Another new addition to the steadily growing flock on the Bay Area's Dynamophone label (also see the new boxed 3" cdr by Curium on this list)!
The shimmering atmospheric piano dappled washes on their debut Something Like Nostalgia are a perfect fit. The Abbasi Brothers follow serenely in the formidable footsteps of granddaddies of ambient quietude Brian Eno and Philip Glass. Really really pretty.
Adem spent most of his teens in one of the most influential post-rock groups of the '90s, Fridge. While his former bandmate Kieren Hebden has enjoyed a bit of a higher profile with Four Tet and his various other projects, Adem hasn't been slacking, keeping quite busy himself releasing several records of pastoral and bittersweet indie-pop. Takes is his stab at a covers record, and while we're starting to grow a bit tired of the 'covers album' concept, we have to say we do appreciate how Adem actually covers contemporary artists and doesn't try to pretend to have obscure influences just to get cool points. And thankfully we are spared from hearing another Bob Dylan cover. Instead Adem wears his influences proudly, an indie boy at heart for sure, covering the likes of Pinback, Yo La Tengo, Bedhead, Low, Aphex Twin, The Breeders, Tortoise, Bjork and more. Kind of like hanging out with your crush in their dorm room as he serenades you with all your favorite songs from the '90s.
The newest entry in Touch's ongoing series of limited 7"s singles, with past installments from Oren Ambarchi, Fennesz, Philip Jeck and Chris Watson, this is the first one by an artist new to us, but it manages to fit well with the other releases in the series, and has us dying to hear more from the mysterious AER (actually the musical moniker of Touch design director Jon Wozencroft). Utilizing nothing but "four atmosphere recordings, radio and an organ stop" AER concocts a darkly minimal soundscape of field recordings and hushed melody. The sounds from the street outside, footstep, voices talking, singing, sirens, thunder (or automobile backfires, or perhaps firecrackers), interwoven with strange clicking, machine like chatter, like a spinning bicycle wheel, random clanks and clatters, room noise and other sonic detritus, while beneath it all, warm whirring melodies drift up from below, adding nuance and mood to what might otherwise be a straight field recording, a rhythm way off in the distance or buried way down in the mix, is sometimes discernible, but only barely, and in fact, could be a trick of the ears, random sounds falling into place, creating not-really-there rhythms. But it hardly matters, we hear them, and they offer a sort of ghostly structure to the proceedings. Quite nice, and we can't wait to hear more.
That magical air in Iceland continues spawn some of the most soaring and beautiful sounds found anywhere on the globe. At just 21 years old, Olafur Arnalds is emerging as a strong voice in a new wave of modern classical inspired majestic sounds. On this, his debut full length, he employs strings, piano, guitar, organ, melodica and subtle ambient electronics at times, to create incredibly rich and lush sounds. Inspired by everyone from Eric Satie, to John Luther Adams, Kronos Quartet to the Rachels and even Godspeed You Black Emperor, as well as, of course, his countrymen Sigur Ros who he's often perfromed with live. Somber and elegant and packaged beautifully with artwork that compliments the kind of fragments of memory his beautiful music evokes.
Baader Brains. This is one of those wonderful instances where the name kind of says it all: frenzied, powerful, pummeling hardcore punk mixed with the aesthetics and politics of extreme Marxist urban guerilla movements. It's by no means a novel combination, but it's incredibly rare for a band of this ilk to be so well done and for every one of its elements to have been given so much obvious consideration. Musically, The Complete Unfinished Works Of The Young Tigers takes the majority of its queues from Damaged-era Black Flag and the Gravity Records catalog, but manages to still sound vibrant, and totally current.�It's muscular, angular, fractured and anthemic all at once and recalls everything that makes us excited about this particular brand of punk rock (post-hardcore, or whatever you want to call it).�This should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the pedigree of Baader Brain's membership: Mike Kirsch and Jose Palafox (guitar and drums, respectively) have done time in some of the heaviest hitters of the West Coast US hardcore scene since the late '80s.�Kirsch, in particular, is a revered figure in the Bay Area, having lent his talents on guitar, vocals and electronics to a long list of bands including Fuel, Torches To Rome, and Please Inform The Captain This Is A Hijack; while Palafox's drumming has been an integral part of Struggle, The Swing Kids, and Yaphet Kotto.�Both also did time in the mighty Bread and Circuits, who sole LP is an underrated classic.� Suffice to say, if you have even a passing interest in the catalogs of Ebullition, The Mountain Collective, Level Plane, or Gravity Records, this is going to freak your beak.
Where Baader Brains becomes (as the youth say) some seriously next level shit, is with everything that surounds the music itself and their uncanny ability to balance the two without either one outshining the other.�The group's devotion to the aesthetic of leftist paramilitary revolution is beyond impressive, while their command and use of its related tropes and references is encyclopedic.�The packaging, album art, liner notes and samples that bridge most of the songs together manage to string together a bewildering series of shout outs (both blatant and subversive) to everything from the RAF to the Khmer Rouge to the PFLP to the Black Panthers and more (there's even some John Zerzan-style future primitivism thrown in there for good measure)!�It's a flood of images, sounds and references that manages to capture the frenetic audio-visual overload of the band's live show, something that we here in the Bay Area are lucky enough to get to see on a semi-regular basis (picture ever-evolving uniforms of the Young Tigers, imposters posing as the actual band being run off the stage at gunpoint, tiger striped balloons falling from the ceiling, split screen video projections, and a seamless integration of live music and samples all crammed together in about 20 minutes of whip-tight performance).�Baader Brains' commitment to its rigorous aesthetic is so complete and so all-encompassing in its mix of different media, that it almost makes more sense to think of this LP as a small part of a much larger piece of ongoing performance art.� That said, this is a seriously ass-kicking record and those of you with no interest in the band's political leanings or no knowledge of the references will find nothing lacking in the record's musical content.
Unsurprisingly, The Complete Unfinished Works Of The Young Tigers comes lavishly packaged to the point that it took three separate labels to come up with enough resources to make it happen.� You get a full-colour jacket printed inside and out), an LP-sized obi, two separate insert booklets, and a fully printed inner sleeve.�It's seriously over-the-top, it's limited to 1000 copies worldwide (300 of those are on swirled yellow and black vinyl and yes we have a handful of those, but will be doled out RANDOMLY!!!), and is selling out all over the place.�Don't sleep on this one - this is one of the most exciting hardcore records we've heard in a long time, and we can't recommend it highly enough!
Another new Aidan Baker release, another sublime gem. And again, we find ourselves wanting to just review it with a single sentence. "New Aidan Baker. If you are a fan, you will love this. So buy it." But look at the rest of this list. If we had that sort of self control, and if we weren't so inclined to gush, this list would be a whole different beast.
But before we get into it, you might as well take our aborted abbreviated review to heart. If you are a fan, you WILL love this and should probably buy it. So fans can push the buy button and move on. Except for those fans who aren't so sure they need another Baker disc to add to the already-threatening-to-collapse Baker/Nadja cd shelf at home. You all can stick around, along with the folks who might somehow be asking "who the heck is this Aidan Baker guy and what's he all about?" The simple answer just requires a visit to the aQ website, and a quick search on either Aidan Baker or Nadja. There you can read all about it, and listen to almost everything we've carried by him/them. But as with all Baker releases, this one is a bit different, and bears a bit more of a description.
Book Of Nods begins with a 8 minute drift that sounds remarkable like a more subdued Necks jam. Simple piano figure repeated over and over, slowly shifting and changing, but looped and hypnotic and dreamily repetitive. Almost like a much more mellow and muted Lubomyr Melnyk, soft flurries of piano blurred into indistinct streaks, quite lovely. The 18 minute follow up is another sort-of-jazz sprawl, slow smoldering drones, super spare abstract percussion, warm and languid and laid waaaaay back, before the original slow motion drift is subsumed by some Pop Ambient washed out whir, giving the track a strange alien ethereal sheen. Track 3, "Obsession", is like a dubbed out hybrid of Low and Bohren, jazzy slowcore, allowed to slither and crawl, the drums a bit more skittery, some of the melodies effected, and flipped backwards, allowed to swoop and thhhhwp, there are even some fluttering flutes, again, bringing to mind a Necks style jazz jam, but give a bit of an electronic tweaking. The 15 minute closer, is yet another slow burning jazzy slowcore crawl, but here the drums are a bit harder, the mood is much more ominous and foreboding, everything wreathed in deep shimmering drones and distant rumbles, peppered with still more swooping backward beats, steaks of feedback, building to an intense, skittery, skipping coda, sounding a bit like Oval remixing the Necks. Nice.
And thus somehow, yet another Baker disc well worth owning! And not a bad place to start for the newbie, although the sounds here are unlike most of Baker's output.
Beautifully packaged in an oversized fold over textured paper digisleeve, with a dearth of information, just various Asian calligraphic characters. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
We love our modern Appalachia, tangled steel strings, gorgeous sprawling avant bluegrass, Fahey, Jack Rose, James Blackshaw, Ilyas Ahmed, it's a crowded field, but all the key players manage to create something much more special than just a Fahey rehash. Sure there are tons of folks out there with a guitar, a heavily worn copy of Death Chants, and not an original musical idea in their head, but there are the few, like the above folks mentioned, who took that sound, and were inspired to create their own soundworlds. You can add Matt Baldwin to that list.
It's a little hard to put a finger on what exactly makes Baldwin's sound so special, it could be more of a focus on classic melody, than on pick and strum, the opening track on Paths Of Ignition darkly unfurls into a warm whirring pastoral guitarscape, lots of major key melodies, unlikely harmonies, strange bits of slippery slide, and plenty of electric guitar buzz, some soaring growling leads, all woven into some haunting raga infused psychedelic space folk. The whole track is laced with tangles of wild almost-shredding guitar, deep resonant drones, swirling little melodic flourishes, it all transforms -his- take on Appalachia into something much more tripped out, psych rock and almost poppy in its prettiness.
The rest of the disc hews a little closer to the neo-Appalachia party line, but even then, his tracks slither and buzz, lots of haunting guitar rumble, intricate finger picking, delicate melodies, dreamy and drifty, mysterious and timeless. Except the one cover, the song that actually got us interested in Baldwin in the first place. It's only 4 minutes long, but it's a killer. Baldwin takes on Judas Priest's "Winter" and nails it. The main riff of the original sounds perfect on a steel string, brooding and ominous, beneath that guitar deep swells of buzzing guitardrone pulses and throbs, and the vocals, Baldwin does a pretty excellent Halford, a reverb drenched high pitched croon, complete with vibrato and little trills, the track finishes off with some killer lead guitar, sprawled over that gorgeous languorous main riff, that seems to slither and drift on forever.
Any one into the current crop of modern Appalachian / neo-folk / whatever-you-call-it guitar music will definitely dig this, and while it's worth it for the Priest cover alone, the whole record is pretty fantastic. Now it's up to Blackshaw to cover some old Scorpions, or Rose to take on a classic UFO or Uriah Heep track, so if either of you guys is reading this...
Bonn Ist Supreme is a rare glimpse into the live performative side of guitar soli legend Robbie Basho. Recorded in Bonn, Germany six years before his death, Basho was by then in his less interesting Windham Hill phase of his career, but you wouldn't know it by this recording. Containing many pieces from his Takoma-era heyday, Basho's fusion of Celtic, Middle Eastern and medieval influences on his guitar work made him the least blues-based of the Takoma triad of himself, John Fahey, and Leo Kotte. Melding an esoteric spirituality to his playing style, it's easy to get lost in Basho's raga like compositions. Some of the pieces do contain his unique singing which is often a dealbreaker for some (though we dig his vocal stylings), but it doesn't get in the way too much here, and shouldn't keep folks from enjoying his mesmerizingly sublime guitarwork. Nice!
