We've long been proponents of the idea, that any sound man can make, using technology and engineering and electronics, nature can make too. And it will be just as mysterious and interesting. Made even more so, that those sounds occur, well, naturally. And in most cases, especially in electronic music, many of the sounds we discover and create using synthesizers, mimic sounds already produced in nature.
Countless field recordings have proven this, and this latest disc - a recording of the ice on a lake in France, slowly melting - does so once again!
By now, regular readers of the list, have been exposed to plenty of unique field recordings, drag races, life support machines, frogs, applause, monkeys, cowbells, barking dogs, rutting deer and of course the sound of water and ice. Ice and water seem to be particularly interesting sonically, as they always seem to be in motion, whether at the microscopic level melting and cracking, or on a more physical level, the sound of rushing rivers, pouring rain.
The sounds here, like many of the other field recordings we are so fond of, sound NOTHING like what you would imagine ice would sound like. Apparently, the layer of ice on the lake, acts like the head of a drum, transmitting the various cracks and crackles and vibrations across the expansive sheet of ice, producing strange tones, some very electronic sounding, all of them mysterious.
This record was woven together the sounds of the ice covered lake on a single day. Hours of recordings edited into one hour, but no other work has been done on these sounds, this is the actual sound of the ice. It begins with the sound of birds, the ice producing tiny little streaks of sound, that do sound like synthesizers, strange space-y FX, suspended in an expanse of murky murmur. The intensity and the frequency of those space-y streaks increases as the day warms up and the ice begins to fracture and melt, the barrage of bleeps and bloops begin to sound like a Star Wars laser battle, and sound like it couldn't possibly be the sound of ice. Eventually, the laser like streaks get deeper, and more resonant, as if someone was adding reverb or delay, until it's just a cloud of fuzzy bleeps and warbly tweets, underpinned by the actual staticky crackle of the ice cracking.
It's hard to explain much better than that, try listening to the sound samples, you will be amazed. It truly is a rare glimpse of some impossible and mysterious soundworld. A peek into how nature works, or at the very least, a chance to overhear the magic of nature, the sounds the exist in the wild, even if most of the time we're unable to hear them. Magical.
Old Wainds. Maybe one of our favorite black metal bands ever. They're from Russia, and bands like Crebain and Leviathan and pretty much every metal band we know LOVE them. And while they're not fucked up and damaged and freaked out and fractured like much of the black metal we love, they manage to move us in a similarly strange way, by employing the usual black metal tropes, the buzz, the blast, the grim necro vocals, the furious riffing, but turning them into something emotional and dark and unique, which is a rarity in a genre that in many ways insists on uniformity, to remain grim and cvlt and true.
In our obsession we also discovered Nav, HABb in Russian, the project of former Old Wainds drummer Izbor, and featuring at least one other member of Old Wainds. Their sound was not all that far removed from the OW mothership, if anything they managed to sound a bit more chaotic and a lot more like classic eighties metal. More old school riffing and melodies, but that sound still somehow woven into OW's super distinctive black metal.
As we wait hopefully for word from Old Wainds, regarding the rumored new album (and while we wait for news about all of their other releases, none of which we've been able to track down for ages, sorry), we've got a brand new Nav record, 4 years on from their debut, and if anything, they've gone even more classic old school metal. So much so, that minus the vocals, and some extra grim buzz, one might be forgiven for thinking this was some unearthed blackthrash rarity from1988.
Just take the first song, starting with a lo-fi classic metal riff, that quickly ramps up to full strength, some noodly leads, a splatter of chaotic almost-blast beats, until the song lurches into a full on metal gallop, the riffing not black at all, instead totally timeless, with shouted background vocals, some woozy arpeggiated breakdowns, and then about halfway through some full on tweaked and trippy keyboards that ooze and warble and buzz and make the whole thing sound slightly maniacal. But soon the keyboards are replaced by some furious leads, until the end, when haunting swells fade in and out until the end.
And then just like that, we're hurled back into the melee, more speed metal riffing, pounding drumming, freaky spaced out keyboards, every song featuring long stretches where the band drops out and the guitarist just riffs all on his own, often 2 or 3 times per song! Plus there's even a track called "Old Wainds" which is a total slow doomy groove, almost a black metal ballad, with swooshes of synth, and a total eighties metal main riff, which does eventually give way to some buzzing blackness, but throughout the song they continue to return to the old school.
It's hard to imagine ANY metalhead that wouldn't dig this like crazy, the sound is huge and heavy, the riffs are crazy catchy, might not be black enough for some, but for what it lacks in blackness, it more than makes up for in true metal!
One of the more heartbreaking stories of the mid to late sixties Northern California music scene also contains a newly discovered trove of beautiful raga folk that has rarely been heard before now. The New Age were a trio of musicians, namely Susan Graubard (who also played in The Habibiyya, which we raved about a few lists back - on an apologetic side note, we're sorry we mistakenly thought she was a guy) on flutes, viola and tamboura and singer and guitarist Patrick Kilroy whose haunting three octave voice and love for indigenous musical forms and instrumentation, namely the Indian raga, gave the trio a majestic Eastern spiritual quality with an Appalachian folk edge (they had all studied under Ali Akbar Khan). Playing numerous shows, with many famous players of the time in Big Sur, Los Gatos, Berkeley, New York, San Francisco and even at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park, The New Age seemed destined to make a big impact on the West Coast folk scene. Yet, one album half-recorded with Elektra in New York (Light of Day) was never finished due to a falling out Kilroy had with the arranger. Even more tragically, these sessions they recorded with Warner Brothers (featuring Bruce Langhorne) were shelved when Kilroy suddenly took ill and died from Hodgkin's Disease at the end of 1967, before the album could be completed. Graubard, now a school teacher in Berkeley, saddened that The New Age never garnered even a footnote or mention in any written sixties musical history, held onto the tapes, in hopes of sometime releasing them. When Raymond Dumont of RD records heard lost tapes of Light of Day, he was pleasantly surprised to hear that more recordings existed and here we are. Great timing, too, that re-issues of The Habibiyya, Extradition, The Christ Tree, Malachi, Joakim Skogsberg along with The New Age are opening up a window into a little seen past where making music was as it should be, a human-spiritual-communal connection.
The band name definitely had us envisioning the tree beasts from Lord Of The Rings, wandering through the blackened forest, their hulking forms casting ominous shadows, their skeletal branches outlined against the moonlit sky. And you know, the music fits pretty well with that image.
Oakeater is a blackened ritualistic 'power' trio made up of dudes from noise outfits the Coughs and Panicsville, but this is not noise music, well, at least not 'noisy' noise music. Instead the sound of Oakeater is dark and mysterious, abstract and black ambient. Primal and raw, primitive and ritualistic. There might be a drummer, and a guitar player, and even a bass player, or it could be three guys hunched over effects pedals on the floor, regardless, they conjure up some seriously evil sounding black sonic mojo.
Almost the whole of side A is made up of whispery shimmer, hushed alchemical whirs, creepy voices way down in the mix, flickering fluttering melody, creaking industrial groans and moans, until nearly the end, when the various sounds coalesce into something more musical, but no less evil sounding. Big black resonant chords ring out, over a heartbeat like throb, the vocals a weary liturgical chant, the sound like some industrial abstract doom metal, but way more spacious and moody and minimal.
The flipside follows a similar pattern, beginning all hushed and whispery, building gradually into a buzzing almost-song. But here the drone is much more pronounced, a buzzing layered Niblockian tone that seems to run through the whole track, while all around it strange fragments of melody and percussion drift and shimmer, the track looping and mesmeric, strangely hypnotic and almost pretty, drone-y and soft focus, only slipping into something slightly more sinister in the last few minutes, the tones becoming more and more warbly and atonal, until some more melodic organ drifts in and the record fades out more dreamy that dreary.
Packaged in killer hand silk-screened sleeves, silver and black and grey ink on plain black jacket, with a silk-screened insert inside.
Ever since we discovered the band Be Persecuted, we've become just a little but obsessed with Chinese black metal bands, of which there are precious few. The Encyclopedia Metallum which typically lists hundreds of bands for most countries, only has 95 Chinese bands, of which we've heard of only three. Be Persecuted, Ululate, and now, Original Sin. Original Sin is one guy, named Evil Soul appropriately enough, and Misanthropic is his only record, released last year, and holy shit is it a killer.
Raw and furious, intense and totally blown out, with a buzz that rivals even the buzziest of BM hordes. Nothing too freaked out or fucked up, just totally grim, blackened classic Norwegian style black metal. But it's a sound we can't get enough of. Sometimes we miss that fuzz drenched buzz, the sort of black metal that manages to be ultra heavy and evil, but weirdly soothing and trancelike at the same time. And Original Sin has that down, blasting maniacally, the buzz so invasive that the songs almost becomes pure dronemusic, and there are plenty of breakdowns, where the guitar picks out a super sad melodies and the buzz becomes like a warm blanket of sound, so sorrowful and melancholy. There's even a cover of Burzum's "Lost Wisdom" which is pretty true to the original, and if anything adds more buzz to the mix, some serious squalls of stuttery drum machine, and way more tortured vocals. The final track, the nearly 11 minute "Original Sin" flits back and forth between loping Burzumic buzz and lightning speed blasts, with some haunting breakdowns with chantlike clean vocals over softly shimmering minor key guitar buzz.
The one thing we noticed songwise, was there were three tracks whose titles related to "The City": there's "The Black Cloud Upon The City", "Be Disgusted With The City" and "The Elegy Of The City", not sure if they're about the town the band hails from or something more abstract, but pretty interesting nonetheless.
Way recommended for those in need of some serious grim buzz or some tranced out minor key blackness.
Never seen this before, maybe it's the first time it's been reissued... a 1970 solo album from Frank Nuyens, who had been the lead guitar player with one of Holland's top '60s beat/blues/psych rock groups, Q65. We've never listed anything by them, but would if we could, they were a fantastic band, we'll keep an eye out for any available reissues. But we're certainly glad to have this Nuyens solo album, it's great too. Super melancholic and melodic, with gentle vocals and a rustic, folkish psychedelic vibe, but also flashes of psych guitar glory. There's snappy drum shuffle and lovely flutey parts too. We hear definite hints of the Beatles, also the Zombies and the Kinks, at their moodiest. We're also reminded of Roy Harper, maybe it's Nuyens' voice and guitar playing and the whole folky-proggy singer-songwriter thing. Check out the track "Vicious Circle" for evidence of that. Another song on here makes us think of Neil Young. And although Nuyens might not be as well known as any of those artists outside of his native Holland, he and Q65 definitely belong in such company. There's been a lot of great '60s/'70s psych/pop/prog reissues lately, and this is one of 'em!! So many good songs here. A really recommended reissue indeed - and it includes a bonus track, a song from a single that didn't originally appear on the LP proper.
More pastoral beauty from this UK outfit, two discs this time, one of originals, record live and in rehearsal, the other discs, remixes and reinterpretations by Robert Horton, Keith Berry, Gregg Kowalsky and Neil Campbell.
