One of two new releases this week in the always kick ass Latitudes series, the other from long time aQ faves White Magic, and this one from the unknown to us until now The (Fallen) Black Deer, which features members of postrock/metal combo the Red Sparrowes. Ostensibly a soundtrack for the second half of Kubrick's The Shining, this is a gorgeous, haunting slab of cinematic drift and drone, that sounds a bit like a drumless Red Sparrowes actually. Moody and drone-y, measured riffing, keening tones way off in the distance, throbbing low end, jagged melodies, all smoothed into Godspeed style slow burning and building epics. The first four tracks play out as a single movement, the same riff, expanding and sprawling, finally culminating in the fourth track, a fierce crescendo, the guitars wailing and moaning, some buried black metal vocals, and bursts of static coming fast and furious, before slipping to the next track, and allowing the riff to drift off, leaving swirls of spaced out effects and layered drones, this goes on for a couple tracks before a new guitar line is introduced, spidery and minor key, mournful with a little twang, unwinding over a distant layer of whirring droning rumble, and over the last few tracks, that riff gets all tangled up with thick slabs of sludgey low end, soaring strings of upper register skree, stuttering chunks of effected guitar crumble, slipping dramatically form hushed and whispered to blown out and heavy. Very epic and cinematic for sure, but what it actually sounds like is just metallic post rock with the drums removed, and some drones added, which manages to turn it into something much more amorphous and abstract, and definitely gives it a sort of drifting unmoored vibe that definitely suits the sound. Especially when you imagine the sights these sounds are meant to conjure up.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES AS ALWAYS. Only 500 of which made it to the US, only a handful making it to aQ, packaged in that cool, origami style white on brown cardstock Latitudes sleeve, with a cool embossed metallic silver logo / image on the front, and a printed full color insert, each sleeve machine numbered.
Of our many guilty pleasures around here, one which we have little opportunity to highlight is our mad love for sixties mainstream pop. Not the little known obscurities necessarily, but the big budget LA productions as performed by groups like Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, The Mamas and The Papas, The Turtles, The Association, Spanky and Our Gang, and The 5th Dimension. While they all had charted hits, they all performed at a time when the musical landscape was changing, and their charted successes gave them the ability to explore less industry-influenced album-oriented material. They all had that odd record, most likely their least successful, but at least one truly stands the test of time, and because of its lack of commercial familiarity, actually sounds the most fresh of the bunch. Case in point, this wonderful soft psych Jimmy Webb-penned song cycle from The 5th Dimension. Basically the soulful black counterpart to The Mamas and The Papas, The 5th Dimension and Jimmy Webb had such an initial breakout hit and such award-winning success with their debut album, "Up Up and Away", that Jimmy Webb was handed complete arrangement and total writing control for the groups follow-up record, The Magic Garden. With production by Bones Howe, who helmed albums by The Association and The Turtles, The Magic Garden could easily be called the best record the 5th Dimension released, even though it was far from successful. Webb, struggling with manic-depression and a bitter breakup, used the song cycle format to chart his fragmented relationship with love. Using soft psych-tinged orchestral arrangements (including sitars!), dreamy harmonies and surrealistic lyrics, the songs weave together intricately, yet belie a darker sentiment underneath all the flower child imagery. For example, the only minor hit on here, the upbeat, "Carpet Man", is about a man who lets the women in his life walk all over him, While "The Worst That Can Happen" is about a former lover getting married to someone else. The best song however is the heart-stabbing Isleys-meet Scott Walker dark orchestral funk ballad, "Requiem: 820 Latham" that is atypical of the 5th Dimension's normally sunny hits. Filled with amazing orchestral breaks that beg to be sampled, this record was recently revealed in a Nick Drake biography to be one of his favorite records to listen to (along with Love's Forever Changes, and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks) due to its stellar orchestral production. And a bonus here is that Rev-Ola took the liberty of moving the contractually obligated cover, The Beatles "Ticket to Ride" to the end of the song cycle from its original location in the middle. The Carpenters always had the better approach to that cover (dour and depressed) anyway, so it's just best to skip that track altogether. Other than that, this is one of those bittersweet gems that fans of sixties pop and production will love!!!!!!
Adrenalin O.D. really get a bad rap as being some sort of joke band. Sure they were funny, and goofy, and had ridiculous song titles, and sang about a lot of stupid shit, but it was more a case of 4 really funny guys getting together to play some serious kick ass metallic punk rock, and the thing is when you get to the music, there's really nothing funny about it at all. A.O.D. were faster and heavier and more brutal than most of their early eighties contemporaries, just check out the first sound sample "A.O.D. Vs. Godzilla", perfectly encapsulates what's so awesome about Adrenaline O.D. With a dead pan introduction "Hi, welcome to our album", the band lurches into a chugging doomy metal dirge, that probably had the punk kids back in 1984 when this came out thinking "what the fuck?", before launching into a super heavy, ultra furious punk rock blast, that is heavier than most metal bands. A.O.D. slip back and forth between some angular Maidenesque guitar harmonies, and that furious blasting punk rock, shifting gears at the end into another kick ass buzzing outro. Holy shit. We forgot how good this stuff sounded. The rest of the disc is not quite so metal though there are moments, this is just punk as fuck punk rock, and even when these guys are singing about silly shit, the songs still destroy. Be sure and check out "Rock & Roll Gas Station", Fenriz from Darkthrone's favorite song. Which makes sense, listening to Darkthrone you can tell those guys were into punk rock as much as metal, maybe even more. There's a video floating around on internet of Fenriz being interviewed in his apartment, and there's a big part where he goes on and on about that track and these guys. FENRIZ ENDORSED!! What else do you need?!
As if the The Wacky Hi-Jinks record wasn't enough on its own, this reissue also includes a whole extra disc of rarities, including singles, comp tracks, live recordings, most of 'em as kick ass as the record proper. Also includes a bunch of photos, and essay and liner notes...
Matias Aguayo is one half of what used to be Closer Musik, a minimalist goth-techno project on Cologne's Kompakt label. The Chilean-born Aguayo and his German "bandmate" Dirk Leyers split after one album, and both went on to other things. Leyers went even more minimal and more blissful. While Aguayo put out one of the weirdest releases to have been considered techno at all, his solo record Are You Really Lost? Well, this ep is the first we've heard from him since then. Once again, he brings back his signature bizarro mix of Latin beats, come hither vocals, and all manner of randomly sampled and sequenced whatever. Along with the single new track, there are two remixes, one from DJ Koze of International Pony and one from Markus Rossknecht. Koze produces a remix that could make friends with any number of Miami Vice meets French filter house jams. Pretty fun, really. On the other hand, Rossknecht's work is fairly run-of-the-mill minimal techno, which is fine but not particularly memorable. If nothing else, this is worth picking up to play the Koze track at your next cocktail party. Closer Musik fans, listen up! Good stuff.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Holy crap is this beautiful, two cassettes in a big oversized white vinyl double tape case, like the ones that language tapes used to come in, or noise tapes after that, a 4 way split of related bands, all integral parts of the Digitalis label family. The bad news, is that this is limited to only 85 copies, and is already sold out. We got 15 of those, and once those are gone, we WILL NOT be able to get more sad to say. Another awesome record that WAY too few people will get to hear. As much as we love cool limited stuff, and special releases and all that, at some point we would probably be willing to trade more releases for more copies, good music is meant to be heard by more than a handful of folks, and if your release sells out in one hour or one day or one week, then probably you could have sold a whole lot more, and a bunch of folks are gonna miss out. But heck, you all know all that, you just want us to pipe down and tell you about this super limited double cassette so you can throw it in your cart and move on. OK, then...
Up first Ajilsvga, the doomdronedirge project of Digitalis label head honcho Brad Rose and his partner in low end crime, probably the nicest thing we've heard from them, a long stretch of crumbling rumbling droney heaviness, but all tangled up with ghostly voices, soaring soft harmonies, giving the track a definite SUNNO)) meets Arvo Part vibe. Cool. Flip the tape over and we've got 4 tracks from Mass Ornament, Rose's partner Eden, who supplies much of the artwork and is responsible for those vocals on the Ajilsvga track. MO offers up some droning drifting, brooding ominous doom folk, multi-tracked vocals over moaning low end, glistening melodies, creepy and crawly and so beautiful. Fans of Inca Ore and Grouper should for sure check this out.
Tape 2 starts out with Alms which just so happens to be the other half of Ajilsvga, and treads similar ground, big billowy low end rumbles, deep and resonant, throbbing and shimmering blackly, building in intensity, all sorts of FX join the fray, and the drone gets more and more caustic and buzzy. Good stuff. Another doomdirgedeathdrone artist to look for more from.
Flip the tape over, and it's the North Sea, Rose's long running solo project, who in the past has explored the fringes of free folk and ambient drone, but lately has been exploring the world of low end heaviness, as he does here again, offering up a seriously dense and thick dronescape, a gorgeous undulating, pulsing, heavy, slow motion tarpit drift.
Definitely amazing stuff. First come, first served, one per customer, hopefully, they'll repress it or release it on cd or something, but for now, be quick or be happy without....
The latest from Bay Area new-kraut-folk-age combo Alps, finds the band sounding more�high fidelity than ever, and more kraut than folk, which in both cases suits them big time.
For those new to Alps, a rundown of several members should help give you an idea of where their sound is coming from: our very own Scott Hewicker (Troll), Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp, formerly of Tussle) and Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Colophon, J.C. Ledesma). But Alps is definitely more than the sum of its parts, their sound is quite varied, expansive, even epic at times, but simultaneously, they manage to craft a sound simple and solid, based as much on rhythm and texture as on song and melody.
