirling synths, dense and heavy, but still funky and groovy. The next track veers back a bit toward the vibe of the opener, but this time it's all vocodered Kraftwerk worship, peppered with sweeping synth buzz and funky cowbell, and a pretty irresistible hook.
Our favorite right now (although it changes every time we listen to it) is probably "Dawn Of The Dead", a total eighties pop jam. Sounding like it came straight out of a John Hughes movie, soaring and bubblegummy, big guitars lush harmonies, it dangerously close to being cheesy, but it's so fucking awesome.
Later there are some surfy carnival organ jams, more eighties technopop, some unabashed total Daft Punk worship, some angular jangle guitar artpunk, flecked with skittery drum machines, and a massive hook filled chorus, the record is almost so scattered that it threatens to be a total mess, but somehow, the songs all sort of fit together, forming some dizzying sugar rush of technicolor techno flecked pop punk synth fuzz bliss.
We're gonna go blog about it. Right now (ummm, not really, just kidding, we SWEAR...). Though I guess this comes close.
It's hard to believe that this is the 9th album from Elf Power. Seems like just yesterday that this Athens, GA band were the new kids on the Elephant Six block. They really haven't released a dud either over the years and like lots of bands who remain consistent over a long period of time it becomes easy to take what they do for granted. In A Cave might be their most fresh and immediate record since their 2000 album, Winter Is Coming, which has definitely become an all-time AQ favorite.
They've really excelled and created their own unique take on psych-pop that's so well constructed and pleasing on the ears. Swirling melodies, experiments with tape and subtle electronics all used to great success, and above all such great songwriting that continues to set Elf Power above the pack, far beyond the rest of those outfits desperate to tap into that paisley psychedelic pop sound but lacking the great songs and killer hooks. Like early R.E.M. paying homage to The Kinks and The Zombies, In A Cave is proving to be one of the better pop records of the year.
In the last few years we all seem to have come down with serious cases of "Anatolian fever"! With amazing reissues of '70s Turkish psych by the likes of Selda, Mogollar, 3 Hur El, Erkin Koray, Edip Akbayram, Bunalim, Mustafa Ozkent and a bunch of great comps. We've been totally and completely blown away time after time by how charged and colorful the sounds coming from the Turkish underground in the '70s were.
Now Ersen gets the proper reissue treatment from Finders Keepers and it's about time, as his amazing and seductive voice has been evoking the most resplendently colorful memories and images of people and places. With instrumentation that's as immediate, funk filled and catchy as his comrades Selda and Edip Akbayram, and a voice that can really do no wrong, Ersen has become our newest Turkish Psych obsession.
It's amazing how well these songs have stood the test of time, sounding so alive, and relevant nearly 35 years after they were first recorded. Ersen has a very special place in Turkish music history, being a vocalist for a period of time for the pioneers of Turkish psych/pop, Mogollar. The truth is Ersen's voice could probably sing over any kind of music and make it all sound so damn good, as it's soulful and filled with such flair, that sort of voice doesn't come around that often. It's no surprise that hip-hop folks like Oh No, Madlib and the whole Stones Throw family have been quite obsessed with Ersen's sounds as well, every song jam packed with so many breakbeats and innovative sounds, just begging to be sampled and blasted on the dance floor. A true gem from a magical era in Turkish psychedelia!
When we ordered this Japanese import, we were like, a split release between Japanese psychedelic stoner/doom rockers Eternal Elysium and San Francisco's own metalcore two-piece Black Cobra? Gotta get that! When it showed up, we were surprised to discover that the entire Black Cobra half had exactly the same tracks as those found on their recent full-length Feather And Stone, which we've already reviewed and raved about. Whoops. So... some of you already have that. However, if you want to get it again, you'll also get 23 minutes of Eternal Elysium material that only appears here. More likely, this is a good call for those who haven't yet picked up the Black Cobra album and also like (or think they might like) EE. Or simply for EE fans who don't mind getting the Black Cobra stuff as well (why would you?) as a bonus. Even at the import price, it's still 2 for the price of 2 (or 1.5 more like it) on one handy disc, not too shabby of a deal, really. So, let's say somethin' about the music for those ignorant of EE and/or BC:
Eternal Elysium always has us a little confused. Strange band. Sometimes they're straight up Sabbath-meets-grunge complete with vocals hinting at Alice In Chains or Soundgarden... and then there's the NWOBHM influences... and the groovy retro-sixties stuff... that's all here, plus of course random weirdness like the brief track "Golden Seaweed", with sped-up chipmunk voices. They try hard to make a stoner drug thing you wouldn't understand, but certainly something that fans of Boris, Solar Anus, and Church Of Misery should check into, to rock out to.
As to the BC half, here's what we said about Feathers And Stone before: Two man heavy riff-machine Black Cobra return with another pummeling release... Picking up right where Bestial left off, Feather And Stone shreds from the start. Brutally punishing circular riffs, heavy as all hell doomy moments, throat ripping screams, and incredibly hard hitting and precise drums. The fact that this massive sound comes from two fellas is pretty damn amazing. The album has all kinds of peaks and valleys. Amidst the constant time signature shifting, and brain-burning riff heavitude, there are a couple of beautifully dark intros and outros thrown in, giving the album a very balanced feeling. But it's mostly just crushingly heavy and ripping. If you can imagine a heavier, much more misanthropic Karp, that's kind of what they remind us of. Feather And Stone is a must for anybody needing a little taste of thrashing triumphant, sometimes doomy and dark, sometimes fast and techy, but always heavy and punk as fuck ROCK music... For fans of Cavity, Karp, Floor, Torche, and things that kill shit! (Note though that unlike the domestic edition of the BC album, there's no cd-rom live footage included.)
This is one grim throng indeed (not thong!). No long songs, no fucked up weirdness, no insane vocals, no retarded riffage, as much as we love all that stuff, we also love intense blasts of frenzied blackened fury. Blast beats so fast they sound like drum rolls, riffing so buzzy and intense it almost sounds like white noise. Vocals buried in the mix, just another layer of buzz and hum, short sharp bursts of super intense blackness. Grim. True. Kvlt. That's what you get with the grim throng that is Exalted. A relentless barrage of brutal thrashing old school raw black metal.