The originals disc is maybe the breeziest and airiest to date, guitars are wreathed in reverb, releasing glimmering notes like blowing the white fluff off dandelions, the notes swirling and drifting, hovering over smooth glassy landscapes of warm whir, smeared synth buzz, minimal muted melodies, warm fuzzy pop ambient style drifts, like some free folk band covering The Orb, lilting free folk, the musical equivalent of dewy grass, autumn leaves falling through from a grey sky, sun dappled hillsides, soft slow shifting clouds, the day's first light, the sun making the moist grass sparkle like diamonds, viewing everything through a frosty pane of glass, rendering everything blurred and dreamily indistinct.
Well worth the price of admission for that disc alone, but there's a whole 'nother record, four long tracks, each of the above mentioned artists re-envisioning the originals. Robert Horton begins with a sprinkle of angelic high end, before bringing in the lows, a series of warm overlapping tones, barely shifting, all intertwined, into one slow organic swell, a near static melody unwinding in slow motion, over the course of nearly 8 minutes. Keith Berry's take is much more gritty, a gentle whirl of fuzzy streaks, muted into dreamlike murmurs, floating within a delicate landscape of glacial lowend and buried melody. Gregg Kowalsky turns his Rameses III source material into something jubilant and majestic, a sort of softened Sunroof!, all bells and chimes and bell-like tones, a glorious cacophony transformed into something less noisy and chaotic and more dense and layered, almost like the sound of a thousand orchestras tuning up stretched into some strange sunlit raga. And finally, Astral Social Clubber Neil Campbell stretches out Rameses III into some blissed out spacedrone, rife with distorted guitars, long drones, high end squalls of feedback, druggy effects, all slithering and squirming just below the surface, a surface which is a seemingly endless Niblock-like drone, the notes and layers beating against one another creating all sorts of subtle rhythms and strange harmonies, simultaneously static and in motion, a roiling writhing inner space ritual.
We can't think of any album in recent history that was more set up to fail than this one.
A "love her or hate her" actress with dubious musical abilities performing mostly Tom Waits covers (with the exception of one original, "Song for Jo"). Even in the highly capable hands of David Sitek from TV On The Radio manning the production (and providing a healthy dose of indie cred), they must have realized this was a high risk venture. Which means we think most people will never bother to give this a listen, which is too bad, because if you didn't know it was Scarlett Johansson and you didn't know these were Tom Waits covers, it's actually a pretty good ethereal pop album. One could easily mistake this for a record by Beach House or even Mazzy Star. There's been much worse music put out by actresses than this (ahem, She and Him), that got away with so much less scrutiny. Perhaps this is the problem, it's setup to be a vanity project when it really isn't (Johansson's vocals are just as much of an instrument in Sitek's production as the swirling music boxes and atmospheres), leaving the actress to bear much of the blame for its failure. Perhaps if it was released under a band name that just happened to have Johansson on vocals or whatever, under any other circumstances this would be a hit. Oddly, David Bowie makes a guest appearance.
Schizoid was responsible for our favorite tracks on the massive (and massively good) 'Don't Fuck With Us' 3 cd compilation of North American digital hardcore compiled by the 'expert' on such things, Mr. Alec Empire. We described Schizoid as "Burzum goes DHR" and that's still pretty right on. But now we have a whole disc, so there's much more variation and much more mayhem! Super distorted, heavily effected, totally evil vocals over dense electronic soundscapes, with chopped up metal guitars, pounding hardcore/gabber/drill'n'bass rhythms. Way more intense and aggressive than almost anything on DHR, and certainly more fucked up and pummelling than almost any electronic music we've heard lately, without falling into the boring, repetitive sameness of most gabber/digital hardcore. Super varied, with full on speed metal gabber, lots of spaced out ambient breaks, electronic drones, and some seriously damaged mid tempo primitive-black-metal-electronica. This is definitely some of the best (and most brutal) electronica to come our way since we first heard 'The Destroyer'. For fans of DHR, The Berserker, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Pig Destroyer, Venetian Snares, Atomsmasher, Burzum, Darkthrone and all that evil stuff.
The aptly-named Scorch Trio is back with another blast of electric guitar fueled n' frenzied Nordic free improv on the Rune Grammofon label. If you liked their previous 3 or 4 discs on Rune G, or the recent Box album featuring Scorch Trio guitarist Raul Bjorkenheim, you're probably eager to grapple with Brolt! Likewise if you're into similar sorts of "dangerous jazz" from, say, Nels Cline's various bands. Yeah, it IS jazz, but with plenty of sharp electric edges and dense drum-battery. While jazz vet Bjorkenheim's six string scorchin' deserves top billing (and he also cranks the electric viola da gimbri), the other 2/3rds of this power trio make plenty of noise too: Ingebrigt Haker Flaten (electric bass, electronics) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums & percussion), both of whom also play in "garage-jazz" freakout combo The Thing with saxophonist Mats Gustafsson.
Track one gets into skonky-rhythmic territory that recalls the spazz-prog of Japan's Tatsuya Yoshida before it's over, while the next one delves into more atmospheric, textural zones a la Supersilent. And so it goes, the whole album chock full of skree-filled soundscapes veering from the moody to energetic.
The first time we heard from the UK's bass and drum (not to be confused with drum and bass) ensemble Shit And Shine, we were already predisposed to love them. Seeing as they featured multiple bass players, a stage full of drummers, and most importantly, at least to us, several lawnmowers. Fuck. Yeah.
Over the course of the last three or four years, these guys have continually pummeled us within an inch of our lives, with their throbbing tribal Butthole Surfers style onslaught, a furious blown out in the red drug drenched psych rock, but only the loosest approximation of rock. More like some sort of government drug experiment, where various deviants and ne'er do wells, criminals and sociopaths, were incarcerated, dosed with all manner of experimental psychotropics, then let loose in a concrete bunker filled with drums and amps and busted up old bass guitars, everything recorded for posterity, until someone started leaking the tapes, code name: SHIT AND SHINE.
This was the most wacked shit we'd heard since Terminal Cheesecake or the Strangulate Beatoffs. And every record drifted further and further out, as the band became more and more unhinged, and now there's this, Cherry, a massive double lp that while still demonstrating the kind of physical and psychic damage Shit And Shine can do, also reveals a whole new world of fucked up sound these guys have tapped into. In fact, when we first threw this on, we weren't even sure it was the same band.
The record opens with a simple percussive drum jam, all toms, sort of tribal, beneath a series of samples, and film clips, a little weird, reminiscent of old industrial, until the next track obliterates the first with a blast of awesome processed metallic riffing, almost like some heavily FX-ed Iron Maiden leads, draped over some shitty shiney sludge, then suddenly guitars flip backwards, the sound becoming some freaked out psych damage, lurching into some killer stop / start dynamics, a churning what-the-fuck sort-of metal jam. Oh yeah, there's also a long long track of old school proto disco, groovy, druggy dancefloor shit, unexpected, but it sort of works in S+S's tweaked sound world. And all of that stuff is peppered with brief super short tracks of classic Shit And Shine tribal drugpsych pummel, but it always slips back into something� curious.
Side three is a single side long track, a gorgeous chunk of layered drone, guitars buzz and rumble, basses throb and pulse, there are probably some synths in there too, the various layers churning and shifting, drifting and shimmering, super hypnotic but still subtly fucked up and creepy.
And finally, for those folks who were put off by all this weirdness, meaning even more weirdness than normal, all of side 4 is taken up by a full on, head crushing Shit And Shine blow out. Doped up and spaced out, huge loping rhythms, pounding multiple drumkits, the basses and guitars a chaotic tangle of crumbling riffs and throbbing distortion, everything locked into relentless looped churning crush. So completely filthy and crusty and damaged that it sounds constantly on the verge of falling to pieces, but it's this continuous chaos and impending doom, that makes S+S's freaky jams so intense and so fucking awesome!
Need we say, TRES RECOMMENDED!
More totally and hilariously garish cover art. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! We got a bunch but AQ folks seem especially partial to Shit -AND- Shine, so these will probably go pretty quick. You have been warned.
We've long been extolling the kick ass retro distorto pop virtues of SF's own Sic Alps. A series of awesome lps, 7"s, cassettes, all way too limited and gone in a flash.
Well the dudes at Animal Disguise have got your back, compiling almost all of those out of print goodies, here's a list: the Description Of The Harbor 12", the Strawberry Guillotine 7", the Semi-Streets 7", the Teenage Alps cassette, the Soft Tour In Rough Form 12", a track from the Hip Hop Shop Sweepers comp and one unreleased song. Whew! That's 26 tracks, in less than an hour, a joyous chunk of noisy, distortion drenched noisepop, lilting, falsetto vocals, detuned guitars, plink plonk piano, everything soaked in reverb and delay, gloriously ramshackle and DIY.
The disc opens with a Strapping Fieldhands cover (definitely one of Sic Alps' sonic forefathers) that begins all pretty and minor key and evolves into a super abstract field of high end ambience, random percussive clatter and feedback. From that point on, the disc offers up short and sharp track after track, acoustic guitars, woodblocks, maracas, shakers, simple drums, more piano, sing songy Lou Reed-ish vocals, super tinny electric guitar, blown out distortion, awesome druggy fuzz, woozy grooves, buzzy distorted old school garage rock, acid fried psych pop, and lots and lots of NOISE. It's no coincidence that Sic Alps shared members with other noisepop locals like Iran and the Coachwhips. Fans of those bands will definitely dig this stuff too.
Messy, chaotic, wild and wooly, rocking and weird, stripped down and distorted, fuzzy and noisy, what more could you want?
A total drone/noise dream team, for the latest in Not Not Fun's Bored Fortress series of split 7"s, too bad we only managed to get about a fifteen of these, direct from Mr. Axoltol himself, who sold us his, and apparently THE, very last copies. Too bad as it's a doozy, but at least a handful of folks will get to lay their ears on this stuff.
The Axolotl side sounds like Karl Axoltol crafted his track knowing full well it was going to be sharing a record with Matthew Bower's Skullflower, as it is a total slab of Sunroof! style ur-drone bliss. A wash of keening high end shimmer, a backdrop of murky upper register whirs, while over the top, a glorious cascade of glistening glimmering feedback.
The Skullflower side finds the band (or the man) continuing to explore dense guitarscapes, however this track is the most musical and melodic of recent outings, a huge wash of guitars, layered and tangled, but with some serious riffage buried in the mix, streaks of feedback and a haunting minor key undercurrent.
Cool eye popping full color cover art. And again, we only have fifteen or so copies so don't get your hopes up�
Now we can perhaps prove that old adage that one YouTube clip is worth a thousand words! Go watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o49KyJQl-Og
Ok, you're back? Now just try to tell us you don't want to buy that band's record! After seeing that clip of Soggy kicking out the jams live on French TV in 1980 (thanks to our pal Brian Turner at WFMU for turning us on to it) we knew that if they had an album, we had to have it! A bit of research and we learned that indeed they did, newly reissued as a vinyl-only, limited edition. And now here it is, while they last. It's an expensive import, but it's also a deluxe gatefold package, with the super-thick LP in one pocket of the sleeve and a freakin' HUGE Soggy poster in the other (now when other records claim they come with a 'poster' they'd better step up!). And who cares how much it costs, didn't you just watch that video??!