On past releases, Alps were a much more ramshackle concern, which at the time was definitely a big part of their sound, and thus set them firmly amongst the lo-fi cd-r drone folks scene, their sound a sort of ghostly Appalachia, mixed with longform drone music, muddy muted ambience, minimal soundscaping and plenty of lo-fi buzz and hiss much of the record mired in a corrosive murk, that only added to their dark dronelike vibe. The move to Type Records, coincides, perhaps not coincidentally, with a sonic shift, where once was abstract and low fidelity, is now rhythmic, and propulsive, looped and repetitive, and most importantly, glistening and glimmering, the sound crystal clear, and this time the dreaminess doesn't come from poor recording, it comes from the compositions, and the arrangements, and a super nice sounding recording courtesy of Phil Manley of the Champs and Trans Am. The core members of Alps also have a keen interest in new age music. Not the Deep Breakfast sort of schlock that most seem to equate with the genre, but instead more the sort of inner space, dreamy drift of Tangerine Dream, Deuter, Steve Hillage and the like. And those sounds are all over III as well.
The opener is a gorgeous looped soundscape of repetitive guitar figures, and glistening chimes, almost like a dreamfolk Steve Reich, bits of Appalachia, big buzzing synths, strummed zithers, a gorgeous melancholy melody played out over the course of five and a half minutes. The second track finds the band getting their kraut on, channeling Neu! Or Agitation Free but through a much more washed out and weary space rock, like Hawkwind gone new age. Distant drifting vocals, all manner of layered buzz, distorted guitars buried in the mix, space-y FX, very tranquil and mesmerizing. The follow up "Cloud One" finds Alps revisiting their folk roots, taking strummed acoustic guitars, and simple piano, and draping them over a woozy melody and a super spare abstract rhythm. "Trem Fantasma" is a barely there whisper of spaced out dronemusic, Gloriously wreathed in musical mystery, drifting piano, fragmented guitars, some soft sixties 'ladada' vocals, another dreamy drifter that threatens to spirit the listener away to some sun dappled green grassed knoll. "Labyrinths" is another new age / krautrock meander, washed out and shimmery, the drums the only thing keeping the rest of the song from just floating away, playful melodies, that sound like Perry and Kingsley rendered in shades of grey. The next few tracks are more abstract, sounds swooping in and out, rhythms, if there are any, buried beneath soft layers of sound, everything hushed and minimal, until album closer, "Into The Breeze", which sounds just like the title would have you imagine, breezy, soft focus, the drums, simple and stripped down, shimmering steel string guitar, that ever present piano, the melody wistful, the production hazy and a little woozy, effects swirling in the background, the drums gradually becoming more and more tripped out, before fading out completely, leaving just the guitar and the piano to drift heavenward, through a field of soft shimmer and the glistening afterglow of the sounds that came before.
The more we listen to III, the more obvious the new age-isms become, which is not a bad thing at all, it wraps the proceedings, no matter how krautrocky or folky or droney, in a sweet swirl of moonlit dreaminess, turning each song into its own sort of otherworldly mesmer.
LIMITED TO ONLY 400 COPIES ON VINYL!!!!! (& the compact disc version is coming soon, but not out yet...)
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Just got these in today, list day, four new aRCHIVE dvd titles (Ai Aso, Mick Barr, Khlyst, and Suishou No Fune). So, we haven't had a chance to watch 'em yet but since they're limited and all we figured you'd rather we just went ahead and listed 'em now rather than waiting 2 weeks. And all four artists are pretty cool after all.
Ai Aso is not so well known, 'round these parts, as the other three artists in this batch of dvd releases, but AQ customers should remember the Japanese chanteuse from her solo cds on Pedal that we've reviewed previously - and also from her split 7" (and photo book) with Wata from Boris.
The material on this dvd comes from a 2007 show by Ai Aso & band in Tokyo, with guest cameos from Wata and also guitarist Michio Kurihara. Not having seen it yet, we can only assume it's in the same vein of dreamy psych pop we recall from Ai Aso's solo albums...
Gorgeously packaged as per aRCHIVE standards (diecut, letterpress, heavy cardstock foldy cover). And, OF COURSE, it's limited to just 600 copies!!!
Expectations were pretty high for this one. Two long time aQ favorites, both with similar yet distinctive sounds, but with incredibly different bodies of work. Aidan Baker, who releases records a mile a minute, averaging 1 or 2 a month, thankfully managing to hit the bullseye almost every time. And Tim Hecker, who has produced 5 or 6 full lengths in as many years, every one practically perfect. Both Baker and Hecker explore similar sonic spectrums, utilizing fuzz and buzz and shimmer, Baker taking it a step further with his doom duo Nadja, taking the lurch and lumber of the genre and adding swirls of gauze and haze and bliss, while solo, he tends toward the more ambient and abstract. Hecker on the other hand takes what appears to be pop music and subverts it, sublimates it, pulls it apart and recontextualizes the sound, which usually involves wrapping everything in washed out whirs and blurred hiss, and all manner of glitch and crackle, like listening to music through headphones made out of steel wool and insulation. But with two such strong sonic personalities, the potential for this collaboration to be a bit of a mess was fairly high, and then of course there was also the possibility that each would just do their own thing, allowing the other to add bits here and there. But somehow, the sounds on Fantasma Parastasie manage to transcend, allowing glimpses of familiar sounds, hints of each artist's own work, but woven into a whole that is unto itself, a gloriously abstract swirl of sound, longform landscapes of bliss and blur, of buzz and even roar, extended movements, in which the various elements drift and shimmer, overlap and intertwine, melodies and songcraft meet texture and soundscapery, guitars unfurl tangled melodies one second, bleary eyed chordal blurs the next, harmonics glisten and hover amidst deep soft swells, distortion and buzz build into fierce walls of blown out psychedelia, the sounds crumbling and decaying before our ears, threatening to collapse, and in this fragile state lies the beauty of those sounds, effulgent, incandescent, but at the same time, blackening, beginning some unnamable process of inevitable decay. And eventually it does decay, those thick roiling sounds dissipate, leaving something soft and shimmery, glistening on a bed of shed buzz and crumbled crush, floating heavenward, its notes and melodies catching the sunlight, and offering up prismatic reflections.
The strange thing about this record is that each song is separated into super short pieces, eleven in most cases, each part between 15 and 45 seconds (it's obviously much more noticeable on the cd). We tried listening to it on shuffle, presuming that was perhaps the intention, and while it still sounds cool, it was a bit too and took too much away from the overall effect. Instead, the various parts, played in order, slip seamlessly into one another, so much so that if you weren't watching the tracks tick by on player, you wouldn't even notice.
The two work amazingly well together, bits of guitar, fragments of riffs, looped and repeated, swathed in thick smears of digital crunch, of buzzing rumble, much of the record sounds like a heavier William Basinski, as if the two were experimenting with they own Disintegration Loops. A few of the tracks are quite tranquil, abstract and minimal, but for the most part, Baker and Hecker seem more interested in distressed sounds, in distortion, in pushing the limits, composing in the red, needles pegged, but taking what in other hands could be harsh and abrasive, and crafting those sounds into something simultaneously soft and dreamlike. Even the various movements, drift smoothly into one another the entire record almost like a single piece, expansive and varied and sprawling, epic and majestic, but inward looking, introspective, melancholy, imbuing the crumbling crunch and blown out minimalism, with emotion, with distinctive mood, at once dark and mysterious, but also strangely hopeful.
The album closer and title track, is the only one not split up into movements, and is easily the most abstract, the most minimal, a stretch of lugubrious low end, so soft, so weightless, a hushed musical murmur, no distortion, no buzz, just a simple swell and sway, drifting fading, and finally disappearing.
Absolutely breathtaking.
Just got these in today, list day, four new aRCHIVE dvd titles (Ai Aso, Mick Barr, Khlyst, and Suishou No Fune). So, we haven't had a chance to watch 'em yet but since they're limited and all we figured you'd rather we just went ahead and listed 'em now rather than waiting 2 weeks. And all four artists are pretty cool after all.
Man, even if we got this last week we're not sure we'd have been able to give it a proper review in time for tonight's list - it's two whole dvds fergoshsakes, and watching even a few minutes of either of 'em is probably likely to induce seizures, seeing as how they document the INSANE guitar playing of our pal Mick Barr, from such techy/mathy/metally acts as Octis, Orthrelm, and Ocrilm. It's billed as "an inclusive look at Mick Barr's estoeric approach to guitar playing", featuring solo stuff, various groups, and footage of an improv meeting with Hella drummer Zach Hill. Essential for any fan of Barr and/or crazy guitar shred.
4 panel foldout cover, tons of vellum everywhere, with scribbly art on the vellum obi by Mick himself. Limited, OF COURSE, to a pressing of just 500 copies.
Time to right another wrong. Finnish black metal horde Behexen are woefully under represented on the aQ site. One listing, no review. Bah! That is not right. So here we have the latest blast of sickness from these legendary buzzing black legions, and they sound as fantastic as ever. We love Finnish black metal, nearly as much as we love French black metal, ditto with Norwegian, there's just something so unique about the sound of Finnish black buzz. Like most black metal, heavily indebted to the Scandinavian elite, but they Finns make that sound their own, Horna, Ajattara, Satanic Warmaster, Clandestine Blaze, Baptism, Beherit, Barathrum, Azaghal and of course Sargeist, two members of which also do time in Behexen.
The production is incredible: so heavy, the guitar so thick and dense; the riffs are amazing, buzzy and black but weirdly melodic, the band blast furiously one minute, slipping into a midtempo lope the next, the vocals a guttural howl, the arrangements cool and not at all typical, some bits of Khold-like groove here and there, deep clean vocals, almost chant-like, long drawn out sections of melancholy dirge that almost sounds like Katatonia, creepy haunting high end harmonics laced over blurred buzz beneath, all bookended by ultra sick, ultra grim blast and buzz.
"O.O.O." is the weirdest of the bunch, and maybe our favorite, with just guitar unfurling a depressive minor key melody, while a deep vocal mumbles and murmurs, and the sound of what could be a knife being sharpened surfaces throughout, but there are strange unlikely bits all over the record, making it weird enough to keep it interesting, but not so weird that it doesn't remain true and grim and KVLT.