While Beck's last album, The Information wasn't all that bad, it sure didn't leave much of a lasting impression. Which broke a streak of very memorable and eclectic releases from the all-grown-up-now wonder-kid from LA.
With Modern Guilt he's enlisted the services of Danger Mouse for production duties and has crafted a really solid West Coast pop record. We can't help but be reminded of Spoon, not only because of the cover art, but also some of the hooks and melodies in many of the songs are definite Spponisms. But ultimately this sounds like a really solid Beck record without any kitsch but with lots of catchy and earnest songs throughout. Very nice.
A couple lists ago we had the Easy Beatles compilation... now we've got some not-so-easy Beatles! This reissue will drive some folks crazy, but we're lovin' it. Hooray for East Bay label Hook Or Crook for getting their hands on this great outsider classic out of Omaha, Nebraska circa 1981. The Better Beatles played Beatles songs with a naive and fucked up post-punk charm. While there are no shortages of Beatles covers and tribute records, none have been made that suit our bizarre tastes better than this one! With primitive electronics that sounded like they could break at any moment and a detached delivery that gives these songs a feeling somewhere between cold wave, new wave and no wave. Not far off from what The Flying Lizards were doing around this same time but much more out of the loop and less self-conscious.
It's super interesting to see how while being one of the most famous and mainstream appreciated bands of all time, the Beatles have spawned so many outsider fanatics from Daniel Johnston to Bobb Trimble. What makes The Better Beatles so damn cool is that they truly made these songs something else, it's not just novelty (though that is a factor), there is a lot of intensity in their delivery. They might have been joking about being "better" but maybe they meant it, they certainly sound like they mean it when they sing John and Paul's lyrics, which are often the only recognizable parts of the songs. We can't count the times we've had a customer in the store get reeled in by this record without even knowing that it's Beatles covers and when they find out they say something like 'I don't even like The Beatles but this is fucking cool!' and even for those of us who love the Beatles as well we can agree, this IS fucking cool!
It's been a while since we've heard from Australia's Grey Daturas or any of the various related combos. It's only really because for a year or two, it was almost like they lived here. Constantly on tour, using SF as home base. We'd see them at shows, in the shop. And we haven't had much new besides the Neurot full length, but we do have a big order of Daturas and other goodies waiting to ship, so that'll take care of that.
But for those who just can't wait, we have collab number two from Blarke Bayer and Black Widow (we might have one or two copies of the first one, see elsewhere on the site), BB being Ben Andrews of down under grind commando unit Agents of Abhorrence, and Black Widow being Rob MacManus from the Grey Daturas, and it's another set of three songs, clocking in at just less than a half hour, and is just as sonically varied (but slightly jazzier, more on that in a minute) as their first tete a tete.
The opener is a skittery free jazz drift, little fragments of piano drifting in a black expanse, the drums chaotic and powerful, very free, shuffling subtly one second, exploding into frenzied fills the next, all the while a sax moans and bleats and skronks, its long tones laid over the proceedings like high end streaks, giving the track a weird free jazz drone vibe. The second track is more of a thick guitary drone, the drums relegated to mute throb and pulse, demarcating a slowly smoldering smear of shimmering strings, swirling feedback, abstract melodic fragments, some post rock lope, some Morricone-ish twang, some crackle and hiss, the drums lazy and laid back, some sort of doomed minimal slowcore drift. Quite lovely. Wouldn't mind a whole disc of this stuff. The duo finish off with a super minimal low end exploration, so minimal we hesitate to describe it as a drone, it's more like a collection of ambient sounds, the distant whir of a building's machinery, the sound of air circulating, the distant murmur of conversation, but take all that and blur it and mute it into a barely there ghost of sound, over which a series of electrical impulses are transmitted, glitch, crackle, super subtle electronic textures drifting above a music so subtle and minimal it could almost be the sound of your speakers humming. Intense and quite beautiful, but may require some high powered headphones to truly appreciate.
Every once in a while, we sort of wish we could just move on musically, forget whatever it was we super into, no matter how magical. Find a new band to fall in love with. To obsess over. To slavishly track down every single shred of recorded music by. Buying multiple versions of the same record just to get one extra song, or a just a few more minutes of glorious drone and buzz. But then along comes a record like this, and wipes that wish away. Boris are indeed the rarest of bands. Few groups engender such utter devotion. If it wasn't Boris, sure it would probably be someone else, but it wouldn't be the same.
Not sure if it's the fact that they're Japanese, or that their early records were so shrouded in mystery, or guitarist Wata's utter bad ass coolness, the increasingly elaborate and insane packaging, the outrageously limited releases, it's probably a combination of all of those things, but the overriding factor is ultimately, that they're an amazing band, who are not afraid to change their sound at the drop of a hat, going from shoe gazing dronelords, to crushing sludge doom destroyers, to wild thrashing rock and rollers, with all sorts of unexpected stops in between. Some folks prefer the droning beauty of Flood, others the Stooges-y stomp of Pink, still others the glacial guitar crush of Absolutego, most folks love them all, and who can blame them?
Smile, the latest from this mighty power trio, takes elements of Pink (arguably, most new fans' favorite Boris record, and most old fans' least favorite) and stretches them way out, turning a record that most of us were expecting to be Pink part two, into easily the group's weirdest and most chaotic. Which is in fact a VERY good thing. Add in some guest action from SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley and Japanese guitarist and Rainbow collaborator Michio Kurihara and away we go...
The record opens with "Message", a dramatically redone version of the A side from the now out of print Statement 7". We described "Statement" like this: fans of Boris' Pink will feel right at home. A serious KISS like riff, some cowbell, and then some ridiculously blown out in the red acid psych lead guitar. It's weirdly lo-fi sounding, but still fierce, and if the band sounds a bit fuzzy and muddy, the leads sound like Wata is IN your headphones, ramming her guitar straight into your ears. It's pretty amazing actually. The music is a wild wooly garage metal stomp, tons of FX, wah wah, the vocals though are a bit of surprise. Weirdly poppy. Double tracked. Super melodic, almost sing-along-able. But it's all about the riffy groove and those impossibly acidic guitar freakouts.
But in the stretched out "Message" version, the track begins with some throbbing sub sonic bass, some seventies "woo-hoo" vocals, some hypnotic tribal drumming, a killer minimal groove that never stops, and even when the track kicks in, it's way more sludge-y and gritty with head spinning stereo panning and an awesomely fucked up mix (another reason to pick up the Japanese version, besides the artwork, more on that later).
The second track, most folks should recognize from seeing the band live. A killer riff, some wailing lead vox, wild thrashy drumming, the various parts spiced up with swoops of backwards guitars, and a crumbling super distorted tripped out FX drenched outro. The next track is THE killer of the disc. With guitars so blown out, they threaten to FRY your headphones, a killer stop start groove, weird blown speaker bass, all wrapped around a pretty sweet pop hook, but the band do their best to bury it in crumbling distortion, and acid fried psych freakouts. Until the last half of the track, where things devolve into some super minimal dronescape with soft strummed whispery guitars, a damaged percussive thud, and lots of barely there shimmer.
Our favorite track, oddly enough, is probably the next one, a cover of legendary Japanese group PYG's "Flower Sun Rain", a gorgeously languorous drift, all reverby clean guitars, soulful vocals, simple subtle percussion, a brief squall of gorgeous sun blasted psychguitar, slipping smoothly back into that slow dreamy drift. We'd have been just as happy to hear Boris do a whole record of PYG covers after that one. But then comes "Next Saturn" another weirdly blissed out pop song, muted tones drifting over muted programmed drums and a thick sheet of distorted guitar, and the vocals, which in the past have often detracted from Boris' power, have definitely become an intricate part of their new sound and have improved vastly, now able to carry a song, and in some ways this whole record, and here they soar and croon, a wicked hook and a lilting moody melody. But it wouldn't be Boris if they didn't smash it to bits part way through, and they do, unleashing huge sheets of heavily delayed guitar and dubbed out drums, throbbing bass, all tangled up into glorious psychedelic meltdowns.
Even the heaviest songs on Smile are infused with hooks and offer up brief glimpses of the poppiness underlying the crunch and rrroooar, no truer than on "Dead Destination" (by the way, some of the song titles in this review are probably wrong, as they are in Japanese on the sleeve, and various sources had different titles, arggh), a thick droned out, bliss blast of thick corrosive guitars, wild sinewy, buzz drenched leads, drums literally buried beneath layer after layer of whir and hiss and a dense wall of guitar. Eventually simple finger picked guitar and more dreamy sad vocals surface from within the roiling psychscape, offering a haunting counterpoint to the fierce fury all around. Even here, at it's thickest and most intense, the song is imbued with a certain melancholy, deftly woven into the freaked out guitars and stuttering mostly buried rhythms.
The second to last track, for its first half at least, is a gorgeous slowcore crawl, just plaintive vocals, delicate guitar, soft cymbal shimmer, a gauzy dreamy drift, that eventually fades to silence, before streaks of feedback fall from the sky, an avalanche of drums follow, until an incredibly emotive main riff, heavy and blown out, takes over, dragging the rest of the track with it, slowly churning, a sort of metallicized krautrock jam, the main guitar thick and distorted, but all around it glimmering harmonics and whirling melodies, those soaring vocals, and of course an appropriately majestic, dramatic in-the-red coda.
The record finishes with a massive 20 minute track, untitled, that almost sounds like a single song synopsis of Boris' new sound. Beginning with tripped out backwards guitar, and skeletal melodies, briefly interrupted by a fierce squall of intense psychedelia, only to bliss back out, giving way to a dreamy dirgey shoegazey dirge, all cascading distorted guitars and hazy lazy vocals, eventually overtaken by huge crumbling slabs of slow motion distortion and blinding streaks of high end skree and moaning feedback, finally drifting off into a slow shimmery feedback infused fadeout.
Be prepared for plenty of confusion in the coming months, this is the Japanese version, the domestic Southern Lord version will have a slightly different track listing, including some different mixes, the lp versions too, will be different, we're not exactly sure how yet, but we'll do our best to keep you informed.
But as is usually the case, the Japanese version has knock out packaging, WAY better than the US version. A puffy plastic gatefold, like something you'd buy at the Hello Kitty store, or a bath toy, a yellow transparent heart cut out of the sponge-like background, all the text printed in metallic silver, inside liner notes printed silver ink on yellow vellum, a silver metallic ink on yellow vellum obi.
If you're a crazy Boris obsessive, you're probably gonna need to buy both the Japanese version and the Southern Lord version, and maybe one of the lp versions as well when they come out, but if you're just here for the music, and you were gonna get just one, we'd probably lean toward this one, for the packaging especially, but also for the revamped opening track.
As always, WAY recommended.
The violin is probably the last instrument you think of when you think of underground cd-r noise drone music. Okay, maybe not the last, but it's pretty far down the list for sure. Yet Mr. C. Spencer Yeh has forged a career with his trusty violin, creating a sizable body of work, ranging from full on blown out noise assault, to breathless delicate beauty, to propulsive krautrock infused space rock, and various mixes of all three. We even Record Of The Week-ed his Operator Dead album a while back. But where that record was more of a group effort, this latest disc, Challenger, finds Yeh returning to his solo roots, getting a minimal amount of assistance on just a couple of tracks, but handling the bulk of the soundmaking himself. And while there is no list of instrumentation, we have to assume that violin is not the only instrument present. NOBODY is that good. But even so, Yeh is really really good, and with a violin and whatever else he has in his soundmaking arsenal, he has once again conceived something of great beauty and import, a collection of sounds, of SONGS, an album that is cohesive yet varied, personal and introspective, yet somehow epic and expansive. If anything, this new disc finds Yeh moving his BSC into the rarefied world of spaced out Krautrock. Neu!, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, A.R. & The Machines, Brian Eno. Much in the same way aQ faves Expo '70, channel seventies space kraut, so does Yeh, but where Expo '70 create thick heavy spaced out dronescapes, the sounds on Challenger are much more melodic, and drifty, dreamy and mesmerizing. There is plenty of noise to be found, but it's doled out sparingly, melodies are sometimes halo-ed in buzz, or delicate rhythms wreathed in feedback, but it's always muted and minimal, allowing the melody and arrangement to shine, and shine they do, each track, a gorgeously repetitive stretch of space-y abstract groove, looped, but slowly shifting and changing shape, propulsive but subtly so.
