This is one of those records that we always thought we were just going to hear about, maybe hear a song or two on some compilation, but never actually get to hear in its entirety. So we're THRILLED to see this pre-CAN album, a soundtrack to a film that never came out (how come those are always the best?!), finally seeing the light of day. And what a tripped out, acid soaked, free-pop-jazz-rock odyssey it is!
Recorded in 1968 by a lineup that included Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit who a year later would make their debut as Can with the release of Monster Movie, listening to these sounds one for sure can hear the seeds of what would become Can's distinctive krautrock sound, but this also displays a much more fried, disjointed and mind altering side to these way ahead of their time music makers. While mostly an instrumental affair that at times reminds us of the equally colorful and fucked up Jean Claude Vannier concept album L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, there are a few tracks which have vocals courtesy of Irmin Schmidt, but the true show stopper is when Rosy Rosy, a film actress in Germany at the time, takes the mic for "Kamerasong", a track we imagine folks like Broadcast and Stereolab have played on repeat a billion times (like we have now!). While plenty of the songs here hint at the more song based Can records to come, lots of Agilok & Blubbo is much more about sprawling, scrappy, tripped out and fucked up delight, the kind of sounds modern day colorful noise makers like Kemialliset Ystavat and Sunburned Hand Of The Man would bow down to. What makes the record so enjoyable is how its paced, just when things have gotten way deconstructed and abstract they snap into more of a catchy, driving melody and then continue on in more bizarre directions and into outer dimensions. Warped, damaged and engaging in all the right ways!
While not straying too far from the rest of the Italians Do It Better catalog (which we'll admit we're big suckers for!) Invisible Conga People definitely, defiantly have their own identity. A bit more dark and brooding then most of their labelmates, there is most definitely a really rich sense of atmosphere in their slow burning electronic sizzlers. You can tell there is some love for the minimal leanings of krautrock and post punk channeled into their dark corner of a seedy dance club. This isn't as much for the dancefloor (though it would be on dancefloors we would frequent) as it is for late wasted nights alone in your bedroom when you just want to close your eyes and get lost in some sizzling sensations. Full on sensual seduction!
For those of you who have had the opportunity to witness the live reincarnation of Nurse With Wound over the past couple of years, there are two bald men making funny noises usually on either side of Steven Stapleton. One is Andrew Liles, who had run the table in terms of a release schedule in 2007 releasing 14 full albums of eccentric drones and abstracted collages, some of which were pretty darn good, but could maybe have used some editing. The other bald man is M.S. Waldron, whose slowly trickled releases are impeccable constructions of modern day Surrealism through audio sorcery, clearly not in any need of an editor whatsoever. Outside of NWW, he's been toiling away in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California under the unwieldy moniker irr. app. (ext.).
This split release with Chicago's Panicsville has been in the works for many years now, finally seeing the light of day in early 2008. The irr. app. (ext.) half of the equation slowly spirals from one assemblage of discombobulated field recordings, agitated ether, and curious atmospherics into another set of equally malformed sounds, much like a black-acid kaleidoscope. Yes, it makes perfect sense that Stapleton would want Waldron to assist in Nurse performances, as he clearly has talent at taking weird noise making to a sublime level of abstraction.
With a name like Panicsville, the expectations were of an obstinant noise project; but instead, this splatter of mechanoid gestures pocking sea-sick drones is a worthy companion to irr. app. (ext.)'s sidereal brilliance. So good in fact, that we may seek out further recordings. So good in fact, that you too should pick this thing up. Limited to 500 copies.
Since we made Jesu's debut full length on Hydrahead one of our records of the week a couple lists ago, it was pretty much a no brainer that Jesu's Heart Ache ep would have to be a record of the week as well. Especially since some of us might actually even like it a little better than the full length, and unlike the Hydrahead release, this one has been impossibly difficult to track down, until now.