Another solo outing from a member of the mighty Lungfish, and another disc of looped repetitive transcendental mesmer. First Daniel Higgs, then Asa Osborne's Zomes, and now Nathan Bell, how these guys ever put together an actual ROCK band we'll never know, we'll blame it on the drummer for now, at least until he comes out with some insane raga drone solo record, then we just give up.
It makes sense though as Lungfish songs weren't like normal songs, they were like minimal loops writ large, expanded into hypnotic epics, the band locked into an incredible groove, while Higgs does his thing over the top. But it becomes more and more apparent, that all the various members of Lungfish had a thing for minimalism, for drones, ragas, for repetition, and thus we have Nathan Bell's Banjo. Recorded in a massive crumbling old cathedral, plugged into a blown out amplifier, these four tracks, while played on the banjo, don't sound country, or bluegrass, or even remotely twangy, in fact they don't really sound like they were played on a banjo. The notes have a sharp attack and a quick decay, but the massive space helps them stay afloat a bit longer than normal, Bell's arrangements and compositions offering nods to Reich and Riley, the pieces nearly static, a simple melody wound up within the endless repetition. So simple and gorgeous and absolutely mesmerizing. If you dug the Higgs solo records and the Zomes, you pretty much need this too.
Limited cd-r, in a hand screened fold over cardstock sleeve with a printed insert. And of course, as always LIMITED!
A brand new record from this weirdo German drone combo (or maybe it's a one man band), and it's a doozy. We have been pretty into everything we've heard from BTC, so we were pretty excited to get out hands on this new one.
In the past, we, and other folks have compares Black To Comm to groups like Oval, Pimmon, Fennesz, Earth and Merzbow, but the truth is in fact much stranger, and much more difficult to describe. This is definitely drone music, but it's so mysterious sounding, not all low end rumbles or shimmering high end skree, instead, it's a seemingly haphazard assemblage of sounds and musical fragments, looped and processed and chopped up, then woven into looooong undulating dronescapes, that churn and shimmer and buzz and whir, but also twist themselves into strange shapes, offering up incidental melodic overtones and subtle rhythms. And the strange thing is the parts really don't matter so much, in that they are eventually transformed into something entirely new. It reminds us of an exhibit at the museum, where a voice would repeat a single word or phrase over and over, and you would try to pick out the word, but it was practically impossible, the looped speech immediately turned into something sonically mysterious and impenetrable. Fractal Hair Geometry is similar in that the source sounds are super varied, but within minutes, even seconds, the source becomes meaningless, instead it is simple an element in a swooning and swaying and woozily hypnotic whole. Chanted vocals, whirring organs, mysterious shimmers, squiggly melodies, buzzing Theremins, electronic glitches, analog synths, wheezing harmoniums, and those are just guesses, cuz just like that museum exhibit, it's difficult to tell what the source sounds are. We also didn't try that hard. It's like trying to peek under the table to see how a magician does a trick. We don't want to know. It's more fun to get lost in these mysterious sounds. One track even introduces a muted techno throb, and for a brief second it sounds like the weirdest record Kompakt never released. It's really hard to describe this stuff, which is probably why we like it so much, check out the sound samples, and hear for yourself!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Right now, everything released by these Northwestern dealers of doomdeathdirgedrone, is out of print, EXCEPT for these two cassettes, Prossneck, Germany 1629, and the split with fellow noisemakers Drowner. But these won't last long. These two tapes are both tour only, limited to 100 copies, we got 20 of each, and judging from past Blue Sabbath Black Cheer releases, those won't last long at all, needless to say, one per customer, and even more needless to say, if you want one of these, don't dawdle! Blink and you'll miss 'em.
This one features two looooong blasts of caustic blur and buzz, murky slowed down vocals, thick waves of hiss, everything churning and roiling, heavy and noisy and brutal, heavy on the drone, built a bit like a low end Whitehouse, some strange demon with a tracheotomy proselytizing over a hellish din, soon joined in by what sounds like terrified screams, and the sound of flames on flesh. Really really creepy. The flipside is a bit more abstract, a drifting sea of crumbling distortion and blurred hiss, some grinding rumbles and buried almost-melodies, sort noise tangled up with deep black industrial dronemusic. As always, heavy and frightening and black as pitch.
Once again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We have 20, that is it!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Right now, everything released by these Northwestern dealers of doomdeathdirgedrone, is out of print, EXCEPT for these two cassettes, Prossneck, Germany 1629, and the split with fellow noisemakers Drowner. But these won't last long. These two tapes are both tour only, limited to 100 copies, we got 20 of each, and judging from past Blue Sabbath Black Cheer releases, those won't last long at all, needless to say, one per customer, and even more needless to say, if you want one of these, don't dawdle! Blink and you'll miss 'em.
The BSBC side is another sea of harsh his and caustic buzz, thick waves of distortion and blurred vocal damage, squealing feedback, a million amps with AM radios blasting white noise through busted speakers, strangely beautiful, but that severed limb, horrible car wreck, utter disaster sort of beautiful. A near static expanse of washed out heavy black noise, once again managing to be surprisingly listenable, at least for those who are into that sort of thing!
Drowner offers his own chunk of thick corrosive heaviness, the sound much fuller and seemingly guitar based than BSBC, churning downtuned crumbling black buzz, shot through with shards of feedback, a monstrous low end sludge, peppered with strange buried melodies, bits of electronic shimmer, and various other sonic bits, but at its very black heart, this is a wall of blown out blackened heaviness, oozing glacially, and destroying everything in its path. The two groups make a pretty good match. And while we know we're gonna hear more from BSBC before too long, we definitely want to check out some more Drowner...
Once again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We have 20, that is it!!
By now, most metalheads know all bout Encyclopedia Metallum, pretty much the ultimate online resource for all things metal. Need to know what member of some band is in another band, what year some demo was released, what a band's particular lyrical themes are, it really is pretty amazing. Like a heavy metal Wikipedia. But unlike Wikipedia, bands and entries have to be approved by the moderators before they make it onto Encyclopedia Metallum, and there are some rules. Which ends up producing some pretty heated and amusing flame wars, mostly by bands who were rejected for one reason or another, usually for not being metal enough!
We stumbled on one such exchange regarding this record right here, but the strangely named Brobdingnagian. Who according to the Metallum head honchos were just not metal enough. Too noisy, too droney, to be honest, it all seems a bit arbitrary, cuz to our ears, this is pretty fucking black, and pretty goddamn heavy, and most definitely metal.
That said, much of this ep is pent not blasting or buzzing, but droning, and rumbling, and crashing industrially, which as far as we're concerned is pretty excellent. Think Abruptum, Emit, that sort of thing, but injected with the occasional blast of furiously blasting blackness. The opening track begins with soft sheets of feedback, rumbling downtuned doom guitar, mysterious voices buried in the mix, the feedback creating truly creepy textures over the lumbering plod, before the band launch into a frenzied blown out super raw black metal freakout, buzzing guitars, harsh vox, blasting drums, eventually petering out leaving another long stretch of deep droning ambience. The second track is way more abstract, and a bit industrial, a harsher Wolf Eyes, tons of feedback and high end buzzing, a crunchy machine like rhythm, that sounds like trucks being dropped from a crane, clouds of hiss and glitch, almost like a lo-fi noise rock Khanate. The title track offers up another sprawling expanse of doomy minimalism, buried beneath a sea of glistening crackles and campfire buzz, thick corrosive rumbles, and more harsh hellish vocals, until the track stumbles back into another raw blast of super primitive black metal fury, and the closer is almost all lasting buzz, off kilter and freaked out, heavy and black, and be sure to stick around for the hidden bonus track, where the band take on a cover that should for sure prove their metal meddle.
Besides being so damn cool to look at, these see through cassettes are embedded with some of the most entrancing and drift worthy music ever, courtesy of Bulbs!
Made for an art show at 381 Projects in Toronto with visual artist Tracy Maurice, Bulbs tapped into a much more dreamlike and effervescent sound then we've heard from them previously. Using drums, oscillator, Arp, guitar and a one string talker (!), the duo of Bulbs create some serious magical alchemy akin to early '70s Klaus Schulze and the inter-dimensional music of Iasos, if those sounds were floating underwater alongside exotic sea creatures and mystical aquatic plants. We've liked everything we've heard from Bulbs up to this point, including William Sabiston's great and sadly out of print Jyrk release as Ball Lightning and his contributions to recordings by Axolotl. But this just might be our favorite Bulbs recording yet. We get the feeling that Sabiston and the other half of Bulbs, Jon Almaraz, had lots of fantastical thoughts in their heads while recording Infirmary Of Dream, as this really taps into some magical landscapes, making us imagine what this duo could create if they were tapped to produce soundtracks for surreal nature films on some sort of alternate Discovery Channel. Imagine if Seefeel were stripped to its most minimal and merged with the most dreamy aspects of Popul Vuh. Only 50 of these were made and we only have a handful so you know what that means....
This is the debut full-length from Norwegian black metallers Celestial Bloodshed. Having only previously put out a demo and an ep, Cursed, Scarred and Forever Possessed (great title!) gives listeners outside of the utterly cvlt underground (who, like, don't live in Norway or trade obsessively over the internet) a chance to plumb their depths just a little deeper. Those lucky few already exposed to the charred sickness of these misanthropic underlords will recognize their place within the blackened realm ruled by bands like Burzum and Gorgoroth. Why do we mention those two bands specifically? Well, CB tend to go back and forth pretty solidly between both the more mid-paced buzzed out dirge of the former and the brutal blasts of the latter. At the same time, they've managed to incorporate some experimental soundscapery and some super cool and strange vocals, well beyond the usual black metal atmospherics. A gloriously grim, harsh and heavy collection of buzzing blackness, which will most definitely fit nicely in any serious metalhead's collection. Hail!