But just because it's not outwardly weird, doesn't mean there isn't strange stuff going under beneath the surface. Plenty of convoluted arrangements, angular atonal riffage, super dynamic arrangements, strange stretches of blown out ambience, where just the blast beat stutters beneath streaks off feedback, there's even some cowbell in there if you listen close. But if you're looking for ultra weird or fucked up this is probably not for you. On the other hand, if you like it raw and black and heavy, and are looking for something old school but a little twisted, Exalted are just interesting and off kilter enough to keep this from being just another batch of retro black thrash, instead offering up a roiling black mass of sound and fury, that we've been listening to like crazy since it first came in!
If this was truly John Fahey returning from the dead, we'd be afraid that he had not moved on to a better place. Taken from a rare out of print double 7" release from 1997, The Mill Pond has got to be one of Fahey's doomiest outings. Recorded with the help of Jeff Allman who adds some electronic elements, it features Fahey on vocals (!), delivering some ghostly shamanistic moans over washes of intense treated, distorted guitar. Titles like "The Mill Pond Drowns Hope" and "You Can't Cool Off In The Mill Pond, You Can Only Die" up the creep factor into an antithesis of baptismal redemption.
Fahey fans will be fascinated, especially those who looking for a Fahey release in a more (or most) experimental vein -- this is it. Or if you're not so sure about Fahey's usual acoustic mode, if you need your music to have a more malevolent edge, check this out! We think fans of the doomdirge likes of Nadja might even dig this. Also, his vocals bring to mind the most out-there trips of '70s psych-cult Yahowha 13.
Comes with an extensive booklet featuring Fahey's paintings, drawings and collages that offer a unique glimpse into Fahey's eccentric peculiarities. Recommended!
We were pretty skeptical when we first hear about Flight Of The Conchords. Who in their right mind would dare try follow in the footsteps of Tenacious D? And we're talking just the original six HBO episodes. Never has a shitty open mic, dual acoustic guitar band been so metal, so funny, and so fucking genius as Tenacious D.
So when we first checked out New Zealand's Flight Of The Conchords, our reaction was that these guys were just ripping off the D. But the more we watched, the more they demonstrated that they were definitely their own thing. The duo, Bret and Jemaine (NOT Jermiane) are super charming, and super hilarious in a weirdly deadpan way. If you haven't seen the show, definitely check it out. Their manager Murray steals the show, as does their only fan Mel, and their dirtbag only friend, the guy who runs the pawn shop. And the songs are pretty funny too, loosely tied into whatever happens to be going on in that episode, and occasionally the whole show is tied instead into the concept of the song, which results in much more tweaked and whatthefuck goings on.
So yeah, love the show, and love the music, which might pose the only problem. As with Tenacious D, we love the songs EXACTLY as they are on the show, the same instrumentation, the same arrangement, the same production, THOSE are the songs we want to hear. So it's frustrating to hear them re-recorded as they are here, the vibe is definitely more polished and less loose, but thankfully still can't take way from the charm of these songs.
Fans of the show might feel the same, taking a while to warm up to these alternate versions, but a lot of this stuff wasn't really focused on in the show, or maybe not in the show at all, and the ones that were, you've probably been dying to hear again. And for fans, all the hits are here: "The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)", "Business Time", the amazing rap track "Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous (Featuring Rhymenocerous And The Hiphopapoatumus)", the dancehall jam of "Boom", and of course the awesome 'binary solo' in "Robots". Not only are the lyrics funny, but the songs are catchy as hell. Not sure how this would play to someone who hadn't seen the show, but if you haven't, what the heck is wrong with you anyway? Buy it, or rent it, and you might as well buy this too, you're gonna want to hear these songs over and over, since after one viewing they stick in your head like crazy. And if you're not interested in the show, but dig clever goofy silly novelty folk, then this will definitely hit the spot.
The packaging is pretty excellent too, a six panel digipak with a cool pop up of Bret and Jemaine, behind which is the cd and a massive poster.
Yet another entry in God Is Myth's ongoing series of 3"cd-r homages to horror author H.P. Lovecraft, who is obviously one of the main sources for metal band names, song titles and lyrical themes. Get rid of Lovecraft and Tolkien and suddenly metal bands would have names like Sunshine and Tigerlilly and would sing songs about picnics and rowboats. But fear not, until some mischievous soul with a time machine gets some crazy ideas, all is well in metal.
Past installments have come from a pretty disparate selection of black metal and black ambient outfits: Caina, Harvist, LVTHN, Sapthuran, Smohalla, and now Frostmoon Eclipse.
Although we've only ever listed one Frostmoon record, we've long been big fans, their blend of classic Norwegian style black metal, a la Mayhem, Emperor with dark moody rock, a brooding gothic groove, the result is a strangely catchy, but still fiercely heavy blackened metallic rock. With long stretches of acoustic guitar, simple drumming and almost flamenco style melodies, they definitely remind us of Opeth as well. But FE manage to take their influences and distill something distinctly their own. The strange thing is, we almost prefer the band when they are all acoustic, which much of this ep ends up being, evoking all sorts of melancholic emotions, with just steel strings and a hushed whispered vocal. That said, these guys can crush, and the blasts of heaviness are indeed intense and blackened, blending perfectly with the folky flutter and dark ambient drift surrounding it.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES. Already sold out and out of print. We got nearly a quarter of those, but like past installments these will no doubt disappear quick. Packaged in a normal slimline cd case, with black and white covers and a sepia printed cardstock insert with a photo and a brief biography of Lovecraft.
Ok, hopefully all of you into dooooooooooooooooom have heeded our recommendations in the past ("best band EVER" we may have said, in a moment of infatuation) and are already well acquainted with this cult Japanese band who exude a magnificently miserable mixture of slow, atmospheric doominess and crusty black metal thrashing, inspired by the likes of Celtic Frost/Hellhammer (natch), Amebix, and Corrupted. This is their 2nd full-length studio album, following 2004's Gloomy Lights debut and last year's The Dawn Of Gallhammer demos n' live cd+dvd collection. That's the one where we busted out the Simpsons Comic Book Guy impersonation in our review, but it's this album that really seals the deal, when it comes to Gallhammer's position in the pantheon of most depressive doom bands ever, anyway. They're up there, no doubt about it, as is proved by this collection of ten tracks, each one of 'em often (but not always) a slow-motion trudge through the depths of emotional bleakness in the form of monotonously massive low-end guitar riffage, wretched cookie monster screams, and simple, gloomy melodies. Several of the song titles are quite indicative of their sound: "Long Scary Dream", "SLOG", "Ripper In The Gloom"... Many of these varied tracks feature a dynamic combination of knock-you-over-with-a-feather soft n' sad prettiness setting you up for some smash-you-with-a-hammer heaviness, or even manage both at the same time. It's the former element, this band's almost post-rock instrumental mesmeric moodiness, for which we think Gallhammer should be best noted. Not that it has any of post-rock's usual complexity, this is raw and primal and ritualistic, perfectly encapsulated by the way the stark, repetitive slowcore acoustic guitar part at the start of "Ripper In The Gloom" suddenly, shockingly gives way to a full-on punk rock assault.
