Illinois' "psychedelic black metallers" Nachtmystium are back with their eagerly anticipated (and somehow controversial) new full-length album for big new label Century Media (after several on Southern Lord). The underground is abuzz, and we couldn't wait to hear it, being big fans of their previous album, Instinct Decay (and intrigued by their recent Worldfall ep, featuring a couple unexpected covers). Probably what's controversial isn't their psychedelic musical direction, which we already had major clues about from the catchy, buzzy, dreamy, E-bowed and bizarre Instinct, but just that Nachtmystium are moving on up from the underground, getting more "indie" scene attention... for instance, a review on Pitchfork, who even wonder if this is really a black metal album. The fact that Pitchfork is even writing about it, makes all the "true" black metallers wonder the same thing. But whatever, yes it's a black metal album, albeit one with lots of Moogy synths and backwards tape effects and even some saxophone (from Yakuza dude) on the three-part, 12 minute "Seasick" opus that ends this disc, and other left field, post/prog/psych rock twists and turns. There's a track ("Away From The Light") of pure ambience. But also quite a few tracks of pure black metal brutality. And beautiful blends of both.
Overall, Nachtmystium mostly remains a raging black metal beast, dosed with spacey FX. Think (later) Satyricon meets Neurosis, maybe, with the controls set for the heart of a dead black sun. Really, if black metallers can deal with the likes of Sigh and Arcturus and gone-prog Enslaved, they can't possibly have a problem with Nachtmystium. In fact, quite the opposite!!
And as far as we're concerned, this is possibly Nachtmystium's best yet. Certainly best produced, and most ambitious. The fullest realization to date of this band's genre-bending progression. And the punny title is pretty clever. Black Meddle, get it? You do if you're a Pink Floyd fan. And it's not the only Pink Floyd reference here. We're not sure that if Pink Floyd circa Meddle were to have made a black metal album it would sound like this, or even if this is supposed to be Nachtmystium's best guess at what that would sound like, but the inspiration at any rate has worked to create something pretty special. There's utter blasting blackened riffarama with rasping vokills, moody stretches of instrumental psychedelic '70s space-out bliss, and, well, what more do you need to know? Already sounds like a thumbs-up AQ item, right? We have always wanted post rock bands like Pelican to be just a bit more metal, and Nachtmystium shows that can work perfectly from the other direction. Recommended. What will Pt. 2 hold in store we wonder?
Every time there's a new Nadja or Aidan Baker release, which is EVERY TIME we do a list, we constantly vow to finally just say fuck it. New Nadja. Buy it. That's it. But every record is a little bit different, and there is a chance that this will be someone's first exposure to a band we actually really do dig quite a bit, so seems unfair to penalize them for catching on later than some other folks. However, we will be a bit less wordy as our drone metal thesaurus has been just about exhausted. But for those of you who might be reading your very first Nadja review: blissed out, blown out, crushing, shoegazey, pummeling, shimmering, sludgey. All words that perfectly describe Nadja's slow motion doomdronedirge.�
This two track release begins with the 30 minute title track, a slow burning, jazzy meander, thick warbly bass, washed out drums, simple strummed guitar, almost Slint-y, and fluttery flute. Like the last Baker disc we reviewed, this one too has some Necks style jazzy drift, but all wrapped around a loping post rock, some gorgeous gauzy slowcore, that builds and builds until it blossoms into a churning blurred downtuned dirge. The cool thing about this track, is the flute remains, floating just above the roiling heaviness beneath it, giving it a strange otherworldly prog vibe. The heavy breakdown goes on and on but as with most Nadja tracks, you sort of never want it to end, but eventually it must, and here the distortion fades leaving a barely there whispered hum to finish off.�
The second track, another half hour long epic, explodes right out of the gate, a burst of crushing feedback drenched heaviness, a super spare abstract doom, one hit, that then slowly decays over the course of minutes, the original crash ringing out into infinity, a sea of swirling streaks of high end, of rumbling distorted low end, an unbelievable amount of sustain, sounding like it could, and maybe should ring out forever. When in fact it's only really 10 minutes! The track then shifts gears, and becomes a piano driven minimal doomfolk, stuttery drums, swooping backwards effects, a dark lugubrious, almost jazzy crawl, that slowly builds its way back to another supernova blowout of blissed out blinding heaviness.�
So there you go. Another Nadja record. It's awesome. You should buy it.�
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Already nearly sold out at the label. We have a bunch, but they won't last long (and we did get a tiny handful of the special edition, which comes with a bonus cd-r. They are identical in every other way, they're mixed in randomly with the regular copies, so a very few of you just might get lucky).
Crashing waves of balls of yarn. That's one attempt to explain this band's sound... Along with bringing in the usual Earth, SUNNO))), and Boris comparisons. The Toronto based duo of Aidan Baker (guitars, vocals, flute, piano, drum machines) and Leah Buckareff (bass and vocals) are an "atmospheric doom" band whose slow moving, heavy and heavily distorted music definitely shares something with the likes of early Earth, but although they've done a split 3" with UK doom nasties Moss (among several previous underground releases) you can't really define them as being a "metal" band at all. Their gauzy, droney, doom-spelled-backwards music has a warm, melodic underpinning, somewhere within the billowing clouds of distortion that form the three long tracks found here. I guess it's something like the churchy, "funereal" doom of Finland's Skepticism, really, but even more calm, echoed and ambient. Melancholic but very pleasant, with both growled vocals and gentle singing hovering just beneath the surface, this music somehow suggests rays of pure white light shining down from on high to illuminate their low-end murk... and during the final third of the last track "Breakpoint" the heaviness drops away altogether for a quietly sung coda that could be from the most mellow and poetic of indie-pop albums. Nadja's music is definitely more abstract and altered than, say, Ocean (another sludge-dirge outfit reviewed elsewhere this list), and is so much more beautiful than the monochrome darkness dwelt in by many other doom bands. If you can imagine an ultra-distorted hybrid of Growing, Codeine and, uh, Ras Algethi you'd maybe come close to the sound of Nadja... Recommended!!
First actual, non cd-r, cd release from this mysterious one man ambient doomy un-black metal band. Like all of the EEE and related bands, Njiqahdda are tough to describe, black metal is the source and the root of their sound, but what is done to that sound, how it is twisted and processed and effected, the arrangement, the production, the recording, are all as important to the sound as the sound itself.
Like the last Njiqahdda record, this one is all about repetition, the riffs and parts looped over and over, the drums locked into rhythms that often stretch the length of the song barely wavering. But like that record, the sound here is fantastic, alien - sure there's the requisite buzz and blast, the distortion and growled guttural vox, but they are twisted into truly strange shapes. The guitar, the main riff, is blurred and murky, turned into a throbbing pulsing drone as much as an actual riff, occasionally stripped down to an almost indie rock like jangle. The drums, programmed and machinelike, offer up a framework for the various elements to hang on, the vocals too are heavily effected, a blown out howl, that sometimes transforms into what sounds like radio interference. And like most tracks, there is always one element that makes everything else seem downright normal, here it's the cymbals, which stutter and hiccup, like they're super processed, or perhaps they're just recorded so hot, that they cause the tape heads to malfunction, either way, it sounds amazing, and sort of like some blackened Chain Reaction record. So for half of the first track's 16 minutes, these elements loop and shift sucking the listener in, mesmerizing with its trancelike groove. At which point the track pauses, before relaunching, this time with thick streaks of distorted melody, and soaring sort-of-leads, blown out Nadja-like majesty, before the distortion and buzz is pulled back, revealing the murky strummy underbelly of the song, leaving just drums and jangly guitar, and a layer of distorted hiss, peppered with weird percussive throbs and dropouts, which only add to the track's weirdness.
And so goes the rest of the record. Loooooong tracks. The riffing so hot and blown out and in the red, that the various distortions and crumbling tape hiss, add a whole other element to the sound. The drums buried in the mix, the cymbals acidic and hissy, sometimes washing out all the sounds around it, other times bathing the main riff in a shower of sizzle, the guitars white hot, slipping from blinding and effulgent to blackened and falling to pieces, what sounds like keyboards, smeared streaks of buzz and drone, deep fuzzy bass, harsh vokills, all the various elements going through various stages of distortion and decomposition, doused in effects and processing, recorded in such a way, that they often don't sound like guitars, or drums, or vocals at all. Each song a series of blackened riffy drones, long stretches of clean shimmer, of lilting jangle, of stumbling dizzying abstraction, even longer stretches of looped mesmerizing buzz, but always run through with lilting melodies, buried hooks, subtly catchy, blissed out and black. A record as much about riffs and beats as it is about sound and timbre, texture and mood, a dreamy blissy blackened dronescape of buzz, blur, loop rhythm and ambience, twisting its unblackness into something haunting and hypnotic and unforgettable.
NOW ON VINYL!
Hurrah! The Notwist's long awaited follow-up to aQ fave album Neon Golden has arrived! That 2002 album set the bar pretty high for modern German electronic pop/rock and its wistful forlorn songs really resonated with many of us. Needless to say, the over five year wait may have elevated our expectations to unrealistically lofty heights. So we're approaching with care, and we'll be totally honest The Devil You + Me hasn't quite knocked up on our butts and tickled our heartstrings the way that Neon Golden did. The exacting and seamless pop blend of programmed and organic instrumentation that left us aghast. All right, we said it, and we won't belabor the point. Devil's appeal is certainly not as immediate, but it does sink in slowly, and Markus Acher's hushed yearning vocal delivery is as charming and affecting as ever. Songs such as the title track are sweetly engaging in a surprisingly Belle & Sebastian way. Meanwhile others such as "Sleep" draw easy comparisons to the lovely pop-tronic tunes of Canada's Caribou. Overall, it's a much darker, less catchy, less pop structured collection of songs. A bit more brooding, a bit less dreaming, and perhaps drawing in a bit more of some of their other bands: both Village Of Savoogna's sprawling sonic explorations and Lali Puna's breezy, melancholic ruminations. Indeed, it instead favors more grand and sweeping journeys particularly with the gracious presence of The Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra. Ask yourself, when doesn't the presence of a bassoon and a harp add epic sorrow and fantasy panache (respectively)? We're sure this one's going to continue to lay down its roots long into autumn. If you're new to this band, Neon Golden's the place to start, but you definitely shouldn't overlook the charms of the Devil.
Formed in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Orchestre Ethiopia took on the task of bringing traditional Ethiopian folk sounds back into the limelight at a time when modern music ensembles were at the height of their popularity. However, rather than simply performing traditional songs for a wider (and eventually international) audience, the Orchestre's sound was unique as it took elements of a number of different folk traditions and mixed them up into a joyous, celebratory blend of Ethiopian cultures. The group itself was as diverse as its musical inclinations: it was initially assembled and led by a series of Americans including an ethnomusicologist and a Peace Corps worker (although it found a native leader in 1966 when Tesfaye Lemma took over leadership) and its membership included singers, dancers and musicians from a diverse array of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The result is a sound that falls squarely between the two styles that the Ethiopiques series has done such a remarkable job of documenting: Orchestre Ethiopia weren't a traditional folk group, nor were they a modern groove ensemble. Instead, they played an inspired pastiche of traditional sounds in a very modern way, never committing to one particular sound or groove.