For those for whom YouTube is somehow forbidden, we'll just say that Soggy (what a name!) were a French band circa 1980-82 who sound a lot like a more metallized version of The Stooges, obviously their biggest influence (end of side one here is cover "I Wanna Be Your Dog"). The skinny, shirtless singer is about as Iggy as you can get, with the added shake appeal of sporting a giant Rob Tyner (MC5) style Afro! Though they're about ten years after the Francais Metal de Proto scene we've obsessed over lately, they're more like Francais Metal de not-so-Proto, they'd fit right in, all heavy and punk and psychedelic. And they're even more obscure than those other French Stooge worshipers Angel Face, but just as badass. In fact, before they broke up the were supposedly slated to open a Judas Priest tour. What else do you need to know? Oh yeah, before they were Soggy, in the '70s some of these guys were in a band called the Hardfuckers!
All right, why are we still writing this? We don't need to, just watch that YouTube clip!! And yes, that song ("Waiting For The War") is included here. Act fast though 'cause this is limited to 500 copies and while we got a bunch we're sure they'll go quick.
If you love Jason Pierce and Spiritualized you'll find plenty to entertain yourself within these Songs In A & E, though the record fails to capture the intensity and otherworldliness of such masterworks as Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, nor the sonorous integrity of Lazer Guided Melodies. This being Mr. Spaceman's first full length outing since his battle with pneumonia in '05, there is a distinctly weary tone to his voice, as well as notably morbid fixation in the lyrics. The last song ends with him chanting the words "funeral home," repeatedly. And with that said, ironically, one gets the sense that we haven't gotten our last great Spiritualized record, though this isn't it. Rather it seems Pierce is transitioning from a less spaced-out and youthful visionary into a more reflexive and bluesy troubadour. The vocals are far less effected on this record than in previous outings, and the acoustic guitar is allowed more attention in the face of the usual choirs, and luscious orchestration. Perhaps on the heels of his spare contributions to the Mister Lonely soundtrack, this is less significant, but in comparison to the broader patterns in his career, it is. Interestingly, the most richly orchestrated songs on the record are partitioned separately as instrumentals carrying the titles, H1-H5. Still here, naturally, are the shockingly, and sometimes even humorously frank references to heavy drug use, but it's perhaps in that honesty that we need Pierce. He seems to be fighting his way slowly into a new paradigm, the peak of which, we hope, will be something to behold.
More super limited vinyl-only, French reissue goodness from the folks at Memoire Neuve, the same label that brings us the mighty Soggy LP reissue featured elsewhere on this list! Stalag are rumoured to have been the first punk band from Bordeux, and Denier Cri tracks their recorded works from their inception in 1978 to their break up in early 1982. Included is the band's one and only release (the hyper-limited 1981 single "Date Limite de Vente" b/w "Secrets," which has become something of a grail among French punk aficionados) as well as unreleased studio tracks and a few live recordings.
Stalag deliver an appealing mix of earnestness, melodicism and snottiness that fits nicely with the recent Perfect Un-Pop and Rubble collections of DIY power pop scrappiness. Picture Buzzcocks/Damned-style punk swagger mixed with a touch of Gallic, cold wave cool and you're in the ballpark. Denier Cri is limited to 500 copies worldwide and we have less than 10 in stock. Once they're gone, they're gone, so act fast! Allons-y!
A brand new record from the Starving Weirdos, two old old tracks, resurrected and pressed onto what we're pretty sure is the SW's very first 7". The group's sound changes so much, that these two archival tracks, while entirely different from anything we've heard from them, still sound very much at home in their constantly shifting body of work. And unlike the more recent material, is much more lo-fi and looped, giving the sound a very rough, lo-fi, sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker vibe, which obviously we love!
The A side begins with a murky processed pulse, with propulsive krautrock drumming but before it gets more than 10 seconds in, there's a strange backwards swoop, and the track seems to skip back to the beginning, which takes up almost the whole side, a gorgeously fragmented tribal drone krauty loop, until right near the end, when the track shifts, the guitar builds to a chaotic squall, the drums blown out, the cymbals sizzling distortedly, a serious freaked out psych jam, with strange spoken word vocals, bits of feedback, and tons of distorted murk.
The flipside is also loop based (or sounds like it), a militaristic snare, rat-a-tat-tat's out an insistent beat, over which a cool shimmery loop, cycles over and over, while in the background deep rumbles pulse and swell, until the drums drop out and the track finishes off with some moody washed out Jeckian ambience.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pro printed black and white covers, with printed inserts.
This long in the works vinyl project finally sees the light of day, and the results are more fantastic and striking, both sonically and visually, than we could ever have imagined. We'd been hearing about this series of boxed sets of vinyl records, each with one side of music, one side of field recordings, a sort of physical extension and manifestation of a long running podcast, both the podcast, and these lps, an experiment in the art of listening. Cool to now have the first few installments in stock (however briefly).
Each lp is limited to 300 copies, comes housed in an oversized box, with a gorgeous actual photographic print affixed to the cover, inside a metallic inked, letter pressed insert. You have to see them to believe them, well worth the price, as they are visually stunning, and the music is breathtaking.
Of the three initial volumes in the A Room Forever vinyl boxset series, The Svarte Greiner seems to be the one generating the most attention. Which makes perfect sense when you finally get to see, and hold and especially hear this amazing piece of sound and art.
Svarte Greiner handles both the music side, and the field recording side, the music darkly mysterious and quite lovely as always, but the field recording side a strange blend of both. More on that in a second.
The A side, begins all deep and glimmering, a lush hushed ambience, warm shimmers, softly moaning strings, distant streaks of whir and muted melody, the sound feels underwater, underground, lots of delay and reverb, mournful super minimal pizzicato melodies, low end rumble, deep and ominous and mysteriously beautiful.
The second half of the A side is super tranquil and spare, soft washes of sound drifting in and out, warm chords, fragments of reverbed melody, all very soft and sweetly hushed. Definitely not as doomy as past releases, but much more hushed and haunting.
The field recording side here is quite strange, but in a way that is endlessly appealing, beginning with a sea of crackle, of record static, hiss and pops, fuzz and buzz, while WAY beneath the surface, deep tones whir and rumble, later on, there appears much more distinctive clatter, thumps, and bumps and rattles, all the while, a dreamy dronemusic seems to drift and pulse beneath the layer of static and hum, it may be a field recording, but to our ears it's the sound of the A side of this disc, being played on a dusty old Victrola, in a garage or a workshop, while someone tinkers and shuffles about, the whole thing recorded on an old wax cylinder. A gloriously fuzzy and crackly expanse of field recorded dronemusic for sure. So excellent.
The cover photo is fantastic, an overexposed, washed out image of branches, in bright oranges and reds, looking like some sort of lava flow, the insert is gold ink on letter pressed textured black paper.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. We got a LOT of these, but a bunch were pre-ordered and were spoken for before we even got them in, the rest are going fast, and once the batch we got is gone, we most likely will be unable to get any more�
We KNOW this is gonna be one that the legions of AQ customers into psych, prog and other late sixties/early seventies heaviness will want. And even if that's not one of your primary musical specialties, this would be a good choice to check out anyway if at all curious.
British psych/prog power trio T2 released this one amazing album on Decca in 1970, the bizarrely-titled It'll All Work Out In Boomland. Somehow, that LP didn't make much of an impact at the time (although the band did play the Isle of Wight Festival) and has pretty much been forgotten by all except obsessive psych/prog record collectors. Until now, it's been pretty hard to come by - the previous cd reissues we know of were either crappy bootlegs or rare, expensive Japanese imports. We've always wanted to list it, though. So we're very happy that the Lion Productions (US) and Acme Gramophone (UK) labels have just teamed up to put out this nice new reish, which boasts three bonus tracks as well!
T2, composed of drummer/vocalist/songwriter Peter Dunton, guitar whizz Keith Cross, and bassist Bernard Jinks, played HEAVY psychedelic bluesrock (a la Cream, Hendrix, Blue Cheer), mixed with progressive stylings (incorporating acoustic guitar, piano, mellotron, strings). Their songs combine Cross's big fuzzed-out hard rock riffs and psych-skronk leads with mellow, melancholic pretty parts and Dunton's gentle, whispery vocals. Very melodic yet heavy, totally classy and special. For instance, the song "No More White Horses" perfectly weaves amped up electric guitar feedback fury into a tasteful tapestry that also glows with lovely piano and majestic horns. Boomland also features T2's side-long, 21+ minute long masterpiece "Morning", a massive, memorable epic of many moods, a track meant to musically and lyrically describe (or potentially enhance?) an LSD trip, as the text and elaborate diagram included underneath the cd tray explains! There's two other songs on the album proper, the storming opener "In Circles" (which reminds us of stuff on Stray's first album, if you know 'em) and the calmer, exquisitely beautiful "J.L.T.", replete with lush orchestration.
Definitely one of the best bands from those magical years of the early '70s! Certainly one that should be better known. Do you dig the fuzzy, proto-metal heft of the aforementioned Blue Cheer? And also heavy progressive Krautrock stuff like Amon Duul II, Gila, Necronomicon, and Out Of Focus? Well kinda put those two together and you'll have some idea of T2's genius. Or imagine Randy Holden's Population II project gone all symphonic. Also, if you're into early, pastoral British psych/prog like In The Court-era King Crimson, Wishbone Ash, or the more obscure (but recently highlighted here) Bachdenkel then you need to hear T2! And for weird, psychedelic cover paintings, this is up there with Culpeper's Orchard, another lost '70s heavy druggy psych classic that we could compare this with musically as well.
Boomland is the kind of thing that turns up in the personal "Top 10 of All Time" lists of those lucky enough to have heard it. This is an official reissue, done up deluxe with those bonus tracks (live BBC Radio sessions from '70, including two non-album songs among them) and a thick cd booklet crammed with insanely extensive liner notes (excerpted from a book about the album or something) that discuss not just T2's history but also provide in-depth examination of Boomland's songs in regard to both the lyrics and the musical theory behind the compositions. Talk about prog! This goes even beyond the usual thorough Acme/Lion packaging treatment. Highly recommended.
British psych/prog power trio T2 released one amazing album on Decca in 1970, the bizarrely-titled "It'll All Work Out In Boomland". That LP didn't make much of an impact at the time (although the band did play the Isle of Wight Festival) and has
T2, composed of drummer/vocalist/songwriter Peter Dunton, guitar whizz Keith Cross, and bassist Bernard Jinks, played HEAVY psychedelic bluesrock (a la Cream, Hendrix, Blue Cheer), mixed with progressive stylings (acoustic guitar, piano, mellotron, orchestration). Dunton's songs combine big fuzzed-out hard rock riffs and Cross' psych-skronk leads with mellow, melancholic pretty parts and gentle, whispery vocals. Very melodic, very heavy yet beautiful, totally classy and special. Definitely one of the best bands from those magical years of the early '70s! (If you dig the aforementioned Blue Cheer, and can imagine them crossed with heavy progressive Krautrock stuff like Gila and Amon Duul II, or even early, pastoral British psych/prog like King Crimson, you've got some idea about the genius of T2.)