It also seems possible that Gallhammer, along with their interest in underground '80s doom-crust, also shares some of the Velvet Underground fixation displayed by their contemporaries from the Japanese psych-rock scene, like LSD-march and Doodles. Heck, track one, the nearly eight minute "At The Onset Of The Age Of Despair" seems to have echoes of VU's "Venus In Furs"... If one of Gallhammer's songs wound up on a PSF Tokyo Flashback comp someday we'd be surprised, yes, but only a little. Though it sure wouldn't be a track like "Killed By The Queen" or "Blind My Eyes", two of the punked out, filthy metal blitzes on here, the latter of which throws in some uncharacteristic Melt-Banana style yelping, dogwhistle vocals along with the usual guttural grunting and growling.
Hey, we made it all the way to the end of this review without mentioning Gallhammer's major non-musical selling point... we said they're a "cult" band above, but were tempted to say "cute", as this trio just happen to all be attractive young Japanese ladies, their looks further enhanced by the tasteful application of gothy corpsepaint makeup. No this fact doesn't make Gallhammer's music sound any better (or worse) but it's, um, interesting. Happily, though, Peaceville isn't using Gallhammer's sex appeal to sell this album, there's not even any pictures of the band at all included in the classy-lookin' white-and-silver digipack. Recommended nonetheless!
Just a list of the folks playing on this here record should have most aQ customers all in a lather: The Skaters, Glenn Donaldson (Jewelled Antler Collective, Skygreen Leopards, Blithe Sons), Clay Ruby (Burial Hex, Zodiacs, Totem), Mansfield (Bruce Carkiss, Garage Indians), Nic Stage (Davenport), Endless (Craig Microcassette System, Drunjus), Tyler Olson (Davenport), Clay Kolbinger (Math Balance Volumes, Davenport), db Pedersen (Ng Keindhiet, Three Bags Full, Rope)...
Recorded one night in 2004, in a barn, and it sounds like it. Fuzzy and warbly and creaky, these tracks were originally released as a super limited tape, and are now available as a slightly less limited lp, with an extra track from the same session, not on the tape!
You know who was there, so you probably have a rough idea of what it sounds like. Gorgeous gauzy drift and drone, lots of fuzz and crackle, everything muted and washed out, clattery percussion, chant like vocals, lots of room sound and delay, swirling FX, underneath the soft swirl of lo-fi ambience lurks some sort of rickety skeletal dronefolk, songs that are barely recognizable, threatening to fall completely apart, all wrapped up in the warm whir of the recorder, bits of feedback, electronics, and here and there some propulsive krautrock like drumming, but all muddy and blurred into something more tribal and primal. Anyone who digs any of the folks taking part, is bound to dig this A LOT.
Beautifully packaged in old lp sleeves, turned inside out and hand screened in green and brown, quite lovely and QUITE LIMITED!!!!
There had been rumors circulating about this record for ages. Either that, or it just -seemed- inevitable, these two grunge icons who both went on to redefine themselves long after the bands that made them were long gone, and the scene that spawned them was long dead, finally together. It seemed like a no brainer. Two of the most distinctive voices in rock, both able to conjure up some seriously dark and volatile sounds, emotional, personal, intense, we couldn't actually imagine what this pairing would sound like. Who are we talking about? Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees) and Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs).
So does it live up to the hype? Most of the press has been about the personalities, the debauchery, the drugs and alcohol, they did name themselves The Gutter Twins after all, so we would imagine some folks doubted the record would ever get made at all. But here it is, and it's a dark beauty. A lot more lush and heavy than we expected, and thankfully it manages to bring out the best in both Lanegan and Dulli. The songs Dulli sings definitely sound like later era Afghan Whigs, which is no bad thing at all, Lanegan adding some gravity with his whiskey soaked gravely growl. And Lanegan gets to lead the slow smoky crawls, the guitars unwinding all serpentine, organs buzzing and warbling, he just always sounds more at home in a cloud of smoke, barely lit by the corner of a stage, bottle in one hand, microphone in the other.
But there are surprisingly few slow brooders, the drums play a big part, the guitars load and soaring, there are strings everywhere, a few tracks even have programmed drums, but the duo manage to imbue each song with some serious pathos, wrapping them in dark clouds and wreathing them in stale smoke. The production helping make the songs epic, evoking wide open spaces and rain swept highways as much as dark bars and shuttered rooms.
"Circle The Fringes" is all swirling strings, and shimmery FX flecked ambience, beneath strummed minor key steel string guitar and moaning cellos, eventually launching into a sweeping groove, complete with staccato dynamics, wailing guitars, the whole thing ultra intense and pretty dang heavy. "Seven Stories Underground" gets all Tom Waits, haunting abstract percussion, the duo's vocals tangling up in strange harmonies, a slithery brooding drift, that builds to a super dramatic climax, before drifting off darkly. "Front Street" begins with the sounds of birds, a pastoral background for a simple folk fingerpicked guitar, again the two vocalists, their different voices, blending in perfectly unlikely ways, unfurling in tense, moody slow motion, peppered with swells of timpani, and warm whirring organ, and eventually soaring strings.
It's hard to be objective, considering how much we loved the Afghan Whigs and the Screaming Trees, how much we dig the Twilight Singers, and treasure Lanegan's solo records, and fans of any and all of those will most likely love this, but like all great collaborations, it's not merely the sum of its parts, the two obviously draw from each other, discovering things that they don't on their own, the resulting music a sort of sonic push and pull, but it's subtle, the sound cohesive and assured, seemingly the essence of the two personalities, both dark and troubled, and with a certain loner vibe, but together, they manage to create a sort of hopeful sadness, a melancholy warmth, the gorgeous sound of dark rainy nights, but with the promise of a new day to come.