Although Orchestre Ethiopia released two LPs between 1969 and the group's disintegration in 1975, the majority of the tracks included on this disc are previously unreleased archival material - a fact which is reflected in the less than stellar fidelity of the recordings. However, the lack of polish adds a wooly, mysterious air to the music, and further emphasizes the group's outsider status. For all of the reasons above, this latest installment of the mighty Ethiopiques series has quickly become a favorite of the aQ staff, and it includes the extensive liner notes, personal essays, and archival photographs that one would come to expect from the fine folks at Buda Musique. Whether this is the first Ethiopiques cd you pick up or the 23rd, the fact of the matter remains: this is a brilliant, gorgeous and haunting collection of music from the golden age of one of the world's most culturally rich regions. Essential!
We've all got our old favorite records that maybe we haven't heard in a while, but it only takes a few bars of the lead-off track to immediately bring it all back and make us wanna dust 'em off again... This was the case when a special order was recently placed for Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark's 1983 album "Dazzle Ships"- �a seeming direct follow-up to Kraftwerk's 'Radioactivity'�- featuring shortwave radio broadcasts, chiming synth lines, speak-and-spells, and earnest, emotive vocals. Take tracks like the bouyant "Telegraph"- it's pure synth-pop goodness, combining an innocent exuberance with considerably more weighty, dark subject matter. An overlooked experimental electronic pop gem, this album is full of wonderful songs and sounds, courtesy of�core members Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey.�In a time when 'the '80s' are seemingly everywhere - and frequently in the most watered-down, cliche forms - it's nice to catch a few quality moments with a brilliant, good old friend. FYI: Jim thinks 'Organization' is way better, but this is definitely OMD's most exploratory moment.�Features the extended remixes of Genetic Engineering and Telegraph and those singles b-sides.
Many of us can still remember the exact moment three summers ago that the Finnish group Paavoharju entered our lives. Their debut album Yha Hamaraa seemed to have come out of nowhere and soon became one of those records that we turned to again and again for an enveloping aural escape. So needless to say we've been anxiously anticipating this follow-up, and we're thrilled to say it's finally here. And in a day and age where quality control has been thrown out the window, it's actually pretty refreshing to find that there are still some folks out there with the patience and commitment to take their time in crafting their art, ensuring that it will live on in our ears and hearts for years and years to come. Paavoharju have done just that with their follow-up to Yha Hamaraa. With the subtly familiar yet fresh sounding Laulu Laakson Kukista, they have somehow raised the bar even higher, with a record that truly inhabits its own world. A place that is filled with flashbacks to a romantic and tragic old world, an oceanic daydream and a wide aerial view of lush green open fields where down below a secret magical world exists. It's actually quite tricky to try to describe the sound of this record as almost every song offers another view of their deliciously unique soundworld. Listening to Laulu Laakson Kukista is sort of like watching a Guy Maddin film, as the songs and sounds on the album feel as if they are at times in classic grainy black & white and other times in the most stunning and vibrant technicolor. There are songs that you could actually kind of maybe dance to ("Kevatrumpu"), songs that should be the theme of the Olympics the next time it's in Finland ("Uskallan"), and songs that conjure images of lost fairytales, musical radio plays, epic voyages, fantastical moments and interrupted daydreams.
It's actually so damn rare these days for a group to truly have its own sound but you just can't really compare Paavoharju to almost anyone else around. It might have been subconscious but after listening to this record several times we started hanging out a lot with David Bowie's album Low. As the otherworldly second side of that album brings us to a similar space as Laulu. We also imagine Kate Bush, Bjork, Robert Wyatt, Edith Piaf and Kurt Weill at the twilight of their careers, transported into the middle of nowhere in Northeast Europe, and dosed with some magic mushrooms before entering the forest to record a record together.
It's been a long while since a new recording has captured our imagination and allowed us to get as lost in its vision as this one has. Once again Paavoharju have created a collection of magical sounds that will continue to keep us warmly embraced and mesmerized with each subsequent listen!
PS: The vinyl came and went and we're waiting for more...
We loved Pantalimon's ep Cloudburst from last year but somehow we managed to miss the full length that followed Mercy Oceans. We will for sure make sure to try to track that down but for now on Heart of the Sun, we get to hear many of those songs retouched, reworked, remixed. The sparse, delicate hazy folk of Pantaleimon remixed? Don't worry there are no cheesy beats, awkward turntables or sloppy hands on any of these songs. In fact the first time we listened we had no idea that any of these songs were in fact remixes. Maybe it's because we hadn't heard any of these songs in their first incarnation. But wow, we were drawn in immediately. Andria Degens is making such beautiful and haunting music as Pantalimon that we almost hesitate to mention that she's married to David Tibet of Current 93, as her own music more then stands on its own. But if folks who haven't heard her before and are C93 fans check this out then the more ears that hear Pantaleimon the better!
While the sound is similar to the music of folks like Fursaxa, Grouper and Christina Carter, there is much more immediacy, focus and a connection to folk history in the songs of Pantaleimon. While less hazy then some of her peers there is a seemingly sonic mist hanging over her songs which stops you in your tracks. There is also a rustic quality in these stripped down songs that makes us think of Bridget St. John and Hala Strana recording a record together. Plenty of folks help out by adding sounds and ambience but all do so with much subtly and respect. Who knew Andrew W.K. could be so subtle, his tasteful keyboards are heard on the record's opener, and the list of other contributors/remixers reads like a who's who of the musical underground (Colin Potter, Andrew Lilies, Stephen O'Malley, Fovea Hex, Lilium, etc). Heart Of The Sun is becoming the record we listen to both early in the morning and then late at night as we surrender to sleep. So beautiful!
Oh Dolly! How we love you so. And how could we not. Dolly is like the wise, fun and sassy aunt we wish we all had. Someone who tells it like it is but never lets the hardships of life take away her spirit or sass. Mission Chapel Memories is without a doubt the greatest collection of Dolly's songs in a brief yet totally special moment of her musical career (1971-1975). During this prolific era she released eight albums as well as four duet collections with her mentor the late great Porter Wagoner. From classic songs you might know like "Coat Of Many Colors", "The Bargain Store" and "Jolene" to more obscure Dolly tracks that just might become your new favorites, as well as some secret weapons / devastating tracks for the next mix you make like "Loneliness Found Me", "Comes And Goes" and "When Someone Wants To Leave." This is Dolly at her most pure and raw. Proving that well before she became a huge pop star and cultural icon, she was responsible for writing, singing and playing some of the most sad, striking and salt of the earth country songs ever recorded. What makes Dolly so amazing and important is how truly universal her songs and sentiments are. No one else could draw as diverse of a fan base and loyal following as Dolly. From country music enthusiasts and southern baptists to punkers and queer activists everyone can relate and grasp onto the magic of Dolly. In recent years folks like the White Stripes, The Gossip and Jenny Hoyston have helped champion Dolly's music, exposing it to a new generation that maybe would have missed out on some truly amazing songs. And if you've been looking for that one document that really captures Dolly's music in its full glory this is the one to have!
Sometimes the world does indeed seem like a surprisingly small place. Years back, we were email penpals with a guy in England, who drummed for a killer mathy post rock band called Polaris. We exchanged records, and dug the shit out of the Polaris stuff we heard. Eventually we sort of lost touch, but would often wonder what happened to our friend, and wonder what had happened to the band, who as far as we were concerned should have been way more popular than they were.�
Well, years later, we get a random email from a label looking to get their records into the shop, and lo and behold, right there on the list is a record from a band called Polaris. It couldn't be. Could it? But indeed it was, recorded in 2004, this most recent release (their last?) from UK math rockers Polaris is like a modern take on nineties math rock. A little dreamier and more melodic and a little less raw then we remember, but still so good. Channeling the sound of Polvo, Pitchblende, Archers Of Loaf, Rodan and the like. Spidery minor key melodies, angular riffage, complex mathy drumming, lots of start stop arrangements, super dynamic, with long brooding stretches of loping melancholy groove, giving way to brief squalls of soft crunch, moody Tortoise like meandering, occasional bits of metallic buzz, gorgeous swells of dramatic Slint-isms, weary drawled vocals, all woven into long flowing post rock soundscapes. We sometimes forget how great stuff like this sounds. Hardly any bands make music like this anymore, and even the modern math rock and post rock bands who do have a totally different vibe than back in the day. The cool thing is, while Polaris definitely sound like they were transported here from 1995, they manage to update the sound, making it their own, somehow prettier and dronier, the vibe woozy and dreamy as well as propulsive and tightly (un)wound. So good. Several songs in, we were smitten, totally transported, captivated. It seems impossible but it doesn't sound dated at all, even though it's so reminiscent of the nineties, a testament to the bands skills and chops. Absolutely recommended, especially to folks who miss the math and the post in their rock.
Remember the good old days? And by old days, we mean the nineties. When there were regular bands, who wrote real songs. Just sort of indie rock, punk rock, rock and roll, whatever? At the risk of sounding like old fogies, we miss those days now and then. The sort of college rock heyday. Soul Asylum (when they were awesome), the Replacements, Husker Du, Pavement, Skunk, Guided By Voices, the Grifters, the Swirlies, the Volcano Suns, the Lemonheads, you know exactly what we're talking about.
Regular old rock bands that write real songs and play guitars and basses and drums, are becoming more and more rare, amidst the dudes crouched on the floor with a garage sale of equipment, nerds hunched over laptops, scary guys in corpsepaint. As much as we love all that stuff, we sometimes miss a bunch of drunk dudes in jeans and t-shirts playing awesome catchy indie rock.
One of those bands was Prisonshake. They never hit it big, like some of their indie brethren, but they made a handful of kick ass records back in the day. We thought they were long gone, but all of a sudden here comes a brand new single, and man if it doesn't have us flashing back to those days, smoky dingy clubs, bands sweating up a storm on stage and just rocking out.
They may be older and a bit less brash, but they still sound pretty great. A stumbling chaotic mix of all the above mentioned bands, lots of indie jangle, distorted crunch, angular riffing, even some handclaps, the vocals are not entirely tuneful, but suit the music. The A side has some wicked funny and snarky lyrics (it's called "The Cut Out Bin" after all) and a weird coda, a randomly recorded conversation and some backwards guitar. The flipside is all over the place, more of a collage than a song, bits of studio stuff, lo-fi live action, more backwards guitars, all tangled up into a stumbling indie blues jam.
The single comes with a bonus cd, including the tracks from the 7" as well as two extra numbers, a groovy, downtuned jangle rock jam, and a shorter poppier one, both instrumental, and both sounding like they could be unfinished tracks from the last proper Prisonshake record. We like!
We got a handful of the SUPER limited version, only 200 made, a blue vinyl 7" housed in a cardstock fold over obi instead of a sleeve, with the cd, and each one hand numbered.
For the last 14 years, New Zealander Stefan Neville has been issuing a steady stream of cassettes, lathe-cuts, cd-rs, 7"s and other assorted slabs of mysterious small-run skronk under the Pumice moniker. Somehow through it all Neville has managed to find a comfortable spot nestled in between two very distinct strains of NZ music-making. At their heart, the songs he writes are pop songs obviously indebted to the legacy of Flying Nun, The Tall Dwarves and The Clean; that said, his willful disregard for fidelity, his love of tape hiss, wow and flutter, garbled vocals and blasts of harsh drone are a tip o' the hat to kiwi noiseniks like Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, and Antony Milton. It's a compelling combination, as it allows his records to be both densely textural and supremely melodic - for every piece of blown out headphone candy, there's a memorable vocal or frighteningly catchy guitar riff. It's this incredible tug-of-war between (as we put it in our review) "doleful drone" and "sheer pop umph" that made us flip out over the last Pumice full-length, Pebbles, and we're happy to report that Neville's latest, Quo, finds him refining the Pumice formula in all the best possible ways to create a record full of impish charms, slack anthems, rambling bedrooms hiss, and speaker fried drone assaults!
