It doesn't get more kvlt than this. Two of the grimmest black metal bands California has to offer. One from SF, one from LA, each rumored to include members of some other more well known black metal bands, the sound of both bands, raw and primitive, stripped down, furious and buzzy, simple and pounding.
The true measure of a black metal band these days is their MySpace presence. The truly grim and kvlt, still somehow manage to whip up a Myspace page, even though that's probably the last kvlt activity imaginable. We like to imagine bands in the forest, or in a cave recording, or covered in blood and corpsepaint wandering through the snowy mountains, not hunched over a laptop writing html. But still a quick look at both bands' MySpace pages reveal that Moon Dark are truly the most hateful and grim band in the land, read as they defend their shitty logo, and their stupid band name, while still managing to accuse all other bands of being false metal and lame poseurs and call for the death of all Christians. While we discover that Harassor are pretty badass looking, fronted by a HUGE bearded bald dude, with corpsepaint and a big upside down cross on his forehead that stretches all the way up to his bare pate. Excellent.
Sonically, both bands tread similar ground. Pounding buzz drenched stripped down black metal. Think Akitsa, Ildjarn, Bone Awl and the like. Moon Dark is the more lo-fi of the two, a furious super distorted rehearsal space sound, the vocals a hysterical shriek over chugging midtempo riffage and barely audible drums (assuming there are drums at all). Occasionally, the riff slips into a bizarre almost circusy sing-song melody which is fucked up but actually awesome, before slipping back into grim buzz mode.
The Harassor side is not so lo-fi but still plenty grim and buzzy, total d-beat style heaviness, Akitsa, Malveillance, pounding drums, SUPER buzzed out guitars, killer gurgly demonic vox, and even some strange scrappy guitar parts which are super cool. Creepy and almost Misfits-y at times, but buzzy and black enough to hold their own with Moon Dark.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Each numbered in human blood. Black and white printed sleeves, and pressed on white vinyl!
As much as we love Aidan Baker's solo recordings, and we most definitely do, from gorgeous expansive minimal dronescapes to haunting melodic abstracts to dreamy deconstructed pop, it's all pretty genius, we have to admit that our hearts will always belong to Nadja. Everything we love about Baker, but presented in the form of a massive buzzed out doom. Even at its heaviest and most plodding, it glistens and glimmers, the melodies shimmering and ethereal, the heaviness washed out into a metallic blur.
Radiance Of Shadows is the latest offering from Nadja, a duo featuring Baker and his partner Leah Buckareff, and is shaping up to be at once the prettiest Nadjar release so far, and the heaviest.
Three 20+ minute tracks, each perfectly balanced between suffocating crush and hazy dreamy bliss. Most folks obviously focus on the heavy crushing riffage, but the magic of Nadja happens just as much if not moreso during the quiet parts, the rhythmic parts leading up to the bombastic climaxes. The build up is just as satisfying sonically as the pay off, the musical version of the whole journey / destination thing. But that said, the pay off is a massive and gloriously impossibly heavy crush, like being beaten to death with rays of sunshine or being suffocated under layer after layer of soft fuzzy concrete slabs.
Each track while hewing close to the Nadja sound we know and live is distinctly different, exploring all the various facets of the duo's dreamy metallic dronepop.
The opening track is a glistening slowcore crawl, a lush swirl of granular textures, and lurching crumbling riffage, but suspended in wide open space, languorous and woozy, with a strange staccato riff, that gradually blossoms into a blown out slow motion dream doom supernova, continually seesawing back and forth between the soft and the heavy, a hypnotic blown out two part doom symphony, wrapped around a dreamy slow motion pop core.
The second track is even dreamier and poppier, with hushed breathless vocals, buried in a swirling soft focus My Bloody Valentine / Galaxie 500 sun dappled blur, punctuated by heaving industrial metal riffing, like a softer prettier Godflesh.
The third track is maybe the strangest of the bunch, the quiet parts near silent, the heavy parts seriously and intensely punishing. The quiet parts are all haunting high end distant drones, glitched out minimal guitar strum, soft barely audible drumming, martial and machinelike, haunting near spoken vocals. The heavy parts pummeling and downtuned, but laced with haunting pianos, and some seriously aggressive growled death metal style vocals, roiling and furious, still plodding and slow, but within that plod, the various elements careening and crashing and threatening to crumble into jagged bits. The dynamic between the loud and the soft is super dramatic, culminating in a washed out buzzscape eventually dissipating and leaving that quiet, insistent melancholy strum.
The sound is so much more epic and massive, but warm and 'live' sounding. For the first time, it actually sounds like A BAND, more than a record constructed in a room by a guy (and a girl). Not sure if it's the songs, or the arrangements, the recording or all three, but whatever it is, made a sound we already thought perfect, even more perfect.
We always talk about how someday, with a record we know everybody is gonna want anyway, we're just gonna say "Here it is. A new Record by so and so. It's pretty great. You should buy it." Or something almost that succinct.
So here you go. French duo Natural Snow Buildings. A brand new tape, Super limited, like maybe 100 copies or something. We got about 30 of them. It's already out of print and unavailable almost everywhere. It's intense, majestic, epic and sort of heavy in a really mysterious way. Beautiful full color covers. It's really pretty great. You should buy it.
It was a sad day when The Hot Snakes called it a day, after delivering three of the most impassioned and fiery rock albums of this decade. So we were super excited when we learned that 3/4 of the band had come back together (minus vocalist Rick Froberg) to form a new band called the Night Marchers. With John Reis taking lead vocal duties this really does sound and feel like a mix of the melodic qualities of Rocket From The Crypt and the more driving and charged elements of Hot Snakes. We can't stop listening to the first half of this record filled with burners that made us remember why we fell so hard in love with Reis in all of his incarnations in the first place (Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From The Crypt, Hot Snakes, etc). While there are a couple slower middle of the road tracks towards the end that don't quite do it for us, when the songs are on fire, this is still one damn fine rock n' roll album not to be missed.
Don't know too much about these guys (or this guy?), Number None, but we've had these sitting in the store for a while, and every time we throw this on, we're reminded how intense and powerful ad awesome this disc is! And every time we thing "we have to get this listed. People are gonna love this, WE love this." Yet somehow, for the last year plus, it's managed to slip through the tracks and go unreviewed, until now!
Unfortunately, these guys and this record are mighty tough to describe. The remind us a bit of Jazzfinger, in that they have no real distinct m.o., instead, they flit from sound to sound, exploring drones, musique concrete, dark ambience, field recordings, often two or more of those at once, but the thing is, whatever sound they've chosen, they OWN it, when you're listening to it, you get totally lost, and forget that moments ago you were listening to them do something else, as far as you, your ears, and your brain know, that glorious sound your hearing right now, extends in both directions, back forever until the birth of the universe, forward to the end of time.
The opening track is the perfect example, a serious and dense drone, layered and complex, notes and tones shifting and overlapping and interweaving, but at the core a super powerful, near static Niblockian drone, so immediately entrancing, 30 seconds in and we were transfixed, and began writing this review assuming that the rest of the record must be just more of the same, and while it's not, and it's a bit frustrating that it's not, as we detailed above, once you're into the next track, the cycle starts all over again.
So in a nutshell, the rest of the record drifts from murky staticky blur, to dense chaotic field recording flecked soundscapes, to soft muted stretches of reverb drenched clatter, warm whispery low end shimmer, sprawling high end metallic buzz smeared into glimmering streaks, super abstract far out free noise freakouts, fuzzy radio interference wrapped around reverberating metal, looped FX drenched video game weirdness and warbly underwater dreaminess. It sounds like utter chaos, and it is sort of, but these guys are so deft with their noise making, that once you push play and sink slowly into the first track, you're done for.
Like many of the Nurse With Wound albums, this has been out of print for quite some time now. Originally, Man With The Woman Face came out through World Serpent back in 2002, only to disappear when World Serpent came to an end. Now the album has been reissued, with new artwork and a limited edition bonus disc. Here's what we had to say about the album way back when:
Having retreated from London to an Irish farm many moons ago, Steve Stapleton has kept the personnel on his recent Nurse With Wound recordings down to just a few other people, with only David Tibet, Colin Potter, and Aranos appearing with any regularity. The Man With The Woman Face, Nurse With Wound's first album since 2000 finds Stapleton working exclusively with Ora's Colin Potter, who has recently been working with Monos and Jonathan Coleclough. Regardless of who's working with Stapleton, Nurse With Wound actively pursues (or stimulates?) bizarre psychological states, often via obtuse free-associations and recontextualized leitmotifs. While many Nurse With Wound recordings have recycled various elements from other albums into new operating theaters, the only recurring theme that Man With The Woman Face shares with previous albums is Stapleton's gentle use of feedback generated by chains of effects boxes looped back upon themselves to generate buzzing electric tones to be manipulated how he sees fit. Here, Stapleton and Potter flutter warm pulses of feedback to undergrid Spartan loops and skittering samples of little toy piano plucks, whirring motors, really angry bees, and something that sounds like an electronic varmint scurrying past its metallic cage into a pile of woodchips. Such strange whirring electronic sounds creak and moan until NWW bursts out of these oddly calming drones into a couple of minutes of nervous psychedelic grooviness that reminds us of the Sun City Girls (330,003 Crossdressers era), before collapsing back into whirring abstractions and murmuring vocal fragments. Nice.