The opening two track salvo is some of the most blissfully beautiful soft noise we've heard. In fact, even calling it noise might be doing it a disservice. The opener is a slow burning slab of minimal murmur, laced with soft tinkling chimes, an abstract ghostly melody over a softly pulsing drone, eventually augmented by some shimmery hiss and random sampled ambience, but instead of distracting, these sonic events, cars driving past, wind, tape hiss, they only add texture to the glimmering drift beneath.
The second track begins with a riff (played on a violin?) that is quickly wrapped up in corrosive swaths of warbly effected buzz, the two elements twisting around one another, creating a strange churning soundscape of stretched out space rock riffage and crumbling distorted drone, that manages to be absolutely riveting.
The next few tracks offer up some more experimental fare, brief chunks of ambient weirdness, one of plastic cup percussion, heavily reverbed, in a wide open stretch of distant whir and tangled electronics, another a symphony of processed vocals, looped and chopped into a hiccupping stuttering soundscape, eventually joined by soft shimmery chords and warm chordal buzz, yet another a collection of crinkles and crackles, like someone stepping on bubble wrap, balling up wrapping paper and a campfire, all draped over the sounds of children laughing and playing.
All before returning to the blissed out dronedrift of the opening few tracks. Reverbed jaw harp floats in a field of static hum and twinkling fragmented melody, deep tones are woven into gentle lilting melodies, symphonic snippets are looped and assembled into a slow building drone, underpinned by fuzzy droney melodies, totally stirring and epic, haunting and mysterious, a bit of Jeck mixed in with BSC's usual glorious buzz, maybe one of the most moving (and possibly one of the best) tracks we've ever heard from Yeh and his 'Core. The final track is an Avarus like coda, sheets of hiss like rainfall (might very well be), bits of percussive chime and clank, plenty of hiss and whir, over the top, a shimmering high end electric melody, that drifts and stutters dreamily, like some alien lullaby.
Absolutely stunning. And thus, entirely and unequivocally recommended.
This is a match that makes perfect sense. As Lichens and Cloudland Canyon have both been making some of the most compelling and rewarding crystalline soundscapes of the last few years. One long track clocking in at around a half hour "Exterminating Angel" does sound like the sum of both of these artists' parts. With the first half sounding much more like Lichens, gorgeous deep in space hazy explorations while the krautier leanings of Cloudland Canyon come into focus in the second half of the track propelling the sounds into their kosmiche orbit. Fans of mid-late '70s Tangerine Dream and early Heldon will for sure want to jump aboard this cosmic adventure.
With all the great records of '80s pop revival we've been diggin' on so much lately (M83, Cut Copy, Hot Chip) it's about time someone did the same with that special time in hip-hop's golden age. Luckily The Cool Kids have stepped up to the plate and made a super fun record that recalls so much of what made us fall in love with hip-hop in the first place. The production and playful spirit captures the old school flavor of folks like EPMD, Eric B & Rakim, RUN-DMC and the first two LL Cool J records. It makes us remember when we would set our VCR's to record those amazing early episodes of Yo! MTV Raps.
We first were exposed to The Cool Kids when they opened for M.I.A last year and while a lot of hip-hop has a hard time translating live, they were so great and full of irresistible energy and youthful charm. We love how stripped down and immediate The Bake Sale sounds. It's clever and dorky but unlike the trend of nerd-on-sleeves 'indie hip-hop' that spawned labels like Anticon and Mush this doesn't have that same kind of smarmy self-consciousness. Instead this is a record that evokes images of spraypaint, video games, colorful hoodies and youthful energy at its best!
Man, we really, really love old school video games around here. The Tron and Rastan games in the store, the Arcade Ambience field recording series, Power Pill Fist, etc. It has to be part of what lured us into the world of Toronto's Crystal Castles and their 8-bit electro mayhem. We're so glad this finally came out, because half of these tracks have been on the internet for about two years and a legitimate release was looking sort of unlikely. But here it is! We digress, on with the review.
Okay, so the duo has been lumped in -- maybe mistakenly -- with the Klaxons, Justice, Digitalism, and the like, but we hear darker, more interesting minor key melodies that occasionally hint at things like The Knife and Junior Boys. In reality, they're not divorced from any of those bands, but there's something about them that gets us. No, not just the aural video game quality, but the undeniable urge to somehow say they're just a bit more punk. Fun. Playful. In fact, there's a handful of tracks on the record that aren't even mixed. And when we saw them play here a year or so ago, their singer Alice was telling us about how she had been kicked out of the previous night's venue for underage drinking.
It doesn't hurt their art-punk street cred that they're best buds with LA's own Health, who they did a split 7" with a year or so ago. When listening to Crystal Castles, there's the feeling that this duo would be just as happy blasting their sounds through a shitty stereo system at their friend's house party, but lucky for us everyone else seems to be feeling it too -- and now they can invite us along to the party.
The third release from SF's Curium comes in the form of a 3" cd-r encased in a slightly larger gift box. As with the rest of the Dynamophone Parcel series, this is a delight to open up and delve into.
Curium (aka Evan Sornstein aka the man behind the label) draws inspiration from literary works, this time it is C.S. Lewis' fantasy realm Bism which "lies below the Shallows of the Underland below Narnia. Gnomes grow living gems and salamanders swim in rivers of fire giving great words of wisdom" (quoted from the liner notes). While the three instrumentals may not necessarily conjure such fantastical visions in your mind, they will offer a soothing dreamy respite from the hecticness of your day. Diminutive as this 3" may seem, there's twenty minutes of loveliness for you sink into as it drifts slowly through limpid, wistful melodic lines.
Psst, seeking more new calming contemplative sounds on this label? Be sure to check out Abbasi Brothers (also reviewed this week) and Fjordne!
Simply stunning sparse and majestic sounds from one of the most talented kora players of all time! Known for his collaborations with everyone from Ali Farka Toure, to Taj Mahal and Bjork. This is Toumani by himself and his kora which he employs to make such magical and enchanting music. Toumani has that same kind of elegance and sheer transcendence that folks like John Fahey and Ravi Shankar had/have with the instruments they mastered. The Mande Variations demonstrates how Diabate has been influenced by Indian classical music, flamenco and blues as well as the Griot music of his native home of Mali. This is the kind of record that allows you to just let go of everything as the hypnotic trance of Diabate's playing takes you away to a higher dimension. The Mande Variations is reminding us of some of our favorite beautiful sound of the last few years from the likes of James Blackshaw, Debashish Bhattacharya and Lanaya. Undeniably stunning and filled with trance inducing soul!
Another manic blast of freaked out 8-bit jams from this curiously monickered purveyor of blown out video game gabber. The sound of Scotch Egg is a bit hard to describe, the closest we can get is, maybe imagine being in an arcade, playing your favorite eighties video game, when inexplicably, lightning strikes the arcade, and the electricity surges through the wiring and right into the video game you're playing, suddenly, the machine freaks out, shooting sparks, the characters on the screen transform into weird shapes and start doing unspeakable things, and the sounds, oh the sounds, that music you grew up with, the soothing lullaby of primitive computer melodies, gone totally haywire, exploding into squalls of utter 8-bit chaos, the rhythms fast and furious tangled and chaotic, flurries of tones, melodies become gnarled and dizzying.
You know that part in Galaga where the mother ship comes down and captures one of your men so you can shoot id down later and have a dual shooter? The sound it makes when it sends out its green and blue tractor beam? Now imagine that sound stretched into a whole song, with the dude from Hella going apeshit on the drums in the background. That perfectly describes one of the songs here. Some of the other tracks sound like the Boredoms if they were transported back to the eighties and tapped to do music for Dig Dug and Mr. Do. Or maybe imagine Venetian Snares, zapped Tron style and beamed into a video game, and these are his desperate musical cries for help. Sound wacked? Well, it is, WAY wacked.
The sounds are all over the map, many you'll recognize as being purloined from some of your favorite video games, but here, they're just tiny parts of a ear pummeling barrage of sound, from Melt Banana style video game grind, to weirdly intense 8-bit drones, all the 'death' music from video games stretched out into actual songs, There are some real drums here and there, some guitar, some fucked up vocals, some tracks even sound like damaged video game free jazz, while others sound like creepy computer math rock, but for the most part it's just frenzied electronic gabber video game lo-fi 8-bit freak out dancefloor destroying mayhem and we LOVE it. Be sure and stick around for the final track, a weird looped groove assembled from what sounds like a tape recorded video game, all lo fi and muddy, but here looped and assembled into some druggy repetitive almost krautrocky drone jam.
While we're not always fans of made-up genres, which we know is ironic since we make up LOTS of genres, some rankle more than others. The most obvious being 'metal-gaze'. And what's even worse is when one catches on to the point that you sort of HAVE to use it. We've used metal-gaze once or twice, but we much prefer genres like doomdeathdrone or wooden metal.
Gaze is probably the most abused descriptor suffix in made up genres, anything slightly blissy or blown out gets tagged with the -gaze suffix. Rockabilly-gaze, adult contemporary-gaze. Sound silly yeah? Well, metal-gaze is not all that different. But recently a handful of our favorite bands all gathered under a new genre, one we're sort of tickled by, and might be forced to appropriate. SHITGAZE. How great is that, blissy and druggy, but lo-fi and crappy sounding. Times New Viking. Psychedelic Horseshit. Total shitgaze. Got a nice ring to it, pretty evocative, and not all that far off the mark. So the latest band we feel belongs among the ranks of the shitgaze elite is the awesomely named Eat Skull from Portland, who offer up the same sort of fractured damaged noise drenched pop as TNV and PH, but with their own twist. They definitely sound a bit like the bastard sons of vintage Guided By Voices, there is some solid hook filled pop in these here tracks, but it's nearly obscured by super jagged crumbling distorted guitars, howled vocals recorded into a dictaphone, trash can drums, all recorded so in-the-red, your speakers might melt. The thing about Eat Skull is they seem less arty and more punky, more rambunctious and random. Offering up spurts of furious noisepunk one minute, weird twangy jangle the next, then some awesome perfect pop the next, but always buried under layers of grit and buzz and tape hiss, fuzz all over the place, tons of high end, as if the bass knob was broken off so they just replaced it with ANOTHER treble knob, thick swaths of surfy organ, blown out until it's a wall of warbly sound, lots of random tape loops everywhere, overdubbed vocals way up in the mix, totally unhinged and off kilter and ultra chaotic, but catchy and wild and sweaty and over the top and fun as fuck!
For fans of the above mentioned bands as well as stuff like Sic Alps, Oh Sees, Coachwhips, Strapping Fieldhands.
ALL HAIL THE NEW WAVE OF SHITGAZE!