Quo opens with "Pumice Quo," a song that hints at what is to come on the rest of the album: fuzzed-out, atonal guitars klang and skree like some sort of netherworldly faux-sitar over a ragged, swinging stomp that effortlessly mutates back and forth with a breezy, expansive, half-time swagger. Rhythmically and structurally it's all angular and math-y but it never sounds cold or analytical - it's like some incredible mix of Doc At The Radar Station and Celebrate The New Dark Age where you can't tell if it's Beefheart covering Polvo or vice versa, but everything sounds perfectly fucked up and damaged but so inexplicably catchy at the same time. Likewise, "World with Worms," a creeping, rumbling, blown-out, billowing sea shanty that mixes Neville's signature, mannered (almost goth, really) vocals with a teetering melody pounded out on some sort of half-broken chord organ or accordion.
The first half of the record continues to cast a few different lines - "Fort" sounds like some sort of classic mid-'90s B-side pop anthem you'd expect from GBV or Boyracer buried under 10 feet of shrieking keyboard noise; "Thermos in the Studio" is a winsome bedroom pop instrumental that would sound right at home buried amongst the ruins of Pavement's Westing (By Musket and Sextant) with lyrical slide guitar melodies that are simple, gorgeous and over in an instant; "Pebbles" is 2 minutes of rambling, shuffling, ramshackle pop. However, everything starts to come together with the second half of the record, as "Whole Hoof" looks back to the Polvo/Beefheart battle royale of the album opener but this time ads layers of distorted howling vocals. It starts out like Simply Saucer plowing through some freaked out rockabilly jam but mutates into something completely creepy and sinister at the end.
The album's second half is incredibly strong and manages to focus the scattershot elements of the first half without sacrificing any of those songs' chimpy playfulness. There's a darker element that emerges, but it never overwhelms the whole proceedings. "Sick Bay Duvet" starts out like a lost Fahey side being played back on a broken down gramophone, all rumbling, twanging, echoing, and slightly out of tune. When drums, melodica and a low, throbbing drone finally kick in at the end, it changes into something completely different - a kind of dour, anti-anthem that leads perfectly next track, "Dogwater," whose warbling, garbled take on Blackheart Procession's western goth vibe manages to come as both tongue-in-cheek and gracefully mannered. Things get stronger still with the last three songs: "Heavy Punter" is a solemn funeral shuffle built around a fractured Beefheart/Polvo riff filled out by ghostly keyboards that woosh and drone in and out of the background and fantastic, layered, pseudo-goth vocal stylings; "Battersby" is almost like Pumice's stab at punk rock with Casio tweeters battling against four on the floor drums and stumbling, disaffected vocals that wouldn't sound out of place on a Fall record (the whole thing comes across like some weird mashup of a NZ cd-r salvo and something off of a Messthetics comp - bizarrely catchy and certainly one of our favorites!); and album ender "Beak Remedy" is 7 minutes of blissed out, see-saw chord organ drone, ghostly tape loops, fluttering, stuttering ambient flickers of feedback, hum and hiss with percussive clomps that sneak in toward the end until the whole thing trickles out with choppy puffs of feedback and static.
All this adds up to a brilliant mix of pop songwriting and freaked out fuzzmongering that has been perking the ears of both customers and staff since it first arrived. We're confident that Quo is going to show up on many of our year end best-of lists, and we think you'll feel the same way about this blissed-out, smashed to pieces, melodic, thoughtful, mannered, playful and thoroughly recommended record!
It may be difficult to believe at this point, but we don't actually love everything from Finland. Nor do we love everything from Japan. And what might be equally hard to believe, is that we don't love every band with a crazy name, a monicker equal parts ridiculousness and ultraviolence, Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars, medieval and futuristic. Nor does the presence of flute supersede all other sonic considerations. And being chaotic and damaged and heavy and downright baffling is not, on its own, enough (although it's very very close).
But, and this is the very big BUT we must concern ourselves with here, we do love EVERY SINGLE band we've heard who hail from Japan, via Finland, with an awesomely over the top super metal name, who are heavy and noisy and mathy and fucked up and sort of black metal, and have tons and tons of FLUTE. But then again, there's only one band that fits that description. Japan's Quest For Blood. Released on Jussi from Circle's Ektro label, championed by Reverend Bizarre's Albert Witchfinder (who also did the artwork and wrote the band's bio on the Ektro website), who create a dizzying complex bombast of proggy heaviness, of complex arrangements, of blackened metallic majesty, all gnarled riffing, furious drumming, riffy and groovy and buzzy, and flute everywhere, and it's the flute that defines the sound of Quest For Blood, whose sound is both metal and some sort of jazz, equally composed and abstract, black and buzzy, epic and deliriously dense, heavy yet folky and free. Quest For Blood began life as a slightly more traditional black metal band called Magane, but after a chance meeting with Yukihiro Isso, who had in the past played with Tatsuya Yoshida and Keiji Haino, the band changed direction, and blossomed into something else entirely, creating a sound never really heard before, and a sound that we now realize is one we had been fantasizing about for ages, black metal, Japanese folk, wild free flute, blast beats, weird chanted vocals, well, okay, we -would- have fantasized about it, had we ever imagined a band like that could actually exist. Well...
If you're anything like us, you'll be hooked after the first track, which begins with what sounds like Jew's harp and marimba, before launching into some blackened post metal riffing, over which a flute flutters and soars over the top, at once intense and melodic, but also airy and ethereal, it's like super dense metallic math rock meets black metal meets jazzprog, until suddenly the band drops out, leaving just solo flute, for 2 plus minutes, wild free jazz fluttery, folky, freaky, the melodies chaotic and complex one second, gentle and lilting the next, squeaks, skronks, wheezes, whistles, the sound falling somewhere between traditional Shakuhachi folk music and manic free jazz. Until finally, the band return, with some Japanese chanting, and epic Viking style riffery, the flute flitting right along, in its own way as aggressive and intense as the riffing beneath it. The second song follows suit, a roiling churning melee of riffs and blast beats, of serpentine riffing, of buzz and crunch, the flute again weaving dense tangled webs of melody draped over everything, a constant fluttering flitting sonic presence, relentless and breathless and truly dizzying.
The whole record is truly relentless, the flute in full on wild solo jam mode continuously, as the band wind and weave various metallic frameworks underneath. And while the sound is dynamic in its own way, it's also utterly ferocious and unrelenting, occasionally allowed some space, when the song unwinds and the flute is left to drift in long stretches of abstract shimmer, or the band slips into something slightly less manic, but for the most part, this is a gloriously mind blowing progjazzmathmetal onslaught.
As if the record wasn't already weird enough, it gets even weirder, and more varied, near the end, as the songs become more dynamic, the arrangements more stop / start, the various woodwinds offering up underwater gurgles and squiggly manic melodies, than more traditional flute sounds. "Yayema" sounds almost gospel-y, very melodic and dramatic, a little over the top, the melodies major key and majestic, but of course peppered with bursts of furious blasts and wild squall of flute freakout. "Uchina" begins like many of the other tracks, a jazz metal blow out, this time with raspy creature-like vocals, and some pounding piano, until the band drops out, leaving just drums and flute and vocals, reminding us a bit of a more freaked out version of that Dave Lombardo plays Vivaldi record, but with far out chanting, distant raspy vocalizations, all very tribal and weird, with a definite Ruins vibe, before launching back into full on metal mode, now with wailing guitar leads all tangled up with the wild flute.
The final track begins with solo flute, before the band joins in, all rough and raw and lo-fi, pounding out a simple mesmerizing riff, almost Circle style, the drums a murky thud, the flute ethereal and transcendent, eventually, the drums sputtering into some wide open space, before getting all wound up with streaks of scrabbly off kilter guitar in some sort of Ginn-ish guitar drum duel, laced with atonal piano pound, fiery flute and crumbling noisy chaos, finally finishing off in a blaze of metallic murk and abstract black jazz whatthefuck.
So awesome. And confusionally genius. Some seemingly impossible mix of black metal, free jazz, Italian prog, traditional Japanese folk, math rock and noise rock; a mind bending, ear melting mash up of Osanna, the Ruins, Absu, Solar Anus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Comus, Cromagnon, Ghost, Finntroll, Jethro Tull, Circle, Xynfonica, and who the fuck knows what else.
Needless to say, or perhaps worth saying over and over and over. WAY RECOMMENDED. And another contender for metal (or whatever) record of the year.
Wow! What an artifact. Here's some Egyptian jazz from the late 60's-early 70's courtesy of of the man who founded the first jazz big band in Egypt and later accompanied Sun Ra on tour in Egypt, Greece, France and Spain. We're pretty sure you must be damn curious by now, so we should tell you that beyond those enticing facts this is some seriously fine jazz played by a band made up of some of the best musicians in Egypt during that era. Five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones, piano, bass, drums and percussion all coming together to form a super rich and tasty sound. Incorporating Middle Eastern melodies and mystique into its sound, this is the kind of jazz that's pretty impossible not to fall for. Like the best instrumental Ethiopiques tracks, Sun Ra's big-band era and Randy Weston's multicultural approach to hard bop. Incredibly pleasing!
We first heard UK duo The Ragga Twins on the amazing Rumble In The Jungle compilation which we made our Record Of The Week back in early 2007. One of the first bands, in the early '90s, to combine the grooves and the toasting of reggae and dancehall with hip hop breakbeats, and essentially creating jungle, which as any avid reader of the aQ list knows, we absolutely LOVE.�
The Ragga Twins began life right in the midst of the blossoming rave scene which makes it a bit surprising that folks got so it. But get into it they did. Along with a handful of other underground groups, the Ragga Twins helped launch a British music movement that continues to this day, as Jungle would spawn drum and bass, which would mutate into garage, techstep, 2step, and eventually grime and dubstep. Even at its very genesis, this stuff was practically perfect, funky, and loose, groovy and aggressive, totally irresistible, big beats, loping hip hop rhythms, sped up breakbeats, the music skeletal, simple loops, all about the vocals, a rapid fire dancehall toasting, delivered in a raw bark, while the beat pounded away beneath. Some of the tracks definitely display some of the surrounding rave culture, fuzzy synths, sweeping strings, bits of techno, but for the most part, this stuff is fierce and funky dancehall jungle, the sort of stuff that The Bug is giving a modern spin.�
Take "Ragga Trip" with its seventies cop show groove, and squelchy synths, the toasting is incredible, rough and raw, and impossibly catchy. Or "Illegal Gunshot", with it's playful marimba melody, and skittery beat. And again, incredible vocals. Then "Spliffhead", with a reggae croon that ends up making it sound almost like Bad Brains at their most reggae. "Rudeboy" wraps techno synths and wailing sirens around a rolling breakbeat, the toasting and crooned vocals, and reggae guitar reeling it back in and keeping it from getting too ravey, while "Juggling" totally evokes eighties hip hop (especially Black Sheep) but it could just be THAT breakbeat. The second disc features older tracks, including a couple from the pre-Ragga Twins Deman Rockers, the older tracks are a bit ravier, or a bit more reggae sounding, but even then, the tracks are still pretty kick ass.�
Definitely essential listening for folks into jungle and drum and bass, who loved that Rumble In The Jungle comp, and who dig all that Bug stuff, this is where it all started!