Germany's THE Ocean, not to be confused with Ocean from the US, have always been a pretty impressive proposition, their soaring epic post Godspeed Neur-Isis style metallic grind, their phalanx of guitarists, their triple vocal attack, the fact that they're a sort of musical commune, but more importantly, the sound they make is MASSIVE, thick and churning and so so so so HEAVY. It boggles the mind how a band can sound this heavy, on record even, we fear for the brave souls that subject themselves to this sort of crushing brutality live.
A lot has changed in The Ocean camp since 2006's Aeolian. Where that record was moody and nuanced, majestic and cinematic, Precambrian is much more immediate, more furious and intense, the guitars downtuned and crunchy, even heavier than before, the vocals a metal howl, bordering on hardcore bark. The drums swinging wildly from monstrous pound to lightning fast blast beats. And the compositions, holy shit! Mathy and complex and convoluted, Much grindier than before, relentless and maniacal. But wait! That's only the first half of Precambrian. Ultra high concept, separated into two discs (or three lps), the first disc, if we're going by the cd (nicely designed as a 3" cd embedded in a 5" plastic disc) is short and sharp and fast and furious and is the first movement. But the second disc (the third and fourth lp) is much more of the Ocean we're used to. Beginning with some abstract clean guitar shimmering in an expanse of distant drones and mournful melodies, quickly shifting into some mathy post rock, all noodly melodies and jagged harmonies, some seriously dark riffing, even some clean vocals, piano, strings, this is epic shit, wound around gnarled bursts of furious intensity. The record is super strange, shifting from almost gypsy sounding folk, with moaning fiddles, and chime like melodies, to dens chunks of Neurosis style sludge, from expansive shoegaze-y bliss outs to full on Eyehategod howl and chug, tripped out almost-jazz to straight up chamber music, and back to punishing ultra heaviness.
Makes no sense to us that The Ocean guys are not as huge as Isis or Pelican or Neurosis. And if you dig any of those bands you owe it to yourself to get into these guys. The cd comes in a double jewel case, one normal 5"s disc, one 3" disc in a 5" plastic disc, with multiple booklets, packed with lyrics and woodcut illustrations. Wow.
But if any record was one for the vinyl nerds it's THIS ONE. So over the top. A triple lp, gatefold, the whole thing black on black, with silver and white ink, spot varnish flourishes, diecut front and back with amoeboid shapes so the inner sleeves are visible, metallic ink on matte black inserts feature lyrics and illustrations, each lp a different color, orange, dark swirled red and swirled grey. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Holy shit!!! It weighs a ton, and is so beautiful and damn if it wouldn't be worth buying just for the packaging. Thankfully the record is definitely worthy of the packaging. WAY recommended. ESPECIALLY the limited vinyl!
'Tis the third album from Denmark's Lars Pellarin, but the first we've heard, and is a nice introduction to his austere yet hypnotic world of minimalistic, muted beats, simple melodies and pleasing drone. Pellarin makes calm, crackly (we love crackle!) electronic music in a dubby, Chain Reaction vein, that fans of Pole and Vladislav Delay and recent Dopplereffekt should certainly check out. In fact, Gundso is such relaxed, gorgeous, atmospheric stuff, that we really hope it finds an audience outside of the utterly techno-centric who are most likely to encounter it.
It's mostly instrumental, but there's some hushed, whispery singing on track 2, "Whistle Like You're 56", giving it more of a Tarwatery feel... and again on the song "Iran" there's some vocals, this time suggestive of Middle Eastern or African chant, to go along with that track's more ethnic infected beats. A bit Muslimgauzey, that one. It's also the longest piece on the album, at 13:42, and by the end builds into something almost psychedelically krautrocky, yet techno. Elsewhere, Gundso is mostly much more minimal.
This cd also includes a Quicktime video, a slowly-shifting computer graphics animation based on the track "Over Faellenden" that compliments the music perfectly, a fly-over of a ghostly, virtual landscape / seascape in shades of grey, black and white, the "camera" smoothly gliding ever forward, past icebergs and over mountain crags and curving freeways, towards some continuously receding vanishing point.
Another early Richard Pinhas album has been reissued! East/West was his fourth solo outing and was originally released in 1980. As the title suggests, the sounds are definitely reminiscent of those from the far east and west, more so the former than the latter perhaps. That said, the eleven tracks are incredibly varied. Check out the kinetic shimmering cityscape of "Kyoto: Kyoto #3", the slinking Fripp inspirations of "La Ville Sans Nom" and Beautiful May", the fevered unprocessed and vocoder'd vocals of the driving prog "Houston 69 Part 1". As with most every Pinhas solo album (and those of his band Heldon), East/West is a wealth of cyclical rhythms, looming atmospheres and near-industrial textures. In fact, it may also pique the interest of fans of Download if it hasn't already. As we were digging this, it made us want to revisit the seemingly likeminded The Eyes Of Stanley Pain from 1996. Included are two previously unreleased bonus tracks!
It seems a bit strange to spend very much time writing about the new Portishead. Since by now, odds are you're probably sick to death of hearing about it. Sure we all loved Portishead back in the day, they were one of those rare 'electronic' bands whose appeal knew no boundaries, metalheads, moms, indie kids, the sound of Portishead was dark and sexy and mysterious, sinister and ominous, dark and rife with crackle and buzz. Perfect drugged out late night bliss out music, their strange way of creating sound and composing music, recording their own samples on to vinyl and then spinning and scratching those samples to create new textures, made for a totally unique sound.
So what does a band do after taking almost a decade off? Do they return with a record that sounds just like the last one, which is probably what most folks want, or do they return radically altered? With a sound bold and brash, reinventing the sound they themselves invented in the first place.
On first listen, Third definitely sounds like the latter, but with repeated listening, the record slowly and subtly begins to slip toward the former. Which most definitely speaks to the magic of Portishead, and the new record, which at once embraces the old sound, while turning it into something new. More than past outings, Third is dirty, out of tune, atonal, noisy, chaotic, urgent, sure past records had all that crackle and buzz and fuzz, but those elements were carefully placed, and kept well within line. Third sounds much more, well, loose for lack of a better word, like actual musicians, feeling each other out, maybe even improvising. Less like a studio concoction and more like a real live band. And the sound suits them. And makes for a record at once warm and familiar, but also alien, sort of 'rocking' and rife with WTF? moments.
Take the opener, "Silence", which begins with some sort of radio broadcast, which gives way to a killer loping breakbeat, immediately the fastest tempo Portishead have ever explored, strings swoop in, the sound raw and urgent, almost like the chase scene from some spy movie, gorgeous distorted chiming guitar harmonics ring out, until finally the track slows down, and slithers sexily, the vocals a sexy sultry croon, but it's not long before the track kicks back into the haunting and tense, string laden cinematic jam that opened the track.
Then there's "Hunter", which begins like classic Portishead, all smokey and late night sounding, soft muted reverbed guitars, a lush gauzy production, the vocals ethereal and ghostly, but even here, a few seconds in, the song is interrupted by a super distorted crumbling guitar chord that halts things in their tracks, before fading out, and allowing the song to resume. The a few minutes later, a strange noodly synth freakoutsurfaces, again derailing the song's slow motion groove, but It just sounds perfect. It doesn't at all sound like random weirdness for random weirdness' sake. The first time is jarring, the second time, you find yourself waiting for those parts, even humming along as if they were as crucial to the song as the main melody or the vocals, and the thing is, they are.
Near the end lurks the single, "Machine Gun", with its very machine gun like rhythm, herky jerky, stuttery and not at all fluid, reminiscent of Art Of Noise, the vocals sweetly soaring over this jagged rhythmscape below, which only really varies part way through when the original machine gun drums are replaced by BIGGER, more distorted drums, and wrapped in strange moaning horns (or maybe synths), only to shift once again moments later becoming more electronic, the beats awash in strange FX and metallic buzz. It's so unlikely, that it makes perfect sense as the first single. If you can embrace that strange rhythm, that relentless and very un-Portishead like sound, then the rest of the record will make perfect sense, unfolding in front of you, revealing both the warm familiar sounds missed, and the new, bizarre sonic elements never even imagined
All over the record, the band confounds and confuses, gloriously, the brooding whispery "Small" shifts gears partway through and transforms into a fuzzy organ drenched krautjam, "Deep Water" is a straight up old timey folk song, the vocals and strings soaked in fuzzy ambience (and reminding us a bit of vocalist Gibbons' post Portishead project Rustin Man), "We Carry On" is a sort of atonal Stereolab style jam, relentless percussion, thick swaths of synth, very repetitive and hypnotic, "The Rip" is part whispery folky flutter, part synthy electro buzz, every track here offers some sort of surprise, whether it's the song itself, or some little sonic strangeness lurking within, but never is the song or the sound sacrificed, each track is perfect in its own beautifully twisted way, catchy but never obviously so, groovy, but often convoluted and fractured, it's a difficult record to explain for sure, which is perhaps why so much ink has been spilled, and while we may be sick of reading about it, we sure are finding it nearly impossible to imagine ever getting sick of listening to it, which is precisely why it's one of our Records Of The Week.