While just about everything Holy Mountain puts out is awesome they also tend to focus on the heavier side of the underground musical landscape. With this debut by Eden Express they're showing their softer side, while managing to keep the awesomeness on full throttle! There would be no other time for this record to get released then smack dab in the midst of summer as this is some sun-soaked-tripped-out-bake-at-the-beach-psych-pop that we can't get enough of. Featuring one member of Cloudland Canyon, this is a group who understand how to evoke colorful and vivid sensations. Mixing Eastern tinged psychedelia with delicious hints of washed out samba with such an effortless and breezy delivery. This is a timeless sounding record that could just as easily be some lost early '70s South American psychedelic gem (which the cover design suggests) as much as a much more drugged out Antena or Brightblack Morning Light jamming on the beach with some Finnish folks like Lau Nau and Islaja at their side. Such delicious delay and reverb, just the right touches of flute and otherworldliness, and it's about time psych gets out of the forest and onto the sand. A record made to soak in sun and melt with.
Kinda too bad this didn't make it onto our list last week with the other Endlessess (Dismal Moan, Blizzard) found therein, woulda been funny, but this is a whole different thing anyhow as you can tell from the second half of their name. Endless Boogie (now that's a handle that will make 'em or break 'em!) are a NYC band featuring two dudes who work at Matador records (we think). Real famous record collector types or so we're told. Now doing their own brand of dumbo psych rock blurt, indeed boogying (they wasn't kiddin'!) and probably all too endlessly for some, in the spirit of their evident sixties/seventies heroes. They got de mojo too, it seems, rubbin' off all those elpees they been collectin'. Cool enuff stuff (though they ain't no Vermonster).
"Smoking Figs In The Yard", the first track, starts off with a spoken "get down have a real good time" intro done in a hokey, jokey (we hope) Beefheart/Billy Gibbons/Edgar Broughton sorta grunt. Ouch. Then they git to rockin'. It's sorta Monster Magnet, sorta Rolling Stones (well, the vocals are kinda Jagger). Meh. But then track two's hypnotic throb, and beerbellycrawlingkingsnake scat singing moves, make it more akin to a redneck version of Circle, or Pharaoh Overlord. Starting to like this better... Endless Boogie coming on like a wanky hybrid of somethin' Circular, with the likes of Drunk Horse or maybe Howlin' Rain.
When track 4, "Executive Focus" rolls around, it's guitar solo wah wah time (moreso even than earlier), stuff that any Comets On Fire, Wooden Shjips or Julian Cope fan can flash on and dig... Acid Mothers too. By the time this song was over, eleven heavy and a half minutes later, we'd been swayed. Endless Boogie is all right with us. And we think we've got the idea. Yep, soon enough, sure enough, track six "Steak Rock" is another repetitive throbber with weird caveman mumblin' Tourette's babble o'er top. Circle's Mika Ratto could speak in tongues with this guy, and they'd understand one another we're certain.
A little later, the album's eighth cut "Jammin' With Top Dollar" sounds like "Mississippi Queen" Mountain with more of that tweaked out-of-the-side-of-the-mouth bugeyed blues holler...
That's followed by the over sixteen glorious guitar-centric minutes of "Low Lifes", a moody, mesmerizing epic of stretched out six string psych action. And then, they rock out the 2:38 duration of the disc's final number "Move Back!". As for the tracks we didn't touch on, "Bad River", "Gimme The Awesome", "Coming Down The Stairs", you can more or less guess at descriptions from the above.
So, the verdict - this gets better n' better as it goes along, though we still find it tough to tolerate the vocals, which are a tongue in cheek tribute to ZZ Top we guess. Struth, if we didn't think the Endless Boogie guys were NYC hipsters taking the piss, we might cut 'em more slack on that. Like, if they were Finnish... but that's hardly fair. Still, the guitars are way cool (if'n you like geeetar), but vocals sorta sound like it's a joke. Yr mileage may vary. You do pretty much get what you'd expect from a band called Endless Boogie! Fans of Wooden Shjips, Itavayla, and of course ZZ Top should check it out.
NOW ON VINYL! Here's what we said when the cd was first released:
Delving deeper into the strange and the eccentric and in the process carving out their own lil' musical niche, The Fiery Furnaces' impressive sophomore album Blueberryboat is like one heck of a wild carnival ride - like a tilt-a-whirl, funhouse and rollercoaster all rolled into one. At times Eleanor Friedberger's vocals seem more oddly affected in a Kate Bush sort of way laced with a mix of campy glam Rocky Horror Picture Show, old tyme cabaret, and sing-song nursery rhyme stylings. The music is heady, sometimes plodding, sometimes careening and often quite surprising, occasionally blending a thick squidgy electronic backdrop with their more familiar acoustic and electric guitar-based instrumentation. A wonderfully woozy listening adventure!
Another great release from this truly dynamic duo! Following two awesome albums comes this collection of b-sides and unreleased tracks. Now for most other bands the phrase "b-sides and unreleased tracks" usually means "cast-offs and not-good-enoughs", but for the 'Furnaces it means nothing of the sort. Their consistent high standard carries through all of their releases including this one. With their broad palette of instruments and ideas they fly in the face of current trends. They thoroughly enchant, puzzle, and rock, adding a novel 'talky' electric guitar line, some beautiful waterfall piano melodies, or some bubbly blurbly synthesizer whenever the occasion calls for it. They shuttle through and blend styles with carefree glee -- barreling in one direction with full momentum and then turning completely on a dime. Eleanor Friedberger has one of the most expressive devil-may-care voices around, delivering her vocals with a knowing nod and a sly wink. Her brother Michael is sure no slouch either. However perhaps the thing that sets them apart the most from a lot of bands these days is their lyrical content. Theirs is true 'story rock'. Each song unfurls a whimsical yarn or intriguing tale, but the subject matter is seldom fluffy, hell, it's frequently downright dark and twisted. Great stuff!
Oh and please note that although it's titled "EP", it's not all that short... it actually has ten songs!
NOW ON VINYL! Here's what we said when the cd was first released:
Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger, the brother and sister duo known as The Fiery Furnaces have certainly drawn lots of comparisons to the plethora of other boy/girl, brother/sister duos of late (White Stripes, The Kills, The Raveonettes to name just a few), but hang on a sec! Don't dismiss them as a bluesy, garagey raw rock copycat pair. 'Though there's definitely waves of low slung slouchy blues, garage and rock flowin' through their veins, there's also plenty more goin' on here. While The Fiery Furnaces are definitely not silly, they are full of whimsy, wit and carefree spirit. Gallowsbird's Park begins at a frantic pace of descending xylophone and piano lines while snarky guitars and thumpin' drums elbow their way through the fray. Eleanor's delivery has a distinct saucy devil-may-care tone to it. She seems to be having a blast kicking out each verse and chorus with such sass. This album is a rambunctious freewheeling jumble, however that's not to say it's by any means messy. What it is is a darn good time! Recommended.
There is no doubt that this record is going to find itself near the top of many of our year end favorite lists. This is one of those rare records that on first listen you are grabbed by its immediacy & intensity and with each repeated listen you melt deeper into its richness. While just in his early 20's Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus) has crafted a record wise beyond his years. There is a fluidity and transcendence on Los Angeles that defies categorization. Call it instrumental hip-hop if you want, but these are songs that would sound right at home next to spiritual Afro-jazz, psychedelic soul and even dubstep. Taking inspiration from the late great J Dilla, Flying Lotus understands how to extract such punch and soul from all the sounds he takes and creates. Flying Lotus has a wide world vision that's as informed by Eastern grooves and psychedelia as it is hip-hop, electronica, video games and cartoon culture (he used to make music for Adult Swim). This is stirring many of the same emotions and excitement as when Four Tet released the Rounds record and in many ways it brings to the next level what so much of Prefuse 73 tries to do.
It actually didn't surprise us that much to find out that Ellison is the great nephew of Alice Coltrane as you can hear the amazing legacy of her spiritual and universal consciousness in the sounds that Flying Lotus create. In fact there are a few upfront Coltrane moments on the record including "Aunti's Harp" which is an all too short but beautiful majestic minute of Alice on the harp. Flying Lotus has found a spot next to Madlib as a much needed ambassador of someone taking hip-hop as a launching pad orbiting to such pleasing outer dimensions. In fact , some of us couldn't help but daydream about a Flying Lotus/Erykah Badu collaboration as they both are so tapped into a magical and exciting landscape of hip-hop & soul that soars in spiritual and psychedelic horizons. Filled with undeniable passion and of course highly recommended!
Yes! The cd debut of this fantastic Finnish four-track project... We actually meant to list this, like, a month ago, but unfortunately the original review we wrote of it was lost in one of our several recent arggh-inducing komputoor crashes, but actually that's a good thing, 'cause it gave everybody here at AQ more time to listen to this, over and over, at home and in the store, and have us all decide that this HAD to be a Record Of The Week. So we ordered more copies from Finland, and re-wrote the review (which, in our memory, was actually probably better written the first time, so trust us on this) and here we go!
Ah, Finland. We've said it before, we'll say it again. So many of our favorite bands hail from Finland, from the hypnotic NWOFHM space rock of Circle to the the funereral doom of Skepticism, with all the freaky forest folk of Kemialliset Ystavat, et. al. in between. And now Fricara Pacchu, solo project from a member of such underground Finnish acts as Avarus, Anaksimandros, Maniacs Dream, and yes Kemialliset Ystavat.
Hopefully you remember our review of the Fricara Pacchu 7" and accompanying art/collage booklet that the Fonal label put out not too long ago (we may still have a few of those babies in stock, if you act fast). Both Allan and Andee accidentally wrote separate gushing reviews of it, that's how much we all liked it! That 7" left us eager to hear a full-length, and now here it is, courtesy of Lal Lal Lal. 12 wigged out instrumental tracks of Fricara Pacchu's undefinable, eccentric, psychedelic weirdness. We had compared the 7" to everything from the Boredoms to Oliva Tremor Control, and that goes too for the all-instrumental music on this cd, to which we can add such other disparate references as Neu! and When and Fuck Buttons. Fricara Pacchu's music is part techno, part noise, part pop... all awesome.
Recording at home on a four-track, Pacchu creates a woozy, rhythmic soundworld filled with distortion and delight. A world of magical gnomes with chugging machines spewing colorful clouds... clouds of mysterious, maybe illegal substances that coalesce in pretty patterns you can hear, as well as kaleidoscopically see. There's dense, druggy layers of guitar feedback with electro beats; lo-fi fuzzy loops, gurgly computer bleeps and sci-fi sound FX swooshes; throbbing pound and gentle ambience. Fricara Pacchu produces fragile music box melodies that exist amidst exploding minefields of noise, like the detonations of distortion that rhythmically obliterate parts of "Four Seasons Of Violins". Noise that is taken to an extreme with the utter, surging distorto-destruction of "Sky Helicopter"...
Whew! Wow. Maybe if the glorious synthscapes of fellow Finns Shogun Kunitoki were way grittier and guitar-ier, done more D.I.Y., and wrapped in steel wool and played backwards on a cheap cassette, that would sound something like the quirky and compelling music of Fricara Pacchu. By which we mean, this is great!
Every metalhead we know has been freaking out over Hellhammer worshipping all girl crusty black metal outfit Gallhammer. And for good reason, the dew spit up a filthy sludgey blackened pound, that pays proper homage to the 'Hammer that came before. But truth be told, there is a bit of novelty to their appeal, hard to argue with three young cute Japanese girls in bullet belts and Amebix shirts, adorned in spikes and smeared black raccoon eye makeup, making this gloriously unholy racket. And we'd be lying if we didn't admit to at least a few aQ staffers having a bit of a metal girl crush on Ms. Vivian Slaughter.