The seven tracks on this self-titled, 45 minute cd were recorded in 1970, intended as the follow-up to "Boomland" -- but the band broke up and this material languished in the vaults until this cd release. Had it come out at the time, who knows -- maybe people would have caught on and T2 would be more than just a cult band today. But, that's the way it is, and here's your chance to join the cult...
Yes, another children's music album from They Might be Giants. Who better to stimulate the minds of youngsters around the globe than these fellows? They've made it their life's work creating remarkably varied, irresistibly catchy and irrepressibly smarty pants pop songs since the 1982. Heck, most of their songs old and new are already totally child-friendly. However just like old Saturday morning cartoons, there's often a subtext that engages the grown-ups too. That said, this their thirteenth album is indeed just for the kids! It's the numerical follow-up to 2006's Here Come The ABCs. Unlike that release whose cd and dvd were sold separately, the cd and dvd for Here Come The 123s come packaged together. What a whale of a delightful, entertaining deal for thrifty parents! Count along with the two Johns -- monkeys, pirates, miles, monster eyes, soup, and pennies too!
Every single time we play this, someone either asks us if we're listening to Monarch. Or Khanate. Every time. That should give you enough to go on right off the bat. And indeed, Trees are a dead ringer for both. Maybe a perfect mix of the two. They don't write songs so much, as put together slow moving arrangements of buzz and howl, throb and skree, crush and chunk, much of the two loooooong tracks here are spent in long drawn out slowly decaying drones, huge chords almost melting before our very ears, feedback and downtuned buzz crumbling to pieces, tones beating against each other, slipping into shrieking streaks of feedback. The long stretches are of course peppered with huge jagged shards of drum pound and demonic vocals, these spaced out blasts somehow arranged to form some sort of skeletal song structure, but it's much more of an exercise in tension and atmosphere, dynamics and drone, and ultra slow motion heaviness.
They do introduce some of their own flavor into the mix, little flurries of double kick, skittering snare drums, some strange strangled mewlings, haunting complex chords, some monklike chants, and some intense abstract soundscapery, so almost-pretty it threatens to slip into some serious black ambience, and at some points, they even -almost- rock, slipping into Eyehategod territory, but it's in the swirling black morass these guys feel most at home, and thankfully, for the dronedirgedoom obsessed, that's precisely where they spend most of Lights Bane. Needless to say, you dig Monarch, Khanate, Moss, Bunkur, etc., you will dig Trees.
Fancy mini-lp style gatefold sleeve with super striking, dense tangled red ink cover art.
We discovered the D-Trash label (and consequently Unitus) via the amazing DHR 'Don't Fuck With Us' compilation from a few lists ago. Unitus is definitely very beat heavy ala DHR, but lays the beats down in a thick, dark miasma of digital crunch and ambient drones and rumbles. Making for an almost dreamy, definitely droney, hypnotic drum and bass workout with stretches of ambient whir, reminding us quite a bit of the seminal Third Eye Foundation 12" 'Semtex' from a few years back. Nice thick analog sounding dirgescapes, with simple, skittery beats woven throughout . Really fucking great! Myabe electronic music isn't dead after all. You just have to know where to look.
These last few weeks we've been trying to get a bunch of kick ass cd's and cd-r's reviewed for no other reason than they have been sitting here way too long, when they should be spinning in someone's stereo or jammed into someone's iPod.
It's been a while, almost a year actually, since we last reviewed something by Finnish freedrone combo Uton, not counting these two discs that have been sitting here forever! Not because they're not great, they are actually, just because we dropped the ball. Anyway, these were both super limited, so odds are once we sell out of the small clutch we have of each, we won't be able to get more, so if these tickle your fancy, and hard to imagine they wouldn't, you better be quick.
Ground's Dream Cosmic Love, released on Students of Decay way back in 2006, is most definitely out of print, limited to only 100 copies or so, which means these are definitely the last ever. A single 45 minute long track, about as murky and muddy and mysterious as these guys get, glistening melodies hover wraithlike, beneath a constant warm low end rumble, washed out and whirring endlessly, it's like the sound of surf, the rumble of rain on rooftops, the vibrations of a passing train, thunder, the vibrations of a busy overpass, all melted down into a swirling black morass, a black pool of sound that seems to ripple subtle with various effects and buried sonic events. A seriously dense sprawl, like being buried alive in a concrete bunker and listening to the world above ground, or floating weightless on the ocean's floor, listening to huge tankers rumble by, a dense and gorgeous slab of ultra minimal dronemusic, rife with subtleties that most definitely reward close listening.
Again, this one is WAY out of print, so go for it, but steel yourself for some disappointment.
Part of the problem with having so many things to review and not nearly enough time, is that every once in a while certain things will slip through the cracks over and over again, until suddenly it's been a month, 6 months, even a year. With cd-r's it's an even bigger problem since they are often so limited that we might only have one chance to get all the copies we need, but even having procured those copies, that record might not get reviewed for ages.
These last few weeks we've been trying to get a bunch of kick ass cd's and cd-r's reviewed for no other reason than they have been sitting here way too long, when they should be spinning in someone's stereo or jammed into someone's iPod.
It's been a while, almost a year actually, since we last reviewed something by Finnish freedrone combo Uton, not counting these two discs that have been sitting here forever! Not because they're not great, they are actually, just because we dropped the ball. Anyway, these were both super limited, so odds are once we sell out of the small clutch we have of each, we won't be able to get more, so if these tickle your fancy, and hard to imagine they wouldn't, you better be quick.
Mystery Revolution is in fact a real cd, released on Digitalis last year, and comes in a gorgeous embossed black and metallic gold sleeve, very austere and mysterious, much like the sounds inside. Uton more often than not remind us of a slightly more twisted, definitely more druggy, and way less minimal Jewelled Antler. They weave dark brooding soundscapes, peppered with hum and whir, crackle and hum, the melodies are off kilter and atonal, piano drifts in and out, sounds are scraped and stretched, everything seems to be nestled in warm drifts and shimmery drones, woodwinds flit and flutter, field recordings (or faux field recordings) drift in and out, organs and harmoniums wheeze out warbly textures, childlike melodies are draped over strange rumbles and jagged shards of crunch and clatter, the sounds of music boxes tangle with whistling winds and warm swells, it's a fantastic and wondrous sonic journey as always.
And again, be warned, there is a good chance this is out of print, so if you want one, grab it fast!
One of THREE new lps on Mississippi Records on this list. One brand new release, and two re-presses of records that slipped under the radar first time around. And we are giving mighty thanks to the folks at Mississippi for repressing those (this is one), because they are fantastic!! (Surprised? You shouldn't be, by our count Mississippi is batting 1000!!! not a stinker in the bunch so far).
Love Is Love in particular, we've been waiting and waiting for, a killer collection of African music, from Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Nairobi and Tanzania. Super varied, from Ethiopian groove to high life, to African blues, juju to pop, every track a total gem. Fans of the out of print Lipa Kodi comp also on Mississippi NEED this.
We were pretty much hooked from the very first track, a smoky sexy slab of groovy Ethiopiques from Alemayno Eshintay, but the rest of the tracks are just as fantastic, jubilant highlife grooves, every track, swinging, jazzy, funky. The B side is a bit more folky and bluesy, lots of acoustic guitars, sweetly sung vocals, much less groove and swing, definitely more African blues and folk, but still just as lovely and magical.
Another amazing collection, housed in gorgeous sleeves, an actual photographic print affixed to the cover, and like all things Mississippi, when we run out of these, be prepared for a bit of a wait as the label represses, considering they've got about 5 or 6 musical irons in the fire at any one time...
For their tenth installment in the Love Peace and Poetry series, Shadoks once again takes us to South America. At first we must admit we were disappointed. This is the fourth volume in the series to cover Latin American psych and so many other regions in the world remain potentially untapped by this series (Italy, Poland, Scandinavia, Indonesia, North Africa, to name but a few). But then we thought better, because we've always known Chile to be an amazing source of some of the best South American psych and sure enough many of the bands on this compilation are amongst our very favorite: Embrujo, Congregacion, Blops, Los Macs, El Congresso, Kissing Spell. Yet there's others here just as good we'd never heard before. In fact this is one of the better volumes in the series, not just because the music is so good, but that much of it was made under hostile political conditions and barely managed to survive, as most records made after 1973 were often contraband, and many master tapes were subsequently destroyed. (Pinochet's CIA-installed military dictatorship ruled until 1990!) It's surprising that given the constantly changing political climate, that bands took so much risk with their music, and album art. Like Aguaturbia, a sort of Latin Brainticket featuring a female vocalist (a rarity on these comps), depicted the singer naked and crucified (a la Salvador Dali) on their second album cover, and even one of the two songs representing them is called "Erotica" feauturing some hot and heavy sounds. Other bands like Congregacion and Sacros take a more mystical and spiritual approach. Some bands are deeply inspired by Hendrix and Deep Purple (Tumulto and Escombros), and others more influenced by the jangle pop of the Byrds and Beatles (Los Macs, Los Beat 4 and Los Vidrios Quebrados). But for all the bands heavily influenced by American and British psych and R&B, it's nice to hear more Andean roots come in to play from bands like Los Jaivas, who mix electric and traditional folk instruments. Another score in this amazing series with hopes for farther flung outings in the future.
There is no more powerful form of vocalizing than Tuvan throat singing. Tibetan chants, opera, death metal grunts, they all pale in comparison to the gorgeous multi-toned 'whistle singing' that throat singers use to create two distinct tones at once, throat singing is one of the few truly mysterious singing styles, and one that still remains difficult to understand, with no real scientific explanation as to how it is actually done, merely educated guesses. The style has been popularized worldwide by the group Huun-Huur-Tu, who have been performing and recording for almost 20 years, in fact recently they performed here in SF. And speaking to the above mentioned power and mystery, we happen to know that in attendance were several local extreme metal musicians, who for years had been trying to learn to throat sing! We've even mentioned in a review or two how amazing a metal band with a throat singing vocalist would be. Maybe some day...
These recordings from 1969, originally only released in the Soviet Union, are only now being released worldwide for the first time. And like most of the Tuvan music we've heard, it's totally mesmerizing, utterly unique, and so beautiful. There are several distinct styles, but most involve the vocalist producing two tones at once, a low raspy buzz, and a high pitched whistle, the buzz acting as a background for the whistle like melodies. The sound is so completely unique, unlike anything you've ever heard, unless you've heard Tuvan throat singing before. Typically, the singes voices tend to sound a bit like Popeye, a raspy croak, that slips seamlessly into that haunting multi-toned whistle/buzz. Sometimes the sound is warm and shimmery, the two notes, the tones perfectly meshed, other times, the vocals are a long drawn out froglike croak, the whistle not in counterpoint as much as the two tone s being produced simultaneously, often as a harmony to an instrumental melody. And the instruments are quite unique too, lots of buzzing strings, Tuvan instruments, of one, two, three or more strings, much like a fiddle, or cello, various woodwinds and of course the Jew's Harp, which is the perfect accompaniment to throat singing.