An archival release from UK bliss folk drone combo Rameses III, released way back in, well, a long time ago, apparently long before the band started experimenting with tripped out production and field recordings, hazy washes of distortion and delay, and long sprawling dronescapes. Just like the title suggests, these are indeed Folk Hymns, very intimate and hushed, whispery and stripped down, often just acoustic guitar and voice. Plaintive and melancholy, the guitars lazy and sun dappled, the melodies relaxed and gentle, the vocals a bit raspy, definitely world weary, some of the songs are embellished with bits of extra guitar, slide, super subtle atmospherics, distant buzz and the like, but for the most part this is a gorgeously minimal modern folk record. Rameses III fans should still dig, but folks into stuff like Palace, Bonnie Prince Billy, Iron And Wine, Appendix Out, Songs:Ohia, Supreme Dicks, Alasdair Roberts, Sufjan Stevens and the like should definitely check out. Might be a gateway record to trippier and blissier things. We can hope...
We only got a handful of these direct from the band, so no telling how long this will be around.
It doesn't get much more breezy and subtly seductive then this one sided 12" by Rubies, with their pal Feist lending her sultry voice to the cause. We've been really anxious to hear Rubies, fronted by Simone Rubi who we always loved in her old band Call & Response. Much like her Call & Response cohort Daniel Judd who is now making some of the smartest and most satisfying electronic music around as Sorcerer, Rubies seems to also have a nice dreamy dance vibe going on. A little more subdued and mellow then the rest of the Italians Do It Better camp, this still fits perfectly on this label that's been doing an amazing job of creating a new legion of disco inspired sounds for this generation. While we wish there was another track on the 'b' side, the almost nine minutes of "I Feel Electric" as remixed by TieDye has been hitting the spot for summertime dancin' with glasses overflowing with bubbly, and fresh strawberries in hand. So sweet and flowing.
Santogold's eponymous debut came with a tall stack of expectations that nearly any artist would have a hard time fulfilling. The number of industry glossies that tagged her the next MIA, or even went so far as to whisper the hallowed name of one Lady Sovereign, had everyone abuzz, ready to witness the next vital permutation of global hip hop whatever pitchfork is calling it these days. So, that said, the record didn't quite pack the punch some of us were hoping for. Or perhaps rather, it just wasn't what we expected, taking many more forays into what can only call a kind of mid-'90s slick indie-rock, that's probably best left for the occasional late-night YouTube session. Even so, Santogold should be credited for her efforts to break genre-constraints, and ultimately the record is stronger for it, if not a bit schizophrenic.
Over the last month most of us have uncovered a few new favorites, and certainly agree this record is no dog. Those in need of a handful of great summer jams from a fresh and promising voice working in the vein of the aforementioned trendsetters will certainly find what they are looking for. Of note, of course, is the fabulous lead single, "Creator," which features Santogold's more fierce vocal delivery, and a killer combination of hooks and rhythms. Also, another standout "Lights Out," shows Santogold making good in her efforts to reach toward new wave and even her punk past for a subtly inventive take on pop music. It's certainly a far cry from the global hip-hop/dancehall designation that "Creator" had her billed as, but even so its seriously infectious, and a few of the songs even sort of kick ass. If you've got a few holes to fill on a mix-tape or just feel like some P-O-P, do it.
Ahhh, Shit And Shine, even the name give us the warm fuzzies. That's because multiple drummer-ed lawn mower bass tribal drug jams often do. And no one does it better, or quite like the UK's Shit And Shine. With a constantly shifting lineup that often swells to double digits, including as many drummers as they can pack into a room. And a wall of amplifiers that makes SUNNO))) seem like they're playing through practice amps, several bass players, often just a phalanx of shitty Casio keyboards, howling vocals, all tangled up into a heaving mass of post-Butthole Surfers drug psych heaviness.
Much like the cd reissue of Cherry (last week's Record Of The Week), Kuss Mich, Meine Liebe is not entirely brand new, the two longest tracks we've had before on a super limited, crazy expensive lp, but here on cd for the very first time. Along with one other loooooooong jam, and a handful of shorter, but no less appealing chunks of what-the-fuck tribal psych-out heaviness.
Let's cover the tracks we've heard before. "Biggest Cock In Christendom" is an in-the-red tribal workout, like a more metallic and way more distorted and druggy No Neck Blues Band. Or a WAY heavier Chain Reaction disc. Thick pulses of low end drift beneath streaks of super distorted amp damage, all very krautrock sounding, but filtered through a bank of effects pedals, all broken or with dying batteries. Definitely blissed out and mesmerizing, but so ominous and creepy. This is the shit musical dreams are made of. 15 minutes of this stuff is not nearly enough. Set it to repeat, drink a bottle of Nyquil and let yourself get sucked under. The other track from the 12", "Toilet Door Tits", is an endless rhythmic jam, with ultra blown out drums, sounding a bit like some Butthole Surfers / Laddio Bolocko hybrid, albeit WAY more distorted and damaged. The sound is completely fried, the whole track sounding like it's crumbling through your speakers, strangled vocals drift amidst the tribal pummel, as do weird alien sounding squiggly leads that squirm and slither from speaker to speaker giving the whole track a super disorienting effect.
The other long track on Kuss Mich is the epic and drowsily sprawling "Preventions Arise", 10 minutes of muted almost industrial sounding rhythms, way more moody and washed out than the other tracks, an endless muddy murky rhythmic jam, pulsing and throbbing, a propulsive groove beneath a very noir spoken word. Strange but a good balance to the sheer brutality of the other tracks.
Scattered all around these three massive jams are jagged little chunks of shiny shit, blasts of noise and crunch and buzz and pound, from brief flurries of machine like grind, furious blast beats, and stuttering off kilter rhythms, to total Buttholes worship, pounding tribal rhythm, buzzing fuzz guitar, hypnotic and intense, to tripped out abstract skitter, all warbly distorted bass, and processed vox, to huge blown out chug and churn, heavy and epic and massively distorted and blown out.
Once again, more proof that these guys (and gals) are the current reigning kings and queens of crushing chaotic drugged out drone drenched drum corps psych-doom heaviness.
Killer packaging, very simple and cryptic, shit brown paper and metallic gold ink shine!
The Kult Of Nihilow website has this to say about Sink's The Process: "This is not a sludge record. This is not a drone record. This is not an experimental record." Which is not actually true, since it's actually an awesome mix of all three. More accurately, it's not an average sludge record, or a typical drone record, and isn't like most experimental music, but that's precisely what makes it so appealing.
Sink are from Finland and have shared a split with aQ faves, UK dronelords Marzuraan, and they traffic in a sound that is both crushingly slow, blindingly heavy, as well as mysteriously dark and droney, but just like anything, it's what you do with all that stuff that matters. Anyone can tune down and play an E chord for 10 minutes. But not anyone can make it sound like angels singing.
On their split with Marzuraan, we described their sound as "a swirling, sludgy wall of hissing fuzzed out blackened ultra noise, harsh and horrific", but there's nothing like that here. The Process is much more musical, and more measured, for a band who is typically defined as a sludge band, they spend much of their time unfurling dark muted shimmery dronescapes, hushed whispery smears of barely audible thrum. And even when they are dropping some serious sludge, it's not really sludgey, the guitars are thick and corrosive, but glimmering and crystalline, rife with haunting chords, the vocals deep monk like chants. The opener here is the perfect example, it sounds like Tibetan monks fronting a doom band, only the doom is strangely melodic, and hauntingly cinematic. Halfway through the track fades into some dark chiming ambience, all muted and blurred, before the crushing doomic blows begin to rain down again, those vocals returning to underpin everything with their thick rumbling whir (sounding quite a bit like Tuvan throat singing). It's a pity the track is only 11 minutes long. We could have gone for twice that! At least.
The second track is all soaring Sunroof! like streaks of sound and strummed acoustic guitars, sounding like a noisier doomier Kiss The Anus, but all washed out and smeared into bleary shoegazey drifts, reminding us of a way more abstract Nadja or Angelic Process actually.
Strangely enough, almost the whole rest of the record is devoid of any hint of sludge or doom, instead exploring longform guitar drones, super minimal sinewave skree, gentle dreamlike ambience, rumbling cavernous dronemusic, until finally, the not at all appropriately titled final song "The Silence", which is anything but silent, four minutes of murky corrosive drift, but like the opener, rife with mysterious melody, disembodied vocals, glimmering chordal blur, all spread out into a thick sluggish doom-ic haze, that seems to blot out the sun, bathing everything in a burnished blood red glow.