Once again, we were sold before we heard even a single note. A super suicidal, ultra depressive, doomy black metal bedroom band called� Happy Days. Yep, that's right. Happy Days. Funny because the music is anything but, but also because, for a band this grim, and this miserable, it seems strange to have a name that to some will no doubt evoke the Fonz and Potsie and Richie Cunningham.
But don't let the name throw you off, Happy Days are not a joke band, they are nothing if not serious. Serious about their utter abject musical misery, from the opening few seconds, a lugubrious loop of mournful reverbed piano, set amidst a deep shimmering sea of drones, and an emotional voice, intoning a tale of personal misery. Super dramatic and powerful, and so so so so miserable.
But that track only serves as an intro. "The Beginning�" starts with a simple guitar melody, which gives way to a spare melancholy strum, peppered with samples from Fight Club oddly enough, and although Brad Pitt is probably the last person you might expect to hear on a suicidal black metal record, removed from the context of the film, those spoken word passages are indeed bleak and perfectly suit the music. That voice intones: "Our Great Depression is our lives�" and then the guitar kicks in, recorded way too hot, the distortion crumbling, a furious fuzz, the drums also distorted, wound into a simple moody crawl, the vocals totally blown out and confusional, going from maniacal shriek, to caustic growl, to strange spoken word, in what seems to be both English and Norwegian, all over a gloriously loping minor key dirge.
The final three tracks, the bulk of the record, are all extended epics, ranging from 10 minutes to nearly 20. And all three offer up more gloriously dismal Burzumic buzz, the drums a doomy plod, the riffs, thick and crunchy, existing more as a nearly static white noise whirled blur, the sound and arrangement and production, woozy and seasick, the vocals over the top, sometimes so loud and hysterical they peg the meters and drown out the rest of the music, even the spoken word parts are super distorted and strangely blown out. The riffs, seems to speed up and slow down as well, almost like the tape speed is being subtly adjusted, which only adds to the haunting otherworldiness.
The sound is ultra raw, and definitely has that bedroom 4-track vibe, giving Happy Days a sound more personal and lo-fi than heavy, but the heaviness is still masterfully conveyed in the sound, the riffing, the super saturated production, the emotion. Miserable abject hateful, but weirdly melancholy and beautiful, a few subtle changes, and this could be a blissed out slow motion sadcore record, but as it is, it's anything but.
The final track is a cover of a song by Czech black metal band Trist, whose sound easily becomes Happy Days', the recording here even more damaged, the guitar so hot and in the red, that it seems to be crumbling to pieces, or the speakers seem to be overloading, making it sound almost electronic, a chopped and clipped distorted chunk of white hot buzz, laid over a framework of equally distorted drums, a lurching slow motion buzz drenched plod, the vocals at their most anguished and miserable. The sound so fractured, that over the course of the song's 10 minutes, it almost stops sounding like black metal, and more like some experimental blackened buzzscape.
Really nice packaging, extra thick cardstock booklet and tray card, spare images, all blacks and greys, it's a real cd too, NOT a cd-r, but still strangely limited to ONLY 300 COPIES!! So odds are once we run out these will be gone for good.
Heavy music obsessives and grind freaks the world over were crushed by the end of Discordance Axis. And rightfully so. Never had a band so artfully combined, furious relentless grindcore, crushing metal, intelligent lyrics, and a visual conceptual aesthetic that was as obtuse and confusional as it was striking and absolutely beautiful.
We had all secretly hoped that the band would reform, record another record, anything, but alas it never seemed to happen. We heard very little from the various members, except for drum dynamo Dave Witte who seemed to be drumming for more bands than humanly possible, as well as focusing on his retro party thrash outfit Municipal Waste.
But finally, one of the other Discordance dudes as resurfaced, vocalist Jon Chang, and holy shit. His new band, Hayaino Daisuki is everything we could have hoped for, but absolutely nothing we would have expected. Chang's amazing impossible shriek is of course still present, but the music is anything but techgrind. Instead it's some sort of supercharged power metal. Like Blind Guardian with a grind makeover. The guitars are furious, the drumming relentless, but the songs are epic with guitar harmonies, incredibly catchy riffs, tons of parts, even some almost-falsetto vocals tangled up in and around Chang's banshee wail. A lot of Headbanger's Karaoke Club Dangerous Fire sounds amazingly like an Iron Maiden 45 played back at 78. Fucking majestic and masterful and soaring and heavy as fuck, with killer little bursts of frenzied riffing, some squiggly leads, stop start dynamics. Minus the vocals, this sounds like the heaviest fucking band from the eighties you never heard. Add the vocals, and it's just genius. Two great tastes that SHOULD not taste great together but do. This is hyper, blown out, freaked out, head spinning, super melodic, grinding hook filled heaviness. The first in what we can only hope is a new musical movement, the New Wave Of Grind Heavy Metal. NWOGHM!!!!
The packaging is pretty nuts too. Nowhere does it mention the members of the band, instead, the elaborate booklet and digipak is filled with pictures of some super cute all girl heavy metal band, with names like Speed Satan, Divebomb Valentine and Psychic Warlock Assassin, with spikes, bullet belts, torn t-shirts, ripped tank tops, and of course flames everywhere. The booklet is made up to be like some obscure Japanese metal zine, filled with band photos, record reviews, comics and more. And while it seems totally random and bizarre, it totally suits the classic (grind) metal inside.
A brand new three song 12" 50 minute ep from Swedish Black metal outfit Hypothermia, whose black metal, is both strangely not metal, and surprisingly not all that black. Much like German 'wooden metal' horde Varghkogargasmal, Hypothermia spend much of their time playing clean jangly guitar, or offering up meandering post rock jams, minor key guitar strum and simple propulsive drumming, sure there are howled vocals and thick swaths of buzzing blackened riffs now and again, but what is so intriguing about Hypothermia is that they manage to evoke the same sort of suicidal emotions and grim atmosphere, without resorting to typical black metal tropes.
Gratoner is three parts of the same song, side A has parts one and two, while side B has the "Repression" version. Truth be told, all three are quite similar, which in fact plays to Hypothermia's benefit, in that Gratoner plays like one long song, repetitive and cyclical, hypnotic and repetitive, which once drawn in, keeps the listener absolutely ensorcelled.