The instrumental passages here convey the same sort of spirit even sans vocals, moody and melancholic, longing and wistful, the strings buzz and shimmer, long drawn out tones making up slowly unfolding melodies.
The final two tracks are perhaps the most unique. One features solo Jew's Harp, but with the player incorporating a throat singing style, turning the harp's unique sound into an even more unique, twisted melodic vocalized buzz. And the final track, is one of the few examples we've heard of female singing from the region, and while the woman here does not throat sing per se, her voice is lovely, and the melody haunting, the plucked strings perfectly intertwined with the emotive vocalizing. So lovely.
In fact this whole record is fantastic. Anyone who already loves the music of Tuva will want to add this to their collection, and anyone who is hearing this stuff for the first time, will, like most of us, probably become obsessed and need to track down everything they can. It's that powerful.
Includes a massive booklet with new liner notes, photos and an essay on throat singing.
NOW AVAILBLE ON VINYL!
It's appropriate that Nigeria Rock Special kicks things off with a supremely heavy slab of organ/bass/drum groove by Ofege called "Adieu," as this is the third and allegedly final installment in Sound Way's incredible Nigeria Special series. We were skeptical that this volume would be able to live up to the high standards set by the first two, but honestly this is probably the best of the three. No joke, it's so effing good that when we put it on in the store all of us just look at each other and kind of do that squinty head bobbing groove thing where you're kind of like, "holy crap how good is this? SO GOOD!" In fact this is one of those rare compilations that manages to transcend its genre and appeal to people who may not normally be into African music -- it's not every day that you see some of the serious blackened noisemongering customers digging stuff from the "international" section!
First thing, the title might be a little misleading... if you're coming to this expecting to hear stoned out proto-metal clomp or extended blues riffage, you might be a bit disappointed. While there are fuzzed out guitar explorations aplenty on this disc, the overall feel definitely leans more towards the funky side of things. If you're a fan of the Boscoe lp we reviewed a few lists back, or the Skull Snaps record, or even Black Merda (or anything from the now sadly out of print Chains and Black Exhaust compilation) you are going to LOVE this record: imagine blown out, psychedelic instrumental passages layered over heavy, heavy, heavy bass and drums with no shortage of traditional highlife and afrobeat flourishes and you're in the ballpark. In fact, with the exception of a few tracks (most notably, Question Mark's "Freaking Out," which, believe it or not, sounds kind of like Can covering something from the Nuggets box), the western influence is actually less present in this collection than it was in the last volume.
There are too many standouts to list them all, but we would be remiss not to mention that Mono Mono's "Kenimania" comes on like Fela tackling a Booker T jam; or that Ofo The Black Company's "Enario" is a simmering pot of mid-tempo funk and call and response vocals that holds up as a worthy successor to their mighty "Allah Wakbarr" (a song you might remember from two other essential compilations: Nigeria 70, and World Psychedelic Classics Vol. 3); or that the treble-kicking guitars of Colomach's "Cotocun Gba Gounke" create a mind-blowing hybrid of Middle-Eastern-tinged desert blues and Hendrix-ian pyrotechnics; or that Joe King Kologbo & His Black Sounds' "Another Man's Thing" is a frenetic polemic that switches gears from hyperactive shuffle to deep funk throb-n-stab in the blink of an eye!
Look, we know we've been pushing these Nigeria Special comps hard for the last few months but it's for good reason: the three volumes together form a meticulously curated, beautifully packaged collection of songs that spans two decades and demonstrates the intense creativity and musical diversity in post-revolution Nigeria. Taken by itself, Nigeria Rock Special is a gripping, exuberant, and infectious listen from start to finish and definitely comes with as high a recommendation as we can dish out!
Perhaps you have to be of a certain, somewhat advanced age to have the same nostalgic memories of huddling up next to your radio late at night, the record button on your tape deck ready to fire, listening for that one perfect song that perfectly captures every semi-embarassing angst-ridden teenage emotion you've felt that day. You might not even know the name of the band, or maybe you misheard the name of the song, and you're pretty sure that you're never going to be able to find the 7", but there is no doubt that the song will inhabit every mix tape you make for the next couple of months. You'll listen to that song over and over until the tape wears out or the radio brings you the next in a hopefully endless series of best-songs-ever. If there's one thing that the radio will always have over MySpace or YouTube or any other latter day source of musical instant gratification, it's that feeling of being secure in the knowledge that no matter how shitty your day was, or how much you hated your school, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of other kids just like you, listening to those same songs at the same moment.
Perfect Unpop harkens back to a golden era for DIY pop deliverance, when John Peel was the high priest of impeccable taste, bringing together the unwashed, spotty-faced masses every night through the power of BBC Radio. Much of the music on this collection falls neatly into the spectrum of spiky-haired, skinny tied, frenetic, punched up power pop, perfected by better known acts like The Jam, The Who, Elvis Costello, The Undertones, and Joe Jackson. However, a few tracks do veer more towards the brash, bratty sneer of the Sex Pistols (Eater's "Thinking of the USA" for one), while others opt for a darker, more austere, occasionally drum-machine backed groove that recalls Joy Division, Wire or some of the French cold wave bands that were undoubtedly starting to trickle across the channel.
If you have even a passing interest in late-'70s DIY power-pop/punk, then there will be some familiar treats (The Vibrators, Swell Maps, Young Marble Giants, Kleenex, The Monochrome Set, Au Pairs, Vic Godard and the Subway Sect), but there are enough rarities here to keep all but the most obsessive reaching for the lovingly assembled liner notes from time-to-time. The music compiled on Perfect Unpop is awkward, fumbling, scrappy, (check out the unintentionally Coleman-channeling sax 'solos' on The Outcasts' "Self-Conscious Over You" or The Prefects "Going Through The Motions" to get a sense of bands definitely working at the outer limits of their technical abilities) but all the better for it - the roughness and lack of polish make the songs engaging and evocative in a way that more perfectly polished pop gems could never be. This is a compilation packed with perfectly fleeting moments of lo-fi perfection that will make you long for those late nights when a song on the radio could make you feel invincible. Essential!
A super awesome compendium of the bountiful music released by Cherry Red Records circa 1981 through 1984. 'Twas such a crazy flurry of wonderful UK music in such a short period of time. The box set brings back such warm fuzzy memories of the distinct slightly eccentric and brainy sounds of those years! It comes with the 2cd compilation Pillows & Prayers, a rarities disc and a dvd of music videos! Artists include many longtime aQ faves: Marine Girls and Everything But The Girl as well as Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn individually, The Monochrome Set, Eyeless In Gaza, The Misunderstood, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Coyne, Felt, and many many more!
Bet you don't have any Black Hebrew soul in your record collection. We sure didn't! But leave it to the folks at the Numero Group to extract this amazing document of the diaspora of black folks from Chicago and Detroit who converted to Judaism and made the pilgrimage to Israel, and more precisely to a city located just west of the Dead Sea called Dimona. When in Israel it was the music and spiritual soul that many of these people brought with them from Chicago and Detroit that would become the soundtracks to their new lives. Musically this is very much in line with the best of spiritual soul and gospel of that era (early '70s) and you can hear the influence of many of their Chicago brethren (Pieces of Peace, The Dells, Earth Wind & Fire). But of course what makes this so cool is the totally unique context that these songs came out of. On a few tracks they even sing some lines in Hebrew and the amazing pictures and in depth liner notes of this very obscure movement and moment in time makes not only for a great record but an even more amazing historical document.
Gorgeous vinyl only double lp collection of various performances from various Spire events that occurred between 2005 and 2006. Five mostly sidelong tracks from the main Spire performers, three of whom should be well familiar to most aQ list readers by now: Philip Jeck, BJ Nilsen, Fennesz, and the lesser known but equally as sonically compelling Charles Matthews (who shared a Spire related 7" with both Jeck and Fennesz recently) and Marcus Davidson.
Jeck's side is everything we could hope for, long lazy loops, slathered in record static, hiss, crack and pop, dreamy melodies skipped into haunting rhythms, everything washed out and blurred, a worn weary sonic drift, organs and voices, soaring and whirring, very mechanical and machinelike, but simultaneously, warm and emotional. Serene, hypnotic, mesmerizing, what else can we say about the magic of Jeck's music that we haven't said before??
Matthews' half of side two is super minimal and hushed, mostly organs, allowed to wheeze and whir, slightly dissonant, but dense and layered, the tones hovering in a suspension of rumbles and shimmers, very dramatic and cinematic, understated and reverent, almost like some strange religious musical ritual. The second half, ostensibly Davidson's, although he is credited with a locked groove, is a dark drone-y flow, keyboards blurred into warm streaks, also slightly atonal, ominous, intense, the muted rumble builds to an almost cacophonous organ-ic frenzy, that heard at full volume must have stirred the soul for sure.
The second disc is split evenly between Nilsen and Fennesz. Nilsen's side, recorded in a church in Sweden, is a dark, harrowing, rumbling, post industrial dronescape, the tones rough around the edges, the melodies lugubrious and caustic, building up into a serious din, metallic washes of sound, thick shards of pulsing buzz, very brittle and sharp, before slipping into something a little more serene, but no less intense, more muted metallic tones, drifting in a churning sea of hissing static and electronic grit, a barely noticeable rhythm, more of a pulse or swell, finishing off in a deep grinding low end blur, like a much more minimal 20th century SUNNO))).
The Fennesz track is all organ, the root of all of these pieces, but here, the organ is unaltered, barely unadulterated, allowed to warmly wheeze, strange tangled melodies, glistening and glimmering, the tones beginning to change shape, the melodies allowed to elongate and blur slightly until they're swallowed up by a warm cloud of static and hiss before fading out completely. The second half of Fennesz' side is a more murky underwater reading of the first half, not as much grit and gristle as we usually expect, instead, the sound is whirling and muted, reminding us of Oval, but with the glitching skips smoother out, leaving just warm shimmering sonic swells, sun dappled melodies, and rich layered high end drones, drifting serenely, pastorally.
Gorgeously packaged, super thick full color gatefold sleeve, super striking Wozencroft photos, pressed on thick vinyl. And as if you even need to be told, quite limited indeed.
It might seem silly to list the second of two 10cd boxsets before we list the first, but we to be honest, both are equally awesome, and there's really no specific chronology. And odds are, most folks who buy this one, either already have the other one, or are gonna want that one too. If you're the latter, and do want both, go ahead and order this one, and we can order you the first one, we're hoping to have more in the next week or so.