Beautifully packaged In an elaborate fold out sleeve, printed in full color with a little tab to hold it shut. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!
Another blast of Skullflowery fury, the second in as many months. Recorded live in 2007, live on the air, at a Belgian radio station, Pure Imperial Reform finds Skullflower mainman (only man?) Matthew Bower joined by fellow axeman Lee Stokoe for 42 minutes of unmitigated dual guitar overload.
As we mentioned in the last Skullflower review, Bower and his 'Flower have gone from riff to noise to and back again over the last twenty years. The last clutch of releases finds Bower once again exploring noise in lieu of any actual riffing. So for folks expecting some sort of Exquisite Fucking Boredom or IIIrd Gatekeeper, this might just rub you the wrong way. But if you loved Bower's Total project, and the more intense and facemelting side of Skullflower, then this live set will definitely hit the spot.
Two guitars, a wall of amps, the sound both white hot and in the red, these two gents spewing furious gouts of hissing fuzz from their respective axes, kicking up a planet splitting din, blown out buzz, squalls of feedback, jagged chunks of deconstructed melodies, streaks of garbled psychedelia, the guitars soaring and screaming, grinding and growling, strings scraped and bent, notes split into a million pieces, chords laid over other chords, gnarled pulsing drones, walls of full on Merzbowian white noise, all whirled into a constantly shifting, roiling miasma of fractured sonics.
Like most stuff like this, a cursory listen will get you nothing but a headache and some sore ears, but dig in, dive in, lay back and let the molten flow pour over you, and suddenly, like all 'great' noise music, the layers unfold and unfurl, melodies surface, rhythms reveal themselves, the sounds, however harsh and brutal, begin to soothe and mesmerize, about halfway in, you'll be totally entranced, a master musical hypnotist, who instead of a pocket watch, swings feedback and amp destroying buzz before your heavy lidded eyes. Wicked stuff for sure, heavy, noisy, brutal and impossibly beautiful.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!
Snowblink is the brainchild of onetime San Francisco transient Daniela Gesundheit, alongside a rich amalgam of collaborators throughout North America, and incorporating a bevy of unique influences. While of course owing some debt to those that came before, the sound of Snowblink is far removed from the canonized female folk royalty unwitting critics will try to compare it to.
Long Live is by far Gesundheit's most mature musical statement to date, boasting rich and complex arrangements, a sensitive and singular approach to lyrics, and as always, her effortlessly fluid and sonorous vocals. To boot, the record was brought to life by the expert engineering of Jay Pelluci and the mixing of Thom Monohan, of Deerhoof and Brightblack Morning Light fame, respectively. Perhaps its greatest feat in the midst of diverse instrumentation boasting bowed glockenspiels and thrummed thumb pianos, is its almost severe intimacy. Given Gesundheit's inevitably serene vocals, she is at her best when her lyrics serve as a kind of gentle lance to the tension around her tales of archetypal traumas. However, not all is Bergmanesque psycho-drama, as several songs also exhibit a more playful and whimsical approach to storytelling. From start to finish, Long Live is a sturdy new plateau, from a promising young voice.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This mysterious musical missive showed up here way back in 2007, and quietly slipped through the cracks, and sat huddled on a shelf in the closet, until just a matter of days ago when we re-discovered it, and thus, we present to you, the last 10 copies of this long out of print cd-r, released in a limited edition of 100.
It was so long ago, we're ashamed to admit, we don't remember much about the band or what they're all about, so we'll go purely on sound (which is probably what we should do anyway).
Two looooong tracks, the first begins quite strangely, a thick undulating dronescape made from voices, howls and hums and croons woven into a strangely soothing wall of textured sound, we kept expecting it to shift but it never does, 19 minutes of pure voice raga, it's super intense, and so raw and intimate and organic, when it ends, like all dense drones, it feels like all the air gets sucked out of the room.
After the fervent intensity of the first track, the tranquil beginning of track two is almost jarring in it's softness, drifting clouds of bells and chimes, spread out over lots of space. Once again, we kept expecting the song to kick in, but instead, it's another exercise in space and tension, ultra minimal and percussive, the chimes and bells ring out and are allowed to decay to almost near silence, before the next flurry of tinkling and chiming. Really gorgeous and strangely zen.
This sort of stuff requires dedicated close listening, headphones help, but that sort of listening is indeed rewarded.
Packaged in a beautiful cardstock sleeve, with paste on liner notes and abstract cover, a metallic gold sticker, and a cd spray painted gold. Once again, there were only 100 copies and that was a year ago, so these are definitely the last copies we'll see...
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Yay, here's another new solo album by Acid Mothers Temple member Tabata Mitsuru (who also has Zeni Geva and the Boredoms on his heavyweight Japanese underground musician resume). We mentioned this one in our review of his other recent solo disc We All Gonna Face The Rising Sun not long ago, and it's pretty similar, again getting the thumbs up from us, for it's gorgeous, droning blend of guitar, loops, backwards tapes, and noisy (but not too noisy) glitch. The tracks Mahhagogo parts 1 and 2 (with their cute little vocal intros) bookend this disc, being the hissingest, harshest dronewerks here. In between them you'll find four other pieces that are mostly much mellower, prettier and placid... mostly. All instrumentals, made from bits of simple guitar melody and swooshing pulses of gentle psychedelic electronics. The likes of "Hydrozoa" are a lazy drift of ambient abstraction, for a sundappled afternoon nap... So nice! Feedback and distortion transformed into utter, sweet blissfulness.
So, it's been two Tabata Mitsuru albums in a fairly short span of time, but we've been fans of him for forever and by Acid Mothers Temple standards, he's not really that prolific. So, if he keeps doing what he's been doing on these, we'd be happy with a few more this year please!!
For any one who's been keeping track, this is record number four from the mad genius behind the damaged brilliance of Xynfonica, Shevalreq and Gluttony. The master of the most important modern musical instrument, THE GUITAR SYNTH. Whose records are either twisted inspiration, or fractured insanity, most likely both. Music to some folks ears, utter garbage to others'. You know where we stand. And if you don't, read on...
The concept behind not just this record, but everything this guy does, is to take a guitar synth and jam out, with the sound of the guitar synth all weirdly atonal and creepy. Then wrap those creepy atonal jams around some high falutin' concept, Vikings, the Roman Empire or something like that, and then the piece de resistance, add some intense growling metal vocals over the top. Sounds insane, and it IS insane, but it's so twisted that we just can't get enough. And we can't be alone since the mysterious man behind the guitar synth keeps churning them out!
Xynfonica was meant to be orchestral, Shevalreq was 'world music', and Gluttony was 'jazz', this time the sound is based on Asian and Eastern instruments, not the real instruments obviously, but the settings on the guitar synth, so stuff like kotos and sitars, but synthesized! The lyrical concept this time around is based on the travels of a group of Danes, as they brave the Arctic Ocean to reach the kingdom of Jotunheim. There are plenty of lyrics, and liner notes so you can understand what's going on, as well as pictures of the synthesized instruments, a guitar, a sitar, lutes. The cover is pretty fantastic too, a giant gold statue, and some Viking archers, squaring off atop big Indian drums! Yep. We're not sure we get it either, but we love it.
So what does it sound like? Well actually, it sounds almost exactly like the other discs. Which is not a bad thing at all. More more more, we always want more. If anything it's even more insane and twisted sounding. The chords warble, the notes are uneven, the tempos shift and stutter, crunchy distorted electric guitars collide with synthesized sitars, long stretches of warped wah wah, the vocals raspy and demonic, the sound often morphing mid phrase into some murky orchestral sprawl, or some tangled freaked out synthpsychdrone weirdness.
Way recommended, essential for keepers of the first three keys (Xynfonica, Shevelreq, Gluttony) obviously, but equally essential for lovers of the weird and the obscure, the freaky and the fucked.
We are huge fans of Tinarwien, that amazing ensemble out of the Saharan desert who so effortlessly integrate electric guitars into their West African hypnotic blues. So we were super excited to check out Toumast when we learned that its leader, Ag Keyna, was not only once a freedom fighter in North Africa but also spent time as a member of Tinariwen. It's no surprise that musically this shares a lot in common with Tinariwen, which is not a bad thing at all! From impassioned foot stompers to entrancing and spacious songs full of soul, the music of Toumast is rich with a survival spirit that one can hear and latch onto even when you don't understand the language.
Keyna was severely wounded by military fire in the early '90s, and was airlifted out of Africa to France for medical care. He began to channel his fighting spirit into music making with the aid of his niece who is a great percussionist, along with the amazing vocal styling of Aminatou Goumar. And thus Toumast was born.
The songs on Ishumar all catch such tasty grooves and make for a listen that is both immediately satisfying and constantly growing on us with each repeated listen. So good!