Loren Chasse is a man of many guises, while his recent solo releases being issued under the moniker Of for the past couple of years, his constant output via Jewelled Antler related projects has continued with his revolving presence in Thuja, Blithe Sons, Softwar, Ov, Kyrgyz, and many others. The work that Loren produces under his own name tends toward the sound art end of his aesthetic spectrum, closer to his work with Id Battery and Coelacanth than the field recordist approach to rural psychedelia found in those Jewelled Antler efforts. Throughout all of his sonic pursuits, Chasse's use of sound has always been to spark the imagination and generate a sense of mystery; and that is certainly the case here on The Footpath.
A dark cloud of rumbles and growls announces the beginning of this album, as Chasse grasps several heavy rocks in his hands and caresses their surfaces with sand, dirt, leaves, water, ash, and other debris. As is often the case, these recordings have been recorded outside with a contact microphone or two and a digital recorder. So the external sounds of the environment creep into these crackling textures and eroded drones. The lulling fluctuations of surf and wind are most common, indicative of Chasse's continued wanderings up and down the California coast. But, you will also find the buzzing slash of an insect chorus or the smoldering bristle from a campfire. Chasse deftly abstracts these softened noises without ever making them sound like they had been processed in the digital arena. Every piece here enjoys a wonderfully rough hewn quality with the edges torn, tattered, and frayed. Hints of the melodic phrasing which Chasse brings to Jewelled Antler pop up on sporadic occasion in small two note phrases, that only barely pass for melodies, emerging from the mire and debris, or with his zither buried within a cloud of tape hiss and bunker reverberations, replayed and re-recorded numerous times exacerbating all of that tactile crunch. Chasse's work always comes recommended, and The Footpath is no exception!
Throughout the Marin Headlands just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the coastal mountains are dotted with countless bunkers which were built during World War II in anticipation of the Japanese invasion that never came. Nearly 70 years later, these bunkers have been weathered by wind, fog, rain, and of course the sodden folks who tromp through the Headlands on a daily basis. These concrete structures with small portals facing the Pacific all have amazing reverberant qualities; and it shouldn't be a surprise that the more frequented bunkers and passageways inevitably echo with the sound of children dying to hear their own voices tossed back to them. The Headlands have been a favored destinations for Loren Chasse, who has sought many of the lesser known and lesser travelled environs for field recordings and jam sessions that would eventually work their way into all things Jewelled Antler (Thuja, Franciscan Hobbies, The Blithe Sons, Of, Ov, etc.). In his recordings, Chasse extracts a profound mystery and grand sense of wonder from that echo, the bunker's grit, the soft recurrence of surf bleeding through those walls, and the distant bleat of a foghorn.
Back in 2005, Chasse took his fellow globetrotting wanderer Michael Northam to the Battery Townsley where the two set up long string wires and various handheld instruments to begin a series of recordings which took a few years to complete after Northam left California. The two did manage to meet up once again in Estonia, there exploring the Soviet industrial ruins that pock the Estonian landscape with similar intentions. Out of the bramble of overgrown weeds, rebar, concrete, dirt, rock, wind, and water, Chasse and Northam straddle those psychedelic leanings of Jewelled Antler and the more studied aspects of minimalism.
The Otolith begins with an acoustic clamor, as if billions of iron filings were brushing against each other under the direction of a couple of hefty magnets, before shifting into a harmonium blur of sustained tones hinting at a melody well beneath these clouds of tousled energy. Softer drones and Aeolian fragments flutter forth out of bowed strings and gently tapped gongs amidst a golden hue of opiated atmospherics. Scrabblings across the surfaces of leaves, rocks, mud, and metal fuse with field recordings of wind and water, as a continuing demonstration of Chasse's alchemy with naturalist sound to bring forth stately ragas and dreamtime psychedelic lullabies. Chasse and Northam work amazingly well together, having produced this thoroughly amazing album. Think Popul Vuh, Parson Sound, Pandit Pran Nath, Harry Bertoia, and Erc La Casa. Totally beautiful and mesmerizing.
Hard to believe it's been THREE YEARS since the last issue of Chunklet. Since then Chunklet has expanded its rock empire to include all manner of comedy, sludge rock, releasing lps, hosting events, all that jazz, so it's no big surprise it took as long as it did, but hell, it's here now, so no more whinging. Just a quick run down of what you'll find in this lastest issue of the snarkiest, snottiest, band hating, hipster crushing music mag in the land!!!
An interview with Mr. Show's Paul F. Tompkins, hirsute comedian Zach Galifianakis, a drug awareness chart, so all you druggies can figure out what the heck you're taking and why, the online music journalist application form, an article on prank calls, the sport of gods, WHIRLYBALL!, comedian Jon Glaser, a Sublime Frequencies interview, and finally, page after page after pager after page of ridiculous shit, a brief list to follow now: How To Read This Issue Of Chunklet, Rocktoids, Rock Sniglets, Dear Rock Star..., Bro-Cabulary, Ten Things All Suicide Girls Have In Common, Silver Jews Lyrics I've Used As Pick-Up Lines, Know Your Rock Girlfriend Stereotypes, Yesterday's Southern Rock Today, Actual Protest Signs We've Seen, Nine Things About Canada We Politely Shun, Glad You're Dead!, We Will Not Listen To Bands That..., Things To Tell A Band Instead Of The Truth, Record Store Names, Music Mag Mix 'n' Match, Local For Life, Your City Really Stinks, Rockopoly and on and on and on and on, millions of tiny lists and jokes and disses crammed into every corner of every page, basically the ultimate bathroom reading for the hip rock household. We've had our copies for weeks now, and have barely cracked the surface. As always, funny as fuck, sure to piss people off and eminently re-readable...
Okay stoner metal serial killer obsessives, you know who you are, even if you're loathe to admit it, time to rejoice as the masters of SKSR (serial killer stoner rock) return, Japan's Church Of Misery.
This ep focuses on UK killer Dennis Nilsen, a serial pedophile and killer, which prompted a conversation about what these guys would do when they ran out of killers to immortalize, but we were saddened to realize that it's pretty unlikely that will ever happen no matter how many records these guys put out.
But fuck it, you don't need to be obsessed with killers to dig this shit, just killer riffs. And the riffs as always are indeed killer. Huge bassy, sludgey, groovy, in fact the opening track on this 12" is so groovy it almost sounds like a more metal ZZ Top. Sabbathy to the Nth degree, lumbering rhythms that either plod or swing depending on the track, the vocals a growly croak buried way down in the mix, sounding not unlike Michael Gerald from Killdozer, super dynamic and stoned. Lots of break downs where just the bass and drums groove, before the riff swoops back in. Wild leads, lurching stop start bits,wild almost space rock outros, and of course, plenty of clips of Dennis Nilsen talking as well as various news reports. Technically this is a full length, even though the B-side is a single super extended stoner metal drug jam, and thus is only three tracks. Sabbath, Kyuss, Green Machine, Acrimony, Solar Anus, Ox, Bongzilla, if that stuff is your cup of THC laced tea, then you are definitely gonna want this.
Beautiful matte finish gatefold sleeves, and of course super limited, only 500 or 600 copies, and CoM records always go crazy fast.
It's been a good long while since we've heard from aQ faves Circle Of Ouroborus, a damaged outsider blackened folk flecked post metal combo who confound in creating gorgeously fractured ritualistic soundworlds.
This latest missive is one half of a split 12" with the equally mysterious Somnivore. When we last heard from CoO, they sounded a bit like a black metal version of Jandek or the Fall, but things have definitely changed, the sound is not so lo-fi, and the sonics are definitely much improved, but without losing any of their signature damaged weirdness.
Chant like vocals, very reminiscent of older Swans, drift over dark distorted spidery guitar lines, the drums, only occasional, dubbed out and also distorted, while in the background lurk slither little minor key melodies, before in swoops a swirl of clean detuned guitars, being strummed frantically black metal style, but instead of buzzing, the sound blurs and smears into a bleary eyed wash, crooned Jandekian vocals soaked in reverb clamber over the top, and the result is something more like some ost nineties Homestead band than a black metal band. But soon CoO kick into gear and offer up the first hints of anything remotely metallic, distorted drumming, buzzing black riffs, but again, less buzzing as much as muted and muddy, the vocals crooned and dramatic, veering into Urfaust territory. Eventually, the buzz fades to a fuzzy washed out drone, that shimmers and drifts before a clean riffy buzz re-emerges accompanied by more deep crooning vocals, emitting a sort of not very black, and not very metal black metal, that seems to be CoO's specialty. Difficult to describe for sure, but we can't seem to get enough.
Somnivore take up the flipside, the first half is all crystalline clean guitar, urgently strummed, strange whispered vocals, chimes and bells, subtle percussion. All very strident and apocalyptic, like a more ominous and creepy Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. Effects everywhere, the track eventually devolving into a swirling morass of deep drones, shifting from hushed whirs to barely there shimmer, to throbbing rumble, eventually dissipating in a cloud of delicate glimmering hush. Nice!
Gorgeous full color cover, printed full color insert, with lyrics and liner notes, and LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!!!
Dark shadows is right, dark shadows from a cold, old sun. Long dark shadows stretching across decades... This legendary 1970 demo recording from Austin, Texas psychedelic rock group Cold Sun has never before been on cd, and only just barely been on vinyl. There's record collectors sitting on desert islands somewhere out there, wishing they had a copy of this to keep them company. It's one of the most cult and obscure and oh so welcome psych reissues in recent memory, that's for sure. Well worthy of its whispered rep, Cold Sun is dark, spectral, tripped out garage-psych in the '60s Texas vein of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators. Indeed, the guys from Cold Sun went on to back up Roky in his band the Aliens, not much longer later.