The core of the track is a loping clean guitar groove, a sort of post rock minor key figure, repeated over and over, alternating between fingerpicked and strummed, the drums too, a simple propulsive midtempo rhythm, all minor key and slightly melancholy, a few minutes into part one, an inhuman shriek surface, and soon after the song switches gears, the same loping jam now overlaid with fuzzy washed out distorted riffage, and the track slips back and forth, clean, distorted, clean, distorted, until part two, where the drums and guitar bliss out, weaving a minimal jangle scape, over which anguished vocals moan and wail, it's a strange combination, but quite compelling, the vocals drop out soon after, and almost the whole second half of the record is just that mesmerizing guitar and drums jam, all jangle and lope, sort of drifty and dreamy and moody, very subtly intense and hypnotic.
The flipside is quite similar, but much more time is spent in black buzz mode, the guitars a thick layer of prickly buzz, over that main riff the anchors all three versions, the track again slipping seamlessly from Burzumy midtempo buzz, to post rock bordering on krautrock groove, the vocals more prevalent, but still that main looping cyclical riff and rhythm keeps us totally enthralled, and could go on forever and ever and we'd keep listening. We're told that these songs may be reworked and added to for a later release, but we actually like them quite a bit how they are, minimal and stripped down, and totally and endlessly mesmerizing.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl, in an incredibly thick full color gatefold sleeve. The cover and gatefold adorned with gorgeous images of caves and forests, trees, and leaves and lakes, the lp is housed in a printed 12" style inner sleeve (with a hole in the middle), and also contains a small poster of the cover.
Maryland's Iron Man, as you might be able to guess from their name, started off as a Black Sabbath tribute band. And we bet they were a pretty good one! Guitarist Alfred Morris III is basically the African-American Tony Iommi, complete with facial hair, fringed leather jacket, and Gibson SG. Total Iommi-worship. We wouldn't be surprised if to find out he'd cut off the tips of a few of his fingers to be more like his hero. So, obviously, old school doom metal is the name of the game here, and this album, originally released in 1994, is a minor classic of the genre for fans of Sabbath (natch), The Obsessed, Trouble, Candlemass, Witchfinder General, Saint Vitus, Solitude Aeternus, etc.
Aside from the fact that the band had black guys in it ("blacker than Black Sabbath" they were billed!), Iron Man didn't really get much notice back when their records came out in the early '90s. Now the metal scene is different, doom is a bit more popular, and at last maybe this band will finally get their due. Certainly it's cool that this album has been reissued, 'cause we always thought it was their best, with their best singer -- who doesn't try to sound like Ozzy. To man the mic on The Passage, Iommi-dude Alfred Morris III found his very own Ronnie James Dio, by the name of Dan Michalak. He's the rather beefy-looking fellow with feathered hair in the back cover band photo. No elf, he. But he sure sounds a lot like Dio, his muscular, melodic, dramatic delivery giving the heavier-than-thou Sabbatherian riffage of Iron Man an extra dose of that epic doom magic that should have been heard by more folks the first time around. We can thank Japan's Leafhound label for bringing this back (newly remastered), much like they've rescued some other out of print doom discs by Revelation and Blood Farmers that also originally appeared alongside Iron Man in the early nineties on Germany's Hellhound label (clearly a big inspiration for Leafhound).
Today, Iron Man's still around, dooming on, with (another) different lineup... speaking of lineups, this album has got Gary Isom on drums, a stalwart of the now-legendary Maryland doom scene from whence Iron Man hail, having played in Unorthodox, Pentagram, and Spirit Caravan among others.
Mysterious one man band Jabladav has proven that he is much more than just a Weakling tribute, offering up his admitted Weakling inspired black buzz infused with strange gnarled Greg Ginn-ish guitaring, and furiously fucked up post rock mathed out weirdness. Grim and buzzy, but also damaged and seriously and gloriously freaked out. He also proved he could drone with the best of them on the recent 3K Hum release, a slab of deep dark dense dronology that definitely holds its own amongst the legends of drone.
So in the spirit of 3K Hum comes this latest Jabladav release, limited to only 50 copies, so we won't get too in depth, needless to say, we were pretty much sold when Mr. Jabladav emailed us to tell us about this new release, and wrote "I've never heard a Buddha Machine sound so evil." Well, heck, what else did we need to hear? Nothing in fact.
So we got as many of the 50 as he could spare and here it is!
Recorded live, using a Buddha Machine, a piano, a Casio and a handful of effects, Jabladav has created a doomy and dark ominous drift. The Buddha Machine's loops transformed into creeping lowend sprawl, bits of distortion and decay lace these long tones, a subtle throb, a deep resonant pulse, murky and muddy and sinister, spaced out, but blurred and smeared into dark dreamlike drones.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! We got way less than that. Packaged in a slim dvd style case, full color artwork and booklet, each disc signed, and numbered, the booklet signed and the insert numbered too.
Valley of Fire finds Jackie-O Motherfucker settling down a bit, and that's not a bad thing.
There have been more bands and more releases embracing the type of song-writing that K Records and Bloomington punx have been quietly working on for years than we could possibly try to count. Part of what's punk about it is that you really only need to know a few major-key progressions, maybe a major scale or two, and you're good to go. But sometimes it's nice to see more developed artists play with the tension between folk and the avant garde. So basically, this release seems to have increased focus on song-writing, less on noisy freak-outs or improvisation -- although here's still some, and a whole lot more vocals. Maybe this record is more for the uninitiated trying to get to the bottom of Jackie-O, or those hesitant to commit to some of their longer, stranger works. Still, somewhat hesitantly recommended.
For a while there, we used to really try and keep up with the detailed reviewin' of new Jandek joints as they came out... but now that we, and he, are on his 52nd (!) record, it's tough. We still like getting a new Jandek cd, to get another shot of that one of a kind Jandek feeling (lonely, weird, confusional) and they're cheap enough, so we hope he keeps on cranking 'em out (pretty sure he will, based on his track record over the last thirty years!!) but having something new to say about the mysterious Texas troubadour isn't easy.
Of course, he's not *quite* so mysterious as he used to be, with live performances (begun in 2004) now almost commonplace. The front cover picture on this one (a grinning red haired man, who now we can identify as Jandek himself in younger days, photographed against a portion of Houston skyline) needn't necessarily be read for signs and portents the way they used to, but his words and music remain pretty opaque.