Like all Soul Jazz stuff, gorgeous packaging, tons of vintage photos and of course extensive liner notes.
We first heard UK duo The Ragga Twins on the amazing Rumble In The Jungle compilation which we made our Record Of The Week back in early 2007. One of the first bands, in the early '90s, to combine the grooves and the toasting of reggae and dancehall with hip hop breakbeats, and essentially creating jungle, which as any avid reader of the aQ list knows, we absolutely LOVE.�
The Ragga Twins began life right in the midst of the blossoming rave scene which makes it a bit surprising that folks got so it. But get into it they did. Along with a handful of other underground groups, the Ragga Twins helped launch a British music movement that continues to this day, as Jungle would spawn drum and bass, which would mutate into garage, techstep, 2step, and eventually grime and dubstep. Even at its very genesis, this stuff was practically perfect, funky, and loose, groovy and aggressive, totally irresistible, big beats, loping hip hop rhythms, sped up breakbeats, the music skeletal, simple loops, all about the vocals, a rapid fire dancehall toasting, delivered in a raw bark, while the beat pounded away beneath. Some of the tracks definitely display some of the surrounding rave culture, fuzzy synths, sweeping strings, bits of techno, but for the most part, this stuff is fierce and funky dancehall jungle, the sort of stuff that The Bug is giving a modern spin.�
Take "Ragga Trip" with its seventies cop show groove, and squelchy synths, the toasting is incredible, rough and raw, and impossibly catchy. Or "Illegal Gunshot", with it's playful marimba melody, and skittery beat. And again, incredible vocals. Then "Spliffhead", with a reggae croon that ends up making it sound almost like Bad Brains at their most reggae. "Rudeboy" wraps techno synths and wailing sirens around a rolling breakbeat, the toasting and crooned vocals, and reggae guitar reeling it back in and keeping it from getting too ravey, while "Juggling" totally evokes eighties hip hop (especially Black Sheep) but it could just be THAT breakbeat. The second disc features older tracks, including a couple from the pre-Ragga Twins Deman Rockers, the older tracks are a bit ravier, or a bit more reggae sounding, but even then, the tracks are still pretty kick ass.�
Definitely essential listening for folks into jungle and drum and bass, who loved that Rumble In The Jungle comp, and who dig all that Bug stuff, this is where it all started!
Like all Soul Jazz stuff, gorgeous packaging, tons of vintage photos and of course extensive liner notes.
We first heard UK duo The Ragga Twins on the amazing Rumble In The Jungle compilation which we made our Record Of The Week back in early 2007. One of the first bands, in the early '90s, to combine the grooves and the toasting of reggae and dancehall with hip hop breakbeats, and essentially creating jungle, which as any avid reader of the aQ list knows, we absolutely LOVE.�
The Ragga Twins began life right in the midst of the blossoming rave scene which makes it a bit surprising that folks got so it. But get into it they did. Along with a handful of other underground groups, the Ragga Twins helped launch a British music movement that continues to this day, as Jungle would spawn drum and bass, which would mutate into garage, techstep, 2step, and eventually grime and dubstep. Even at its very genesis, this stuff was practically perfect, funky, and loose, groovy and aggressive, totally irresistible, big beats, loping hip hop rhythms, sped up breakbeats, the music skeletal, simple loops, all about the vocals, a rapid fire dancehall toasting, delivered in a raw bark, while the beat pounded away beneath. Some of the tracks definitely display some of the surrounding rave culture, fuzzy synths, sweeping strings, bits of techno, but for the most part, this stuff is fierce and funky dancehall jungle, the sort of stuff that The Bug is giving a modern spin.�
Take "Ragga Trip" with its seventies cop show groove, and squelchy synths, the toasting is incredible, rough and raw, and impossibly catchy. Or "Illegal Gunshot", with it's playful marimba melody, and skittery beat. And again, incredible vocals. Then "Spliffhead", with a reggae croon that ends up making it sound almost like Bad Brains at their most reggae. "Rudeboy" wraps techno synths and wailing sirens around a rolling breakbeat, the toasting and crooned vocals, and reggae guitar reeling it back in and keeping it from getting too ravey, while "Juggling" totally evokes eighties hip hop (especially Black Sheep) but it could just be THAT breakbeat. The second disc features older tracks, including a couple from the pre-Ragga Twins Deman Rockers, the older tracks are a bit ravier, or a bit more reggae sounding, but even then, the tracks are still pretty kick ass.�
Definitely essential listening for folks into jungle and drum and bass, who loved that Rumble In The Jungle comp, and who dig all that Bug stuff, this is where it all started!
Like all Soul Jazz stuff, gorgeous packaging, tons of vintage photos and of course extensive liner notes.
This raw Swedish progg-punk band, whose name, delightfully enough, means "fox piss" in English, got their start back in 1970, a bunch of teenagers drinking beer and jamming and doing the occasional Black Sabbath or Jimi Hendrix cover. As they got a little more serious, they wrote more original songs, but jamming remained a big thing with them. They were part of the Swedish underground music scene in the '70s, playing the summer free festivals and hanging with freaks and anarchists and so forth... also they were friends with such better known bands as Guidbrallan and Samla Mammas Manna.
It wasn't until 1976, not long after they'd started calling themselves Ravjunk (named after some terrible coffee the drummer had been confronted with one morning), that they got around to recording an album, Uppsala Stadshotell Brinner, made on the cheap in their own, primitive but functional home-built DIY recording studio. They pressed up copies of the record themselves, and distributed it as best they could, indeed getting some good reviews and radio-play. It was to be Ravjunk's only album, but they did follow it over the final years of the decade, before their dissolution in 1981, with a number of 7" singles (not included here), the band apparently pursuing more and more of a heavy punk rock sound... which you can already hear hinted at on their album.
The album itself, is a heavily fuzzed out mix of bluesy jams, Hendrixian guitar wailing, krautrockish drone, and plenty of garagey proto-punk attitude, all recorded mostly live, with a raw, lo-fi sound... all the more charming for it, really. It's all here on this deluxe digipack double disc cd reissue, along with unreleased material from the Uppsala Stadshotell Brinner sessions, and recently discovered demos and even rawer live tapes, the complete recorded works of Ravjunk circa 1976-1977. It would have been cool if they had included Ravjunk's 1978-1980 singles too (one of which was banned in Sweden for political reasons), but there is -plenty- of music here, almost two hours of it, from the gruff blues punk of "Hey Little Girl" (something you might imagine the Baby Grandmothers would sound like if they'd heard Motorhead) to the brooding title track to the calm and blissful spacerock of "Nasten (Den Tysta Skogen)"... the krautrock of Can and the like is definitely an influence on these discs' many sinuous, rhythmic instrumental psych excursions like "Vi Ses (Vid Taj Mahal)". Other obvious inspirations include the Stooges, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Cream, the Groundhogs, Hawkwind, etc... the MySpace page for the (recently reunited) band even cites T2, Joakim Skogsberg and Magma! If you're into gritty '70s underground sounds, then this could definitely be your cup of fox's piss! Perhaps grittiest on the non-album material included, such as the 21 minute endless jamming rant and rave of the bonus track that ends disc one, "Naturbarn". (Meanwhile, the second disc ends with a 10+ minute live garage-psych punk stomper, a version of David Peel and the Lower East Side's "Who Killed Brian Jones? Was It One Of The Rolling Stones?"). Very cool.
Two late sixties records collected from the beloved Brazilian singer, Elis Regina. Elis Como e Porque (1968) and Elis Regina in London (1969), display the full range of her stellar vocal abilities singing many of Antonio Carlos Jobim's best known songs such as "Wave" and "How Insensitive". Not as well known in the states, probably due to Astrud Gilberto's fluke hit "Girl From Ipanema" which jump started the soft-samba wave abroad, an antithesis to Regina's tempestuous moodiness and dynamic vocal delivery (She was nicknamed "little pepper").
Although these records are not quite as exquisitely breathtaking as the 1974 lp she recorded with Antonio Carlos Jobim, they nicely showcase this vital musical figure whose untimely death at the age of 36 has made her a near saint in Brazil. No soft samba here, she's as bright as the sunniest day in Rio!
Er, when it Reigns it pours... as you should remember, last list we reviewed the new full-length cd from one of our favorite UK post rock acts, Reigns. We're waiting for a restock of those now, but in the meantime we've got *another* new Reigns release, a limited edition 2-song 7" single. Two new tracks of their lovely, so lovely and evocative instrumental music. Shimmering and mesmeric. That would be reason enough to pick this up, but, there's more: this comes packaged with a twelve-page booklet full of text in a tiny tiny font, detailing more of the adventures of Reigns Operative B, a diary of a field recording investigation into the English countryside. Of course things get a bit fantastical and weird, and in the end it's a bit like something by Thomas Ligotti. This is totally what we think makes Reigns extra-special, that added dash of imagination and mystery, presented in a confusional, supposedly scientific yet tongue-in-cheek manner. Neat!
Attention Steel Pan Fans! Japan's EM Records at your service, with the latest (fourth already) in their unusual series of obscure reissues featuring that trademark Trinidadian tuned percussion instrument, the steel pan (drum). If you've been with the series thus far, you'll want this one too for sure. Or, if you've never checked out any steel pan music, this wouldn't be a bad place to start, either. As the first ever solo album by a steel pan player from Trinidad, one who'd been the musical director for calypso superstars Lord Kitchener and Mighty Sparrow, it had a duty to be groovy, and Earl Rodney's 1973 album Friends & Countrymen is nothing if not groovy, slinkily so on opening track "Juck Juck" ferinstance. Recorded in New York City by Rodney and group of fellow expatriates from the islands, this album is mostly instrumental, most definitely danceable, full of Afro-Caribbean rhythms, jazzy horns, funky '70s wah wah guitar, congas, whistles, and of course the lovely vibes-like sounds of the steel pans themselves.
As always with EM releases, this reissue is top notch, the cardboard gatefold sleeve containing a fold-out 12"x12" poster of the album's wild and colorful cover painting. Man, by the time EM is done with this Steel Pan Series of theirs, we're ALL gonna be steel pan fans, dammit. They will not take no for an answer.
It's been a while since these two have gotten together for some noisemaking. Not since the very popular around here Vintermusik (now sold out, sorry). But since then, both have been plenty busy, releasing a clutch of limited cd-r's as well as at least a proper full length or two. Most recently, the beautifully dark Black Sleep from Dag Rosenqvist, aka Jasper TX.
So how much has changed since these two last teamed up? Thankfully not too much. The two work well together, which makes perfect sense considering they travel similar sonic paths on their own, so here the two sort of blend their sonic palletes, and the result, as has been the case in the past is not the sum of the parts, but more a minimal distillation of their two sounds. Not as lush as one might imagine, but also not as spare and academic.
A gorgeous hushed minimalism, that is just spike enough to remain interesting and to keep just on this side of pure ambience, adding grit and texture and a sense of subtly ominous foreboding.
Beginning with a soft, fuzzy drone, all smeared with tape hiss, the track gradually gathers low end, deep swells rising ever so gently from the abyss, while some sort of high end sine waves separate themselves from the sound, becoming prickly layers hovering far above the warm drift. The two halves, the low and the high, continue to transform independently, both gathering static and crackle as well, eventually, the low end sprawls into a glacial chordal whir, slowly spreading in slow motion, while the high end has become a sort of skittery sonar, offering up strange pulses and keening high end tones, those tones slowing down gradually, becoming less sharp, lower in fact, while the main melody also begins to fade, both eventually fading to nothing almost simultaneously. Quite nice. Fans of either will definitely dig. As will folks into abstract minimalism and all manner of drones and microsounds.