Heart Ache, released on Dry Run, a tiny UK independent label, was to be our first glimpse of Justin Broadrick's much anticipated post Godflesh project (but for most of us, it's actually a second glimpse since it's taken until now for us to get copies to list) and sonically it sounds exactly like you might imagine a record between the last Godflesh record and the totally amazing Jesu full length would sound.
We had all pretty much given up on Godflesh. Gone was the glorious industrial pummel of Streetcleaner and gone too was the dubbed out machine metal of Slavestate, and in their place, tired rehashed riffs, shouted atonal vocals, and uninspired songwriting. So while our age-old love of early Godflesh had us super excited to hear this Jesu everyone was talking about, we were pretty much ready to be disappointed. Which was precisely why we were so blown away when we finally heard it. Everything we loved about Godflesh was there, plus a new found love of melody, swoonsome clean vocals, expanded insturmentation (piano!) and extended slow building tracks of brooding intensity and smoldering instrumental ferocity, all smeared into dreamy industrial bliss drone epics!
Unlike the full length, on which Jesu is a full band with a live drummer, on Heart Ache, Jesu is just Broadrick, a guitar, a piano, and of course a drum machine. Ahhh, the drum machine. How it warms our Streetcleaner worshipping hearts. Clangy and clattery, brittle guitars soar over crumbling distorted rumbles, all machinelike and clinical but imbued with a weirdly organic lushness. Drifting clouds of ghostly feedback, sonic vapor trails of haunting minor key swells, all slip and shift into vast stretches of shimmering cinematic ambience, with slowly pealing guitar tones and synthesized chant-like vocals, gorgeously melancholy almost Goblin-esque in its creepy beauty. Everything held together by smooth, clean, barely affected vocals, all dreary and weary, repeating simple mantra-like lyrics, distant and otherworldly. The whole thing sheds its industrial armor as it moves forward, showing more skin, becoming more vulnerable, becoming less and less rigid, and more and more soft and indistinct. Pretty, dreamy, blissed out and sweetly sorrowful, with Broadrick's endlessly repeated, haunting refrain drifitng and fading, like a mirage that may have never been there at all. And that's just the first track.
The second track is just as surprising as the first, starting off with spare solo piano, joined eventually by simple, finger-picked guitar, eventually drifting into a simple low end piano chord, repeated over and over and over, floating in the inky blackness, until the song lurches into a sludgy crawl, with huge murky downtuned riffs (think Fudge Tunnel's "Hate Song" at 16rpm), but then Broderick confounds again with heavily delayed, clean vocals, singing in a strangely hypnotic counterpoint to the main riff. Dizzying and quite lovely. It's a constant tug of war between the black hole tar pit dirge and the almost hopeful sounding vocals. Like the first song, track two devolves into a whole 'nother beast, as it slows down and blisses out, with lilting melodies creeping into the sludge and making what was only moments before a metallic behemoth crushing all in its wake, into a creepy rickety, buzzy back porch crawl, spare and skeletal, with distorted piano, buzzing fret noise and lots of ambient reverb that's gradually smoothed out into a fuzzy smear of static, beneath a simple low end piano figure, chiming and ringing out into nothingness. One of those rare records that manages to be heavy yet pretty, beautiful but scary, sweet and sorrowful, darkly doomy and gloriously luminous!
We missed out completely on the cd version of this, as it was only available direct from the band, we finally managed to strike up a deal with Avalanche, the record label of Justin Broadrick, so hopefully from here on out we'll be able to get anything and everything Avalanche, on this list alone we have the most recent batch of releases, Heart Ache on vinyl, a brand new Final album on picture disc, and this, a compilation of old and unreleased tracks recorded between 2000 and 2007.
Apparently, up until now, most Jesu records were made up of parts and tracks recorded in the past, so in a bid to start new and fresh, Broadrick decided to gather up everything he had, and stick it all on a record, and start from scratch.