On The Myth Of Blue Icicles there's four songs in the typical Jandek mold of minimal, meandering (track 3, "The Daze", is over 14 minutes long), not-so-melodic outsider folk: Lethargic, stream of consciousness singing-talking, sounding pained and maybe a little drunk. Atonal, abstract guitar strum. Also pained and somewhat drunken. But for sure not jolly-drunken... this is all about emotively sparse, depressive atmosphere.
And it's a proper solo "studio" album, not one of the many live documents with avant-indie sidemen that Jandek's label Corwood has been releasing of late as well. Not that the distinction is terribly meaningful, since Jandek's live records feature all new songs anyway, and also any album with Jandek on it is indeed equally uniquely Jandek...
Just about the last thing we'd expect from this boy/girl Southern doom-dirge duo (and sometimes shoegazing indie-pop pair) is a concept album about the French Revolution. But with tracks like "Fall Of The Bastille" and "Procession A La Guillotine" that's what you get here, though!!
The 21 tracks here veer wildly from thrashing hardcore (with rabid vokills) one moment, to grungy rock riffage graced with blissed out female vocals (some in French) the next... There's a hushed acoustic interlude or three, and vast tracts of crushing glacial doooooooom as well. From track to track, this is all over the place, you'll never know quite what to expect next. It's eccentric, ambitious, sorta schizo, and heck we're impressed. More importantly, entertained, 'cause even with all the variety, Jucifer fans (such as ourselves) can count on this 66 minutes of music to include plenty of the band's usual distorto-sludge amp worshiping heavy rockin' heaviness a la Boris, as well as plenty of guitarist Amber Valentine's lovely, breathy melodic vox, the other crucial element of the unusual but effective Jucifer formula. It's sorta like you've got the Melvins playing loud on the stereo in one corner of your room, while you're also listening to Mirah or Mary Timony singing sweetly on your iPod headphones. And again, on top of that, it's about the French Revolution. Way to go Jucifer, really threw us for a loop. Vive La Revolution!
There is something so nice & refreshing about this slab of D.I.Y. vinyl. Makes us wanna listen to each side and then jump on our bikes and take a long ride to the park and play with our friends till the sun goes down. Sterling Says are a SF band who bring pop hooks and catchy melodies to their fuzzy and rocking pop-punk (not the Warped tour kind...the other better kind!) that falls somewhere between Big Drill Car and Cheap Trick.
Katie The Pest come from Long Beach, CA and their song instantly transported us to that great bygone era of twee that's not afraid to pack some punch into its delicious indie-pop. Their track "Spit it Out" had us thinking of Tiger Trap and early Aislers Set and that's most definitely a good thing.
At last!!! We knew we could count on the Skin Graft label. They've finally reissued the amazing, long-out-of-print debut album by Koenjihyakkei (aka Hundred Sights Of Koenji), a crucial "side project" of Japanese spazz-prog faves Ruins. Originally released by the Japanese God Mountain label back in 1994, this is one that any fan of Ruins, or heavy crazed Zeuhl-style prog rock action, MUST HEAR, NOW.
If you're familiar with the Magma-obssessed Tokyo bass and drums duo Ruins, imagine them becoming EVEN MORE Magma-obsessed and adding female vocalist/keyboardist and a guitar player (actually, adding a bass player, as the Ruins bass player nimbly switched to guitar for this). This uber-Ruins quartet then wrote a bunch of insane, gorgeous prog rock tunes (or, in one case, adapted a traditional Bulgarian one, on the track "Yagonahh", surely one of the most incredible reeling hoedowns ever recorded) and play them to dazzling perfection. The French '70s prog band we keep mentioning (Magma) are insane, but not quite this heavy or hyper. If you like Ruins and/or Magma and/or weird prog music, you want to get this if you haven't already. It's probably the best of Koenjikhyakkei's albums, which are all pretty cool... indeed if you've been following our updates and scanning our website, you probably have read our ravings about this band's other releases. And as good as they are, this is the one, that started it all. Sooooo bombastic, so energetic, so exotically catchy. You've likely never heard anything as majestically grandiose and yet as full of stop on a dime frenzies as opener "Ioss", ferinstance. And the whole album is full of that sort of thing. It makes us gleeful just to think about it. Definitely in the top two or three of of all Tatsuya Yoshida related non-Ruins releases sez our resident Japanophile, Allan (don't ask him what the others are though, he'll spend all day agonizing over it).
One kinda curious note to make about this reissue, though: mastermind Yoshida not only remixed it for this reish, but he apparently also RE-RECORDED all his drum tracks! We're pretty sure only he could tell the difference. We really wonder what inaudible-to-others flaws he felt he needed to correct! This new disc seems to be about 12 seconds longer than the original, too, but we couldn't tell ya where/why.
Tomas Korber is a Swiss avant-guitarist who has enjoyed many a collaboration with the likes of Keith Rowe, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Otomo Yoshihide. His work emerges from the microsound school of pristine digitality, with the guitar being an electro-acoustic springboard for noise, grains, textures, harmonics, and overtones that get further distilled through laptop tricks. Effacement is not unlike a Christian Fennesz / Bernhard Gunter collaboration, if such a thing were to take place. Fizzing electricity steadily builds up to crescendos of thick locust chorales; shimmered surfaces of post-Birchville Cat Motel amplifier drones slowly dissolve down to the point of near silence; and rasping clatters of digital noise do blast forth, but in very small doses cast against the long passages of subdued activity.
Some may scoff at the idea of our black metal cassette grab bag. A random selection of wonderful blackened obscurities, all grim and mysterious, abstract and kvlt, offered in bunched of 3, 6,10 or 20. You never know what you'll get, but invariably, every grab bag offers up at least one remarkable gem, one instant classic, and usually more than that. In fact, a close look at some of last year's best of lists, reveals at least a handful of tapes from the grab bags in folks' top tens, which is tough to argue with.
One of the tapes, in one of those grab bags was from this band right here, Leaden, from Italy, who we were immediately smitten with, if one can actually be 'smitten' by something this creepy and bizarre and haunting and confusional. But we were, and still are.