Anyway, most record nerds and certainly most garage / beat freaks are no doubt well aware of the Rubble series of lps collecting all manner of garage, psych and pop rarities on killer comps, each filled with all time favorites and tons of should have been classics. Super grungy garage stomp, sunshiney pop, groovy psychedelic jangle, shimmery hippy grooves, fuzzy flower child folk, tripped out acid psych, druggy dream pop, fuzzy proto metal, Beach Boys-ish surf rock and every possible stop in between. Just a list of some of the hundred plus bands should have most music obsessives drooling: The Accent, Fairy Tale, The Californians, Ice, Cherry Smash, Felius Andromeda, The Attack, Turquoise, Bulldog Breed, Virgin Sleep, Human Instinct, The Timebox, Outer Limits, Tintern Abbey, East Of Eden, Ozworld, Buzz, Blue Bous, Southern Sounds, Force Five, The French Revolution, The Peep Show, Espirit De Corps, Our Plastic Dream, Nirvana, Ghost, Groove, Sub, Science Poption, Strawberry Children, Curiosity Shoppe, Noah's Ark, The Zipps, The Pretty Things, Tuesday's Children, Jackpots, Wonderland, Wallace Collection, Jason Crest, The Sound Barrier, House Of Lords, St. Valentines Day Massacre, Mint, Carriage Company, Dreams, Chasers, Remo Four, Sea-Ders, Fox, The Oscar Bicycle, Gentle Influence, The Lion Tamers, Wild Silk, Spice, The Afex, Philamore Lincoln, Andwella's Dream, Argosy, Time Machine, Oct'Opus, Dee & Quotum, The Still Life, Doomsday Machine, Infantes Junilate, Pregnant Insomnia, Fruit Machine, Lions Of Judah, Cymbaline, Together, Protobello Explosion, The Fourmyula, Icarus, The Moving Finger, Cinnamon Quill, Blossom Toes, Soft Machine, Bump Of Chicken, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Pandemonium, Adjeef The Poet, Apple and more more more!!!
Besides having some of the most awesome band names ever, these are some of the most amazing tracks you'll ever hear. It's like the greatest pop psych fuzz surf garage hippy folk proto-metal mixtape EVER!!!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Each disc in it's own sleeve, a huge booklet with liner notes, housed in a super nice acid drenched full color box, each one machine numbered.
Way recommended! ----* ----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed : ----* If you want to order one of these, just search for the item you're looking for, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart! 1-2-6 "Graveyard Paradise: The Complete 1 2 6 & Taboo Recordings, 1966-68" (Ugly Things) cd 15.98 ABSOLUT NULL PUNKT "Absolute Magnitude" (Blossoming Noise) cd 14.98 AETHENOR "Betimes Black" (VHF) cd/lp 13.98/14.98 AIR "Moon Safari" (EMI) cd + dvd + book 26.00 ALLIEN, ELLEN "Sool" (BPitch Control) cd 15.98 ALTER EGO "What's Next?!" (Klang Electronic) cd 16.98 AMBARCHI, OREN & Z'EV "Spirit Transform Me" (Tzadik) cd 16.98 AMEBIX "No Sanctuary" (Alternative Tentacles) cd/lp+7" 14.98/13.98 AMON DUUL II "Hijack" (Revisited Records) cd 17.98 ANAKRID "Banishment Rituals of The Disenlightened" (Beta-lactam Ring) cd 16.98 ANCESTORS "Neptune With Fire" (North Atlantic Sound) cd 19.98 ARC "Arkhangelsk" (Epidemie) cd 15.98 ASCEND "Ample Fire Within" (Southern Lord) cd 15.98 BAKER, AIDEN "Book of Nods" (Beta-lactam Ring) cd 17.98 BALDWIN, MATT "Paths Of Ignition" (American Dust) cd 14.98 BATTLEMASTER "Warthirsting & Winterbound" (Forcefield) cd 13.98 BLACK ANGELS, THE "Directions To See A Ghost" (Light In The Attic) cd 13.98 BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW "Zodiac Girls" (Suicide Squeeze) 7" 4.98 BON IVER "For Emma, Forever Ago" (Jagjaguwar) cd 14.98 BRUHIN, ANTON "Vom Goldabfischer" (Algamarghen) cd 21.00 BUN B "II Trill" (Rap-a-lot) cd 14.98 CAVE, NICK & THE BAD SEEDS "Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!" (Mute Records) cd 16.98 CHILD READERS "Music Heard Far Off" (Soft Abuse) cd 14.98 CIRCLE X "Prehistory" cd 14.98 COLDWORKER "Rotting Paradise" (Relapse) cd 14.98 COUGH "Sigillum Luciferi" (Forcefield Records) cd 10.98 COURTIS, ANLA / SEIICHI YAMAMOTO / YOSHIMI "Live At Kanadian" (Public Eyesore) cd 10.98 CROM "Hot Sumerian Nights" (Underdogma) cd 14.98 DANIEL, TED QUINTET "Tapestry" (Porter Records) cd 14.98 DISKJOKKE "Staying In" (Smalltown Supersound) cd 16.98 DJ SCOTCH EGG "Drumized" (Load) cd 15.98 DRUMM, KEVIN "Imperial Distortion" (Hospital) cd 19.98 EAT SKULL "Sick To Death" (Siltbreeze) lp 14.98 EATER "The Album + Singles Plus" (Anagram) 2cd 17.98 EIKO, ISHIBASHI & TATSUYA YOSHIDA "Slip Beneath The Distant Tree" (Rhythm Tracks) cd 15.98 EREB ALTOR "By Honour" (I Hate Records) cd 16.98 FLAMES OF HELL "Fire and Steel" (Draconian Records) cd 18.98 FREE POP ELECTRONIC CONCEPT, THE "A New Exciting Experience" (Vampisoul) cd 23.00 FRICARA PACCHU "Midnight Pyre" (Lal Lal Lal) cd 15.98 GIANT / TIDES "Split" (Level-Plane) lp 13.98 GOTO80 "Made On Internet" (Pinipung) cd 17.98 GREGOR SAMSA "Rest" (The Kora Records) cd 14.98 GUILTY SIMPSON "Ode To The Ghetto" (Stones Throw) cd 14.98 HAINO, KEIJI & MASAMI AKITA "Kikuri" (Victo) cd 15.98 HATCHET "Awaiting Evil" (Metal Blade) cd 13.98 HEAVEN AND "Sweeter as the Years Roll By" (Staubgold) cd 17.98 HEAVY, THE "Great Vengeance and Furious Fire" (Counter) cd/lp 14.98/22.00 HOWLIN' MAGIC "The Dreaming" (Lal Lal Lal) cd 15.98 JAY, JEREMY "A Place Where We Could Go" (K Records) cd/lp 14.98/13.98 JAZKAMER "Art Breaker" (Smalltown Superjazz) cd 16.98 JEX THOTH "s/t" (I Hate Records) cd 16.98 JEX THOTH / PAGAN ALTAR "split" (I Hate Records) 7" 12.98 JOYNER, SIMON "The Cowardly Traveler Pays His Toll" (Team Love) cd 14.98 KALMA, ARIEL "Le Temps Des Moissons" (Beta-lactam Ring) cd 17.98 KAWAGUCHI MASAMI'S NEW ROCK SYNDICATE "Cat Vs. Frog" (Palindrone) lp 17.98 KAYO DOT "Blue Lambency Downward" (Hydrahead) cd 14.98 KLUSTER "1970 - 1971" (Water) 3cd 27.00 KLUSTER "Admira" (Important) cd 14.98 KLUSTER "Vulcano: Live In Wuppertal 1971" (Important) cd 14.98 KOSS "Four Worlds Converge As One" (Mule Electronic) cd 16.98 KULTIVATOR "Barndomens Stigar" (Mellotronen) 2cd 28.00 LIL MAMA "VYP Voice Of the Young People" (Zomba) cd 17.98 MANIACS DREAM "Turku Hold 'Em" (Lal Lal Lal) cd 15.98 MANITATSU "Reason For Travel" (Rhythm Tracks) cd 15.98 MAYER, NATHANIEL "Why Don't You Give It To Me?" (Alive) cd 15.98 MELOY, COLIN "Colin Meloy Sings Live" (Kill Rock Stars) cd 14.98 MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS "Infant Spirtuality Rates Coconut Percent" (Pacific City) cd-r 9.98 MONOTONIX "Body Language" (Drag City) cd/lp 12.98/12.98 MUDHONEY "The Lucky Ones" (Sub Pop) cd/lp 13.98/14.98 NADJA "Desire In Uneasiness" (Crucial Blast) cd 14.98 NAKED ON THE VAGUE "Blood Pressure Sessions" (Dual Plover) cd/lp 16.98/13.98 NATURAL FOOD "s/t" (Porter Records) cd 16.98 OLD 97'S "Blame it on Gravity" (New West) cd 15.98 ORCHESTRA BAOBAB "Made In Dakar" (Nonesuch) cd 16.98 OSBORNE "s/t" (Spectral Sound) cd 17.98 OSMONDS, THE "Crazy Horses / The Plan" (7T's / Cherry Red) cd 17.98 PATTON, MIKE "A Perfect Place" (Ipecac) cd 16.98 PENTEMPLE "s/t" (Southern Lord) cd 15.98 POLLARD, ROBERT "Robert Pollard Is Off To Business" (GBV) cd/lp 14.98/14.98 QUIET VILLAGE "Silent Movie" (!K7) cd 14.98 ROOTS, THE "Rising Down" (Def Jam) cd 14.98 RUBIES FEATURING FEIST "I" (Italians Do It Better) 12" 9.98 RUSALNAIA (FEAT. SHARRON KRAUS) "s/t" (Camera Obscura) cd 15.98 RUSSIAN CIRCLES "Station" (Suicide Squeeze) cd 14.98 SANTOGOLD "s/t" (Downtown) cd 14.98 SARAH'S CHARITY "Code Of Red Twin" (Arbor) cd-r 9.98 SARMANTO, HEIKKI "Moonflower" (Porter Records) cd 16.98 SEMIMUUMIO "Vamos" (Lal Lal Lal) cd 15.98 SHIT AND SHINE "Kuss Miche, Meine Liebe" (Load) cd SHY CHILD "Noise Won't Stop" (Kill Rock Stars) cd 14.98 SIAN ALICE GROUP "59.59" (The Social Registry) cd 14.98 SIC ALPS "Fool's Mag" (Folding) cassette 5.98 SILVER MT ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA & TRA-LA-LA-BAND "13 Blues For Thirteen Moons" (Constellation) cd/lp 15.98/22.00 SONIC YOUTH "J'accuse Ted Hughes" (SYR POB) 12" 10.98 SPRING HEEL JACK "Songs & Themes" (Thirsty Ear) cd 16.98 STAR STANGLED BANGER "s/t" (Aztec) cd 24.00 SUN RA "Some Blues But Not The Kind Thats Blue" (Atavistic) cd 15.98 TABATA, MITSURU "Lumrapideco" (Utech) cd 16.98 TAPE "Luminarium" (Hapna) cd 16.98 UNEARTHLY TRANCE "Electrocution" (Relapse) cd 15.98 V/A "Disco Italia" (Strut) cd 14.98 V/A "IVG Vol 1" (Born Bad) cd 15.98 V/A "Living is Hard: West African Music in Britain, 1927 - 1929" (Honest Jons) cd/2lp 17.98/22.00 V/A "Nashville Sputnik: The Deep South / Outer Space Productions Of Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan 1956-2004" (The Omni Recording Corporation) cd 16.98 V/A "Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump" (Strut) cd 14.98 V/A "Steppas' Delight Vol. 1" (Soul Jazz) 2lp 26.00 V/A "Steppas' Delight Vol. 2" (Soul Jazz) 2lp 26.00 V/A "Steppas' Delight" (Soul Jazz) 2cd 25.00 V/A "Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story" (Big Beat) 2cd 29.00 V/A "The In-Kraut Vol.3" (Marina) lp 19.98 VEGETABLE ORCHESTRA "Remixed" (Karmarouge) cd 17.98 VON TILL, STEVE "A Grave Is A Grim Horse" (Neurot) cd 14.98 WALKER, PETER "Echo Of My Soul" (Tompkins Square) cd 14.98 WE ARE SCIENTISTS "Brain Thrust Mastery" (Astralwerks) cd 10.98 WEED "s/t" (Revisited / Phillips) cd 17.98 WELLES, ORSON "Your Obedient Servant" (El Records) cd 17.98 YA HO WHA 13 "Feather Of Wisdom" (Phoenix) lp 23.00 YELLOW SWANS "Deterioration" (Modern Radio Record Label) cd 11.98 _______________________________________________________________________ ABOUT MAILORDER
One final teaser before the tUMULt release of Varghkoghargasmal's Drowned In Lakes full length. Another glorious slab of "wooden metal" from this German one man band, that as always, is not particularly metal, or wooden. In fact, it's more like some strange off kilter krautrock, warbly organs, stumbling drums, lurching grooves, off kilter tempos, simple downtuned clean guitar strum, haunting keyboard melodies, all tangled up into a gorgeous creepy forest jam. The track begins all doomy and droney, the keyboard wavering over the deliberate drumming and the muted riffing, very spare and space-y, eventually locking into a more propulsive groove, the drums impossibly off, in an amazing way, totally in their own dimension, the guitar a mere mumble, except for the spidery melody that holds the whole thing together, the keyboard louder than anything else. Imagine a cross between Avarus and Benighted Leams and you might get something close to Varghkoghargasmal. Awesome as always.