A couple years ago, we started to regularly carry the releases from Mystery Sea, a Belgian label who only release cd-rs of "night-ocean drones" in editions of 100 copies. Unfortunately, there were a bunch of those micro-edition releases that we never managed to get a hold of: Rapoon, Mnortham, Coelacanth, Spiracle, and Troum being some of those we wish we could have tracked down. The good news is that some of these Mystery Sea discs have been resurfacing as proper cds on various labels around the world, both near and far. Troum's contribution to the Mystery Sea project was rumored to be out of print right when it was released; and it's a very good thing that the Russian imprint Faria has made this available again.
Nearly 10 years ago, Troum emerged from the ashes of the post-industrial project Maeror Tri. In this incarnation, the Troum duo focused their sound upon amorphous drone compositions for guitar, bass, accordion, and a shitload of effects boxes. We've long long championed Troum as one of the pinnacles of dark, heavy, guitar-driven dronemusik alongside the likes of Aidan Baker / Nadja, BJ Nilsen, Oren Ambarchi, and SUNNO))). Objectlessness is a mighty fine entry in Troum's storied discography. Two long tracks of deep narcoleptic whirs, marked by Troum's signature infernal rumble, out of which radiant drones soar towards the heavens. They's always balanced the sublime and the nightmarish, the beautiful and the malevolent; and such dualistic metaphors play themselves out within the shadowy cascades of their dronemusic.
The Russian version of Objectlessness features new artwork in a slightly oversized cardboard sleeve with 4 postcards. Limited to 750 copies, which should last a bit longer than the original cd-r, but probably only a little bit longer.
Oooh. A great dub/reggae comp always brightens our day. This one had us smiling all week. As the title indicates, it comes to us from Basic Replay, the reggae reissue subsidiary of Germany's Basic Channel techno label (shared with another great imprint, Honest Jon's of the UK), who are dedicated to bringing back crucial Jamaican jams (both hits and obscurities) that align with Basic Channel's dubby aesthetic, whether in the raw dub or digital dancehall genres... Over the past few years, they've brought out a bunch of great recordings from the '70s, '80s and '90s, and this is essentially an essential sampler of the label's releases, featuring 16 killer tracks from 13 artists, all of it (except for the White Mice and Keith Hudson cuts) on compact disc for the first time, as most of Basic Replay's releases have been 12" vinyl only. So now the turntable-impaired can get in on the action - or those who simply missed the 12"s. We should have been listing them all along, but didn't, though we have stocked a few in the store. This cd provides a convenient way to get with the program.
Straight out the gate, Basic Replay proves how fierce this can get with the machine gun mayhem of Ackie's catchy "Call Me Rambo". Tough indeed. The rest of the disc's sixteen tracks are put on notice, and rise to the occasion. It's all such solid stuff, ranging from uptempo bangers like Professor Grizzly's even catchier "Fight The Professor", to mellowed out, slinky soulful cuts like Ijahman Levi's "I Am A Levi" (parts 1 and 2)... There's laidback instrumentals with echoing percussive dub effects exploding like depth-charge distortion detonations (Tenastelin's "Burial Tonight Version") and blissed-out Spaghetti Western stylings with melodious vocals (keyboard king Jackie Mittoo's "Ayatollah") and tick-tock electronic Geiger counter beatscapes (Prince Jazzbo's "Replay Version") and all sorts of other treats that fans of dub and reggae (and probably dubstep too, even though that's not what's on here) ought to swoon over.
The other names on the comp we haven't yet mentioned: Chuck Turner, King Culture, Courtney Melody, Gregory Isaacs, Andrew Bees. We're not expert enough to explain how and why all these artists fit together historically and/or stylistically, maybe they don't, but the selections on this cd flow so nicely together. Superb, recommended!
Also now available on vinyl!! Yay!
Ah those French and their electronics, if there's one thing we've learned, they're really good at busting out catchy synth lines and addictive dance tunes. France in the late '70s to mid '80s particularly, held an abundance of innovative and distinct synth-based cold-wave acts, many of whom where under the radar and less popular than the likes of Jean Michel Jarre or Richard Pinhas, but still rich in texture and just as brilliant. We read somewhere that Ruth sold just 50 copies of their (amazing) album released in 1985. The fact that we know next to nothing about any of the artists on this comp makes it even better!
If the Tigersushi Collection, So Young But So Cold that we listed a while back tickled your fancy, Bippp will not disappoint. The folks here at aQ have been eating this up! This compilation, put out by Everloving, licensed from the French label Born Bad, is a marvelous collection of raw futuristic energy and minimalist beats. In it you hear the beginnings of cold wave, dark-wave, post punk, and electro pop. Act's "Ping Pong" suggests everything from The Police to early New Order while the quirky efforts of "Touche Pas Mon Sexe" by The Comix is fast, spastic and bouncy with minimal drum machine effects, slicing synth stabs, and swirly, grinding melodies similar to Kraftwerk or early OMD. CKC's "20h25", catchy as all hell, stands out the most with backing robotic vocals, eerie Casio lines, and a somewhat random slap bass break mid-song. In the pulsing, metronomic works of "Pretty Day" by Mary Moore, another gem in the collection and one of the only two tracks with English vocals, Mary sings about love and death in equally coy tones. TGV's "Partie 1" is sort of a punk anthem (as are a couple others in the collection) with interlocking key patterns and quick, nervous yelps.
Seems a little out of place that the last song, "Rainbow Man", is a tune by Ed Banger (present day French electro monarch) label frontman Busy P (who samples the "Touche Pas Mon Sexe" track by The Comix listed earlier on in the comp) though the Collection's title suggests French New Wave "1979-85"..?? Still a damned good track regardless. And maybe the bait to get some of the young 'uns interested in this cool old stuff. Really it's astounding how fresh in quality the bulk of these songs are as well, as if they could've been released within the last five years, on a label like Ed Banger...
Most of the bands on the compilation apparently released vinyl runs of 1000 or less the first time around. Lacking an aboveground hit by a homegrown version of Depeche Mode or Soft Cell, the scene portrayed on Bippp remained largely hidden. As brilliant and often catchy as the tunes are, they remained weirdly confidential. We can only hope that the release of Bippp leads to reissues of full albums by these acts! We already knew we needed that Ruth record back in print.
If you've been keeping up with the fairly recent wave of late '70s, early '80s French post-punk and new wave experimentation, then you're definitely going to need this. Des Jeunes Gens Modernes - Modern Young People - oscillates between the pop electronics of Ruth and the angular guitar stabs of Metal Urbain. Officially, the compilation is in conjunction with a show at the Agnes B gallery in Paris, but for those of us too far to just stop by, this is the next best thing. Also, we've got to admit, college was a long time ago, and our French is pretty rusty. So, attempting to decipher the fold-up insert was a bit of a challenge, and instead of potentially embarrassing ourselves we'll just tell you that it's there. In addition to the bands mentioned above, there are some other rare favorites on here. Guerre Froide, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and Charles de Goal all make appearances. You may remember Guerre Froide's "Demain Berlin" from the Flexi-Pop series, as well as the band Visible. If nothing else, let it be known: GF's absolutely anthemic and completely amazing "Ersatz" is finally back on vinyl! That alone makes this worth buying! For sure one of the better, if not the best, of the whole early 80's French electronic/punk revival compilations. If you've got any interest at all in that scene then you need to pick this up pronto, because there's no telling when half of these tracks will be available again, not just in general but on vinyl in particular!
FYI: unfortunately, the sleeves of pretty much all the copies we were able to get had one slightly crushed corner. It's not a terrible defect but we felt we should mention it, buyer beware and all that. It already took forever to get these in stock so we weren't gonna send 'em back and wait for another batch in several months, which might not be in any better shape anyway. But just so you know.
The world may be full of doom and gloom, and your shelves may be bursting at the seams will all manner of slow motion sludge and funereal dirges, but there was a time, when true doom wasn't so easy to come by, the world wasn't prepared for slow motion misery and abject musical miserablism, but we were, and we hunted and searched, and thus we discovered Finland's Skepticism. The heaviest, most beautiful, most perplexingly atmospheric music we had yet encountered. It was so washed out and dreamy it was barely metal. So slow and pretty it almost sounded choral. We described the music of Skepticism as sounding like sitting in a church, while a doom metal band practiced in the basement, the huge thudding crush, barely audible through the floor, the sounds intertwining with the warm whir of the church organ, some strangely spiritual sonic confluence, that was as magical as it was mysterious.
And it wasn't just us. The sound of Skepticism spoke to all sorts of people, metalheads, doomlords, drone freeks, weirdo music obsessives, and it made perfect sense, as it was all those things, metal, doom, drone, weird. Add to that, lovely, haunting, creepy, ominous and absolutely fucking brilliant.
So here we have a double disc tribute to the masters of slow motion doomed beauty, from a handful of bands, as with most comps, many we'd never heard of, a few we were already big fans of. And also with tributes, how do you pay tribute to a music that is already so perfect? Do you try to sound as much like it as possible, or change it into something else entirely? Somehow, all of the bands here have managed a little bit of both, enough that this is a gorgeous and epic funereal doom record all the way through. Pretty enough to appeal to folks who just like their music dark and dreamy, but heavy enough to mesmerize the blackest hearted of metalheads.