Band leader Bill Miller sings, in an fragile yet urgent drawl, sounding rather like Roky himself, and also plays acid-rock leads on an electric, amplified autoharp (that's right, autoharp, a zither that's usually more of a country/folk/bluegrass instrument) which really gives Cold Sun an outsider edge... and while there's also the requisite dose of fuzz guitar here, Cold Sun can't be reduced to the "fuzz monster" category. It's all together weirder and more affecting than that. Aside from Miller's autoharp, part of what makes it so strange and so special are his lyrics. Take for instance the opening few lines of track one, "South Texas" (if we've transcribed 'em properly): "You have seen the eyes of the geko staring out watching from the crack in the wall you were thinking of going right through but it's outside it's not you you have heard the voice of the gekos telling each other here comes another robot it's a swarm of night climbing dragons crawling out searching just walking cross the ceiling..." Except when he says "robot" it sounds like someone else is saying "human" at the same time. And it just goes on and on getting weirder and weirder, its emotional essence aided by the outsiderishness of the delivery, acid-serious and plaintive. Goes so perfectly with Cold Sun's lysergic layers of sinuous sound. Yep, you can see that this is an example, perhaps thee ultimate example, of that unique Texas, desert psych style... they've got their own, otherworldly, feverish tradition of that down there.
The Cold Sun demo (and not even all of it) was pressed to acetate in 1973 in an edition of just ONE copy. And then it was lost to the sands of time, until reissue label Rockadelic did an LP version in 1990 that caused a bit of a stir amongst psych-hounds... and was limited to only 300 copies itself. But THIS cd edition is the definitive one, including all the music from the demo tape -and- two live bonus tracks! (The live tracks, recorded in 1972, are of songs not on the demo, and are quite worthy, being just a bit hissier and lower-fi than the demo itself, and maybe slightly harder rocking.) It's also got enthusiastic liner notes from noted psych nerd Jello Biafra (!), and also from Cold Sun's Bill Miller himself. World In Sound has done a nice job with this holy grail reissue, we're sure they took the responsibility pretty seriously. Now everyone, at last, can hear these truly psychedelic, (cold) sun-baked sounds...
A couple years back, we raved about a disc called The Dematerialized Passenger, the first album from this unique band (or perhaps we should say project), remember? In case you don't, here's the deal: Combat Astronomy are a USA/UK collaboration, creating a crushing industrial/jazz/prog hybrid. Imagine Godflesh with a free improv horn section, saxophones squealing amidst the metallic riffage. Or Scorn taking a skronked-out stab at chamber music. Like their earlier release, this new Combat Astronomy opus is again laced with punishing, rigid drummachine beats, along with heavy, uber-low-end fretless bass shaking each song with doomic distortion. Which establishes an absurdly heavy context for sax, clarinet, flute and bassoon to freak out organically, like wild weeds creeping through cracks in giant slabs of concrete, on the floor of an abandoned factory somewhere.
But unlike their all-instrumental debut, this time Combat Astronomy have recruited a female vocalist, Elaine di Falco, who also plays some piano, to add yet another unusual dimension to their mashup of extremes, now reminding us slightly of James Plotkin's now forgotten post-Old project Flux. (Hmm, maybe Kayo Dot and later Ulver could be other comparisons now too.) If the addition of her vocals makes this a bit more overtly melodic, it's still no less extreme overall. And certainly just as intricate, her delicate vocal arrangements in themselves quite complex, multi-tracked, as on the urban R&B influenced (???? no, we're crazy) "Touch The Moon" and the album's whispery coda, "Ordinary Miracles". And the focus of CA is still on the ominous grooves, ambient electronics, and battling horn bleats... tracks like "Alive Inside Eternity" and "Sentinel" are lengthy epics (12:36 and 16:49, respectively) of serious beats and blats and skree, in the challenging, compelling, militant manner to which actually only Combat Astronomy can truly lay claim. The vocals, when present, then take it into another, equally unlikely, atmospheric realm of twisted prog-pop. Pretty darn cool!
Finally! After how long? It's been years since we've heard from Aaron Cometbus, well, at least properly. There have been some collections in the form of books, but those were compiled from old issues of the zine itself. Anyway, we thought the last issue - which marked 25 years - was his swan song, but with this one we were apparently proven wrong. From squatting to love stories, from traveling to drugs and more, Cometbus has always centered around Berkeley, California, and has always been one of our favorite zines ever. This time around things are no different, as the story once again starts on Telegraph Avenue. A few things have actually changed a bit. Over time, we've seen Aaron's stories go from zine writing to something more akin to subcultural documentation. He collects stories and retells them for our reading pleasure. He goes back to Telegraph and decides to hunt down the stories behind the area's bookstores. To be honest, this is probably mostly for hardcore fans. You know, the ones that will be discussing the same parts with each other the next time they get together and catch up. If you like Aaron's writing style, his sense of humor, the way he observes and recounts things, then this will fit perfectly with your other Cometbuses...
A lot has changed since we first listed Paso Inferior nearly a decade ago. Here's our very short review from way back then:
"Japanese crust-sludge band, super slow, super heavy. Their new disc. Some facts: 1) they just toured the States. 2) their lyrics are all sung in Spanish. 3) the drummer used to be in Omoide Hatoba, Boredoms guitarist Yamamoto's weird jazz/pop project, but he quit when Omoide signed to a major. 4) this album features only one song, it's 40+ minutes long... Great vegging-out music for fans of Earth, Sleep, Eyehategod, Swans, etc."
Well, all of that stuff still applies for sure, but this is not, as we thought, a vinyl reissue of the original cd. Instead this is a rerecorded version of Paso Inferior, recorded in 2002, utilizing the same themes and melodies, but a whole new song, the A side sonically similar to the original, the B side, a droney blissed out drift, which is in fact an 'ambient version' of the original Paso Inferior!!
Since the original release, the group has released several more records, each slower and more epic than the last, even incorporating piano and acoustic guitar. And you can hear that in the reimagined Paso. Their appeal spread way beyond the punk rockers and hardcore kids who held them so beloved. Metalheads are Corrupted obsessed nowadays, as are the new breed of dronedirgedoom fanatics. But back in the Paso Inferior days, they were the underground kings of sludge, sharing splits with pretty much every power violence band that was up for it. A band that was spoken of in hushed reverent tones, but whose actual recorded output, included only a single full length, Paso Inferior.
The spirit and power of the original are definitely present, but the sound is better, heavier, and weirdly pretty in that way only Corrupted seem to be able to pull off.
One sidelong doomsludge crawl, the guitars black and viscous, the track laced with squealing washed out feedback, the vocals a growled gurgle, the drums a loping lumbering pound, recent talk of a single 3 hour song don't seem at all far fetched when listening to the reimgined Paso Inferior, there's something magical and mysterious about the music of Corrupted, no matter how slow or sludgey or stripped down, it never gets boring, it sucks you in and soothes your spirit, while it crashes and pummels, mesmerizing, hypnotic, so heavy, but weirdly transcendental.
The other half of the new Paso Inferior is another sidelong epic, this one dark and ambient, all shimmery drones, haunting melodies, mysterious voices, a dreamy drift rife with long tones, layered chords, but all muted and blurred and stretched into something more dark and lovely than grim and ominous, perfectly balancing the sludgey sprawl on the flipside.
All new artwork to go with the music, black on black, shiny on matte, the band logo and flames or drips or streaks of some kind, inside a printed insert, pressed on nice thick vinyl, and of course CRAZY limited. In fact pretty sure this is out of print now and we might be one of the only places with copies. Which means, as always, these will go FAST.
The black cloud over sunny California grows and grows, with each addition to its dark army and each new missive from one of its elite! Black metal has found a strong foothold in this unlikely location. Xasthur, Leviathan, Draugar, Crebain and a small dark likeminded legion lurk in the shadows, far away from the fun and the sun, unleashing some of the most raw and uncompromisng black metal we've ever heard.
AQ pal Wrest and his genius one man avant black metal outfit Leviathan return with what may quite possibly be his best, most intensely weird material to date. We just can't get enough of his dark and violent, totally skewed take on grim frosty black metal. And for this release he teams up with relative newcomer Ancalagon The Black and his outfit Crebain. Not quite as weird as Leviathan, Crebain channels his darkness through a more thrashing Darkthrone/Mutiilation style.
On this split, Wrest takes his ultra distorted inhuman vocals, pummelling hyperspeed blasts, and violent riffery to a whole 'nother dimension, and moves even further away from his contemporaries, both in terms of sound and concept. There are certain sonic similarities for sure, but Leviathan has such a personal and undiluted take on the black sounds that so obviously flow through is veins. For every blast beat and every buzzing riff, there's some stuttery, fucked up breakdown, or extended blissed out ambient soundscape, or rhythmic mathrock workout, or strummy clean guitar jangle, or weird production with all sorts of glitches and strange sounds. The ambient parts here are definitely some of the most beautifully creepy we've ever heard, from a metal band or otherwise. And the metal, well, by now you should know few can touch Leviathan when it comes to black metal brilliance. And the thing is, Wrest doesn't think any of this is weird. He just makes the sounds he hears in his head, and they sound right to him. And they are right, but in such a beautifully weird way. Can't wait for the upcoming full length Tentacles Of Whorror. His half of the split ends with a straight ahead and super necro cover of cult early '90s San Francisco metallers Von's "Blood Angel." Nice.
The other half of this is Crebain's first offical cd release, having previously only released a super limited cd-r demo last year, and it's just as good as that demo led us to hope. This is as raw and buzzing and blazing as it gets. Where Wrest is a master of arranging, creating moods and ambience, Ancalagon is a master of the riff. An unbelievably good guitarist, these riffs are lightning fast and swarm into your ears like a plague of locusts. Thrashing and chaotic, Crebain is a furious no-nonsense metallic onslaught. Programmed drums allow the rhythms to keep up with the madness inducing riffery. Occasionally things slow down to midtempo, and then it becomes quite obvious that Crebain is actually writing catchy songs, not just an insane series of parts. Melodies and almost-groovy riffs propel loping hypnotic dirges towards their eventual obliteration via hyperspeed blasts and that blurry Crebain riffery. Fucking great.