So here it is, seven years of unreleased Jesu, and while from the above you'd think it would be mostly fragments and song parts and experiments, most of the tracks here are fully realized songs, although sonically the differ a great deal from much of the Jesu you've heard. More stripped down, way more poppy, almost new wave-y here and there, definitely not as heavy, but occasionally dark and intense, occasionally blissed out and shoegazey, and surprisingly cohesive and listenable and really great for a collections of odds and ends.
It starts out strangely enough, with "Don't Dream It", which sounds like a classic Jesu jam, except for the fact, that the vocal line is a snippet of the final number from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but Broadrick, takes that melodramatic croon and sets it amidst minor key piano, warm whirring buzz, skittery rhythms, squalls of distorted downtuned guitar crunch, and wraps the samples in delay and reverb giving it a cool dubbed out vibe.
The drums throughout are way more electronic sounding, skittery and glitchy, less POUNDing, which makes a lot of this sound almost Boards Of Canada like, but with those floaty weary vocals, and lush swaths of woozy drowsy keyboards. A couple of the tracks get all loping and post rocky, a few others are super laid back and glimmery and down tempo, like the perfect soundtrack for some mysterious late night wandering. Here and there, things do get a bit heavy, like the crunchy chug on "Dummy", although even there it's all tangled up with some stuttery almost krautrocky keyboards, but for the most part, this is a whole different side of Jesu, one we're super into, and now that we've heard it, we hear more within proper Jesu records, but with all the skitter and jangle and shimmer, this also reminds us of another past aQ favorite, the sort of post rock electronica of Asbestoscape.
Needless to say, Jesu fans NEED this. But anyone into M83, anything on Gooom, or any sort of cool skittery electronic metallic pop weirdness should definitely give it a listen as well. check it out.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Pressed on super thick 180 gram vinyl, and housed in swank full color gatefold jackets. Hopefully we'll be able to get more when we run out, but just in case, probably better not to risk it.
Good ole' Jimbo Trout and his Fishpeople are doing a mighty fine job of keeping an old timey flame burning brightly here in the Bay Area, with their great mixture of bluegrass, bop, swing, backporch blues and more, all with a twang that's hard not to tap your toes and sway your hips to. This is the band you wish was playing at the farmers market or in your local town square, such good vibes and a wide array of instrumentation (guitar, banjo, fiddle, washboard, harmonica, clarinet, sax, piano, accordion, xylophone and pedal steel guitar.) While all of the players sound top notch, we have to say the fiddle playing on this record is pretty unbelievable! The album is packed with both traditional tunes nicely arranged by Jimbo as well as covers of folks like the Mississippi Mudsteppers, Jimmie Rogers, The Shelton Brothers, etc. Can't think of a better soundtrack to your next hoedown!
It has come to this. Just as we somehow suspected. And desired. Underground guitar maestro Mick Barr, he of such monomaniacal hypershred mosquito-like guitar and drums (or drum machine) bands as Orthrelm, Octis, and Ocrilm, has finally unleashed the bona fide black metal album that we always knew he probably wanted to do. And should do. After all, in our review of the last Ocrilm album Annwn released earlier this year on Hydra Head, we'd said that not only did Barr's guitar buzz remind us of black metal music, but that if it were a black metal album it would be one of the best (and most fucked up, too) of the year.