Gorgeously packaged in a super complex folded origami sleeve, black spirographs and white text on green metallic paper. Super striking. And of course, super limited...
Originally from Tokyo and now living in the states, Sawako has a really nice and subtle touch in creating delicate sounds that drone, crackle and flow in such a beautiful way. Delicate but never too precious this is a record sure to catch the ears of fans of the Fennesz/Sakamato collaborations, Christopher Willits and the final track (the only one with vocals) reminded us a lot of the early sound of Mum that we've been missing.
Mick Harris has been operating his dub-electronica project Scorn for over 15 years now, with his first forays being released through Earache and later through the industrial minded Hymen Records. Throughout his career, his goal has been devastation through dub, taking plenty of cues from contemporary contexts, whether that be the Pathological label from the early '90s (e.g. Terminal Cheesecake, Ice, God, etc.) with their post-Public Image Limited heaviness, or from the Illbient dark-dark-dark hip-hop of Spectre and the Wordsound crew, or as is the case on this album, the dubstep of Kode 9 and Burial. A threatening, malcontent atmosphere has always been at the heart of Harris' work, even if you were to go back to his early days in Napalm Death; yeah, you'll find that here creeping around the modulated sub-bass riffs that wow & flutter in most every dubstep track. The tracks themselves are nowhere nearly as memorable as anything that the aforementioned Kode 9 or Burial have concocted; but Harris does have a knack for keeping things dark. And if the dark, the dubby, and the devastating is what you are after, look no further.
Ed Banger producer, Sebastian, really "revs" things up with this 12". The title track "Motor" is the epitome of rude! If you're tired of wimpy dance music and need something to put some hair on your chest, this is probably the biggest, hardest, grinding, pumping, and almost unbearable (in a good way) tune you could hope for. The jist of it is a sample of a motor revving faster and faster, chopped up, pitched in different ways, and arranged over some pretty sinister drum slappage. You'll either hate it or love it and we here at AQ are eating it up. The other 2 B-side tracks are definitely much more endurable and just as good if not better. "Momy" is actually more of a quintessential disco track compared to Sebastian's common production style, filled with strings, trills, and the normal choppery of course. "Army" sums everything up with Sebastian displaying his usual yet crafty beat trickery, throwing pounding drums mixed with more of that gritty, churning, distorted bass synth that we've always loved from him and the rest of the French Ed Banger family. Awesome!
Latest in Gears Of Sand's series of super limited, hand assembled live discs, each documenting a single performance, the first was from the always prolific aQ fave Aidan Baker (of Nadja), this one from the curiously named Seconds In Formaldehyde, whose last disc, a favorite around here, bore the legend "This music was created with the pure power of the guitar drone", and while for that disc, those words could not have been truer, for this latest one, SiF explore a world much more soft and melodic, still generating sounds exclusively with electric guitar, but here the sounds are ethereal, tranquil, the edges soft and rounded, notes and chords waver and shimmer, the guitars soaked in reverb and delay, and processed into long blurred streaks of sound, minor key melodies drift and everything is hushed and underwater. The opener is 20 minutes of almost New Age style bliss, total bottom of the sea, sun dappled sonic glimmer, looped and mesmerizing and subtly dramatic. Cinematic and expansive, yet hushed and intimate. Absolute crystal vibration bliss.
The other two track are similarly dreamy, but offer up much more varied texture, the second getting a bit raw and intense with an almost Nadja style climax, which quickly gives way to more glistening harmonic drift, while the closer, offers up some effects drenched atonal melodies, almost like underwater whale songs, laid over a deep warm shimmering swell, the result, a surprisingly dramatic bit of soft focus, deep listening ambience.
So gorgeous. Not as 'heavy' as the other SiF disc, but still might appeal to fans of the guitardrone, a la Fear Falls Burning, Aidan Baker, Troum as well as folks into pure late night dreamdronebliss. Packaged in a thick, silkscreened, cardstock origami style fold over sleeve. LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered, we got about a quarter of those, so be quick...
Latest release from Holy Mountain, a new 12" from The Shining Path, the duo of Ilya Monosov, and Preston Swirnoff. We've dug pretty much everything we've gotten our hands on so far, and this 12" is no different. Well, actually it is, sort of.
And no we don't mean it's different as in we don't dig it, but no, as in it sounds WAY different than other SP releases. Where as other records were overdriven dubbed out druggy psych rock, Chocolate Gasoline has a bit of, well, a sort of calypso vibe mixed into their usual psychedelic stew. It's really strange, sort of sleazy sounding, WAY tripped out, but we still love it.
Stripped down percussion, moaning reverbed guitar, blown out FX drenched leads, strange vocals, that almost sound like Jamaican style toasting, and that calypso vibe. It continues on through most of the record, occasionally interrupted by dubbed out rhythms, clouds of electronic glitch, all dizzy and druggy, it actually sounds a bit like this: imagine the house band in some dark dingy calypso bar, a bar you just stumbled into after being heavily dosed with LSD, everything spinning and twisting into freaky shapes, the band jamming in the corner, begins to lift off the ground, their sounds becoming colors, the bar fading until just you and the band are standing on some other planet, watching the Earth melt in the background while the band jams on, and the little rock you're on drifts closer and closer to the sun.
Packaged in an eye popping 12" style sleeve, all reds and blues and yellows, just begging for some 3-D glasses!
The Shining Path is the psych rock alter ego minimalist experimental duo Ilya Monosov and Preston Swirnoff, and in the past we've raved about their blown out kraut flecked space rock. This new 7" captures the group live in 2005, two tracks from one of their very rare live performances.
The opener is a deep slow burning dirge, glistening and glowing, the sound of a planet slowly drifting into the orbit of a collapsing sun, guitars swirl and soar, grind and growl, effulgent and resplendent. This is drone rock rendered almost static, the riffs crawl, the bass throbs, the whole track creeps, or more appropriately, floats weightless, in a cloud of layered red hot psych guitar, spit out in thick glowing gouts, shot through with feedback, it's like High Rise covering Stars Of The Lid!
The second track is a bit more rocking, the drums and bass locked into a motorik groove, while the guitar, still super distorted and blown out, spits out riffs in sudden bursts, eventually coalescing into one constant stream of psychfuzz, pelted by fragments of super effected vocals, strange little squalls of FX, and then the bass gets all dubbed out, bouncing back and forth beneath the buzz and fuzz.
Like all Trensmat 7"s, the vinyl comes bundled with a bonus cd-r, this one featuring an extra live track, a heavy rocker, with some serious riffing and harmonica (!), as well as four live videos from various performances, nicely filmed, cool effects, tripped out lighting, and most importantly, more awesome music, with bleated sax, moaning horns, droney raga-like buzz, chanted vocals, creepy ambience, thick walls of guitars, rumbling throbbing bass, all woven into some seriously spaced out psychedelic dronerock.
Pressed on white vinyl and of course, VERY LIMITED!
Ultra ultra limited one sided 7"s from local noisepop faves Sic Alps. Pressed on clear blue vinyl, packaged in a plain white sleeve with a black and white sticker and NO information, this just might be the poppiest Sic Alps yet. Beginning with revving engines and super distorted drums, the track soon launches into some sunny jangly reverb drenched pop, all clean jangly guitars, summery sing songy vocals, a super catchy melody, classic old school Phil Spector style lo-fi production, it's almost a shame it's only one song. Like a noise rock Archies, or the Beach Boys recording for Siltbreeze. Good stuff. And, it's a Throbbing Gristle cover fyi!
Holy drone!! This is not at all what we expected from these guys, but then, most Skull Defekts records tend to confuse or confound. Which is pretty much why we love them so. And who are we to turn up our noses art a sonic surprise, especially when that surprise is DRONES. Big thick buzzy snarling crumbling blown out low end buzzing writhing brain melting, ear drum crushing, rib cage rattling, speaker destroying drones. Skull Defekts are no stranger to the drone, and the fact that they called this record Drone Drug, should have been a clue, but the band, who in the past have been heavily rhythmic, have discarded pretty much everything except for the drone. No beats, no riffs, no recognizable instruments, nothing but deep dark drones.�
This is a seriously heavy record. Dense and brutal, four extended tracks, each an exercise in tension, long form extended tones, but within these, stretched out sounds, much like dronelord Phill Niblock, the various layers are surprisingly active, throbbing and pulsing, and twisting and slithering and buzzing and whirring and shimmering, the sounds rough and raw, bits crumbling and emitting grit, slipping into fuzzy drift and then slipping back into a solid endless throb. The power of the drone is divine, and when harnessed, like this, with volume, and texture, and timbre, the music is a physical presence. Headphones come to life and encase your head in an organic black cocoon of sound, speakers unfurl thick flows of sonic tar, laying supine, eyes closed, you're soon buried alive, beneath layers and layers of resonant rumbling sound. And it is divine.
This is powerful, earth shifting, massive minimal music. Not sure if these sounds come from synths or guitars, electronics or sine wave generators, malfunctioning effects pedals or a microphone lowered into the center of the Earth (we're leaning toward the latter), the result is something so primal and organic, so primeval and timeless, the act of listening seems to alter the listener's molecular structure, transporting the listener to an alternate universe, made entirely of sound, where our bodies are transformed into sound waves, our souls escape their mortal shackles and reveal themselves to be pure, deep drones. So awesome.�
San Francisco heavy metallists Slough Feg (aka The Lord Weird Slough Feg), led by vocalist/guitarist Mike Scalzi, have built up a deserved cult following over the years, whom we guarantee will NOT be disappointed with the contents of their latest epic, eccentric metal opus Hardworlder, their sixth full-length album. Indeed, Slough Feg's fans should be quite thrilled. And with luck Hardworlder will recruit some new devotees to the cult of 'Feg as well, they deserve it 'cause nobody but nobody makes albums with this sort of peculiar panache anymore these days. Not since the '80s, or even the '70s, from whence the guitars of Hardworlder seem to hail, and there's a heckuva lot of guitar here... memorable riffs and virtuoso solos and Maiden-ized twin axe harmonies... guitars guitars guitars! It's evident that Slough Feg's latest revised lineup (which features a change of drummer, and "Don" Angelo Tringali of cult doomsters Cold Mourning replacing Hammers Of Misfortune's John Cobbett on second lead guitar) has if anything only enhanced the "guitariness" of this band, as if that was imaginable. The Scalzi/Tringali dual guitar teamwork is phenomenal, and both guys peel off leads left and right, not just to impress with the notes they can play but because they simply can't contain their love for the raw beauty that can flow from fully cranked Gibson Les Pauls. They've got the power, and the responsibility, to play like they've taken up the torch of every great heavy metal band from the '70s and the '80s that's fallen by the wayside...
This album's title is a word they coined themselves, referring to the idea of a space-travelling adventurer bumming around on a rough planet in a bad part of the galaxy, a loner toughened by life on a "hard world" -- typified by Gully Foyle, the protagonist of sci-fi author Alfred Bester's 1956 classic The Stars My Destination (read it sez Allan and Andee!!). A book and character which provides the inspiration for the track "Tiger! Tiger!" as well as for the Kirby-esque comic-book illustration that graces this album's cover.