This split is another nail in the coffin containing the corpses of the Nordic metal elite, as black metal's Calfiornia contigent threatens to thaw their frosty corpses with the soul shearing rays of its black sun! Aieeee! Limited to only 666 copies!
Holy shit this is rocking us so hard! Imagine if someone snuck into Dead Meadow's practice space and stole all their weed and replaced it with amphetamines, the band that would emerge might end up sounding as awesome as Crystal Antlers. Before we heard them we were a bit scared off by the name thinking they might be another in a way too long line of wannabe new weird American folkies but luckily that is not the case at all! We were never able to get our hands on any of their limited cd-rs but now that we finally get to hear what they sound like we're so happy that, for a change, the hype was totally justified.
This reminds us a lot of the first time we heard Comets On Fire, yet somehow Crystal Antlers manage to breathe new life into psychedelically charged garage rock. We even hear hints of Drive Like Jehu with less math and more acid or like Hot Snakes or Mudhoney raging through covers of early Hawkwind. Every time we've played this in the store we always get lots of folks excitedly what we're listening to, and without fail someone working in the back of the store comes up front to find out what the heck they've been rocking out to. So great to have some new and truly rocking garage psych to please our ears and kick our asses!!
So, this is the quote-unquote rockin' Dead C album? So we were told, that was the supposed spin on this one, the twenty-somethingth album from these veteran NZ "free-rock" heroes. But maybe we got that wrong, 'cause aren't they all equally (free-) rockin'? Probably what was meant was that this was more "song-y", in comparison to their previous album, last year's Future Artists, 'cause there's more singing... but otherwise, not such a huge departure. And their album before that, 2003's The Damned, was WAY rock on tracks like "Truth". It's always kinda funny getting into discussions about just how rock or noise or whatever the Dead C are, anyway, since the thing about them is that they're playing Dead C music exclusively, forging into otherwise uncharted, unnamed sonic territory with each release even after 20 years in the "biz", leaving all other underground noise/drone/rock/experimental/floorcore acts to play catch-up. As we said in our review of Future Artists, the Dead C have an amazing ability to take "unmusical sounds, caustic, abrasive, minimal and harsh, and weave them into something beautiful." That they surely do here. If you've never heard 'em before, this could be a fairly accessible starting point.
Certainly, you can't argue that lead off track "Mansions" (the 1st of 4 songs on this 45 minute disc) does not, underneath its avant-garde, noisily shambolic exterior, have a rock n' roll heart that's a-beatin'. As well, there's melody amidst the murk, with mumbly, half-whispered vocals rising to the fore. But really it's more moanin' than it's rockin', the whole album moaning and droning, full of shrill feedback textures and an eventually hypnotic sheen of percussive clangor (on the lengthy track 2 "Stations", and track 3 "Plains" especially). They stir up quite a dense din on the latter, leaving more space on album closer "Waves" for Michael Morely's plaintive vocals to wend thro' the distortion, showing the kinder, gentler side of the Dead C... Such a fine blend of immediate emotional impact and unsettling, unfamiliar audio explorations. As "song-y" as we say this is, who else writes songs that at each and every moment seem maybe like they are finishing, and/or beginning anew? Standard song structures and instrumental roles are abandoned or deprioritized in favor of an alien Dead C agenda of experimental, improvised (yet to their own logic disciplined) expressiveness that really does justify the "free" in the free-rock tag. As essential as ever. (And if you can, don't miss 'em on their first US tour in ages - they played SF last night and it was great.)
At last! Dengue Fever have deemed it time to grace us with the follow-up to their highly lauded and loved 2003 self-titled full length American (played) / Cambodian (sung) treasure. If you enjoy Southeast Asian pop and you've somehow missed this group live or on record, please don't let another day go by without treating yourself royally to the sounds of Dengue Fever! This (along with the Bay Area's own Neung Phak alias Mono Pause who offer a broader spectrum of Southeast Asia's pop music) is probably as close as you can get to the 'real' thing without flying to the other side of the globe. If you want a little rundown on the group's story, please see our glowing review of their first album which was written by our then-co-worker Byram who seriously knows his stuff.
Happy to hear and report that the group have picked right up from where they left off in delightful ear-tingling fashion. Here, they've once again created a faithful and respectful recreation of the genre, but this time they've allowed more of their individual influences into the mix -- fleshing things out more, beefing up the rock elements a bit more (heftier saxophones and guitars), but they wisely leave plenty of the spotlight to Chhom Nimol's jaw-dropping vocals. If you need more convincing (yeah, like we really need to twist your arm on this one!), check out a couple of the album's highlights "One Thousand Tears Of A Tarantula" and "Sleepwalking Through The Mekong"! Intoxicating, irresistible and immensely recommended.
A side note: Has anyone else noticed that the cover art bears a remarkable resemblance to those of the Sublime Frequencies Southeast Asian compilation series? Makes sense!
Grizzly Bear fans will immediately recognize the vocal stylings and elegant moodiness of Daniel Rossen who is one half of Department Of Eagles and who has been a major presence in Grizzly Bear for the last several years, joining the band in 2004 and helping make Yellow House their best record yet. Along with his Department Of Eagles bandmate Fred Nicolaus, the duo have released several records that somehow slipped between the cracks but luckily with the widespread popularity of Grizzly Bear and their recent signing to 4AD this will be their most widely heard releases yet. And it's a good thing too, because this is such a moving record. With arrangements that sound like a more somber adaptation of Van Dyke Parks signature style or what it might sound like if Sufjan Stevens covered the more bittersweet side of Vetiver or Wings. And with most of his Grizzly Bear bandmates on board, there's no denying that In Ear Park sounds a lot like a great Grizzly Bear record, if not a bit more focused and even more emotionally impacting. Most of these songs were written after Rossen's father passed away, and there is such an honest reflection and mournful tone to these songs. So nice.
Active, uptempo instrumental electronica action outta Sweden on the Smalltown Supersound label (home to the likes of Hans-Peter Lindstrom and Bjorn Torske). It starts off with some pretty piano, but soon breaks into the bouncy, percolating danceparty stuff. Diskjokke mixes it up nicely, never getting too stuck in one set of sounds... "The Dinner That Never Happened" could be a chill-out echo of the Star Wars Death Star music, while elsewhere some possibly African drumming gets mixed in with the squelchin' distorted beats. The disc also takes some purely atmospheric detours as well.
Geographically, they're from the land of skweee, and Diskjokke have some of that funky skweee playfulness, but this is not quite skweee, being more techno, but close.
In the last few years Dungen have gone from being a mysterious underground Swedish psych sensation to one of the most beloved bands in the indie music landscape. With 4 they prove they deserve all the acclaim and recognition that's come their way as they continue to evolve and expand their sonic horizons in such pleasing ways. It's not always how hard you hit but instead what kind of magic you can create with sound, thus this is probably the least rock sounding record Dungen have made, and we think the lush arrangements and warm texture suits them perfectly. While this could still pass for some lost gem from the Scandinavian psych underground of the early '70s there is something so unique and distinctive about their sound. They are one of those bands that after hearing only several seconds, their signature sound is already evident. But unlike folks such as Clinic who also have a sound we like but continue to make the same record over and over, Dungen have proven to be imaginative and skilled songwriters who move forward with each release, while remaining the Dungen we know and love. It's almost like they've been listening intently to the more nuanced and atmospheric psychedelic reissues from Ennio Morricone we've seen lately. Along with the new record by The Alps reviewed last list, this Dungen is more exciting evidence that that folks are still finding fresh (also lush and gorgeous) ways to enter a psychedelic state of mind. So great!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Seems foolish to write that much about this even though it's AWESOME. It's limited to only 90 copies, it's already out of print, so all you need to know is it's Jon from Barn Owl solo, guitars, Fender Rhodes, harmonica, trumpet, harmonium and flute, all woven into a beautifully creepy expanse of slow burning twang flecked drone. Not all that far removed from more modern Earth, but much murkier and way more ominous.
Elm manages to be sweetly sinister, darkly brooding, and HEAVY without being heavy. It's all about the drone, and Elm manage to explore all sorts of dronemusick here, from soaring high end ragas, to glistening glimmering sun dappled shimmer, to crumbling downtuned buzz to spare spidery drift. This stuff is awesome. And beautiful. Seems like such a shame to make it so limited. So for now, at least a handful of you will get lucky enough to snag one of these. If you want to be one of those lucky ones, best act fast....
Gorgeous packaging, cool skeleton forest drawing, the cd and sleeve, in a silver paper outer pouch, each one hand stamped with Elm written beneath the stamp in cursive. So nice!
Back in stock. Might just be your final chance to pick one of these up!!
When we first heard about this record, a split release between some unknown band and ultradoom AQ crushworthy sludgelords Monarch, whose track was an hour long, we wondered how the heck that was fair to the other band. We then discovered that the other band was in fact French grinders Elysium, whose songs average around the one minute mark (one song here clocks in at a whopping 8 seconds) it started to make sense. And what an awesome idea, what a great combo, the two extremes, blazing buzzing hyperspeed grindcore and slow motion sludge. Two great tastes... er, sounds... So here we have 4 tracks from Elysium, total time 5:55, and one track from the mighty Monarch, total time 58:27. Fucking awesome!
So first up Elysium, fast and furious, guitars like squiggles of white hot lightning, the drums like rhythms being fired from a machine gun into your head at point blank range, vocals that screech and gurgle, everything a head spinning blur. Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Nasum, Rotten Sound, you might as well add Elysium to that elite list.�
But they're just the warm up, the appetizer, Monarch's "Amplifire Death March" is why we're here, and they do not disappoint.
So Monarch, for those who don't already know, are one of the slowest, heaviest bands in existence, whose artwork consists of weird Hello Kitty like crosses, skulls and burning churches, as is fronted by a very cute, non-tattooed, non-pierced, spikeless, leatherless, young lady in a sensible skirt and top, who howls like a banshee from the depths of hell and who write in the liner notes "Listen To Judas Priest"? How rad is that? RIDICULOUSLY RAD! And sure we'd be crushed out on Monarch just based on their lugubrious tarpit sonic sludge, we're just like that, but having an adorable frontperson just pushes it over the edge.