Thus, those not afforded the luxury of actually seeing Gallhammer play live, have been clamoring for a live video. The music is awesome, but somehow more awesome when that harsh hellish howl is coming out of such a diminutive frontwoman, and this din is being produced by this all female trio. So here you have it, Gallhammer, performing live, like the title says in "the ruin of a church", the band set up upon the altar, in front of glowing stained glass windows, pretty striking visually for sure, and the sound is fantastic, thick and chuggy, pounding and blackened, the vocals a blasphemous presence in this house of God. BUT, the band aren't all that exciting to watch play. They don't headbang, they don't jump around or thrash wildly, and to be fair, maybe this music doesn't lend itself to that sort of action. Instead the band sort of sway back and forth, entranced, occasionally stepping to the mic to bellow hellishly (and it's revealed that both axeslingers have wails that could peel paint!). So minus any sort of extreme action, it is mesmerizing, helped along by the massive riffs and pounding rhythms, the whole band conjuring up some early eighties demons and channeling them into filthy crusty buzz.
There are plenty of extras, two other live shows, a bunch of videos (that are mostly the band rocking out live, but they rock out WAY harder for the camera), a photo gallery (!), and a band interview, but again, it's slow going as it's subtitled, and being translated, so there's plenty of waiting for questions, answers, and nothing wild or shocking, just a mellow conversation, interesting for sure, but not mind blowing.
But so what. It's GALLHAMMER!!! And for all our minor kvetching, this disc is pretty cool, and for now, as close as we're gonna get to sweating and swaying wildly in the pit at a Gallhammer show, and certainly as close as we'll ever get to actually talking to Vivian. Swooooon. So yeah, recommended. ----* ----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed : ----* If you want to order one of these, just search for the item, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart! 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/lp 15.98/19.98 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 ANAKRID "s/t" (Fever Dream Fever) lp 13.98 ANAL MAGIC & REV. DWIGHT FRIZZELL "Beyond The Black Crack" (Paridigm) cd 16.98 ANIMUS "Hallucinations: Ideals Surrounding Water, Sand, And Clouds Of Dust" (Ars Manga) cd 14.98 ANNIVERSARY, THE "Devil on Our Side: B-Sides & Rarities" (Vagrant) cd 14.98 ATAVIST "Alchemic Resurrection" (Rise Above) 10" 17.98 AVSKY "Malignant" (Moribund) cd 14.98 BEHEXEN "My Soul For His Glory" (Moribund) cd 14.98 BUN B "II Trill-(Chopped up not Blopped up version)" (Rap-A-Lot) cd 14.98 BUN B "II Trill" (Rap-a-lot) cd 14.98 BURNING BRIDES "Anhedonia" (Cobraside) cd 14.98 CELESTIAL BLOODSHED "Cursed, Scarred and Forever Possessed" (Moribund) cd 14.98 CLOUDLAND CANYON / MYTHICAL BEAST "split" (Not Not Fun) lp 14.98 CLOUDS "We Are Above You" (Hydra Head) cd 14.98 COFFINS "Buried Death" (20 Buck Spin) cd 14.98 COFFINS "Mortuary Of Darkness" (Kreation Records) 2lp 22.00 COUGH "Sigillum Luciferi" (Forcefield Records) cd 10.98 COURTIS, ANLA / SEIICHI YAMAMOTO / YOSHIMI "Live At Kanadian" (Public Eyesore) cd 10.98 DEADBIRD "Twilight Ritual" (At A Loss) cd 13.98 DISKJOKKE "Staying In" (Smalltown Supersound) cd 16.98 DRUMM, KEVIN "Imperial Distortion" (Hospital) 2cd 19.98 DRUNK INJUNS "From Where The Sun Now Stands I Will Fight No More, Forever" (Alternative Tentacles) cd 10.98 EATER "The Album + Singles Plus" (Anagram) 2cd 17.98 EMPIRE AURIGA "Auriga Dying" (Moribund) cd 14.98 FERN KNIGHT "s/t" (VHF) cd 13.98 FLAMES OF HELL "Fire and Steel" (Draconian Records) cd 18.98 FLEET FOXES "s/t" (Sub Pop) cd/lp 13.98/15.98 GOTO80 "Made On Internet" (Pinipung) cd 17.98 HOLLENTHON "Opus Magnum" (Napalm Records) cd 15.98 I SHALT BECOME "Requiem" (Moribund Records) cd 15.98 IHSAN "Angl" (Candlelight USA) cd 12.98 INDIAN JEWELRY "Fake and Cheap" (dLTD) lp 17.98 INDRICOTHERE "s/t" (Gilead Media) lp+cd 14.98 ITAL TEK "Cyclical" (Planet Mu) cd 14.98 JEPSON, WARNER "Totentanz and Other Electronic Works, 1958 - 1973" (Melon Expander) cd 19.98 JEX THOTH / PAGAN ALTAR "split" (I Hate Records) 7" 12.98 JIMMY CAKE, THE "Spectre & Crown" (Pilatus) cd 17.98 JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN "To Survival" (Chrysalis) cd 13.98 KULTIVATOR "Barndomens Stigar" (Mellotronen) 2cd 28.00 KWELI, TALIB "Eardrum" (Blacksmith) cd 13.98 LES TROUBADOURS DU ROI BAUDOIN "Missa Luba" (El / Cherry Red) cd 17.98 LIL MAMA "VYP Voice Of the Young People" (Zomba) cd 17.98 MACHINEFABRIEK "Bijeen" (Kning Disk) cd 14.98 MACHINEFABRIEK & STEPHEN VITIELLO "Box Music" (12K) cd 14.98 MANIACS DREAM "Turku Hold 'Em" (Lal Lal Lal) cd 15.98 MASTERS, MARC "No Wave" (Black Dog Publishing) book 29.95 MGR "Wavering On The Cresting Heft" (Conspiracy) cd 14.98 MONOLAKE "Hongkong (Remastered)" (Monolake) cd 17.98 MONOTONIX "Body Language" (Drag City) cd/lp 12.98/12.98 MORGEN "s/t" (Phoenix) cd 17.98 MY MORNING JACKET "Evil Urges" (ATO Records) cd 13.98 N.E.R.D. "Seeing Sounds" (Star Trak) cd 14.98 NACHTMYSTIUM "Assassins: Black Meddle Part 1" (Century Media) cd 13.98 NATURAL FOOD "s/t" (Porter Records) cd 16.98 NEED MORE SOURCES "Shed" (Moteer) cd 15.98 NEGATIVLAND "A Big 10-8 Place" (Seeland) 2cd 15.98 NEGATIVLAND "Presents Thigmotactic" (Seeland) cd 13.98 NEMESIS "The Day Of Retribution" (GMR Music) cd 23.00 O LEVEL (TEENAGE FILMSTARS) "A Day In The Life of Gilbert and George: 1977-1980" (Artpop!) cd 17.98 OMEGA "10000 Lepes" (Hungatron) cd 17.98 OPETH "Watershed (Collector's Edition)" (Roadrunner) 2cd 23.00 PATE, JOHNNY "Outrageous" (Dusty Groove) cd PEACE, THE "Black Power" (Groo) lp 30.00 PENTEMPLE "s/t" (Southern Lord) cd 15.98 PINK FAIRIES "Finland Freakout 1971" (MLP (Major League Productions)) cd 27.00 PLUXUS "Solid State" (Kompakt) cd 16.98 PRISONERS, THE "Rare And Unissued" (Big Beat) cd 17.98 PUMICE "Quo" (Soft Abuse) cd 14.98 QUANTEC "Unusual Signals" (Echochord) cd 16.98 REATARD, JAY "Singles 06-07" (In The Red) 2cd 17.98 RILEY, TERRY "The Last Camel In Paris" (Elision Fields) cd 14.98 RUSSIAN CIRCLES "Station" (Suicide Squeeze) cd 14.98 SARMANTO, HEIKKI "Moonflower" (Porter Records) cd 16.98 SEMIMUUMIO "Vamos" (Lal Lal Lal) cd 15.98 SEVEN THAT SPELLS "Black OM Rising" (Beta-Lactam) cd 26.00 SHY CHILD "Noise Won't Stop" (Kill Rock Stars) cd 14.98 SIC ALPS "U.S. EZ" (Siltbreeze) cd 13.98 STAR STANGLED BANGER "s/t" (Aztec) cd 24.00 STOOGES, THE "Gimme Some Skin" (Get Back) cd/lp 17.98/16.98 STUDIO "Yearbook 2" (Information) cd 17.98 TAPE "Luminarium" (Hapna) cd 16.98 TILLY AND THE WALL "s/t" (Team Love) cd 15.98 U.S. CHRISTMAS "Eat The Low Dogs" (Neurot Recordings) cd 14.98 UNEARTHLY TRANCE "Electrocution" (Relapse) cd 15.98 V/A "Des Jeunes Gens Modernes" (Naive) 2cd 27.00 V/A "Disco Italia" (Strut) cd 14.98 V/A "Do The Pop! Redux Part One" (Savage Beat) 2cd 24.00 V/A "Ed Rec Vol III" (Ed Banger) 2lp 29.00 V/A "Ethiopiques 23 : Orchestra Ethiopia" (Buda Musique) cd 15.98 V/A "Japanese New Music Festival 2008" (Magaibutsu) cd 13.98 V/A "Well Hung: 20 Funk-Rock Eruptions From Beneath Communist Hungary - Vol.1" (Finders Keepers) cd 23.00 VILLALOBOS, RICARDO "Enfants (MAGMA REMIXES)" (SED) 12" 17.98 WHITE STRIPES, THE "De Stijl" (Third Man / Warner) cd 12.98 WHITE STRIPES, THE "Elephant" (Third Man / Warner) cd 13.98 WHITE STRIPES, THE "Get Behind Me Satan" (Third Man / Warner) cd 14.98 WHITE STRIPES, THE "Icky Thump" (Warner Bros.) cd 16.98 WHITE STRIPES, THE "s/t" (Third Man / Warner) cd 13.98 WHITE STRIPES, THE "White Blood Cells" (Third Man / Warner) cd 14.98 WHO'S YOUR FAVORITE SON GOD "Out of Body Diva" (Holy Mountain) cd 13.98 WICKHAM-SMITH, SIMON "Love & Lamentation" (Pogus Productions) cd 14.98 WICKHAM-SMITH, SIMON & RICHARD YOUNGS "Veil (For Greg)" (Jagjaguwar) cd 14.98 WILSON, GARY "You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story" (Plexifilm) dvd 26.00 WOLF PARADE "At Mount Zoomer" (Sub Pop) cd/lp 14.98/14.98 YA HO WHA 13 "Feather Of Wisdom" (Phoenix) lp 23.00 YELLOW SWANS "Deterioration" (Modern Radio Record Label) cd 11.98 _______________________________________________________________________ ABOUT MAILORDER
Finally available domestically, Cerebro Electronico (Also known as s/t (1969)), is Gilberto Gil's most wild and exciting Tropicalia outing. Mutantes fans hungering for more should not skip this gem. If Gal Costa's 1969 psych-fuzz groove album floated your boat, get ready for this. Another raucous and wild slab of political subversion that later caused his and Caetano Velosos house arrest and subsequent political exile for many years. Featuring some of the most psychedelic guitarwork the world has ever known, studio wiz Rogerio Duprat outdoes himself on the almost-Dockstadteresque 'Objeto Semi-Identificado'. There's even a Mutantes cover ('2001' or 'Dois Mil e Uno') which out-freaks the original! And some fucking awesome whistling on "Volks Volkswagon Blue." Those unsure of where to start on Gilberto Gil's long musical career should begin right here! Highly Recommended.