Interestingly, if you Google "Hardworlder", you'll find that Slough Feg managed to come up with a term that ONLY exists in connection with this album. You'll find their website, their MySpace page, their Wikipedia page, the review of Hardworlder in last week's Village Voice (yes, strangely enough, right next to the new Pharoahe Monch and Smashing Pumpkins -- how'd that happen??? The Village Voice says, "Badass sci-fi metal that it's finally cool to listen to"...we've been telling folks that for years...). You might also run across someone else's MySpace page, who goes by the handle Hardworlder -- but it turns out it belongs to an Australian university student who's a huge Slough Feg fanatic. He's gonna be happy when he hears this!
The album's opening one-two punch is hard to beat: the relentless build-up of adrenaline instrumental "The Return Of Dr. Universe" which leads us breathless into the impactful majesty of "Tiger! Tiger!", destined to be considered an instant classic in the Slough Feg canon we're sure!
But the rest of the album is up to that mighty task -- the majesty continues with midtempo maritime lament "The Sea Wolf", and thence through to the doomy riffs of the album's title track, and onward... Hardworlder seems to possess an anthemic, sweeping, saddened grandeur, a more uniform overall feel than its shorter and more schizo predecessor Atavism, although you'll find that Slough Feg sashay down all the (un)usual skyways and byways you might expect from them. The manly, melodic doom-paced epics coexist here with rollicking '70s styled hard rockers (such as "Frankfurt-Hahn Airport Blues", obviously a nod to Atavism's equally boogie-riffed "Starport Blues"). "Insomnia" starts off Thin Lizzyish to the max, but halfway through the band rides into the Halls Of Manowar, and a wordless Viking chorus rings out... The galloping requiem of the psychological tragedy "Poisoned Treasures" (reprised from their split 7" with Bible Of The Devil) will get stuck in your head, as will much more on this impossibly catchy album... And one of our favorite tracks here is the lengthy show-stopping instrumental "Galactic Nomad", with an almost-Allmans level of gorgeous guitar interplay, that could illicit a "we're not worthy" from The Fucking Champs themselves.
And while Hardworlder's obviously working the science fiction angle that proved popular for 'em on their concept album Traveller, it also serves up ye olde Celtic folk in the Slough Feg tradition -- in fact, one of the two (2) cover songs here is a version of "Dearg Doom" by '70s Irish folk-rockers Horslips. The other cover is "Street Jammer", originally by '80s American epic metal weirdists Manilla Road. Both are tributes to Slough Feg's influences in a general, not specific sense, since we happen to know that they'd never heard either band until years and years after Slough Feg's inception. Speaking of influences, if you listen close to "Street Jammer" you'll hear some Chuck Berry licks thrown in not found on the original... and we'll also note that Slough Feg deliberately selected an early Manilla Road song, that's a lot more hot rockin' than what people usually think of in connection with that band. Further, while we're usually more into covers that DON'T sound so much like the originals, in the case of these two songs it's OK that they do since a) they're pretty obscure and b) both still totally sound like Slough Feg could have written them.
Ok, we're rambling, and you get the idea... Hardworlder is another ripping masterwork from a band that will either dominate your metal-addled mind, or you just won't get. We hope you do. 'Nuff said.
Yes, this sounds just as we imagined it would -- Ms Smith's potent weathered spoken word going head-to-head with Mr. Shields' texturous wall o' guitar. If you're a fan of either you'll definitely want to check it out at least once or twice, but even after a few listens we're still finding ourselves sitting on the fence. Many of us here love both artists, and this idea maybe sounded fantastic in concept, but we're not so sure that it was so successful in practice. It ain't no peanut butter cup! For those unfamiliar, The Coral Sea is Smith's literary tribute to legendary photographer, the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and these recordings are from two Smith and Shields performances at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London UK circa 2005 and 2006. Quite reminiscent of the absolute cathartic outpouring of artists such as Diamanda Galas.
From the same label that brought us the damaged depressive blackened genius of Happy Days, and the melancholic doom-ed black metal of Leaden, comes this, the first release from Swiss outfit Smorzando, who craft a strange and haunting world of melancholy black metal, mixing the creepy drone-y miserablism of Burzum, with strange abstract post rock, and super blown out in the red production, creating something both black and brutal, fucked up and mysterious, with a super unique sound that is as much noise rock or post rock as it is black metal.
The drums are simple, the guitars go from distant minimal jangle, to blown out crumbling distortion, the melody is a simple keyboard suspended in a sea of black buzz, the vocals go from guttural growl to hysterical shriek, but are buried under swells of super distorted �in-the-red, shoegazey blackness. Occasionally, the songs lurch into furious blasts, but for the most part just lurch and lumber, lonely and forlorn, the deep bass and strange melodies sound like foghorns, the production wrapping everything in a grey fuzzy fog, the guitars effected and warbly, sometimes sounding almost electronic, other times sounding like a black avalanche of sound, always underpinned by a lilting melancholy melody or some ghostly ambience, so gorgeous and sad and heavy and absolutely beautiful. One of our new favorite slabs of depressive doom drenched black metal misery for sure.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Each packaged in a super cool plastic clamshell cassette case, with haunting black and white artwork, and printed black and white fold out insert.
Wow! The Mael brothers have done it again. Who else, thirty-seven years into their career and 20+ records later, are making some of the most charged and vital music of their life? Pretty much no one except Sparks! Exotic Creatures comes hot on the heels of their summer residency in London where they spent the better part of a month playing EACH ONE of their records night after night in chronological order. The last night of those performances they unveiled this brand new record to the world and man how much we wish we could have been there. As Exotic Creatures Of The Deep deserves such a grand and staged presentation. But it's doing magical wonders through our speakers and headphones too.
Very much in line with their last two great records, Hello Young Lovers and Lil' Beethoven, this album feels like it's part of a truly remarkable trilogy of bombastic, orchestral, grandiose pop done so right.
If it's possible, this record seems even more flamboyant and fiery than past outings but in only the most glorious ways. It's also filled with some of the most beautiful pop melodies you will hear this year, songs with more twists and turns and surprises then most prog bands could dream of and an understanding of what crafting an album that works from start to finish is all about.
What makes Sparks so special is that beyond the tongue in cheek word play, clever titles, and wry sense of humor, is something always so honest, intense and individual in their music and vision. Songs with the ability to be both so self-deprecating yet totally triumphant. We urge you to spend lots of time with this record on your headphones or blasting it alone in your house, as it's when you really spend deep quality one-on-one time with this record that it really takes a hold of your senses and enters your life in such a striking way. Even though the album begins with the angelic singing of the words "I don't care if you love me, just as long as you like me" we can't help but still be so in LOVE with Sparks!
A brand new record from the Starving Weirdos, two old old tracks, resurrected and pressed onto what we're pretty sure is the SW's very first 7". The group's sound changes so much, that these two archival tracks, while entirely different from anything we've heard from them, still sound very much at home in their constantly shifting body of work. And unlike the more recent material, is much more lo-fi and looped, giving the sound a very rough, lo-fi, sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker vibe, which obviously we love!
The A side begins with a murky processed pulse, with propulsive krautrock drumming but before it gets more than 10 seconds in, there's a strange backwards swoop, and the track seems to skip back to the beginning, which takes up almost the whole side, a gorgeously fragmented tribal drone krauty loop, until right near the end, when the track shifts, the guitar builds to a chaotic squall, the drums blown out, the cymbals sizzling distortedly, a serious freaked out psych jam, with strange spoken word vocals, bits of feedback, and tons of distorted murk.
The flipside is also loop based (or sounds like it), a militaristic snare, rat-a-tat-tat's out an insistent beat, over which a cool shimmery loop, cycles over and over, while in the background deep rumbles pulse and swell, until the drums drop out and the track finishes off with some moody washed out Jeckian ambience.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pro printed black and white covers, with printed inserts.
Imagine if you could erase time and create a special Hacienda party on the beach that New Order ws playing, with special guests Robert Smith and Lindstrom, in an all night session under the stars as the waves crash on the beach under the glow of the starlit sky. Then you might get an idea of what this album by Swedish duo Studio is all about. Studio create a totally refreshing version of early '80s greatness that sets its focus on capturing a warm sensation akin to ending up at the beach after a night of dancing and some of those ecstatic drugs still in your system. The record is bookmarked by two long cosmic instrumental's filled with shimmering synths that sneak in some kraut and subtle afro-beat influences with total perfection. The songs with vocals really do sound like The Cure and New Order joining forces as they catch an endless groove under a spinning disco ball. While there is some similarities to what folks in the DFA camp have been doing there is a much more smooth and golden sensation to Studio's sound. West Coast also reminds us a lot of White Magic's Sorcerer album, one of our favorite electronic records of last year. Both demonstrate the perfect way of extracting the warmth from synthesized sounds to bring the dance party back to the waves and water. A record that grows deeper in our veins each time we listen, we have become hooked! Not sure why it took us so long to list this but better late than never...
Holy crap those suicidal black metallers have nothing on Stunt Rock. At least in terms of pure self loathing misery. They talk a good game, and the music is appropriately miserable and melancholy, but their depression is so abstract, so much so that in some cases, it sounds as much like a gimmick as 'Satanism'. But this is indeed depression. Misery. REGRET. Past Stunt Rock releases didn't really give any idea that all this lurked below the surface, but this release more than hints at it, it takes his Stunt Rock heart, and pins it open, like a high school dissected frog, letting us poke and prod, and examine all the blackness inside.
It's also pretty funny too, if you think folks like Ivan Brunetti are hilarious, which we do. In fact, this is totally the record we could imagine Brunetti releasing. And it is in fact a sort of instruction manual, covering such topics as to how to choose a new mate, and to avoid the mistakes you made in past relationships. A page of little tags to place on your belongings for after you die when people dig through your stuff (for your pornography stash, for your box of old love letters, etc.), a very Brunetti like comic detailing a botched suicide attempt among other things.
The Prescreening A Potential Love Interest multiple choice form is amazing, it goes on for pages and pages, and is so gloriously black hearted. The there's the Learning To Forget & Adjusting To Living Alone section, also pages and pages, teaching you to do just as the title says, try different routes to work, repaint, get a new social circle, new wardrobe, but it's super well written, wry and bitter, fucking brutal here and there. There's also an activity section, with a form to write down all the songs you want played at your funeral (the first is filled out for you, Creed's "My Own Prison" haha), as well as a sort of last will style form, with spaces for things you want to leave for folks, as well as spaces for the people you want to make sure DON'T get anything (and the specific things you want to make sure they don't get. There's also an amazing section called Upsetting Things You Wrote When You Were Young. Poems, letters, lists of people who wronged you. But they're all blacked out CIA document style, leaving just the caustic comments by the author. All of this is gorgeously hand drawn and printed in a 10" book housed in a super nice cardstock screen printed hand numbered cover, each one hand numbered, the front a three color illustration of a blood splattered sink.
And there's a record. a 2 song 10", two parts of the same piece, titled somewhat cryptically "Dear Christian Girl (Parts One And Two)", a DJ Shadow style indie rock soundscape, lots of amazing (and amazingly depressing) samples, funny, fucked up, sad, melancholy, the song simple and hooky, but stretched out into a more electronic sort of groove, with thick buzzing synths wrapped around the Slint-y guitars, loping rock drumming, subtle hooks, no proper vocals, instead, the tale of the mysterious Christian Girl and Stunt Rock's saga of regret is told in a continuous mix of voices and sounds, of vignettes and fragments, in shuffling beats and melancholy melodies. Pretty great. And the perfect companion for the book. And as if that weren't enough, you also get a cd-r, with the same music as on the 10". All told, you get a 10" vinyl record, a 32 page book with hand silk screened covers, 3 Stickers, 1 Button, a cd-r and 1 of 4 different hand silk screened posters.