So yes, this rules, and is suitably funereal, appropriately slow and somber, so slow in fact it makes Khanate sound like speed metal. Okay, maybe that's stretching� it a bit, but this is some seriously slow motion shit. The riffs stretch out for ages, the drum hits are MILES apart, the vocals a screech / howl / moan, a mouthful of dirt and broken glass, a voice so harsh and hatefilled it seems impossible that it could come from Monarch's diminutive sensibly dressed leader. There are huge stretches of near ambience where it's just the hum of the amplifier, some soft lilting chords, a pounding single drum rhythm, vocals screeched across wide expanses of space, draped across fading riffs like flayed skin before the next chunk of sludge drops.�It's almost as if some leather winged demon was flying above, soaring through the black night sky, hurling huge hundred ton chunks of sludge at the ground every few seconds, or few minutes, where they splinter into a million pieces, filling our ears with shards of searing sludge. A pounding ultra-dirge, a tempo well below 16rpm, the sort of creepy crawl that were it to slow down any more would be just a single tone, albeit a crushing pummeling one. So heavy, and so slow it's almost stops being sludge and simply becomes some abstract heaviness. By now you should know what we're getting at. This is doom, ultramegadoom, doom with a page full of 'o's, wallowing in the same murk as Moss, Rigor Sardonicous, Stumm, Catacombs, Esoteric, and all who bow before the power of dooooooooom.
This is a split release between TEN labels (count 'em:�Shifty / Amanita / (((Parade))) / 213 / Throne / Amertume-Corruption #2 / Fidelio / Murder / Wee Wee / Solitude) which is kinda cool, but also kinda dumb, as each label only gets a handful of copies and therefore it goes out of print before you know it. We got 50 copies originally and those disappeared in a flash, and only now finally managed to get a handful more from one of the labels' secret stash! Probably the last copies ever.
We go on and on at length about all the fucked up and damaged, weird as fuck black metal bands we love so much, but we don't really mention Emit usually, which, as we listen to this final Emit release seems just plain wrong. Might be due to the dearth of recordings, only 3 proper releases, one a split, now mostly unavailable, this latest is another collection, gathering up all manner of unreleased tracks as well as a handful from various demos. And holy shit is this stuff amazing. We absolutely loved A Sword Of Death For The Prince, but Abortions makes that one seem downright tame in comparison. This is a tough one to describe, but we'll do our best.
Emit exist somewhere between raw black metal buzz, and creepy black ambience, but their take on both is absolutely tweaked and damaged and pretty insane. The opener here is a thick wall of buzzing guitars, layers of feedback, and what could be analog synths, some serious drone, but all draped over a VERY un-metal rhythm, a weird jaunty shuffle, all offbeat high-hat, like a calypso or something, the beat changing tempo wildly and randomly throughout, speeding WAY up, then right back down again, while the track continues to undulate and buzz fiercely. Right after that the sound shifts to something much more abstract, a dark and brooding drift, laced with strange ambient sounds, warbly low end melodies, bits of crackle and hiss, only to immediately transform into a blast of caustic noise, before slipping back into minimal drone, and finally a haunting reverb drenched spoken word invocation. And we're only 4 tracks in. The rest of the record is equally and gloriously schizophrenic, some highlights: super spare drums over a thick whirring organ drone, and what sounds like a super high pitched harmonica melody, super angular and slightly off key black metal buzz, with an organ or a synth, making the whole thing sound super sinister like a busted metal music box and the drums still doing some sort of UN-metal beat, a totally bizarre, processed buzzscape, all stuttery and staticky, like a skipping cd, but shaped into something weirdly metal and very twisted, swirling thick clouds of black drone and chanted vocals, lots of quite beautiful dark ambience, all very creepy and haunting and ethereal, finally finishing off with the 13 minute epic "Visions Of Timeless Nought", a super obtuse sort of black metal jam, more of those fractured fucked up drums, vocals wrapped in reverb and careening wildly all over the place, guitars that moan and groan and squeal, everything weirdly dubbed out, the drums bouncing wildly, the high-hat loud and sizzling all over the place, the entire song sounding like it's being reflected in a funhouse mirror, warped and warbly and woozy, just listening makes your head spin, which is pretty fantastic actually.
The band has recently ceased to be, reinventing itself as Hammemit, with a new sound and new direction, so for those of you who have yet to discover the warped joys of Emit, and have been hankering for some new blackened weirdness, freaky and fucked up, druggy and confusional and so so so strange, this is probably your last chance...
Most people probably remember Alec Empire best as the head of Digital Hardcore Recordings, or as the front man of Atari Teenage Riot, or for his various solo records, but here at aQ he's probably best know for the LOUDEST instore ever. It was pretty insane, not sure how we even got away with it. Folks were coming down from stores 4 or 5 doors down to see what the heck was going on. There was as big a crowd of lookie-loos as there was people to see the show. He was DJing with Merzbow albums or something.
But it's been years, and Empire has gone through a bit of a transformation since then, he's not so much into the super distorted jungle anymore, his more recent records have been more industrial, sounding like Nine Inch Nails or Ministry, but actually good. We dug his last, The Futurist, a slab of metal riffs and drum machine beats, of howled vocals and stomping garage rock. A weird mix, but one that definitely suited him. But this most recent disc is different all over again. First there's the glamour shot in the booklet, all bleached bangs and aviator shades, and the legend underneath the disc that says "This is an indie rock noise record...", and it is, sort of. But we'd also say it's a sort of industrial synth pop new wave record, borrowing HEAVILY from prime era Gary Numan, and a little from Suicide too. It may be derivative, but it's still awesome. The opener is worth the price of admission alone. A killer hook, total new wave goth-industrial dream pop, equal parts Interpol and Gary Numan (the synth line is criminally Numan), the vocals a bit robotic, a weird atonal bridge, but the whole song so fierce and catchy, and the sort of thing that would destroy a dancefloor filled with silver booted, multi-scarved glam pirates for sure.
There is some weird shit here too, robotic proto-funk, angular electro, murky ballads, groovy garagey buzz, it's all good, we're also reminded of the Mark E. Smith + Mouse On Mars project Von Sudenfed at times too. But the best parts are definitely rife with thick fuzzy synths, and killer beats, all wound up into groovy late night, strobe lit, stilleto heeled, funky, sexy blasts of buzzing new wave. Way cool.
First proper release from this French blackmetal horde, released on a new black metal label run by the guy who runs Turgid Animal, home to Skullflower and various other noiseniks. But this is not some noise / black metal hybrid, no Epidemia Mortaliis are grim and true and raw, and as with most black buzzers, owe much to their mighty Scandinavian forbears, but the cool thing about EM is they have their own distinct and slightly skewed take on black metal, which results in a sound both buzzing and brutal, but also stumbling and weirdly lo-fi.
The newest demo, has the band slipping from frenzied blast, to loping dirge, and back again, the vocals hysterical and over the top, the drums super loud in the mix, the arrangements convoluted and complex, the guitars mournful and thick, but sort of low in the mix, which gives the songs a sort of off kilter, damaged vibe, the drum fills and the cymbals drowning out the rest of the musicians when ever they kick in, but the riffing is awesome, weirdly woozy, also adding their own seasick vibe to the proceedings, and there is some really fucked up stop start parts, that sound almost like black math rock. It's not full on fucked up enough to appeal to the folks only into damaged freaked out blackness, but it is plenty weird enough to keep it from sounding like every other BM band.
The second half, which is the older demo, has weirdly enough a much better production, the guitars way higher in the mix, the songs too are much faster and more furious, the guitars wild and dense and layered, but the band still does all kinds of cool weird shit, slipping some Ved Buens Ende sort of mathiness into their black buzz, and the guitars again, all over the place, buzzing, sliding slippery and tangled, crunchy and crumbling, the vocals too, even more freaked out than on the newer demo, thick with distortion and reverb, a howling hellish falsetto, another layer of creepiness over an already creepy buzzscape. Definitely wild and weird enough to appeal to the black metal crowd into insane tortured vox. Much more melody on the older demo too, but woven subtly into the band's grim black assault. Nice droning haunting intros and outros on both demos, some backwards weirdness and some dense dark ambience. Definitely kicked our ass right away, but every listen has us digging this more and more...
A friend of ours was telling us all about Frail, and the way he described it, we knew it was something we had to hear. Imagine a band that sounded exactly like the Cure, but with harsh black metal vokills!! Listening to it now he wasn't that far off the mark. This is some seriously strange stuff. Not heavy at all really, jangly, poppy, a little gothy and depressive, minor key, the drums simple and solid, soaring synths, guitar and bass locked into moody grooves, a little bit eighties new wave, all the while the vocalist howls his harsh demonic screech over the top, which turns it into something completely, well, fucked up really. But kind of genius. The music at times reminds us of Alcest or Amesoeurs but with all the metal removed, pretty and lilting and melancholy, drifting and jangling beneath those hellish howls. Not sure what else to say, if you're anything like us, you already added this to your cart, and it's going to fast become one of your favorite new records. Definitely an acquired taste, but then all the best tastes are...
Absolutely one of Andee's new favorite black metal recordings!!
AQ pal Forrest has been championing Fucked Up literally for years now, and as we mentioned in the review of the Year Of The Pig review, we just weren't feeling it before, But Forrest hassled and hassled and finally we began to see the light. So when this new record finally dropped, we figure who better to gush and swoon than the person who got us to like the band in the first place. Take it away Forrest...
Fucked Up are not worried about orthodoxy or the retro purism that seems to periodically seize up the gears of the perpetually self-consuming punk revival. Based on their interviews, which are farragoes of obvious bullshit interwoven with a fair amount of surprisingly candid insight into their working methods, it's pretty apparent that Fucked Up is in a lot of ways better considered an art project than a band. They take not giving a shit
very seriously.