Finally available on vinyl. One of our favorite records by longtime aQ faves the Grails. Where as the title suggests, The Grails cover and reinterpret "Three Psychedelic Rock Songs From Around The World", including one of our favorites from the Flower Travellin' Band. And since this is part of Southern's Latitudes series, it is indeed limited, this time to 1000 copies worldwide, which means 500 made it to the US, 50 to AQ. Packaged in that now immediately recognizable black and white woodcut style Latitudes sleeve. Pressed on obscenely thick white vinyl (with bits of black swirl in some of them), one sided, the flipside featuring one of the most intricate and striking etchings we've seen so far. Also includes the same insert that came with the cd. Needless to say, these are gonna fly out of here. Probably won't be able to get more, so be quick, or be dead...
We already loved the Grails. Then they have to go and cover Flower Travellin' Band. What the hell are we supposed to do now? Love them more?? Okay, fine. We love them more. Any band that has the balls to take on "Satori" deserves all the respect you can give them. This is volume 4 in Southern Records' Latitudes series, the first three of which (William Whitmore, Shit & Shine, Ginnungagap) we were only able to get a handful of each, which of course sold out in no time. We managed to get 25 of these, but there is no guarantee we'll be able to get more, so be prepared to be disappointed. Sorry. We tried to order 50, but what can you do?
So anyway, "Satori"! What a completely amazing song, those of you who for some reason don't already own Satori by the Flower Travellin Band, please remedy that immediately, you will not be sorry. And the Grails do an amazing job of turning "Satori" into a Grails song, it's still heavy, and it's still got that Eastern vibe, In fact it sounds a little bit Sun City Girls with its fiddle parts, but it's a little more mellowed out, and post rocky, and they wisely forgo the vocals which would be pretty darn hard to emulate.
The second track they take on is the Byrds' "Space Odyssey", a brooding twangy dirge, with dubbed out drums and absolutely dreamy lapsteel and slow building washes of cymbal sizzle, gloriously dark and hypnotic.
Finally, it's on to the UK (remember, this record is titled Interpretations Of Three Psychedelic Rock Songs From Around The World) to tackle "Master Builder" by Gong. The first half is a creeping crawling fog of shimmering guitar overtones and rich chordal swells, eventually building to a full on wild and woolly prog attack with wild drumming, mad fiddle sawing and major guitar freakout. SO AWESOME!
These (formerly) stoner rockin' Swedes didn't used to interest us all that much, until their last album Wolf's Return, where their previous sound took a terrific turn into epic doom METAL. Suddenly they sounded a lot more Viking! Dooming like blood brothers to countrymen Candlemass, Grand Magus gained new fans at AQ with that release, their power trio hard rock proudly wearing the leather and spikes of true metal.
This new album, if anything, is even more metallized, picking up the pace a bit (due to an eager new drummer?) on several tracks, galloping with the fervor of thee classic ass kicking acts of olde. When they slow it down a bit, we're hearing plenty o' the mighty Manowar, especially on the standout track "Silver Into Steel". Seriously good stuff. Frontman JB's manly singing remains strong and melodic as ever. His guitar riffs and leads aren't bad either!! Iron Will is proof that Wolf's Return was no fluke.
Latest blast of buzzing black filth from this Belgian horde and it's a doozy. Nothing avant or freaked out, fucked or damaged, nope these guys are masters of the pure black arts, channeling the spirit of Darkthrone, through a wall of murky majestic riffing, blasting beats almost totally obscured and buried by the massive amounts of murk and buzz, the vocals a reverb drenched, an animalistic growl that comes as close to throat singing as any "vokills" we've heard, a raw rough sort of slow guttural roar.
Minus some awesome almost Sabbathy doom style riffing (complete with tolling bell right at the beginning of the first track), and some lurching woozy eighties style classic metal (sometimes underpinned by strange sounding double kick rumbles), the band spend most of their time in a wintry flurry of blown out buzz and furious blast.
Fast, primitive, ugly and raw, Grimfaug unfurl track after track of mesmerizingly hypnotic old school Nordic style buzz, and sometimes that's really all you want or need.
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with an entirely characteristic yet coy swell of effected elemental smear, crumbling delicately yet forcefully, until giving way to what is, to date, and here is the coy part, Liz Harris' most songwriterly and structured album. As opposed to the rich swaths of drone that up until now defined her sound, Harris has shifted from the abstract towards a more distinct and figurative sound. True to the title, the record unfolds like a sort of mysterious and morbid fairytale, innocent in its clear and elegant melodies, yet creepy and highly abstract in its more droney and sublime interludes. For the most part, her guitar playing is laid bare, removed from the dense fog of effects that typically occlude them. And what we discover is actually a pretty strummy record, with plenty of clean guitar articulation though certainly the aroma of her previous tech heavy approach remains in what is relatively speaking still pretty effected. At times she even reverts back to the gorgeous icey crunchy string attack of some previous efforts. With so much space liberated in the absence of drones, we also get to hear her stunning voice. Furthermore, the occasional audible lyric creeps to the surface, one standout fragment being "Love is enormous," a somewhat shockingly affirmative sentiment from an otherwise darkly mysterious and abstract persona. From start to finish "Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill" lulls you into its graceful murmurings and hypnotic thrumming. An exquisite addition to an already compelling discography. Recommended.
We reviewed a cd by these Canadian grinders a long ways back, a furious twisted atonal slab of spazzed out math grind, that reminded us of Drop Dead or Crossed out all tangled up with the Locust and as we said before sounded quite a bit like your head hitting concrete. Well we managed to get a small handful of these tour only singles, and it's more of the same. But here, the sound is even more convoluted, chaotic, spastic, angular off kilter riffing, freaked out drumming, super dense and dizzying arrangements, with long drawn out stretches of droney repetitive chug, peppered with bits of lightning fast blasts, the guitar constantly slippery and slithery, the chords unhinged, the notes seeming to twist and warble, almost like a slide guitar, but this woozy weirdness gives the whole records a super unhinged feel. Reminds us a whole lot of some long lost Gravity band, which is a VERY good thing indeed. (and we just might have a few copies of the HHC cd in stock, check elsewhere on the site). LIMITED TO 200 COPIES.
Health, the band, are an entirely unHEALTHY, and thus utterly appealing concoction of manic rhythms, jagged guitars, yowled vocals, all wound into exploding bursts of freaked out noise drenched new wave tribalism. Chaotic, spastic, freaked out, manic, mathy, grindy. It's like the musical version of a diet rich in Pixie Sticks, Lik-M-Aid, licorice whips and Mountain Dew, and it's that imaginary diet that seemingly fuels Health's sound. What else could explain the boundless energy, the intense spazziness, the fractured heaviness, the blown out total rock action?
But as we mentioned in our review of their self-titled debut, as much as we love pretty much everything they do, we like them best when they're drone-y and synthy and drifty and hypnotic, and that is the side that seems to shine through on Disco, a collection of remixes and reinterpretations from a bunch of artists, none of which we recognize except for Crystal Castles, who shared a split with Health a while back.
At first we thought the title Disco was ironic, a pisstake, especially considering the first track. The opener, remixed by Acid Girls, doesn't do much to the original, except loop certain parts, add some noise, some bursts of electronics, none of which would have been that out of place in the original. There is definitely much more of a dance-y groove, but it's almost more New Wave-y than dance-y, and again, if you told us this was a non-remixed Health track and we hadn't heard the original, we wouldn't even blink. The second track, had us maybe reconsidering, while not disco by any stretch, it begins with tribal drums and reverbed vocals, which soon gives way to a dance-y groove, some noodly synths, but again, not all that far removed from the original, at least in our admittedly fuzzy memory. But then the next track drops, another Acid Girls remix, and everything changes. The Disco title makes way more sense. Suddenly the record is in full on modern electro disco, fuzzy synth, groovy Ed Banger style jam mode. From gloomy new wave skittery disco pop, to full on ultra distorted synth heavy Justice style dancefloor destroying jams, to skittery After Dark new wave, to minimal housey style Kompakt-ed grooves, to eighties Japanese video game style 8-bit worship, to Fischerspooner-esque Theme From Beverly Hills Cop retro, and pretty much every awesomely cheesy groovy stop in between. Pretty schizophrenic and all over the place, but somehow, all the various versions remain sort of true to the original sound. Anyone who dug the Health debut, and are not afraid to explore the dancefloor, will dig this big time. And folks who have never heard Health, but love shit like Crystal Castles, MGMT, Justice, Daft Punk, Alter Ego, Digitalism, Cut Copy and the like, this might just be your gateway drug, to things more noisy and punk rock.
Latest from this Brooklyn trio (at least they were Brooklyn based last time we checked, they may be spread out all over the country these days, but at least one of em is still in Brooklyn!) and while they still wield some serious psychedelic heaviness, they've also gotten seriously melodic. The first of two sidelong tracks on this new lp is wrapped around a main riff and looped rhythm, that is crazy catchy in addition to being blissfully blown out and weirdly hypnotic. The trio lock into this relentlessly staccato groove, a sort of machinelike groove, super repetitive and robotic, the group pounding away, while the guitar slowly builds momentum, the sheets of high end and the streaks of feedback and wall of buzz lifting ever higher, a slow burning ascendancy, it almost sounds like some scientist took a lost Fushitsusha jam and slowed it down, it the lab, to examine it more closely, like some Discovery documentary featuring a time lapse film of a 'psych jam' captured in the wild. Until finally the main chugging rhythm drops out, the whole track becoming more and more stripped down, the drums skittering away, while some tangled buzz continues to twist and contort, into various permutations, the drums remaining the only constant, the guitar offering up strange and gloriously gnarled melodies, and the bass just buzzes and rumbles heavily. Right at the end it gets super spacious and pretty, but still without losing any momentum or lysergic energy.
The flipside is another grinding buzzy psychjam, one set of strings oscillating intensely in the low end, chugging and churning, the other locking into a woozy looped riff, all draped over another blown out motorik groove, that sounds like a more loose extension of the main A side rhythm. The track has plenty of twists and turns, eventually getting all mathy and metal in the middle, the main riff becoming super spidery, the drums going spastic and free, but still all settled on a thick bed of grinding mesmerizing buzz, finishing off with a burst of resplendent epic majesty, gradually slowing down to a weird warped outro, of lurching, skittery downtuned riffs and haunting disembodied metallic buzz, weaving back and forth and finally leaving a washed out sun baked glow to fade out quietly.
The cool thing with Three Lobed releases, is that not only do you get the lp, gorgeously packaged and pressed as always, but you also get the same songs pressed on an actual cd. Including a 17 minute bonus track only on the cd. Another weirdly looped slow motion psychedelic workout, this one even more slow and bleary than the lp sides. The drums setting the skeletal framework, locked into another mesmerizing complex loop, around which thick effected buzz, scrapes and chugs and whirls fall into step, establishing another kick as motorik groove that could go on forever as far as we're concerned, and in terms of the track, actually does, while the guitar here soars weightless high above, sounding all angelic and sun dappled, almost like a wailing voice, spread out in glistening streaks over that awesomely relentless chnnk� chnnk chnnk chnnk, below, so kick ass, weirdly minimal but still so heavy and psychedelically resplendent, eventually slowing down to a lysergic, buzz drenched crawl, before finishing off in a blinding chaotic crush of blinding high end, squiggly freaked out FX and chaotic drum crush.
Gorgeous black and white packaging, with a super tripped out, crazy intricate pen and ink cover image, thick sleeve, pressed on thick vinyl, with a real cd not a cd-r, and crazy limited as always, only 647 copies, each one hand numbered, we got a bunch from the band when they were here on tour last week, so not sure we'll be able to get more once these are gone...