And we know all those forms are jokes, but we're really tempted to fill them out. Fun and funny, but only if you're a twisted bitter old crank, like us!
Latest, crazy limited release from our of our favorite modern purveyor of doom-folk. A genre that seems to have been created specifically to describe the dark, mysterious moodiness this guy creates. And Penpals Forever is no different, beginning with a flurry of percussive guitar thrum, tons of reverb and buzz, a shimmering black forest of metallic shimmer and deep rumbles, all woven into what up close is a dizzying swirl of sound, but step back and the pattern is evident, a slow sprawling minor key melody, a haunting horror movie creep. A roiling black sea of huge slabs of glacial low end, that blot out the sun, swallowing the various guitars beneath it, moving like massive deathships, the shadows only allowing brief glimpses of the melody beneath. Truly ominous and cinematic. Eyes closed, these are the kind of sounds that would give the weak hearted nightmares, while the rest of us luxuriate in its thick blackened drone drenched buzz. Glorious.�
LIMITED TO ONLY 150 COPIES. Sold out and out of print at the label. Packaged with a metallic silver and black insert, with metallic silver labels on the tape.
Reflections On A Ceiling is another micro-edition from Darren Tate, the founder of the seminal British avant-drone project Ora with Andrew Chalk. In his recent investigations both under his own name and the Monos project, Tate has been pushing towards a more electronic context with all of the cold, barren, and alien references found in '60s electronic music (e.g. Delia Derbyshire, the Forbidden Plant soundtrack, and most of the electronic esoterica reissued through Creel Pone). Reflections On A Ceiling continues with that trend. Tate opens the album with a series of cold wet field recordings of rain, wind, and other soggy, sodden sounds. Out of this introduction, Tate unravels a series of oscillating tones whose ringing electronics occasionally tumble into declining melodies only to drift into the distance as a Klaus Schulze ambience. For a few minutes in the middle of the album, the synthetic notes subside in a deep dark mass of ghastly electron murk, sort of sounding like a typical Hospital / Hanson production gone by the way of Brian Eno. Tate slowly slips back into the twin-note phase shift with thickly delayed field recordings of wind and rain as the finale to this album. Nicely done. There's something like 150 copies of this kicking around. We've also read that the pressing was only 50 copies. In either case, we don't have many and it's unlikely we'll get more!
Latest chunk of heaviness from the band, not the actress. This time the Texans tackle a classic tune by Lungfish, letting it sprawl across both sides �of a seven inch, fading out halfway through, and fading back in on the flipside, a la "Freebird". TC were wise to not emulate the sound of Lungfish, instead choosing �to transform the song into their own, turning a stripped down repetitive dronejam into a blown out stoner metal Southern rock groove, crunchy riffs, thick swells of Deep Purple style organ, wild squalls of wah guitar, super distorted and heavy, with leads all over the place. The A side is all instrumental, the guitar kicking up some serious shit, the band definitely expanding on the Lungfish original.
The flip side fades in and finally the vocals kick in, and again, good idea to not shoot for the moon, as it would be a tall order to try for Daniel Higgs feral yowl, so instead, it's more of a groovy rock wail that goes from smooth and melodic to raw and raspy, well in keeping with the music underneath. The band work it pretty hard, rocking out, but never losing sight of that original looped Lungfish arrangement, until finally slipping into a tripped out mellow outro. Nice!
Pressed on thick white vinyl. Housed in a super deluxe hand screened thick black cardstock sleeve.
We have loved Torche from the very first time we heard them. Rare is the band who seem to effortlessly create a sound, that whether we all realized it or not, was exactly what we had always wanted to hear. We haven't met a single person who wasn't immediately smitten with Torche, their sound, the one we had all been hungering for, some kind of perfect pop, made impossibly, and irresistibly heavy. A dizzying collision of incredible hooks and downtuned pummel. And Torche were, and are, the undisputed masters of that very unique heavy catchiness, or catchy heaviness. Their debut sounded like a super charged heavier than Heaven Nirvana, or maybe the Foo Fighters crossed with the Melvins. That was the sort of shit we should be hearing on the radio. And seeing on MTV.
Torche's recent ep, In Return, while still awesome, found the band ditching much of the pop in favor of a much heavier sound, embracing their inner Melvins, yet thankfully never completely losing that pop side, just obscuring it beneath riff after riff and furious skull splitting drumming.
So here comes the long and anxiously awaited second full length, and while maybe after In Return, we were expecting them to move even further away from the pop, we really needn't have worried. Somehow they managed to make a record that falls somehere right in between. Easily as catchy and hook filled as their debut, but even heavier than In Return. The riffs are massive, the guitar sound HUGE, the vocals keep getting better and better, still way down in the mix, but perfectly complimenting the sound, not too melodic, but none of that pointless caterwauling. The drums too, are LOUD and incredible. And the songs, shit, strip away some of the distortion, and we're talking top 40. Sort of.
The opener is an instrumental blast, that sounds like the late great Karp, super dense churning hyper riffage, and super complex drumming, dizzying guitar harmonies, almost like some Fucking Champs / Melvins mashup. But the second is all pop, right out of the gate, an awesome melody, big thick riffs, soaring vocals, over the kind of drumming that is as catchy as any of the other instruments, not since Nirvana would we find ourselves humming the fucking drum fills, but this is Torche, what do you expect? It's like pop punk given a sludge doom makeover.
The whole record is an exercise in extremes, coexisting impossibles. No record this poppy and this catchy could possibly be this dense and distorted and downtuned and heavy, but it is. And no metal record, or sludge record, should be able to be so hook filled and catchy and still retain it's sheer fury and intensity, but again, the proof is right here.
"Across The Shields" sounds like a primo slab of nineties college indie rock, a main vocal melody that sticks in your head the second you hear it, a killer bassline that on its own is as catchy as anything any of the other instruments are doing, but here it's wrapped around super metallic harmonies, dense squalls of tribal drumming, and some chest rattling downtuned chug. "Without A Sound" begins like some sort of early SST jam mixed with dirgey Melvins jam, but deftly transforms into a crazy catchy pop song, "Amnesian" seems to take the obtuse melodic sludgery of Harvey Milk, and turns it inside out, offering up soaring harmonies and a totally majestic main riff, but separated by atonal slabs of slow motion dynamics and pounding percussion, as well as wild FX drenched psychedelic leads. We could probably go song by song, and talk about how heavy and/or catchy each one is, because they are. ALL of them. Some tracks do veer in one direction or the other, but even then, the band seem incapable of sounding anything but both heavy AND poppy. There are certainly worse problems.
But like any band worth their salt, they do delight in confounding, so the record finishes off with the 4 minute, VERY un-poppy title track, incredible sludgey and dirgey title track, beginning with a roiling miasma of guitar buzz and hum, eventually a riff kicks in, the drums stuttering and staccato, the riff a churning start stop, lurching and hypnotic, a dark slithery groove, the guitars crumbling and wet with FX, in the background clouds of glimmering whir and twinkling reverb drenched guitar squiggles, a primo classic Melvins era trudge, and while not overtly catchy, Torche still seem unable to commit to full on pummel, so even in this climax of primal riffage, lurk some unexpected, very subtle hooks. Whether you realize it or not, hours, days, weeks later, you'll find yourself humming along to what ostensibly is the least catchy song here. And if that's not a sign of pop genius, well then we don't know what is...
INCREDIBLE packaging, borrowing its main concept from that Open Hand record from a few years back, the booklet cut into overlapping layers, the tray card, covering only half of the jewel case revealing the art on the inside, the booklet folding out into a massive sprawling, garishly cartoon horrorscape, but beware, if you take the booklet out, it's a bitch to get back in!
Now a vinyl version!! Here's our review of the cd reissue that Tiliqua put out in 2006:
Not to be confused with Doug Martsch's amazing nineties outfit, the Treepeople, -these- Tree People are equally amazing, but are a whole different proposition.
This disc was originally released as a super limited lp way back in 1979 and managed to quietly disappear. Now, here we are nearly three decades later, and whattaya know? There's a whole movement of modern free folk, 'freak' folk and the like, and if you didn't know better, pretty sure we could pass this off as some strange super limited cd-r by some modern folk revivalists. But keen ears would certainly be able to tell. This is so entirely original (especially for the time) and genuine sounding. Mostly acoustic guitars, flute and vocals, the Tree People had two distinct sounds, the first, a lilting melancholy moonlit folk, like Cat Stevens or Van Morrison, a gorgeous lazy drawl, rich and lustrous, over simple folk and fluttering flutes, dreamy and gorgeous, sounding like some lost folk classic one minute, a strange "Girl From Ipanema" style shuffle the next. But even at it's sweetest and softest, the record seems to always have a hint of melancholy, sometimes even a trace of ominous foreboding. Which definitely gives the songs a subtly dark undercurrent. The majority of the record however is spent in full on hippy jam mode. Very Comus-like at times (especially on track two, "Sliding"), wild steel string excursions, dense tangles of fingerpicked melodies and aggressive strummed riffs, with a definite raga like vibe, all over a smattering of hand drums and tablas, a glorious drifting buzzing steel string dronefolk, that just sounds so incredibly timeless. Elsewhere, the same jams evolve into more tranquil acoustic dreaminess, with the flutes floating over sweet lilting melodies, but even then, the songs will be peppered with sudden bursts of buzzing slide guitar, or brief squalls of atonal fingerpicking. SO cool. And considering the current love of all things freaky and folky, it's sort of amazing that stuff like this was already being made 27 years ago!
Obviously, fans of the current crop of modern folk troubadours will find this absolutely essential, Devandra, Vetiver, Espers, Newsom, whatever your particular poison, the Tree People will fit in frighteningly well. Hard to say whether it speaks to the prescience of the Tree People, or just to how much these modern bands have actually been 'borrowing'. Either way, this is absolutely essential.
The music of Piero Umilani was always the breeziest and most fun-loving of the Italian soundtrack composers. What more proof do you need than the opening track of this collection, a song made famous by the Muppets, "Mah Na Mah Na". But if you've never heard the rich intonation of the male lead vocalist in the original, you really owe yourself a listen. Furthermore, the fact that the song originally came from a soundtrack for a film called Sweden, Heaven and Hell, just adds to Umilani's zany mystique. This collection of sixties and seventies soundtracks is a good start for those who missed out on the now out of print Easy Tempo reissues from the late nineties. There's plenty of whimsical guitar leads, snaking through festive and enchanting xylophones, trumpets, and all manner of eccentric auxiliary percussion one would associate with the decadence and elegance of '60s and '70s era film. When not baroquely festive, Umiliani assuredly works his way through darker moods with trembling string sections, haunting vocals, and lilting guitar lines. And of course, naturally, for good measure, there is some fucking brilliant whistling, which always makes EVERYTHING better, whether it be a compilation of forgotten soundtrack music, or a stroll home from work. It may not be THE definitive collection for Umilani enthusiasts but it has plenty of Italian cinematic soundtrack gems, from spy themes and Spaghetti Westerns to pensive romance and of course, sunny femme-vocalised pop. Anyone looking to brush up Umiliani, or Italian soundtracks in general will cover some important territory with this one.