On the one hand, there's vocalist Pink Eyes's love of old-school Situationist shock tactics, which sits uneasily with his autodidact's preoccupation with esoterica and metaphysics, leading to lyrics that come across as Iggy Pop acting as Charles Baudelaire's puppet. On Fucked Up's debut album, Hidden World, the lyrical themes were as various as Henry Darger's phantasmagoric fantasy world of the Vivian Girls (look it up; no one-sentence summary can do it justice) and Blakean transfiguration; on Chemistry of the Common World the mixture is a little less indigestibly rarefied and maybe a little more quotidian, but not by much. It's still not really punk as we've come to know it, despite all of Pink Eyes's John Brannon-esque choked growling. It's still all over the place.
On the other, there's guitarist 10,000 Marbles's production and guitar work, an incredibly dense wall of overdubbed guitar, Pink Eyes's yowling, pounding drums, relatively straightforward bass playing, harmonized guest vocals (contributed, in an oddly recursive turn of events, by all-female Brooklyn chainsaw pop group Vivian Girls), flute, organ, bongos, whispered chants, horn drones, cheap analog synthesizers... you name it, it's in the mix somewhere. It's hard to say whether the songwriting is a product of influence or pastiche: "Royal Swan" owes a heavy, heavy debt to Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine" (they're even in the same key), "No Epiphany" pilfers both its melody and its sound from the Dandy Warhols, "Twice Born" comes across as a particularly easygoing Blood Brothers song, and "Black Albino Bones" is a hardcore take on Ride-style muscular shoegazer; "Lost of Days",
with its malevolent punkabilly riff stolen from East Bay Ray and then improbably fused with avant-garde horn drones (contributed by 10,000 Marbles's high school band teacher) is a self-contained masterpiece that reminds me of nothing so much as the recent Asbestoscape album, although in all likelihood Fucked Up got there first.
Fucked Up's sound is deceptive; their fondness for bright, major-key riffs laid over apocalyptically loud minor-key harmonic beds, slathered in truckloads of effects, obscures the underlying sinewy grace of the relatively complex songwriting, and the relentlessness of the sonic attack (this is some thick music) conceals the fact that the sound shares more in common with the post-Glenn Branca multi-tracked noise-guitar drone of bands like Helmet, Sonic Youth or (most closely, to these ears) Band of Susans than it does with, say Negative Approach or Black Flag, to whom Fucked Up are more frequently compared.
Like Hidden World, The Chemistry of Common Life is a coherent, carefully sequenced album with a beginning and ending that mirror each other. I've tried to not give away too many of its secrets - it's a complex, rewarding listen that is more than the sum of its parts, and it deserves a wide audience. People expecting an ordinary hardcore record are likely to be surprised. Very little about Fucked Up, and The Chemistry of Common Life, is ordinary. It may not be beautiful in a traditional sense, but it is very powerful, and at times - in the literal, oldest sense of the words - awesome and magical.
Over the course of several years Gang Gang Dance have made the evolution from totally whacked out and hard to describe collage of sound weirdness to slowly injecting more structure and carving out actual songs while still keeping an aura of mystique and playful experimentation in their sound.
Saint Dymphna pushes their evolution with even more structure and a kind of hypercolor sheen providing a psychedelic soundtrack that sounds a bit like Kate Bush performing at an all night psychedelic rave. Its evident that for the first time in fully realized form the band is really embracing the last word of its moniker, making music for the kind of late night dance parties we'd love to frequent. Maybe it's some of the band members' strong involvement in late night culture as DJ's and partiers over the last few years that has helped shape this exciting shift in their sound. You can tell they've been listening to lots of the most interesting dance music around as there are healthy hints of Bangra that pop in and out of the songs on Saint Dymphna as well as a more nuanced take on what lots of the Italians Do It Better camp (Chromatics, Glass Candy) have been up to lately. But what made us originally fall in love with Gang Gang Dance is still present, their true sense of adventure and a fearless ability to merge influences that usually seem so disparate, into a seamless whole. Not many other bands could have a record with a song that sounds so much like the mostly swirly moments of My Bloody Valentine ("Vacuum") followed by a song with Tinchy Stryder on the mic for a track that would be at home on M.I.A's latest. That is the true beauty of Gang Gang Dance, they really understand how to blend and merge color and sound to create something that can takes on its own life. We've just begun to immerse ourselves in this record and so far we are loving the ride, and we have a feeling that this one will be on nonstop play in the weeks and months to come!
First in a series of remix 12"s, each being released on a different label, each with a different collection of uber cool remixers, all tackling various songs from recent aQ highlight, Genghis Tron's Board Up The House. Off to a pretty good start with volume one, just check out the remixers: Justin Broadrick from Jesu, Steve Moore of Zombi, Eluvium and of course Mr. Rob Crow of Pinback and Heavy Vegetable.
First up is Steve Moore and as we might have expected (and hoped), he gets all Goblin / Heldon on our asses, transforming the original into some awesomely creepy and cheesy eighties soundtrack, all murky sci -fi synths and old school drum machine pulse, haunting and cinematic, definitely evokes all sorts of gruesome and scary images and ideas, why isn't this guy scoring movies??? This may be a GT remix, but boy it sure just sound like Zombi. Who's complaining?
Broadrick steps up next and takes a clunky chunky rhythm and chops it up a bit, loops it into a strange mechanized lurch, wrapping the whole thing in thick streaks of Jesu like fuzz, taking the vocals and drenching them in effects and burying them in the mix, adds in some soaring strings, streaks of feedback, and we're definitely in some metal bliss territory, the second half gets a bit heavier, much more doomy and ominous, but still quite shimmery and dreamlike.
On the flipside, Rob Crow tries his hand at a GT remix, and his ends up being the most schizophrenic of the bunch, mangling it into super strange shapes, stripping away all the metal guitars, adding acoustic strumming, only to flip it around and have it all come crashing back down, draping the vocals over some weird bloopy electronics, pulling up the drums, turning it all tribal, before letting it explode back into some face melting crunch. It's almost like they pumped Crow full of caffeine and let him loose in the control room where he proceeded to go nuts with the faders while they were mixing, but it sound pretty excellent.
Finally, GT transformed into deep shimmering dark ambience, fuzzy and gauzy and washed out and expansive, hushed melodic blur, over deep soft swells, eventually building to something a bit heavier and blissier, almost sounding more like a Jesu mix than the Jesu mix, or maybe more of a soft Sunroof! Either way, quite nice.
Pressed on cool grey and gold swirled vinyl, and SUPER DUPER LIMITED. We only got a fraction of the copies we ordered, so these will probably be gone soon.
Johnny Jewel may not be a household name but his music has been on our stereo pretty much non stop for the last several month. The musical mind behind both Chromatics and Glass Candy, it's his sparkling touch that has helped make electronic pop sound exciting again. It's no mistake that Glass Candy had the leadoff track on the After Dark compilation that helped define one of the more exciting scenes to emerge in the last several years. Songs that make you want to dance in clouds as you get lost in that hazy intersection of new wave, spaced out disco and post-punk minimalism.
Much like Chromatics who underwent a very radical and rewarding shift in sound with their latest Night Drive, Jewel has brought that same aesthetic to Glass Candy with equally impressive results. Beatbox travels in such a nice way starting off with seriously sassy momentum on songs like "Beatific" that almost sounds like Lizzy Mercier Descloux covering a track from the first Madonna record and then the later part of the record travels in much moodier cosmic territory recalling French AQ faves Ruth with nods to the brilliant early production of Giorgio Moroder. Glass Candy rang in the new year with a performance here in SF on New Year's Eve and we can't think of much better company to party with. So good!
Holy shit. GORE! Easily one of our favorite heavy bands EVER. This is the sort of review that is so intimidating. A record we have loved for years and years, listened to hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, and then to finally have to put into words what it is that makes it so good, so special, whatever it is that makes these two of our favorite records EVER!!!! How much do we love these records? Well, whenever we would find one used, we would buy it just to give it to someone who needed to hear it, so much so that Andee at one point was even talking to the band about a comprehensive career spanning box set. But why you ask? Difficult to explain, especially without being able to play it for you, so since we just got these lps reissues in, and since they WILL be coming out on cd as well, we're just gonna go ahead and list these lps now with an abbreviated review, assuming that most Gore fanatics will need these anyway, and most heavy music fans have probably at least heard OF Gore, if not heard them once or twice, so they too might also want to pick these up. When the cds come out, we'll list them properly, with a longer more fleshed out and more gushing review (if that were even possible... IT IS!), with sound samples and everything, but for now...
Gore were a Dutch instrumental power trio trafficking in ultra minimal heaviness, like an even more minimal Melvins, but sans vocals, their songs made up of one, maybe two riffs, pounded out over and over, a bit like a more metal, proto-Circle.
Hart Gore and Mean Man's Dream are the first two Gore records, but play like part one and part two of a single song cycle. Crushing, pummeling, heavy as hell, repetitive, motorik, but weirdly melodic and impossibly catchy, we can't stress enough how massive and seminal these records were and are. Gore mastered a sound that would go on to influence countless heavy bands, and yet, somehow, these two records stand solid decades later as YEARS ahead of their time, masterpieces of heavy rock, of minimal metal, of proto-math metal, of hypno rock, this, as they say is THE SHIT.
For now, all we can say, is if you are at all into heavy music, these records are about as essential as it gets, your life will be changed, the way you look at music, what you consider heavy, how you hear other heavy bands, all of that will change, for the better. Trust us.
For Gore fanatics, like us, these are ESSENTIAL, the new designs are gorgeous, incorporating the timeless original album covers with new drawings and a beautiful super stylized layout. Inside, the records are pressed on nice thick vinyl, with printed inner sleeves adorned with tons of rare photos as well as extensive liner notes detailing the history of the mighty Gore! And most importantly, both record come with a whole extra lp of live tracks from the same era! Unreleased and unheard until now!
BUY THESE NOW!