We've been so excited for this one for a while! While disco has received a much deserved renaissance in the last couple years there has been a big void of anyone new really making true great disco that captures the best moments of the golden vintage days of the genre. Luckily the guy behind Hercules And Love Affair, Andy Butler, has had quite an education in the history of the last three decades of charged and soulful dance music , due to his experiences dj'ing at a leather bar in Denver, and his last several years immersed in New York's club culture. With a super talented cast around him, Butler has made one of the year's best records, for sure one of the greatest and smartest vocal driven dance records in years!
While Antony (Antony & The Johnsons) has been lending his voice to many records over the last few years, Butler uses him in such exciting ways knowing that under the usually mournful and melancholic side to his voice there was an inner dancefloor diva just ready to let loose. Antony's vocal delivery evokes a sound and spirit that is reminiscent of Sylvester and you can tell that Sylvester, Arthur Russell, Patrick Cowley, Frankie Knuckles and the heyday of the Chicago house scene all served as major inspiration to the making of this record. Along with Antony there are also great vocal contributions from Nomi (who has toured a lot with CocoRosie) and Kim Ann Foxman as well as Butler himself on a few tracks. The album is a full band affair with great horns, strings, keys and Tim Goldsworthy (DFA) production and drum programming all merging together for such a full and rich sound. Above and beyond anything, these are such well crafted songs that aren't just winks to the past but instead carry the torch for impassioned and joyful sounds well into the future, keeping your body moving and your spirit raised high. Highly recommended!
Been meaning to get to this one for a while... and then we reviewed it and our supplier was out of stock... but now they've got 'em again and here you go: Japanese guitarist Hisato Higuchi's previous disc on the Family Vineyard label, Dialogue, was all about the almost motionless, mysterious spare strum, a lonely n' lovely abstract guitar meditation. This newer disc starts off that way, with the quietly beautiful "A Hundred Signs Of Light"... but then, when track two, "Grow", kicks in, Higuchi's guitar playing suddenly, surprisingly takes a thrilling turn into amped up electric skree territory. It still sounds lonely and lovely - just WAY more loud and distorted. "Blood And Leaves" follows in the same vein. But then "Melody In The Mud" takes us back to the hushed, minimal moodiness of the first track... though 'tis only a brief (1:39) interlude before the next track, "Electric Guitar Light", erupts in full speaker shredding glory. It's a bit like Loren Connors sharing an album with Keiji Haino (hmmm, actually, those two have done that, but it's been a while and we can't say for sure that's what this sounds like...).
This album continues like this, Higuchi's somnolent, near-ambient songs (with some breathy, barely-there vocals), abutting others that aren't nearly so mellow... one of those is album-ender "Cry Baby Flowers", which sounds something like Eddie Hazel's "Maggot Brain" with a Merzbow makeover. Actually these crinkly-cranked distorted guitar solos -are- still sorta mellow, or at least mesmeric, but only if you're used to enjoying noisier stuff. Certainly they share the same slo-mo suggestions of melody and melancholia with the quieter pieces on here...
Definitely for fans of Neil Youngish fuzz freakout feedback side of Nagisa Ni Te, or Hjiokaidan noise guitar maven Jojo Hiroshige's more "musical" solo efforts. We really, really like it.
Record number two from Howlin' Magic, and it's all about more howlin', more magic too if you're as enchanted by this brand of blown-out blooze as we are. Lo-fi and lovin' it. Is this the first non-Finnish release on the Lal Lal Lal label? Well Howlin' Magic fits right in with the usual Finnish weirdness even though they're just from just down Santa Cruz way, and by they we mean he, 'cause Howlin' Magic is a one man band. Imagine ol' Hasil Adkins playing stuff that sounds more like old Comets On Fire. Such insane all-instrumental shambolic stomp, with a mystic sci-fi hippieish vibe reflected in such song titles as "Voltron", "Quantum", and "The Universe Is Love". As with the first album from Howlin' Magic (not to be confused with Howlin' Rain, by the way!), this is for those who love psychedelic geetar excess, a la everything from Acid Mothers Temple to Michael Yonkers... freakin' recommended!
Record number two from the mysteriously monickered Hum Of The Druid, and as we mentioned in the review of the first lp, that's exactly what you'll hear, some serious druidic hum, which is just something we made up so you'll just have to take our word for it. The follow up takes the already intense and heavy caustic drones of the first lps and takes it even further. Darker, filthier, heavier. At times it almost sounds like field recordings of a construction site chopped up and assembled into something slightly more musical, at others it sounds like Earth, circa 2, overdosed and slumped against a wall of Sunn amps cranked to 10, and at still others, it sounds a bit like someone spinning Masonna records on a busted Victrola. Indeed.
Massive swells of sound, all low end, and we mean VERY low end, super blown out, crumbling, Merzbowian, vast expanses of speaker destroying rumble, giving way to stretches of sound much more tranquil, like Masami Akita mixing Wolf Eyes. Sheets of murky industrial drift wreathed in corrosive buzz and wallowing in downtuned tectonic filth. Some parts sound like wind blowing on a microphone, but cranked to danger levels, other parts sound like a million turntables with the needle stuck in the run off groove of some super scratched up old record, peppered with the clatter and clank of some alien machinery, it's almost like a stereo test record, but instead of tones, it's a series of long, sprawling slabs of super intense drone, and speaker shredding grind and buzz. It's all very deep and abrasive, caustic and corrosive, but actually strangely mesmerizing.
Gorgeous and super creepy cover art too! We only have 15 copies and then it's gone for good...
It's weird to think of Isis as a real band. And by that we mean, the sort of band that plays arenas and makes videos and you might see on MTV if MTV played videos anymore. And we've been fans for so long, it's sometimes difficult to get a handle on just how popular they are. And they are HUGELY popular. And rightfully so. They rule. They are one of the metallic post rock elite. Straddling the sounds of Mogwai and Neurosis, mixing the two into their own potent brew. We've yet to be disappointed by an Isis record, and we predict we won't be anytime soon. But we were surprised by some of the tracks on their most recent full length. How much they've evolved, and it's never more evident than on "Holy Tears", easily the most epic, and weirdly enough commercial sounding track we've heard from them. All clean vocals, barring a few monstrous bellows, and long stretches of moody meandering; hearing this, it's no surprise that Isis toured with Tool. This is the sound of a real rock band. An arena rock band even. It's an awesome song, but not nearly as feral and crushing as other tracks, which makes it the obvious choice for a single. That said, the heavy parts here are still MUCHO heavy, but even when the band is at their heaviest here, it's still melodic and dare we say, accessible. There's a live version of "Holy Tears" too, which is pretty cool, but probably the track that most folks will be after is the Melvins / Lustmord remix of "Not In Rivers, But In Drops", which takes the original, and seems to strip away all the guitars, replacing it with a layer of buzzy murk, and takes some of the vocals and process them into something super alien. The drums remain, still tribal and heavy, but the whole track is rendered hauntingly barren, mysteriously muddy, fuzzed out and druggy, almost dubby at times. The guitars return later, but even then they're buried under layers of blurred buzz and wrapped around super loud industrial percussion. The vocals are let loose to howl wildly over just drums, before everything coalesces into a final blow out of roiling crumbling guitar, fuzzed out bass, and a chugging feedback drenched finish. Fucking awesome. Would love to hear a whole Isis record remixed by those guys (and we bet it might just exist already).
Also added on as a bonus is a gorgeous video for "Holy Tears", a super stylized slow motion shot of a body falling from a building, haunting, abstract, so creepy, cutting to black as he hits the ground, then revealing some beautiful and intense shots of veins and organs and fetuses, like some Max Aguillera Helweg photos come to life. Before finishing off with some ultra fucked up footage of the jumper's face 'on impact'. Cool!
It's actually been a while since we've heard from Jasper TX, aka Dag Rosenqvist. For a brief spell, JTX was churning out releases like a Machinefabriek or Aidan Baker. And to be honest, we actually didn't mind, as we've loved pretty much everything Rosenqvist has released. In fact, the very first Jasper TX release, I'll Be Long Gone Before My Light Reaches You, still ranks as one of our favorite discs, and in some ways was sort of the first of this new breed of obfuscated blurred ambience we've come to love so much.
Anyway, finally a brand new full length, one epic 51 minute track, split into 6 movements, and right out of the gate, we're smitten, deep dark swells, washed out barely there melodies, distant hiss, and a strange buried pulse, that seems to surface and then disappear, like some mysterious beasts heartbeat, growing louder as it reaches the surface, only to fade away as it disappears back into the depths. Long drawn out tones, shimmery reflective, before it slips into something MUCH more minimal, the second movement, a super low-end drift, barely audible through speakers but in headphones it's a powerful seismic rumble, rippled with strands of whispery static, and more buried barely audible rhythms. It's only on track three that the record takes on anything songlike, a loping lilting guitar, unspooling a dreamy laid back melody, a keyboard picking out a simple harmony over the top, all underpinned by a soft dronelike murmur.
But the respite is brief, Black Sleep is indeed true to its title, narcotic and very dark, murky and mysterious, the record shifts into some abstract assemblage of thumps and bumps, before they fade out leaving a distant ominous whir, spread out like a slow moving black sonic sea, before shifting back again to song, the guitar returning, this time suspended amidst dense layers of static shimmer, low end rumbles, laced with bits of grit and glitch, of hiss and static, all very moody and intense, threatening to build to something climactic, but instead, shifting slowly forward, resolutely and mournfully.
The final part, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes, begins with a cacophony of buzzing and scraped strings, a manic exploration of a piano's inside, still surrounded by shards of electronic glitch, the static and buzz creating accidental rhythms over a distant machine-like hum, before a melody surfaces, minor key and melancholy, the notes appearing one at a time as deep swells, the distant drones building in density and intensity, never quite exploding, but building to a muted murky chordal climax, majestic, but still subdued, before as all things drone must, it fades to silence.
Definitely not the prettiest Jasper record (that honor still goes to I'll Be Long Gone) but certainly the darkest, and maybe the most mysterious sounding, a musical rendering of the Black Sleep, which to our ears can only be death, and as a soundtrack to slipping off our mortal coils, we'd be hard pressed to do much better than this.
First cd issue of what is reportedly a highly sought after record of UK psychedelic rock. The singer's got a nice Skip Spence strain in his voice, and there's a lot of sitar on top of the more traditional instrumentation, and the winsome harmonies are
We raved over the earlier reissue of minimalist composer Ariel Kalma's 1978 epic Osmose. So much so we made it a Record of the Week! Now Beta-Lactam Ring has reissued Kalma's 1975 debut Les Temps des Moissons (Time of The Harvest), a foray into electronic ragas using saxophone (lots of sax), ethnic instruments, effects and all manners of electronic filters. Less proto-new age sounding than Osmose, Les Temps takes cues from Terry Riley's Poppy NoGood explorations with saxophone and time delay and expands on them with krautier influences using kalimbas, flutes and wah-wah effects into a metaphysical tapestry of free music. Fans of Riley, early Kraftwerk and Joakim Skogsberg will find lots to love here! As long as you don't mind sax...
While it might not always seem like it, sometimes the thing we're craving for the most is some blazing, direct in your face on fire rock n' roll. The problem is that most groups who play that kind of stuff these days either come off as total burn outs or are way uninspired. So when we heard this for the first time we all smiled wide and started rocking out with wreckless abandon! It was exactly what we've been wanting to hear. King Khan has made some really good garage fueled rawk in the past with the BBQ Show, but this collection of songs with his soul soaked band The Shrines has caught our attention and interest BIG TIME. With a nine piece band including Rahn Streeter on percussion who has played for everyone from Curtis Mayfield to Stevie Wonder, the songs are filled with undeniable chops and King Khan's vocals have been giving us great flashbacks to primetime era Rocket From The Crypt and the Make-Up as well as folks like The Dirtbombs. These are songs that owe as much to the history of garage rock and Nuggets compilations as it does to the Stax sound and all sorts of scorching r&b. Feels so damn good to have some high octane tunes to blast throughout the summertime!