Leaden, with their mysterious logo, the band name in a very classical looking cursive, the amazing album title: Monotonous Foghorns Of Molesting Department, song titles like "Black Apartment Of Depression", "I'm The Filth" and "When Out Seems To Vanish", it seems just too good, like the music couldn't possibly live up to the mystery and magic promised by the packaging, but if anything, the music is stranger, and darker, murkier and WAY more mysterious.
On the surface, Leaden are purveyors of doomy suicidal black metal, but their sound, and their songs bear only a passing resemblance to their brothers in abject buzz.
From the first few seconds of the opening track, a skipping delicate piano figure, peppered with stuttery bursts of static (and no it's not your cd player), the record immediately reveals itself as well out of the ordinary. Even when the band join in, the sound is not heavy and buzzy, instead it's washed out and muddy, weary and worn, the guitars a fuzzy gauzy blur, the drums muted thumps, the vocals harsh, but again smeared into something less jagged and more drone-y and monotonous, the whole vibe dark and dejected, the bass surprisingly active, pulsing and throbbing beneath the streaks of guitar buzz, almost like some sort of Burzum / Joy Division hybrid. At some points, the song stumbles to an even slower doom-ed pace, the guitars transformed into keening soaring tones, while the bass rumbles beneath, the drums even more skeletal. And that song pretty much defines Leaden's sound, the rest of the record following suit. It's definitely black metal, but only barely, instead, it sounds like some sort of blackened goth, or doomy slowcore, all the elements are definitely there, the riffs, the pounding drums, the harsh vocals, but the way they're recorded, arranged, the production, the ambience, the mood, it's all very dark and depressive, but with a distinct doom-pop element running through all of it. Strip away much of the buzz, and you might be hearing something more like Bedhead, or maybe Codeine, it's that sort of timeless musical misery, just rendered in shades of black, and degrees of buzz.
In fact almost every song at one point or another, shifts into some gothy groove, all simple propulsive drumming and doo-doo-doo-doo basslines, drifting above a swirling morass of reverbed guitars and disembodied riffs and croaked growls, and imbued with a surprising amount of pop, not hooks per se, but the melodies are indeed catchy, in their own grim way. Somehow heavy enough to still be black metal, but muted and murky and lilting and drone-y enough become some sort of black buzz pop, some slowcoredoom, a gorgeous moody melancholy collection of dreamy drone-y doompop drift.
A lot of how you feel about a record is determined by when you first heard it, or at least when you listened to it most. Some records remind us of college, others about a specific relationship, a breakup, but it's amazing how music can embody a memory so completely. And how the same music can mean so many different things for so many different people.
A lot of folks our age, probably first heard The Lemonheads' It's A Shame About Ray when they were in their early twenties, maybe just out of college, or like some of us, just sort of wandering aimlessly instead of college. And while we're not sure if it's just the above mentioned musical memory, or if these songs actually embody that sort of shiftless rootless confusional youth. Regardless, it's a pretty fantastic record, that sounds as good, and as timeless as it did 15 years ago. The pop minded around here might rank Ray as one of the best pop records EVER. And listening to this again, we still would.
It's the sort of record that is so part of our musical lives, it's hard to review, like Slint's Spiderland, when we find out someone doesn't actually own it, we freak out and insist that whoever it is BUY IT IMMEDIATELY. So for folks reading this, who dig pop music, and who don't own this, for fuck's sake, buy it now. It's so catchy and rocking and sad and emo and pretty and hooky and perfect.
"Rockin' Stroll" is one of the all time best record openers, super kick ass and catchy, the vocals a lazy drawl over super propulsive riffing, "Rudderless" is all minor key and dissonant melody, but with a main hook to die for, and a killer chorus, "My Drug Buddy" has to be one of the best drug songs ever, sad and sweet and heartbreaking, "Alison's Starting To Happen" another rocker that subtly and sweetly reminds us of the Lemonheads' punk rock past, we could go on song by song, every one perfect in their own way. It's been a while since we've listened to this record all the way through, but immediately we were singing along, every word, drumming, air guitaring, Ray is just so fun, and so simple, but one of those records that never gets old, and we never get tired of listening to it.
It would be well worth buying even if this wasn't the super deluxe version, but since it is, even Lemonheads fans who already own it will have to think hard about buying it again, might be worth it. The record includes the original bonus track, their cover of "Mrs. Robinson", the acoustic B-side "Shaky Ground", and the whole record in demo form, really awesome acoustic sketches of each song, that manage to sound just as cool, and way more intimate than the actual recorded versions. The dvd includes ALL the music videos, as well as some live acoustic performances, all wrapped up in a fancy fold out digipak housed in a plastic slipcase, but that's all just the icing, the record's 12 songs are well worth the price of admission all on their own.
Absolutely and without a doubt, one of the best pop records of the last twenty years. Buy it. You won't be sorry.
Well, although the date on the latest issue of The Lowbrow Reader says "summer" and it's barely spring, we can appreciate LBR's eagerness for the warmth of the sun. Heck, we were just as eager to receive this long awaited comedy-centric mag! New Yorkers Jay Ruttenberg and Neil Hagerty (yes, that Neil Hagerty!) are the driving forces behind this 36-page witzine. Included are editorials on Gene Wilder and overlooked comedies, as well as a survey asking celebrity folks (Patton Oswalt, Randy Newman, and John Waters among them) the question: "What Should We Do With America's CEOs? As always, cleanly laid out and well illustrated so that your chuckles, laffs and guffaws can be let loose unencumbered.
Third in Thrill Jockey's limited edition cd/book releases, following the Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot from aQ fave Daniel Higgs of Lungfish. Whereas Higgs' was a regular sized full color book, this one, from Rob Lowe, aka Lichens, and artist Rose Lazar is pocket sized, a little perfect bound book, one side is illustrations by Lowe, flip it over, and the other side features illustrations by Lazar.
Both Lowe and Lazar share a very similar style, unclear if that's always the case, or if they chose to emulate a certain style just for this release, but it's quite striking, tribal andelaborate, crystals and raindrops, clouds and rainbows, lots of stippling and tiny lines, geometric shapes, disembodied hands, mysterious text, toadstools. Lazar's half is much more childlike and innocent, while Lowe's is a bit more detailed, with lots of tiny lines and miniature shapes, more sort of spiritual, while Lazar's is more playful.