Right out of the gate, Nest (who we'd never heard of) offer up a 14 minute version of a track off the first Skepticism, and do their own sort of blissed out reverential dronedoom version which might be our favorite track on the comp. Stretches of lilting acoustic guitars over rumbling drones, separated by shimmering keyboards and slow plodding muted riffs, so soft it's barely metal at all, more a sort of droning slowcore. Much like the original, but even more soft and shimmery.
The rest of disc one, offer up more traditional doom versions of Skepticism classics, but each twisted and tweaked enough to be a good fresh listen. The final track on disc one, "The Organium" by Oktor, might be the weirdest, a sort of industrialized, mechanical stumbling doom lurch, with sung / spoken deep crooned vocals. Weird but super cool.
The highlight of disc two is of course Rigor Sardonicous, who we of course LOVE, and who do a killer version of "Chorale", beginning with backwards guitars, which eventually morph into a massive downtuned dirge, with that mournful melody buried in the mix, and the strangely loud cymbals we love so much (see some of our other RS reviews about that). The other groups on the second disc definitely take their liberties, Calmsite, turn their track into almost death metal, Aarni give Skepticism a folky makeover, and It Will Come, start out slow and sludgy, but then slip into some sort of drifting post rock slowcore. It's all pretty awesome. How bad could it be starting with Skepticism songs after all?! But either way, this is an awesome collection of intense and beautiful, slow sad heavy dooooooooom, that most definitely does Skepticism proud.
Achtung! Last chance to get with the In-Kraut, if you haven't already! This excellent series' third (and, sadly, final) volume offers up another twenty tracks of rare, super groovy dancefloor filling fodder from West Germany, circa 1967 to 1974, all of it pretty amazing and also amusing, in that it's generally waaay over the top and ultra-kitschy. In fact some of these tracks are so ridiculous, sooo deliberately go-go ga-ga "psychedelic" and "hip" and "groovy" that it's almost like they're parodies of these sort of swingin' sixties sounds, a la Austin Powers - who if he were German, would be getting down to exactly these sorts of swinging tunes.
If you're already an In-Kraut initiate you know what to expect: a mix of instrumentals and vocal numbers (speaking of vocal numbers, "Butterflies Never Cry" by Georgees is INSANE, utterly out of hand) done by big band-ish combos looking to wow the hipster denizens of Deutschland's discotheques back in the day. Which means this stuff is delightfully dated and far out at once, with fuzzy acid rock guitars slipped in alongside the funky beats, jazzy, zazzy horns, and lush orchestral maneuvers.
Other than the Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra (whose "World Is Gone" is almost as disturbing as it is gleefully goofy and groovy) we don't really recognize too many of the artists here, except a few who also appeared on previous In-Kraut installments, most are totally unknown to us, yet awesome, which is a reason to buy a compilation like this. Some names: Daisy Clan, The Rainbow Orchestra, Inga, Ambros Seelos, Rolf Kuhn, Certain Lions & Tigers, Adam & Eve, Acid, Heinz Kiessling, The German Top Five, Memphis Black, Karl Schiller... and a bunch more. Just a few of the highlights include the Beatles composition "A Hard Day's Night" as performed by Katja Ebstein (which could have been a standout on that recent Easy Beatles collection), and a quite, uh, horny rendition of Led Zep's "Whole Lotta Love" done by Dieter Zimmermann (and band), in the tradition of the Deep Purple cover that appeared on vol. 2.
From pop-rock covers to original soundtrack themes, there's plenty of shuffling grooves and slinky instrumentals (Acid's "Hipguard" would thrill Christine 23 Onna) to make this the perfect lava-lamp / mirror-ball crossover collection. Ja, vol. 3 is as strong the first two, highly recommended. You can't listen to this and NOT be having fun!
And as usual with these In-Kraut comps, the cd booklet is packed with graphics and text pertaining to each track. It's quite clear that the compilers know their stuff!
We've been DYING for this. In pretty much every review of a grime or dubstep record, we lament the lack of decent releases, at least in the US. But for the last couple years, Portland based dubstep label Lo Dubs, has been (not so) quietly releasing 12" after 12" of crushing, bass heavy, dancefloor destroying modern dubstep from a whole new crop of dubsteppers. We managed to get a handful of each of the 12"s, never really enough to review, but the wait was worth it, now ALL of those 12"s are compiled on this here double cd. One disc mixed, the other a collection of all the 12"s, both completely kick ass.
Very few of the names are recognizable, unless you're already a little dubstep obsessed, well, except Nadja, more on that in a second, but half the names here are becoming fast favorites, South3rn, Starkey, Pacheko, all have taken the dubstep template and cranked it up, added their own style. This isn't nearly as laid back as a lot of dubstep, this stuff is hard, the beats dense and heavy, the atmospheres ominous, lots of buzz and rumble, plenty of lo-fi grit, the vibe is almost more like old school raga jungle, but all wrapped around that unmistakable dubstep stutter.
And yeah Nadja / Aidan Baker completists, there is indeed a Nadja dubstep remix here, perpetrated by the legendary Vex'd, however, the original is barely recognizable, all the crush and buzz of the original is buried beneath Vex'd's brutal beat, sick synth swells, and all sorts of grinds and beeps, the end result is just as intense and brutal as a Nadja track, but rendered in electronics and beats. Awesome. But then, pretty much every track here is a killer, from dubbed out reggae, to robotic electro, to skeletal groove, super raw synthed out basslines wrapped around jagged dubbed out beats, alien effects, Jamaican style toasting, tons of buzz and weird skittery groove, anyone who has been digging dubstep at all NEEDS this. If you loved Milanese, Burial, Venetian Snares, the Box Of Dub comps, then this is for you...
Jim Blanchard and Misty Morgan were two of country music strangest creatures. Not only releasing some far-out sides as a duo, they helped produce many of Nashville's more left-field acts. Nashville Sputnick, the latest compilation from the Omni Recording Corporation (who also released Porter Wagoner's The Rubber Room, and Bruce Haack's Electric Lucifer) features many of Blanchard and Morgan's production highlights from the fifties to the present. Like the space-age sounds of Joe Meek meeting the down-home (and often cornball) wit of Hee-Haw, this compilation covers obscure and little heard sides of country-pop gold.
Hailing from Buffalo, but meeting in Hollywood, Florida where they both played lounge piano in neighboring clubs, the duo seemed psychically connected to meet (especially after finding out they were born in the same hospital, and their parents and siblings shared the same names, amongst other strange synchronicities). Releasing a string of 45's under different names and independent labels, Blanchard found his way into Nashville as an independent producer after producing surprise hit "Gemini" which ended up being covered by The Ventures. Influenced by The Tornadoes, "Telstar", Blanchard and Morgan saw a way for country music to be taken out of the "earthly moorings" that had reigned supreme in Nashville. Years before mavericks like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson had wrangled creative control for themselves from the grip of the Nashville machine in the seventies, Blanchard and Morgan, consummate outsiders, managed to shake up the establishment by penning tons of tunes with a novelty flair and studio gimmickry that became increasing popular. Mostly because they weren't about the usual country music themes. Songs about the space age, time travel, dancing skeletons, and living dead chickens along with more common themes about travelin, cowards, and sensitive love songs, gave the duo enough credibility by taking country music out of its more provincial themes and actually relating to current events and style trends emerging in the sixties. Although most of the acts they produced early on like Joel Mathis, Rusty Diamond, Donel Austin, and Brad Wolfe never broke big, they were paving the way to break out themselves, charting a string of hits in the seventies such as "Tennessee Bird Walk" and "Somewhere In Virginia In The Rain" (of which a disco version is included here). Nashville Sputnick contains a rare glimpse into a spacey sound that is so little heard or remembered in country music, but one that should be played as often as possible.
The world is full of massive metal labels, Century Media, Relapse, Metal Blade, each home to hundreds and hundreds of bands, lots of bands we love, but plenty we could certainly do without. There are way more tiny little metal labels doing their own thing, WAY below the commercial radar, each cultivating their own unique little scene, based on a combination of location, style, and in the case of Rusty Axe, a totally brilliant, massively fucked and utterly idiosyncratic DIY approach to metal music. Every little while, Rusty Axe release a super cheap label sampler and every time we are totally blown away by the sheer weirdness and genius of the bands they dig up.
This time around (volume 4!) there are way more familiar names than usual, but that in no way makes this comp any less appealing. In fact the known names will still seem pretty obscure to all but the most obsessive metalheads: The Wizar'd, Godless, Enbilulugugal, Black Vomit, V.A.C.K., Tjolgtjar, Marks Of The Masochist, and that's really about the only bands we know. Other until-now-unknown-to-us bands include Sermon Of Foulness, Trasher, Dead... Again, Sacrificial Blood, Talk Sick Earth, Esprit Derange, Brobdingnagian, Infinite Missiles, well we could go on and on, needless to say, for adventurous metalheads, this is the shit! Heavy on the black metal, but with plenty of doom and noise and fuzz and buzz and howl.