From Japan, the artist/producer known as Koss (real name: Kuniyuki Takahashi) has apparently been around for a while, involved in the electronic scene since back in the '80s, dabbling in everything from electro body music to dub to hardcore noise to chillout techno to deep house. This, however, is the first album of his we've heard. Well better late than never. Four Worlds Converge As One is lovely, lovely, calm, and lovely. It starts with the soothing, beatless ambient drift of "Water", the first of four tracks on the disc and at 29+ minutes the longest. Hissing, humming, with field recordings of obvious watery origin worked in, this track is like the sound of a white mist rising from the shore of a gently lapping lake, with a wind softly blowing. A relaxed, melodic drone piece. That could have been the whole disc right there and we'd be sold. But there's three more parts, each over a quarter of an hour in length, representing the other elements of fire, air, and earth...
Track two, "Fire / M Point (40N42-34N33 Mix)" is immediately more active than "Water", with pleasantly creaking noises, eventually joined by shuffling electronic beats, and glitchy clicks worked into the washes of more feedbacky drone. Following that, "Air / MW Point (137E35 Mix)" is back to the blissful shimmer of the first track, but with the addition of minimalist Reichian (Steve, not Wilhelm) pulsations. Looping, layered sounds from some classical stringed instrument. Utterly hypnotic of course. And then, Koss brings us down to "Earth / S Point", wrapping this disc up with a surprising mix of forest-at-night nature sounds and percolating, processed tribal percussion, with echo and effects. It gets denser and denser, but remains quite soothing, the sort of "exotica" you might expect from, say, one of Eye Yamataka's remixes... though perhaps a little "rainstick-y" for some. But the more "Pop Ambient", droney-synthy explorations that mostly fill this album are enough for us, so good, reminding us of Eno and Budd (Harold, not the Aussie grunge band) and Tangerine Dream and even composer John Luther Adams.
And by the way, the "converge into one" idea of the title has a special meaning - apparently Koss intends that if all four tracks/elements on this disc were to be played simultaneously (you could buy three extra copies of the cd... or make them yourself), a whole new song will emerge. Hmm...haven't tried it, we're happy with the four just by themselves so far. Recommended!
Byard Lancaster was a revelation. An aQ customer turned us on to him, as a flute player, it might have even been Porter Records head honcho Luke Mosling, which would make perfect sense, regardless, the music of Byard Lancaster blew our minds. We're (not so) mildly obsessed with flute music, especially jazz, so hearing Lancaster completely own the flute, pulling off Roland Kirk style sing/shouting through the instrument and then smoothly slipping into so soft fluttering groove, we were immediately obsessed. And even more blown away to discover it wasn't just the flute Lancaster had mastered. Piccolo, clarinet, sax, piano. We knew we had to hear more. The bad news being that most of Lancaster's recording were impossible to find. Which is why we were so excited when Mosling started up Porter, specifically with an eye to re-release all the lost Lancaster titles. So here's the first one, Personal Testimony, a collection of solo recordings originally released in 1979, and so amazing. From the soulful piano groove of the opener, with softly crooned vocals and dark swirling melodies, to the ethereal drifting fluttering flute of "In Lovingkindness", the melodies moody and mystic, multiple fluted interwoven and gloriously and complexly entangled, to the wild funky soulful flute jam that is "Dogtown", you can almost imagine the bad kicking in behind him, as he whips up impossible clusters and flurries of notes, occasionally offering up James Brown style grunts between breaths, to the deeeeeep droney low end moan of the big horns in "Brotherman", the tones reverberating and rumbling gloriously. There are a handful of sax tracks too, some skronky and FREE, others smooth and jazzy, some all tangled up with other overdubbed horns, all of them amazing. Some of the most intense and beautiful solo recordings we've heard for sure.
This reissue has six new tracks tacked on as bonus material, recorded last year, a sort of 'now' to the first half's 'then'. Not so into the a capella opener, maybe a little too soulful scat, but soon we're back into some serious flute territory, laced with hand drums and shakers, various vocalizations, and some wild playing. Three tracks worth of kick ass, wild and free, fluttery and free flute action, that sounds almost as good as the first half. The second to last track is solo piano, dark and moody, some gorgeous flurries of notes, dense clouds of thick chords, wild free explosions of sound, eventually building to a super chaotic wild piano freak out, pounding, with all the pedals down, before drifting back into more tranquil territory. The final track is hymn like, soft fluttery flute, delicate piano, and crooned vocals, lilting and melancholy, and quite lovely.
An awesome and essential reissue, well worth it for just the '79 release alone, but the bonus tracks make it just that much sweeter. Lots of liner notes, past and present, as well as a bad ass photo of Lancaster shirtless, in tight white pants, wailing on the sax!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
These warnings are beginning to sound like mantras: THIS IS VERY LIMITED. THIS WILL MOST LIKELY ALREADY BE OUT OF PRINT BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS. WE GOT THE LAST 50 COPIES AND WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET MORE!! LIMITED LIMITED LIMITED!!! But like all good mantras, it pays to heed the sage advice contained within, and in this case the advice would be pick one of these up quick like before they're gone for good. A Silhouette In Splinters is the long in the works "ambient" record from Leviathan, released on Canadian label Profound Lore, lp only, pressed on thick red vinyl and as you may have surmised EXTREMELY LIMITED. Part of what makes Leviathan records so powerful and mesmerizing is Wrest's mastery of mood and ambience, so here he gets to explore an entire album of bleak and depressive atmospheres. But this is not pure ambient music, its ambience is only obvious when compared to the dense complex sound world of other Leviathan releases. This is not static ambience, not in the least, these are actual songs, not just creepy swooshings and simple drones. Silhouette is like an entire record made up of the best black metal intros ever, but here, each one is fleshed out into actual musical narratives. Skeletal guitar figures, drift and shimmer darkly over ominous swells of mournful minor key lament. What little percussion there is, hovers ghostlike beneath a wash of blackened swirl. The entire record is wrapped in a foggy cloak of starlit skies and murky underground passages. A haunting soundtrack to misery and horror, death and dying.
We talk about 'long awaited' releases all the time, records we hear about well before their actual release date, forcing us to wait and wait and wait, but few records have been as eagerly anticipated, or generated so many emails from customers as this, the latest from SF black metal behemoth Leviathan. Especially considering the rumors circulating that this may indeed be the final recording from Wrest and his one man band, Leviathan. If it is indeed a swansong, it's hard to imagine a more fitting or more powerful farewell-and-fuck-off.
Even being a huge fan and voracious devourer of black metal, we would be hard pressed to tell lots of BM bands apart. It's the nature of the beast in some ways. But the second we threw this on, even if we hadn't known what was playing, there's no mistaking the sound of Leviathan, the guitar tone, those demonic croaked vocals, the dizzying lush black buzzscapes, the convoluted song structures, the weird mathy rhythms and the incredible riffs.
Massive Conspiracy is not a huge departure from the sound of Tentacles Of Whorror, if anything, it just takes all the elements of that record and pushes them just that much further out. The sound is a bit more dense, more epic, the drumming is amazing (especially after the switch from electronic drums to real drums) the compositions more sprawling and expansive in scope. Which is saying a lot since past Leviathan records were pretty dang epic and sprawling already.
The sheer hatred of the titles is certainly expressed in the music as well, this is some scathing, hateful furious sound.
The record begins with some strange static, hissing drone-like buzz, ominous ambience beneath it, a haunting melody, then Wrest's howl and the record explodes in a flurry of rapid fire riffing and relentless blasting, but only briefly, the song immediately switches gear into a lurching lope, then right back into the blast. The song is peppered with super dense squalls of high end buzz, streaks of ultradistorted skree, while beneath all sorts of murky melodies lurk, almost like some old 78 was left playing in the background, giving the track an incredible creepy vibe, the last half of the song wraps itself around a slithery downtuned staccato riff, a gorgeously grim dirge that pounds its way to a burst of black chaos at the finish.
The second track is all whirring synths, loping drums, and Wrest's gurgling growl, a weird skeletal ambient dirge that is soon swallowed up by keening high end guitars, crunching downtuned churn, and some super freaky almost operatic vocals, the middle of the song is all full speed freaked out intensity, before again, the song locks into a super riffy groove, much like the opener, before finishing off in another black blaze.
The rest of the record follows suit, weaving super elaborate soundscapes of black metal buzz, and moody mathy meandering, dense black ambience, and swirling low end drones, the tracks rife with parts and bridges and confusional changes, all masterfully wound up into dense convoluted blackened, that while on their own are strange enough, are also peppered will all manner of sonic weirdness, be it slippery peals of woozy, dizzying melody, garbled vocal fragments, soaring harmony guitar melodies, super obtuse dynamics,
All culminating in the final two tracks. "Vulgar Asceticism" is definitely the most fucked, and maybe most amazing song Wrest has ever recorded. Even the opening, with its muted riffing and murky bass throb, staccato riff, and weird Greg Ginn-ish scrape and grind, before the song takes off. And the main riff is super warbly, almost sounding like he's playing with a slide, the notes wavering and detuning, only to be yanked back in line, and then bent way out of tune again, the result a blurry seasick lurch, exacerbated by the dynamics, the riffs often slipping into strange start stop stutters, until the song reaches it's middle stretch, the bass and drums locked into a relentless midtempo blast, while layers of guitars, and various riffs slip and slide, waver and warble, a super dizzy expanse of funhouse mirror blackness that is as fucked up and far out as it is amazing and masterful.
The closer, "Noisome Ash Crown" is an appropriately somber end to Massive Conspiracy, maybe even Leviathan itself. The whole first half a funereal crawl, a bleak grim landscape of whirring thick black ambience, and strange squalls of processed vocals, squiggles of distorted guitar, the drums a solid framework for the drifting abyss above. A strange washed out, gauzy black ambient bridge, gives way to a crushing almost industrial dirge, the melodies majestic and sorrowful, the vocals harrowing and harsh, the drums furiously flailing before transforming into muted little tangles, the rest of the song following suit, a dark minor key outro that gives way to the same black static that started the record.
The first limited pressing comes in a red digipak, featuring some seriously twisted original artwork from Wrest on the cover. Inside lurks a 12 page full color booklet, with more freaky drawings, lyrics and no liner notes.
NB. this officially comes out on Tuesday (3/25) so we can't sell any in the store 'til then, but of course mailorder folks can go ahead and order it now, to get in the mailorder queue...
What's in a name? Pretty much everything when the name is LIGHTNING SWORDS OF DEATH. Really, fuck all these bands called Sword something or other, how can they not be completely and utterly slain by a horde with a name like LSOD!? They can't, and they shall!
We reviewed the new record by Endless Blizzard last time around, a black hole heavy platter packed with furious frenzied wintry blackened old school black metal, well, EB guitarist, Roskva, was wielding his axe in LSOD before the Endless Blizzard even began. As you might imagine, the sounds are similar, a definite nod to classic old school metal, a bit of death, a bit of thrash, raw and filthy, but still plenty mathy and complex, the drums manic, with impossible flurries of lightning fast blasts, the guitars thick and downtuned, snarling and buzzing, the vokills a guttural caterwaul, the songs veering from black thrash into pounding blackened doom to almost crusty grindy thrash. Plenty of nods to Celtic Frost and Hellhammer, as well as the Nordic BM aristocracy, with a SUPER heavy production, that manages to make the whole thing crushing and brutal, without losing any of its raw grimness. Way recommended. Especially if you dug the Endless Blizzard. Yet another horde to perhaps be considered for inclusion in the rarified ranks of the West Coast USBM elite.