Splitting the disc with V. is October Falls, another one man band, this one from Finland, who specializes in dark ambient folk, and here, it's just that, all mournful minor key acoustic guitar, lilting and sorrowful, moody and meandering, so darkly pretty.
Super thick sleeves and jackets, a handful are on colored vinyl, so you might get lucky, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
On first listen, this sounds like the ultimate aQ record. Crumbling processed blackened vocals, strange electronics, stumbling synths, fractured riffs, damaged drum programming, all wound up into some freaked out super fucked up electronic black metal weirdness. Bursts of furious electronified black buzz, bursts of furious gabber, stretches of new wavey synthesizer, pounding blackened dance music, all a serious what-the-fuck.
If it was some mysterious one man band from Finland or Japan or Tasmania, who lived in a shack, with nothing but a 4-track and a bunch of busted electronics, we'd very likely be going on about how we just discovered the most awesomely retarded metal record ever.
But actually, Vvervvolf Grehv is in fact the work of the dude from Nebraska synthwavers The Faint, with a studio full of gear, doing his best fucked up black metal. And to be fair, this is pretty fucked up and weird, and appealing in its random electronic black metalness, but it's hard not to be predisposed to NOT like it. Some hipster dude slumming it, and making his own brand of electronic metal. But we experience this stuff all the time, we'll get some record, and someone sort of likes it, but then we wonder, "Well, what if it was some all girl group from Japan? Or some Swedish dwarf? Or some invalid who has never left the bedroom where he makes this music?" The answer is usually, "well then it would be the best thing ever?" But how much should that stuff have to do with the music. Theoretically none. A good record is a good record, whether it's on a major label, or an indie, whether it's a band or one person, whether everyone hates them or they're hugely popular. But it's easier said than done. We're all predisposed to dig certain things and hate others. We've joked about having a record store with NO album covers, and NO band names, just everything in plain white sleeves, filed by number, where you base EVERYTHING on the sound. No personalities, no band discrimination, just purely music for the sake of music. Some day maybe.
So that all said, this record is actually pretty cool. Definitely WAY freaked out and fucked up. Black metal fans might find it to be way more electronic than metal, but there's enough bizarre riffing, pounding blast beats and demonic howls, to offset the buzzing synths, the squelches and glitches, the groovy dancefloor throb. Fair warning, it's a bit maniacal and intense and borders on some serious Steven Schultz territory (Busuchan, Puny Humans, History Of Vats, Stalin Claus Superstar!) a la Mr Bungle / Zappa ADD relentless freakout spazzcore, but if you can handle it, this is most definitely the weirdest electronic black metal what-the-fuck record you're liable to hear, maybe EVER.
This is a downtuned stoner sludge face off between two German outfits, who tackle their Sabbath obsessions in slightly different ways. Weed In The Head start things off with delciate clean guitar figures, which are interrupted by ULTRA distorted blasts of metal riffing, the kind of distortion that is so fuzzed out the sounds are almost crumbling into pieces. Doesn't take long before the clean guitar disappears under an avalanche of groovy sludge, pounding Cromagnon drums and wailing sort of Ozzyish vocals. A weird blend of Sabbathy groove and Kyuss-y desert rock, heavy but most definitely stoney and groovy. Things occasionally slow down into almost Eyehategod terrirtory and eventually bliss out into a druggy trippy Monster Magnet style space jam. Cool!
Gorilla Monsoon (named for the wrestler we presume) counter with their own stoner psych sludge groove, starting out with a gorgeous bit of hazy ambience, all guitar distortion and feedback, before the main riff powers through, kicking up all that ambience into a swirling sonic dust storm. Dark and murky, but a bit more rocking than WITH, and much harsher vocals, that swoop wildly from a King Fowley type growl to a near Khanate like hellish shriek. There are some sludgy Eyehategod moments, lots of loping midtempo fuzz and groove, but like Weed In The Head, Gorilla Monsoon are ultimately channelling the spirit of the mighty Sabbath (heck, the singer's nom du rock is even Jack Sabbath) and there ain't nothing wrong with that.
Packaged in a nice fullcover foldover sleeve and pressed on nice thick vinyl
White Medal! What an awesome name for a metal band. Not to be confused with white metal, or unblack metal, this is not any sort of Christian metal, this is some twisted damaged doom-ed blackened heaviness the likes of which we've never really heard before.
This stripped down UK horde, open up proceedings with gentle clean guitar, minor key melodies, a bit of dreamy drift, until the track explodes into a hyper distorted blown out chugfest, super stripped down and raw, but SO distorted, it was a bit difficult to tell if the band was plodding along doomily or blasting furiously, just a massive blown out rrrooooaaaaar. The drums pound away beneath an epic metallic riff that churns and throbs, slathered in blistering distortion, the sound almost more like Godflesh or Pitchshifter than black metal, too hot and loud to be lo-fi but the same sort of texture and timbre. Keyboards (it sounds like keyboards) enter the fray and the track builds to some sort of total majestic metal blow out. Like Godspeed versus Bone Awl or something.
The flipside starts with some static high end guitar buzz, and just like the A side, the song erupts into a furious chaotic pound, the sound on this side much more distinctly fast and blackened, but with the same super saturated ultra distorted guitar, buried drums and shrieked vocals, there are a few tranquil moments, the guitar still distorted and buzzy, just sort of hovering dreamily before the band launches back in.
The label compares this to stuff like Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Ancestors and stuff like that, and while we do hear a bit of that, the sound is also massive and majestic, making us think of bands like Godspeed, Menace Ruine and a bit of that postrockmetaldrone we dig so much. WAY recommended.
LIMITED of course, packaged in cool hand screened sleeves.
If you've got a soft spot for exceptionally well-crafted charming gentle pop with sensitive lad vocals, here's your (and our) latest crush! Right from the opening track of his debut album Carefree, Devon Williams will surely make you swoon with his sweet boyish demeanor and the comforting sway of the guitars. Most of the songs are quite engagingly reminiscent of the warm jingle jangle of '80s indie pop and the wide eyed innocence of '60s Brill Building pop. Mind you he'll surprise you with little more edge on numbers like "Stephanie City" which some around here thought brought to mind a bit of Pixies. Songs such as those make his recent tour pair-up with Dan Bejar's band Destroyer less of a head scratcher and more of a complementary coupling. Lay on some glorious string embellishments (courtesy of Steve Gregoropoulos of Lavender Diamond) which seemingly alternately inspired by the swirling orchestrations of Flaming Lips and Burt Bacharach, and you've got a breezy summertime keeper!
This month's adventures in modern music include, on the cover, Carla Bozulich and her new group Evangelista. Inside, aQ fave Machinefabriek, jazz percussionist Dylan Van DerSchyff, Chicks On Speed's Anat Ben-David, an awesome Invisible Jukebox from the Wu Tang Clan's RZA, another aQ fave, soundmaker and Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada (interviewed by our own Jim Haynes), sampling soundartist Vicki Bennett of People Like Us, Canada's most enduring noiseniks, the Nihilist Spasm Band and of course, a vast array of reviews, from cds to 7"s, movies to installations, performances to books, and a final page Epiphany from cellist Mark Wastell.
Witch's self-titled debut from 2006 was one of our absolute favorite "stoner/doom" metal releases of that year (or any year sez Allan!). An unlikely "supergroup" combo consisting in part of members of folk-pysch collective Feathers, with famed alt-rock guitar god J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. on drums (not guitar!), Witch exceeded all expectations with their slow and Sabbathy, heavier than thou, utterly righteous psychedelic doom mastery. OMG, oh my Iommi, the riffs!!
Perhaps aware that they couldn't really outdo (or outdoom?) themselves riff-wise, the debut being such a tough act to follow in that department, the Witchy ones have smartly decided to accentuate some other aspects of their sound on their sophomore slab. So while the first Witch had held hints of SST styled '80s punkishness, our first impression of Paralyzed is that it's definitely much more punked out than its illustrious predecessor. Perhaps Mascis, who used to keep time in hardcore/grind band Deep Wound way back when, wanted more of a workout on the drums. It's quite chaotically energetic and uptempo aggro a lot of the time, along with indulging in their usual lugubrious headbanging trancification. A little less Vitus, a little more Flag (is the song "Gone" a nod to Ginn's other band?). And maybe more Frost, less Sabbath.