Highlights include: a new track from aQ faves Black Vomit, purveyors of True Sheffield Black Psychedelia, which hear means a plodding blown out wall of buzz, peppered with fucked up effects and creepy inhuman vox, so heavy and in the red, it manages to almost slip into shoegaze territory. Almost. Toil offer up some lo-fi blackness, rife with classic metal riffing, but some seriously fucked up howled vocals and some tangled confusional leads. The Wizar'd cover Witchfinder General, the drums stumble gloriously, the guitars SO buzzy and hot, the vocals like a karaoke Zeeb Parkes. Enbilulugugal don't disappoint (do they ever?) with some retro thrash, but rendered all scribbly and lo-fi with INSANE vocals that sound like a million pterodactyls. Infinite Missiles are all old school retro punky thrash, with killer riffing and shouted vocals. Gaiman offer up the 'short version' of their track, which clocks in at almost 8 minutes, a sluggish Burzumy trawl through sonic black swamps with some gurgling underwater vokills and a bit of Viking riffage here and there. V.A.C.K. offer up some maniacal basement black metal, furious drumming, buzzsaw riffs and howled hellish shrieks�Fuck, who are we kidding, all the tracks here rule, not all of them will have us running out to track everything down by the band, but in the context of this comp, they are all pretty darn near perfect, in their own totally fucked and fractured, demented and damaged way.
Pretty soon we're gonna have to stop complaining about not getting enough dubstep. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the double cd collection from PDX label Lo Dubs, and now we've got this, another killer collection from Soul Jazz, a follow up to their Box Of Dub collection. But where Box Of Dub seemed to cover a wide sonic spectrum of dubstep and modern dub, Steppa's Delight is all the current hyped shit, dubplates, white labels, singles, lots of names we already know and love, Kode9, Benga, The Bug, Shackleton, but loads more we've never heard before.
Right out of the gate, it's already a winner, with Kode9's "9 Samurai", a dubstep classic if there ever was, sounding like the RZA gone dubstep, ominous cinematic samples, a strange skittery beat, brief squalls of intense synth buzz, some creepy spoken word, this is like the dubstep version of that ubiquitous Massive Attack song, groove but so full of dread. Would be surprised if this didn't start showing up in soundtracks pretty soon (Guy Ritchie? You listening?). Next up is Benga, who while not as grim sounding, still offers up some intense minor key grooves, complex skitter, and some jagged buzzing synth melodies. Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" we already loved from that Skull Disco comp a while back, and it still sounds amazing, murky and menacing, the drums muted and murky, except for the occasional gunshot-like snare blast, mumbled vocals, haunting swells and deep atmospherics. The Bug Teams up with Warrior Queen, for a dense slab of buzz, some super heavy low end, a slithery bass line, simple stripped down beats, and some crazy catchy sing songy toasting. There's even some grime here and there, with Skepta contributing a killer convoluted flow to Plastician's "Intensive Snare". Uncle Sam's dubstep is almost straight old school reggae, except for that little dubby shuffle. Goth-Trad offers up some seriously darkened dub, the neverending bassline buzz, the clattery percussion, the haunting sampled vocals, a horror movie melody straight out of Halloween. Shit, we could go on and on, track by track, but by now you probably realize this is a must have. Like we mentioned in the Lo Dubs review, the dubstep and grime obsessed absolutely need this, and if you dug Milanese, Kode9 and the Box Of Dub comps then this too is another must have.
Pretty soon we're gonna have to stop complaining about not getting enough dubstep. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the double cd collection from PDX label Lo Dubs, and now we've got this, another killer collection from Soul Jazz, a follow up to their Box Of Dub collection. But where Box Of Dub seemed to cover a wide sonic spectrum of dubstep and modern dub, Steppa's Delight is all the current hyped shit, dubplates, white labels, singles, lots of names we already know and love, Kode9, Benga, The Bug, Shackleton, but loads more we've never heard before.
Right out of the gate, it's already a winner, with Kode9's "9 Samurai", a dubstep classic if there ever was, sounding like the RZA gone dubstep, ominous cinematic samples, a strange skittery beat, brief squalls of intense synth buzz, some creepy spoken word, this is like the dubstep version of that ubiquitous Massive Attack song, groove but so full of dread. Would be surprised if this didn't start showing up in soundtracks pretty soon (Guy Ritchie? You listening?). Next up is Benga, who while not as grim sounding, still offers up some intense minor key grooves, complex skitter, and some jagged buzzing synth melodies. Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" we already loved from that Skull Disco comp a while back, and it still sounds amazing, murky and menacing, the drums muted and murky, except for the occasional gunshot-like snare blast, mumbled vocals, haunting swells and deep atmospherics. The Bug Teams up with Warrior Queen, for a dense slab of buzz, some super heavy low end, a slithery bass line, simple stripped down beats, and some crazy catchy sing songy toasting. There's even some grime here and there, with Skepta contributing a killer convoluted flow to Plastician's "Intensive Snare". Uncle Sam's dubstep is almost straight old school reggae, except for that little dubby shuffle. Goth-Trad offers up some seriously darkened dub, the neverending bassline buzz, the clattery percussion, the haunting sampled vocals, a horror movie melody straight out of Halloween. Shit, we could go on and on, track by track, but by now you probably realize this is a must have. Like we mentioned in the Lo Dubs review, the dubstep and grime obsessed absolutely need this, and if you dug Milanese, Kode9 and the Box Of Dub comps then this too is another must have.
Pretty soon we're gonna have to stop complaining about not getting enough dubstep. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the double cd collection from PDX label Lo Dubs, and now we've got this, another killer collection from Soul Jazz, a follow up to their Box Of Dub collection. But where Box Of Dub seemed to cover a wide sonic spectrum of dubstep and modern dub, Steppa's Delight is all the current hyped shit, dubplates, white labels, singles, lots of names we already know and love, Kode9, Benga, The Bug, Shackleton, but loads more we've never heard before.
Right out of the gate, it's already a winner, with Kode9's "9 Samurai", a dubstep classic if there ever was, sounding like the RZA gone dubstep, ominous cinematic samples, a strange skittery beat, brief squalls of intense synth buzz, some creepy spoken word, this is like the dubstep version of that ubiquitous Massive Attack song, groove but so full of dread. Would be surprised if this didn't start showing up in soundtracks pretty soon (Guy Ritchie? You listening?). Next up is Benga, who while not as grim sounding, still offers up some intense minor key grooves, complex skitter, and some jagged buzzing synth melodies. Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" we already loved from that Skull Disco comp a while back, and it still sounds amazing, murky and menacing, the drums muted and murky, except for the occasional gunshot-like snare blast, mumbled vocals, haunting swells and deep atmospherics. The Bug Teams up with Warrior Queen, for a dense slab of buzz, some super heavy low end, a slithery bass line, simple stripped down beats, and some crazy catchy sing songy toasting. There's even some grime here and there, with Skepta contributing a killer convoluted flow to Plastician's "Intensive Snare". Uncle Sam's dubstep is almost straight old school reggae, except for that little dubby shuffle. Goth-Trad offers up some seriously darkened dub, the neverending bassline buzz, the clattery percussion, the haunting sampled vocals, a horror movie melody straight out of Halloween. Shit, we could go on and on, track by track, but by now you probably realize this is a must have. Like we mentioned in the Lo Dubs review, the dubstep and grime obsessed absolutely need this, and if you dug Milanese, Kode9 and the Box Of Dub comps then this too is another must have.
It really doesn't sound like that good an idea. Reggae versions of country classics. But from the first few strains of Johnny Cash's "Ring Of Fire", as interpreted by the Skatalites, that instantly recognizable melody, the vocal line replaced by a trombone, the original's swing replaced by some Jamaican groove, it suddenly becomes clear that it's not such a bad idea at all, and as the compilation progresses, it begins to seem like a fantastic idea, and why the hell didn't anyone think of it sooner?! Jamaican bands were always covering and reinterpreting American music, rhythm and blues, funk and soul, and as we've discovered, country too, all it took was for Trojan to gather them all up. Trojan do their usual fantastic job, three discs worth of the best reggae country covers, with excellent liner notes, all tucked in a little cardboard box.
So many classics, "Tennessee Waltz", "Stand By Your Man", "Help Me Make It Through The Night", "Take Me Home Country Roads", "My Elusive Dreams", "Don't Take Your Guns To Town", "Will The Circle Be Unbroken", and more and more, performed by folks like Hortense Ellis, Max Romeo, Dennis Brown, John Holt, Toots & The Maytals and others. After a few listens to these reggae versions, the songs sound so perfect, and so classic, that gets hard to remember the originals, and even harder to imagine how the originals could have ever sounded better.
This isn't all that new, but we've been listening to it like crazy, so we figured lots of aQ customers would probably dig it as much as we do!