The accompanying cd is a single 15 minute piece, split into movements, of original music from Lowe, who normally performs under the name Lichens, typically using only his voice and a handful of effects, creating ghostly shimmery soundscapes. But here, Lowe is using all manner of soundmakers, certainly keyboards or synths of some kind, the result is an airy, glistening, sparkly modern new age. Little flurries of synth notes are looped over and over into a very krautrock like mantra, in the second movements, those flurries are smoothed out into something much more tranquil, a whirring backdrop for a super minimal raga, bits of subtle buzz, and strange bits of percussion, all very woozy and dreamy and Eastern sounding, the final movement melds the two, bits of buzz and whir are sent hurling into the void, through clouds of glimmery spaced out effects, blissy and softly tripped out, perfectly complementing both artist's drawings in the book. Metaphysical, abstract, dreamlike and mysterious.
While they last we have the ultra limited version, which feature the cover on both sides hand painted by each artist, and come housed in a screen printed cloth bag. Once these are gone, you'll get the normal version, which is slightly cheaper.
For those of you who just skim the list or only read the first few sentences of reviews, let us get your attention real quick. Lurker Of Chalice, in case you didn't realize, is the work of one WREST, aka SF black metal overlord LEVIATHAN. Paying attention now? Good. let's proceed. Lurker Of Chalice has existed in one form or another for several years now, but outside a cassette or two this is the only recorded evidence and man will it blow your mind. Originally conceived as a less black metal, more experimental musical outlet (and possibly inspired by Leviathan / AQ faves Benighted Leams) Lurker Of Chalice is constructed from lots of black metal parts as might be expected, but lot of very un-black metal bits as well: arpeggiated post rock guitars, martial percussion, simple propulsive krautrock rhythms, swirling droning ambience, strange haunting vocals, obscure found sounds and samples, doomy slow motion dirges, reverb drenched, almost sun dappled melodies over creepy warbly soundscapes, warm thick keyboards, heavily strummed steel string guitars, rich throaty crooning, super overblown distorted guitars, all smeared into a warm fuzzed out, dreamy and melancholy, mostly midtempo blackened doomscape. Occasionally, Lurker blasts into full on black metal, like on the second track "Piercing Where They Might", but even in a BM context, things are beautifully way off kilter, rumbling bizarrely affected vocals, dizzying riffs that swirl and slither and make it impossible to focus, huge jangly guitars over miltaristic snare drums and warbly Michael Gira like vocals. So weird. But so perfect. Imagine Leviathan and Benighted Leams and the Swans and Ved Buens Ende, all somehow mixed into some darkly evolving, gothic tinged expanse of moody metallic melancholia. This is maybe the best sounding record Wrest has made which is saying a lot. And it's definitely the weirdest, and most certainly the saddest. The whole record is dripping with intense emotion, minor key and slowly stretching toward some bleak future of broken promise and crushed spirit. From slowly evolving, almost cinematic instrumentals to massive and majestic dirges to woozy effect drenched post rockisms to ultra bleak ballads to damaged black metal crush, Lurker Of Chalice evokes total and utter misery, a musical invocation to the lost and alone, wandering in search of hope, under the suffocating black cloak of night, crushed beneath a starless sky and adrift in a soulless universe, exposing every raw nerve and dark corner of Wrest's twisted musical soul. So fucking good!
Over the course of several records, M83 have virtually invented their own genre, we're not even sure what to call it, but it's some sort of gossamer, fuzzed out blissy dream pop, so much so that, the name M83 itself became an oft referenced descriptor when referring to bands of all stripes that borrowed bits of fuzz or buzz or bliss from M83's sonic palette.
The last record, Before The Dawn Heals Us, found the band shedding some of their more arty influences, much of the krautrock, some of the electronica, lots of the buzzy shoegaze, opting instead for some straight up eighties pop, replete with cheesy electronic drums, big choruses, super effected guitars, a gloriously retro chunk of sweetly dated pop, BUT, they balanced that with some seriously over the top fuzzed out bombast.
However, that record definitely hinted at what was to come, and now years later, the bombast is long gone, and if anything, the band has delved even further into our teenage years, and reinvented themselves as a band plucked right from MTV circa 1985, and we love it! This is total emo. Before there was emo. The soundtrack to hanging out in parking lots, crushes, love notes, first kisses, John Hughes movies, falling in love, break ups, mix tapes and all that stuff.
The sound of Saturday = Youth is that, the sound of Saturdays, no school, hanging out with friends, the sound of being young, your whole life ahead of you, but with every second feeling like it could be your last. So much angst, so much passion, so much hope, and so much fear. All perfectly represented by this collection of gloriously glistening sunshine-y pop and fuzzy synthy electro pop.
The record begins with melancholy piano and swoonsome synths, fluttery female vocals somewhere between Kate Bush and Elizabeth Fraser, an intro that quickly gives way to some straight up eighties style MTV pop, a la Tears For Fears, all wooshing and emotional and dramatic, but so awesome. Not sure if this would be quite as appealing to someone who hadn't grown up on this kind of stuff, but for those of us who did, it's pretty irresistible. The next song is all electronic drums, and super processed soaring female vocals, squiggly synths, electric piano, and more super dramatic soaring choruses.
Our favorite so far is probably "Graveyard Girl", with its Cranberries-esque intro, all big jangling guitars, and crooned vocals, the melody super sweet and melancholy, drifting over swooning synths and a relentless rhythm, this is perfect pop, harmonies and hooks, all filtered through that particular time. It helps that there's a video that pretty much perfectly captures the spirit of the song. With a cute gothy girl who visits the pet cemetery and leaves dog toys and kibble on gravestones, pining after the cute boy. Filmed all fuzzy and old, so it looks just like out memories feel. There's even a spoken word part in the middle, delivered by a young girl, talking about loneliness and love, it's pretty perfectly heart wrenching. And then the artwork, all fuzzed out photos of various teens, the jock, the goth girl, the cute guy, the hot girl, the nerd, the punk, all hanging out in some sun dappled park on a Saturday, killing time, being young.
The whole record is like that, so totally moving and jubilant and emotional and slightly cheesy but in a really good way. Whether they're channeling the electronic skitter of New Order, or the fluttery dramatic pop of Kate Bush, or the jangle rock bombast of the Hooters, it's the very best kind of retro. It all makes us feel either really really old, or secretly sort of young again. Or like we're in some awesome eighties teen movie. Regardless, we love it, and can't seem to stop listening to it...