Not that they don't bring the riffs, it's just that they don't quite match the 10 on a scale of 1-10 magnitude of those from the likes of "Changing" or "Rip Van Winkle" from the self titled album (how could they?). However, the speedier (in parts) Paralyzed does certainly boast a bonanza of snakey lead guitar action, liberally dosed in tripped out psychedelic FX. We gotta hand it to singer/lead axeman Kyle Thomas, he shows no signs of nervousness taking tangled solos with none other than (let's not forget) J. Mascis bashing away behind him. Nor is he shy on the mic, his vocals sometimes reminding us of the sneer/snarl of Blaine from The Accused... with, still, a bit of the Ozz. Other observations: sometimes we think we hear the cries of garagey pop jangle buried alive on some of these tracks, and at times we might (might) describe Witch as sounding like a way more badass Dead Meadow. Also the more lumbering tracks here ('cause they do slow it down) remind us of some early Melvins or Steel Pole Bathtub. It's a pretty rad, reverby mix altogether, an cool collision of heavy psychotic shambling psych and corroded crossover punk/metal. We're digging it. Comes in a black digipack adorned with the apocalyptic, druggy, melty-looking artwork of bros Luke and Kyle Thomas, which makes it even cooler.
For those of you who missed out on the limited edition double cd version of the Wooden Shjips debut release on Holy Mountain, here's a proper reissue of that bonus disc, now in a digipack instead of a paper sleeve, and with the addition of the Shjips' now out of print Summer Of Love 7" (never available on cd before!).
This disc has the three tracks from the Shjips debut Shrinking Moon For You 10" and both cuts from their Dance, California / Clouds Over Earthquake 7". We'll try to summarize what we said about these songs before. The music from the 10" starts off with the title cut, a fuzzy garagey stomp, a groove that locks in and plows forward relentlessly. We began to feel like we were listening to some sort of garage rock Steve Reich. Guitars just sort of buzzing along, blooping new wave bass right underneath, simple solid drumming. But then in swoops some super feedback guitar that sounds like a demented horn section, and before you can examine it more closely it disappears, and we're back to the groove. That happens a few more times before the vocals kick in, sort of sing songy, but SO drenched in delay that the words get all jumbled up and are sort of jettisoned into outer space. There is also a subtle wash of fuzzy keyboards giving the whole thing a sort of Loop vibe. the second track is quite similar except the vocals are a bit more distinct, sort of laidback and mumbly. After a few listens, it became clear that there is some sort of minimal thing going on, but it's more like some lost Velvet Underground track arranged for Reich and Riley. Droney and drifty and druggy and totally mesmerizing. The third track bucks the trend and instead veers off into some tripped out ambience, with drifting motes of guitar fuckery, random sounds and noises, and some cool creepy backwards vocals. Sort of like an indie hipster freenoise "Revolution #9." Cool.
The two tracks from the 7" are also quite sonically similar to the 10" cuts. First up, surprise surprise a buzzy lo-fi garage groove, beneath bizarre super distorted insectoid guitar leads, buzzing WAY up in the mix and sounding almost like some primitive malfunctioning synth. But the whole time, beneath the alien buzz, the groove just hums along, like some extra baked Velvet Underground outtake. "Clouds Over Earthquake" is way more laid back, some blown out sun baked riffage, a super lazy groove, like Loop played at 16rpm, decorated with warm hornlike melodies that eventually stretch out into some serious outerspace psych rock explorations. The vocals we loved so much on the 10" resurface here too, laconic, drawled sung/spoken and super affected, very Lou Reed sounding albeit buried way down in the mix and absolutely drenched in thick reverb and fuzzy delay. Awesome!
So those tracks are all here (not in that order though) along with a radio edit of "Dance, California" for completists.
But unlike the bonus disc that came with the first pressing of the Shjips' debut, this disc tacks also on the Summer Of Love 7", an 11+ minute slab of everything we love about these guys: a relentless, neverending blown out fuzzy groove, all warm whirring organ, fuzz guitar, and throbbing bass, the drums a super solid motorik framework, the vocals sort of sung / spoken, reverb and delay EVERYWHERE, the strangest addition are the haunting horns that drift and moan ghost like over the fuzz jam below. By the second half of the track, the band have locked it in and sound like they are never gonna stop. A looped cyclical minimal fuzzrock jam that sounds almost like some crazy crossbreeding of the Doors and Spacemen 3, which should appeal to Circle, Salvatore and Magyar Posse fans as much as all the druggy psychrock dronesters out there.
Anyone who missed out on that bonus disc NEEDS this. For everyone who DID get it (and there are a whole lot of you), you just have to figure out if it's worth buying again to get that extra S.O.L. 7" material on cd.
Either way, killer stuff and absolutely essential!
The buzziest black metal band in the land? That's precisely how Wrath Of The Weak were described to us, and the truth wasn't all that far off. The sticker on that cd compared them to Burzum and Ildjarn as well, which was also pretty right on the money. But the buzz factor, turned WOTW into something much drone drenched and spacey, tripped out and trancey, like Velvet Cacoon before them, the buzz defined them, every note, every melody, was designed to be wreathed in buzz, to blur and smear into streaks of sound.
This is record number two from WOTW and it's just as buzzy as its predecessor, but a few things have definitely changed. The tone and timbre is different, a bit more bright and brittle, less murky and washed out, more high end, more a wall of blackened skree. And within the sound, the the songs seem to be more musical, more complex melodically, there's a whole lot more going on beneath the buzz. Blasting at full volume in headphones, this record is an epiphany, your ears grow accustomed to the relentless buzz and begin to dig out sonic subtleties, picking up on all sorts of hooks and riffs, sounds and voices, different parts flow seamlessly into each other, the drums actually seem to crystallize before your ears, instead of just another layer of buzz, they are a distinct rhythm a flurry of beats, the vocals seem to emerge from the surrounding skree, offering up another unique layer sonic fury, but everything is so intertwined with the buzz, that these occurrences shift back and forth, the drums drift in and out, the vocals buried surface briefly, sometimes everything locks together into a total static blur, other times they all swing and swirl seemingly haphazardly, before locking into step again. It's the nature of a sound this dense, of music this furious and this buzzy, so blown out, so distorted, that it require some serious alchemy to make get all the sounds to hold their own, and even then, it requires some serious listening to hear them.
And like the record before it, which ended with some weird skittery electronica, this record finishes strangely as well, with a nearly 22 minute ambient drift, all wheezing organs, and deep shimmering tones, woven into dense sonic drifts, some definite soothing aural warmth after the frosty chilly buzz of the preceding 45 minutes.
More musical manna for the buzz hungry, definitely some of the fiercest, most distorted and noise drenched black metal you'll hear. Been wallowing in the extreme buzz of Velvet Cacoon, Mausoleums, Brown Jenkins, Procer Veneficus, Animus, you might as well add Wrath Of The Weak to that list...
When we first discovered Wrnlrd, a mysterious one man black metal band from Virginia, we were happy enough to discover a new weird band to dig. The usual buzz and howl augmented by lots of strange ambience, plenty of noise and murk, all wrapped up in some truly unique packaging. We had no idea how weird it would, or could get.
This latest disc, at least visually is the best of the bunch, a silvery splattery logo painted right on the jewelcase, the booklet filled with strange text, images of maps and graveyards, hidden behind a gauzy vellum sheet, featuring a barely detectable image. More weirdness on the disc, and peaking out beneath the tray.
But all of that barely prepares you for the music. The fist disc we reviewed, the 4th in Wrnlrd's in-the-works 9 part series, was a dense tangle of blackened buzz and furious riffing, the next, #3 in the series, was all washed out ambience, this latest, being number 5, is in fact nothing like either. Sure it incorporates bits of buzzy blackness, and lots of strange atmospherics, but it's way more abstract, woozy, tripped out, blurry and mysterious.
21 short tracks (there's some serious number obsession going on here, check the Wrnlrd website for more) the first handful very spare, each made up of just a handful of chords, big warbly downtuned chords that strike, and then fade out sloooooooowly, leaving tons of space for stray voices, bits of country music (Wrnlrd, pre-black metal, was a serious bluegrass player), intercepted transmissions, there seem to be some drums, and even some vocals, but they're definitely indistinct, the drums a plod here, a skitter there, the vocals a buried croak, it's not really until the 6th track, that the band locks into something even remotely resembling black metal, and even then, the guitars are brittle, and seem to bend and twist like viewed through a funhouse mirror, the drums a machinelike blur buried in the mix, all beneath the same moaning doomy guitar that oozed across the first handful of tracks.
The rest of the disc staggers dizzily through all these disparate sounds, the black buzz, is peppered with Jandekian detuned guitar warble, acoustic guitars and banjos offer up little steel string tangles, beneath detuned guitar riffage, all very angular and chaotic, huge sheets of distant thunder like rumble, skittery percussion, more voices and mysterious sounds, samples, super atonal guitar weirdness, lurching deconstructed doom, thick walls of guitar buzz wreathed in tripped out FX, the whole record seemingly sounding like some black metal record left in the sun to warp and melt just a bit, and then played back on a dusty old Victrola. Like nothing we've ever heard (even on other Wrnlrd discs) but whatever it is we are digging it big time.
Now Tee Pee has reissued this domestically on LP, just a wee bit after the cd reissue on Cold Sweat that we already listed... here's what we said before about this all-time AQ fave:
Cool. A truly cult band begins to get its due. If you read our list or are otherwise hip to out-there '70s communal psych rock then you already know all about the amazing Ya Ho Wa 13, house band of Father Yod's Source Family, uh, commune. It was just a few months ago that we hosted a book signing with Isis and Electricity Aquarian and other original members of the Source Family, in conjunction with which the reunited Ya Ho Wa 13 played a show here in San Francisco. Wow. That was something.
So, what with the book (The Source: The Untold Story Of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 And The Source Family) and associated publicity, now the Cold Sweat label has done a domestic digipack cd reissue of what might be the best of the Ya Ho Wa's many albums.
Here's more or less what we said about this big AQ fave when we listed the previously available UK import cd edition a few years ago:
Whoah, man. A seriously trippy, dark and clangorous document here from the (very literally) cult group of early '70s rockers called Ya Ho Wha 13. Of all the many albums that the legendary Father Yod and his band of freaky communal-living hippies made back in the day (most but not all of 'em compiled into the massive Aquarius-beloved 13-disc God And Hair box set that came out in Japan some years back), it's always been THIS one that we at AQ (and pretty much every other reputable source too) have heralded as the absolute heaviest and best of the bunch. An essential item for anyone into far-out freeform '70s psych weirdness. And it's got an unbeatable title, eh? Penetration: An Aquarian Symphony. How can we not dig that? So we're quite stoked to have it reissued by itself on cd for those who haven't got and/or aren't ready for the box set. The four tracks here (including one entitled simply "Ya Ho Wha 13") venture from droneing spacey effects laden soundscapes with eerie Eastern-sounding vocal wailing to full-tilt throbbing, percussive tribal lift-off frenzies complete with stabs of heavy guitar distortion. Throw in some whistling to add an off-kilter spaghetti western soundtrack vibe and you've got Penetration. A damaged, dense, intense, quasi-religious psychedelic California-krautrock experience. Even the mellowest parts are still pretty edgy. This 1974 recording is definitely to be considered a cosmic precursor to everything from the drum circle discs of the Boredoms to the improv rock of Reynols to the neo-hippy clank of the No Neck Blues Band. Amazing. And totally utterly AQ-recommended!!