Varghkoghargasmal. When we first discovered this German one man band, it was via a cassette, with a black and white photocopied cover, a washed out image of some wintry forest landscape, accompanied by the legend 'wooden metal'. Needless to say we were totally intrigued, only to discover, that there wasn't anything really that metal about it, or wooden even. Not sure if 'wooden' referred to the trees, or to acoustic guitars, but none of that mattered once we head the music inside. A twisted confusional mix of slowed down Dick Dale style surf riffage, stumbling drums, haunting melodies, warbly organs, all wrapped around a simple motorik almost krautrock groove. We had no idea what to call it, or really even what to think, other than being totally smitten, transfixed and ensorcelled. Definitely ensorcelled.
So here we have the brand new album from Avenger, the man solely responsible for Varghkoghargasmal, and if anything, it's even more haunting and mysterious, more creepy and strange, and somehow way more beautiful.
It's a difficult sound to explain, the guitars are clean, but are often still playing in a black metal style, frantic riffing or rapid picking, but just as often the guitars are spidery and minor key, unfurling lugubrious tendrils of creepy twang, or reverbed shimmer. The vocals are minimal, a hushed whisper here and there, a Viking style chant during one song, but it's mostly left to the music, which is incredibly evocative, it's like some sort of acoustic black metal, mixed with slowed down surf rock, dark languorous krautrock, and a distinct Morricone vibe as well. And then there are the drums, which by design or by happenstance, are a definite sonic focal point, as they are WAY up in the mix, and they are all over the place, the fills are chaotic, the rhythms stumble and stutter, but in their imperfections lie a truly unique sort of emotion and feeling not found in most music. The drums anchor everything, locking into foresty krautrock grooves, sputtering into dense little tumbling squalls, the prefect framework for Avenger's rickety moonlit jams.
Most of the songs creep and crawl, sometimes behind a curtain of rainfall, the sound of the forest spirits, flickering firelight, fireflies lighting up the canopy overhead, pianos pick out mournful melodies, the drums, lurching along, a perfectly imperfect accompaniment, organs wheeze, synths whir, steel strings twang, the whole thing so impossibly transcendent, effortlessly evoking ancient atmospheres and deep emotions. When the band lock into a more rocking groove, and the rhythm builds into something propulsive, the guitars stretch out into long streaks of buzzing melodies, the organ plays along like some old time music box, and the sound transforms before your ears and transports you to some truly mysterious otherworld.
There are some black metal references for sure, mostly the ambient bits of Burzum, and some of the riffing recalls suicidal black metal, albeit played with no distortion and more melancholy really than miserable, some of the more frenzied parts even sound like Iron Maiden played on acoustic guitars, and sometimes the guitars manage to sound like banjos, but still the creepiest and prettiest moments occur when the sound winds down into something much more minimal and muted, letting the keyboards weave fluttery melodies, over whirring drones and spare guitar melodies, only occasionally flecked with little flurries of haphazard drumming.
One of the few records that we can unequivocally describe as being utterly unlike anything else you will ever hear! Hauntingly beautiful, beautifully bizarre, and WAY WAY recommended.
Cover records can tread into dangerous territory. If the song choices are too obvious or well-known (for example: Patti Smith's "Twelve"), it's torture on the listener. But if all the choices are too obscure, it misses the whole point of doing a cover. You want a sense of familiarity, but with enough reinterpretation that the song is re-energized and sounds new again. Vetiver's new record treads that fine line rather gracefully, offering up tracks by familiar enough artists, even if the songs themselves are not the most well known. An avid record collector, Andy Cabic of Vetiver has selected twelve songs that have inspired his folk and roots musical leanings, with a track by Hawkwind being the most left-field. Songs by Louden Wainwright III, Garland Jeffreys, Townes Van Zandt, Biff Rose, Michael Hurley, Ian Matthews, and Norman Greenbaum, may harken back to a day when all these records used to be easily found in second hand shops, where surely most of them were purchased. But the surprises are from the most obscure tracks such as "Sleep A Million Years" by Dia Joyce (from an album by Kathy Heideman) with guest vocals by Vashti Bunyan (!), and "Houses" by Elyse Weinberg. While we would have loved to have heard more diverse genre-busting choices (The Vetiver/Neighbors 12" remix really whetted our appetites for new possibilities with Vetiver's sound), Thing of the past feels just like that, a well worn and dusty artifact that still charms after repeated playing.
A dark and thick and beautiful as a scrying pool of molasses! This is the third solo album from the formidable Steve Von Till (Neurosis, Tribes Of Neurot). He sounds like a man mustering his last shreds of battered hope and dusty breath as dreams fade with the sunlight into dusk. On the surface it may seem quite akin to many other somber country and folk contemporaries, however much like that of his band (whose music traverses terrain so far beyond the bounds of the 'metal' genre in which they are usually slotted), Von Till's music evokes something more -- an expression beyond common man world weary melancholia. The hushed strum of an acoustic guitar offers some comfort as the haunting slink of slide guitar threads its way around Von Till's bristly deep voice cresting into ominous swells of electric guitar grit and distortion. Recommended.
Yet another lost cd-r, dusted off and wheeled out for your perusal, and perhaps purchase. Released last year, this little gem from the now prolific VxPxC was limited to only 50 copies, and thus is long gone. These 8 or 9 being the only remaining copies, means that only a few of you will get lucky, and emerge from the melee with Lizard In The Spring tucked safely in hand, and you will be pleased, for this is a hearty slab of droned out fractured folks and space-y drift. Deep snowdrifts of sound, distant voices, wind chime percussion, all very lo-fi but warm and whirring. Track two introduces some laxy drawled vocals, some stripped down rhythms, all drifting weightless in reverb drenched blackness. Like a seriously wasted (or more wasted) Velvets. There's even some harmonica!
The next two tracks are super murky and muddy, like listening to an Avarus cassette on a boombox under a blanket. Wheezing and weary, with that harmonica surfacing again. There's a brief blissy drone coda, but before that, the band spread waaaaay out into a 13 minute underwater space blues jam, that sounds almost orchestral, with deep swells, what sounds like soaring strings, broadcast speakers stuffed with steel wool.
Packaged in a cool mini dvd style case, full color artwork, inserts, hand numbered and crazy limited and way out of print. Last copies ever.
From right here in our sunny San Francisco neighborhood, comes an eagerly anticipated new release that clinches its Record Of The Week status not only by comprising a fantastic debut full-length album of hypnotically searing garagey psych jams, but also by including a BONUS disc (limited edition, first 2000 copies only) in a cardboard sleeve shrinkwrapped to the jewel case, featuring all the tracks from the now-out-of-print 10" and 7" vinyl records released last year that first made us -- and so many others, foremost among 'em Tom Lax of Siltbreeze/Siltblog fame, and Byron Coley at The Wire -- into drooling Wooden Shjips fanatics.
And yes, if you haven't run into them before, it's Wooden ShJips with a J, that's not a typo, just a way we guess of making their moniker more psychedelic (and easier to Google, too). They've garnered a lot of deserved attention from folks into minimalistic psych throb, that's for sure, and further whetted everyone's appetites for this album with the "Summer Of Love" 7" single that came out a couple weeks ago and has already sold out (2nd pressing in the works, be patient).
So, this new self-titled album follows on from that single with five more fuzzy, super groovy, guitar/organ/bass/drums slowburners, somewhere between Comets On Fire and Circle, with a definite Doors-y vibe as well, in part due to the keys which give this an almost loungey relaxed feel at times, and in part due to the occasional laidback Morrison-ish vocals of guitarist Erik Johnson. Erik also makes us think of Neil Young as well, as his more "out" guitar solos -- some if 'em SCORCHING -- could be off of Young's feedback-filled Arc. Or a Les Rallizes Denudes record! Track four, "Blue Sky Bends", having the best Rallizes-ish drone-factor of the disc. Overall, we'd say that these tracks, as a development from their earlier material, exhibits more and more of a throwback to the ballroom Frisco style of the sixties... now they just need to get a light show happening! But something tells us they'd be all about stark bright white strobes and dark black shadows only, maybe some b&w op art spirals, if their monochrome packaging aesthetic and the general heavy lidded mood of the music is anything to go by...
And then there's the limited bonus disc. Don't dawdle, you don't want to miss it (particularly if you didn't score the original vinyl releases). It's got the three tracks from their debut Shrinking Moon For You 10" (the one that they didn't even tell us about even though we see these guys on the street every day, we had to find out about it from Mr. Lax's blog!) 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. These are the songs that had us jonesing for a full length, which you've just read about up above, and now all this music is together in one crucial package, while they last.
FYI, a vinyl version of the full-length is to follow in a month or two we're told... and maybe Holy Mountain can come up with some better cover art for it too? We were a bit underwhelmed by the blurry black & white photo of the band sitting around on the steps to someone's house, but then again their vinyl releases were in clear sleeves with no art to speak of, so I guess elaborate packaging ain't their thing. But motorik minimalist krautrocky pulsations, mellow Doorsy '60s groove, and out and out geetar psych-splosions are, so we can't complain!!