The world has been dying for more Urfaust, well, at least out little freaky blackened damaged corner of the world. We couldn't get enough of these guys, their creepy lurching Burzumy metal, totally freaked out super dramatic depressive stumbling blackness, the insane shrieked Ethel Merman like vocals, the bellowed deep crooning, the majestic mournful vocals, a sound so completely insane, but so totally amazing and irresistible. As pretty much all of their recordings have been totally unavailable for a while now, we've been unable to turn new folks on to these guys, which is a shame, since people in search of stuff both baffling and beautiful, heavy and confusing, mysterious and incredibly idiosyncratic, couldn't do much better than Urfaust. And those of us who had played their recordings to death, were in dire need of more more more!
So here we have it. More. Not much more, only three tracks, but they're long-ish, and more than enough to hold us over. And even at a mere 20 minutes in length, it's almost more than we could have ever hoped for. All of the elements we so loved about Urfaust are present and in full effect, but somehow the band have managed to make their sound even weirder, more fucked up, and somehow also more haunting and beautiful, without losing any of the total what the fuck factor. The opening track begins with some stripped down almost industrial rhythm, over whirring machine like sounds, before the main riff comes in, but instead of sounding like a guitar, it's almost like an organ, wheezing out a minor key melody, jarringly working it's way through each note, while over the top, the vocals are even more shrieky and haunting. The 'riffing' shifts to washed out warble, sounding almost like it was assembled from dusty old looped records. The drums are super distorted, and mechanical, and perfectly balance the washed out main melody and the reverb drenched shrieks, which are later joined by deep growly crooning. But the bridge to the song is so pretty, and so turntable-y sounding. It's a bit hard to explain, but it does sound like a Jeck, or Tim Hecker loop, worked into an almost-riff. Whatever it is and however they did it, it sounds amazing, creepy, mysterious, and so gloriously bizarre and beautiful.
The second track has the same sort �of wooden rhythm, but over it soars a strange machinelike high pitched buzz, a gnarled feedbacky guitar, that buzzes and warbles, the vocals a more punky yowl, buried way down in the mix. Super intense, and relentless, with that main buzz/squall running through the whole song, almost like a depressive black metal, noise rock mash up, but deftly twisted into Urfaust's strange stumbly sound. The close begins with blurred and indistinct voices, swirling in a stretch rife with reverb and delay and distortion, everything creepy and blurred, until the guitars come in, or at least they sound like guitars, sort of. Much like the first track, they sound almost like keyboards, or weird loops, assembled into strange depressive lurchings, The sound is murky and muddy, the drums buried, the vocals too, everything wreathed in some sort of effect, the main melody and riff swaying seasickly, swelling drunkenly, the vocals growing gradually in intensity, to a banshee like howl, a drunken sounding croon, before fading away again, leaving that main melody to buzz and throb, the vocals becoming a growling drone barely audible, the track woozily wavering and finally fading to black. So creepy and pretty, and unlike any Urfaust that came before, but somehow practically perfect. Another absolutely genius slab of bizarre blackness. But sadly, three songs is not nearly enough, as these are bound to get played to death, over and over and over as we wait for more�
The mighty Sound Way label (the fine folks who brought us the killer Nigeria Special compilations) is back with another fantastic reissue of classic West African popular music, this time documenting the mid-1970s output of the enigmatic and flamboyant Sir Victor Uwaifo, the guitar-boy superstar! You might recognize Uwaifo from his appearance on the Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump compilation where his track "Dododo (Ekassa 1)" was a real skirt blower. These days, when most of us have access to this kind of music only through curated compilations featuring dozens of performers, it's a rare treat to get a more well-rounded picture of a single artist; big ups to Sound Way for delivering the goods!
The majority of tracks on this collection are based around Uwaifo's unique hybrid of the traditional rhythm of the 'ekassa' coronation dance with highlife instrumentation. The result is something joyous, funky, and soulful that manages to maintain a laid-back, upbeat feel that is distinct from the frenetic rush of Afrobeat and the other scenes happening in mid-'70s Lagos. In fact, there's a sweet, classic pop element to Uwaifo's songwriting that has more in common with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens than it does with the American funk, soul and disco that inspired his contemporaries. Valens is actually a pretty good jumping off point for comparison, as the electrified version of the ekassa rhythm lends a Latin flourish to the music that recalls Valens' Chicano rock styles saturated with fuzz, wah and a distinctly Nigerian rhythmic sensibility.
Unsurprisingly, it's Uwaifo's guitar playing that stand out as the real centerpiece of the record as it skips from traditional highlife accompaniment to psych-tinged, fuzzed-out solos to primitive delay and wah-wah experimentalism, sometimes all within the same song! Uwaifo's jangling open-string solos, jarringly nimble riffing, and ability to switch effortlessly between rhythm and lead again recall Buddy Holly and also classic US surf rock (in fact, the track "Agho" goes so far as to quote parts of "Tequila" - weird, but fantastic!), but there's a lot more going on than that. Check out "Igboroho (Ekassa 24)" to hear Uwaifo pushing his guitar into fractured, no-wave territory; given that it still sounds completely freaked out now, it must've been thoroughly mind-expanding at the time.
As with all things from Sound Ways, this disc comes with lavish packaging; meticulously researched and compiled liner notes replete with archival photographs, album art; and song-by-song gloss by Uwaifo himself. It's a fantastic package highly recommended for anyone who's been enjoying the goldmine of reissues of African popular musics we've been seeing over the past year. So good!
Black Stars: Ghana's Hiplife Generation is a challenging, and possibly rewarding collection of tunes from the last five odd years comprised of, as the title would indicate, "hiplife" music from Ghana. But what is hiplife? you may ask, and apparently that's the question this compilation sets out to answer. Clearly, as is often the case in the game of inventing and naming new musical genres, we're dealing with the sometimes awkward, and other times ecstatic middle ground between two already canonized genres, in this case "highlife" and "hiphop". Stateside, having recently savored and suffered contemporary permutations of highlife via The Dirty Projectors and Vampire Weekend, as well as receiving a handful of uncorruptably good vintage highlife collections from the Soundways label, it seems ripe time to check in with what's happening to highlife on its mother content. The results are mixed. In general the affair is very much an energetic and confused amalgam of hip-hop, dancehall, reggaeton, a little bit of textured bloop and bleep, sampled and looped highlife guitar, and even at times some of the spare synthesized organicism and mystique of dubstep. In all cases however, there is nothing of the gritty texture, glow, and blown out splendor of vintage highlife that has been so endlessly loved and fetishised in the United States. The palette is rigorously pop, and even at times, to our ears strikingly childish. Think Disney's somewhat jingoistic take on African music in the Lion King, or even for those deep lovers of early '90s cartoons, Tailspin! So, if that variety of positive freneticism is your bag, and you want to know what's up in Ghana, then come along. Also, if you're just in a curious and actively transcendent mood, you might enjoy this for its educational value as well. However, to all others, consider this a mere suggestion, not required listening.
The past few years have been good to disco. Somehow it's managed to rise above its mucky kitsch value in which it had become historically mired. The popular conception that it was just a mess of ridiculous clubs jamming The Andrea True Connection packed tight with sequins and cocaine is apparently not wholly true. Not every club played Andrea True. But amidst the silly outfits and copious drug use, there were some fantastic songs and artists that expanded on the innate dance potential within funk and soul. As the ubiquitous cowbell and 4/4 rhythmic pattern of disco spread across the world like a glamorous plague, different regions seemed to add their own take on the dance phenom. Perhaps most notably were the Italians. Ah, even in pop culture, where would dance music be without the bassline arpeggiations of Giorgio Moroder? The clearest trademark of much Italo Disco, along with the synthetic drum sounds, and the overall spacey, futuristic bent. That is to say, there was a specific sound that became relevant and distinctive. And while this compilation really does have some amazing songs - like the semi-obvious "Now Baby Now" from Kano - not every song really does a good job at conveying what it is that makes this very recognizable genre what it is. Moreover, even as a disco collection, there are some notably weak moments. For instance, Revanche's "1979 It's Dancing Time," with b-rate, throw away choral vocals that cheaply hint at the Philadelphia sound. Not to mention the insanely dated and just plain cheesy title. Then there's D. D. Sound's "Burning Love," a secondhand version of the wonderfully sleazy, inventive Rinder and Lewis work that earmarked the AVI sound from LA - geez, will someone reissue that stuff?! There is a booklet inside, which is fairly informative, if not a little self-serious. An example is contained within the first paragraph where the author of "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life," Bill Brewster, very boldly claims that if not for Italo, then "dance music would have remained decidedly more monochrome and house music would almost never have happened." We're going to say that Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles might disagree a bit. Sure it was definitely an important chapter in dance music history, but let's not get completely carried away. Okay, enough of the negative aspects. There are some great songs on here that are totally worth owning, like Kasso's "Brazilian Dancer." What an amazing song! Totally in the vein of French group Voyage's completely epic and timeless "I Love You Dancer." Bands like Daft Punk and Phoenix can just send them a thank you letter and royalties at any point in time. So, completists will want this, but maybe it's not the best starting place for someone just working their way into this type of music. Although if you're a big fan of disco already, then you have probably been searching for one or more of these tracks at some point.
After being AWOL for a year or so, this longtime fave is now back in stock, and the timing is perfect since we've been raving about a bunch of similar comps of cool vintage French new wave/punk/electro stuff recently like Bippp and IVG and Des Jeunes Gens Modernes. If you liked those, you gotta check this out, 'especially if you're into the proggier side of things.
This one was kind of a sleeper hit when we first listed it. I mean, we knew it was a cool record, but boy did people like it. We sold a ton and then the label ran out. At last it's been repressed, so here it is again. Definitely recommended!
France. Synths. 1977-83. Intrigued? You should be. This comp, compiled by a couple of today's top trainspotting electronica mavens, highlights what are indeed some obscure, awesome French entries into the field of proto-techno. Richard Pinhas of Heldon we've talked about recently, also Metal Boys, and you might remember Ruth from a reissue a while back, but there's plenty of names here we're getting acquainted with for the first time: Nini Raviolette, Mathematiques Modernes, Kas Product, The (Hypothetical) Prophets, Moderne, The Droids... Sixteen tracks in all of sinister prog/pop electronics, droning ambience, Magmoid robotics, futurepunk, and sci-fi dance darkness. So young, so cold - so stylish.
The cool thing about records like this, and this kind of music in general on vinyl, is that it's difficult to tell if a record is scratched, or if there's fuzz on the needle, as those are the sounds that have been harnessed to create the rhythms. Crackle and pop, hiss and skip, the more beat up the record, the more complex and abstract the rhythm. But for the sake of this review, we'll assume the copy of the new Touch single by Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio we listened to was indeed pristine�
The A side opens with a super minimal loop, seemingly crafted from the run off groove of an old record. A stripped down skeletal groove made from a bit of hiss and crackle, laid over a gorgeous blurred murky loop, that slowly builds and builds as the rhythms remains static, simple, hypnotic, the whole thing very abstract and quite lovely.
The flipside also begins with a super minimal rhythm, again, assembled from bits of vinyl detritus, this one too looped over a slow building drone, but this side is a bit more intense, the background sounds slightly more corrosive, while managing to remain subtly musical. At some moments, because of the staticky rhythm, it does almost sound like some dreamy drone 7" that got all scuffed up, especially when the music drops out and the needle settles into the locked runoff groove, where it stays, playing out the rhythm that began the track over and over and over.
Latest in Touch's recent 7" series, like all Touch releases, beautifully packaged, with a simple spare design and adorned with gorgeous photos by label head honcho Jon Wozencroft.