So, now Barr and equally tech-y cohorts guitarist/bassist Colin Marston (that's right, of mathy mindbogglers Behold...The Arctopus!) and drummer Lev Weinstein (Bloody Panda) have started the utterly blackened Krallice, releasing their self-titled debut on the respected Profound Lore label. And the rest of the USBM scene should take notice, these guys mean business. Sure, anybody with a MySpace page can have a black metal band, make a cool unreadable, thorny logo (like Krallice's) and come up with song titles like "Wretched Wisdom", "Timehusk", "Energy Chasms", and "Forgiveness In Rot" (as Krallice have done) but probably not that many can actually back up all those black metal signifiers so seriously with their MUSIC, music of such sheer power and perfection that we find here. Wintry winds are blowing here (i.e. it's not hot air), as majestic melodies ride the crests of tsunami-sized waves of distorted, buzzing guitar. The six mesmerizingly lengthy tracks found on this Krallice disc are quite technically complex, and buzzingly relentless, much as you'd expect from Barr and Co. It's a blasting blizzard, with raging vokills and hyperspeed drumming but most importantly, shreddingly gorgeous guitar leads, densely woven, that build and build always to new forbidden plateaus of melancholic, misanthropic triumph. Imagine maybe the epick grimnity of Weakling or Wolves In The Throne Room, already badass in the guitar department, with an extra dosage of divebombing fretboard squiggle, interstellar energies continually released in the form of six string shred... yes, Krallice certainly "bring it" as it were, and should appeal to both fans of Barr's previous quasi-metallic, mathy mindfucks as well as those looking for quality USBM, advanced structures or not. (Although, in regards to neo-classical shred, they haven't quite unthroned the true Yngwie's of USBM, the late lamented Windham Hell.)
This just might be our favorite new 'noise' record. The key to that statement being those little marks around the word noise. This is most definitely noisy. But it's not pure noise. It's textural. It's droney. Somehow it's weirdly melodic too. Hard to explain, it's a big ol' massive slab of grinding guitar drone, laced with shards of static, and streaks of high end skree, the low end undulates and pulses, creating a distinct, but super subtle melody, a dense rumbling support for all the high end weirdness happening o'er the top.�
Josh Lay for those who may not know, is in fact the drummer for fucked up avant noise doom combo Cadaver In Drag, and this here is what happens when you let THAT kind of drummer make his own record. Not sure what he's using, guitar, synth, 4-track, shortwave radio, effects. We like to think the cover of the cd is an actual photo of the recording taking place, a beat up old console turntable, two old blown speakers, a cow skull, a half drunk bottle of booze, and an upside down cross. Cuz, c'mon, put al that stuff together, it would have to sound a little something like this, At least we'd hope so.�
Two tracks, the first, the title track is the above mentioned 'noise', a gloriously heavy blown out crumbling damaged stretch of coruscating sound, weird that something so obviously harsh could be so listenable, but it really is. At one point some creepy horn comes in, maybe it's a synth, but it sounds like a horn, it blats for a second, then just lays down and forms another layer of buzz, tones warble and wail, almost like some radio shack built siren, and gets all tangled up in that thick viscous buzz. We literally can't stop listening to it. So much so, that it's only right now, that we actually made it to the second track, which is kick ass also, but much more subdued, a weird stuttery loop, locked into an endless rhythm, while beneath, the same deep ominous low end from the opening track buzzed and reverberates, as the track progresses, more and more sounds enter the mix, a microscopic symphony of beeps and buzzes, squeaks and squiggles, all just adding to the general dreamy noise drenched din. AWESOME!
And unfortunately LIMITED TO ONLY 80 COPIES! And we got all they had left so act fast...
Somehow this is exactly what we've been hankering for. A sprawling blackened songsuite, equal parts, dark ambience, dense drones, heavy electronics, buzzy lo-fi almost new wave sounding keyboards, spidery post rock guitars and soft noise. Even writing it, that seems like a pretty unworkable, or unrealistic combination, but somehow these Midwesterners make it work. Big time.
They definitely could be considered sonic brethren of bands like SUNNO))), Pussygutt, MZ412, Troum, To Blacken The Pages, Wolf Eyes, Vulture Club and the like. However, Locrian take that sound someplace all their own, creating actual SONGS, as opposed to just soundscapes or drones. And there's a definitely black metal component for sure, no matter how abstract. Guitars are everywhere, seemingly the foundation for Locrian's sound, although as often as the guitars are unfurling spidery post rocky melodies, or distant reverbed riffs, they are also smeared into warm whirling clouds, left to drift and gradually change shape, or pulled apart and allowed to crumble into jagged little shards. Noise in a big component too, often the prettiest parts are treated with a patina of grinding soft focus electronics, or groaning downtuned tones.
The record opens with a gorgeous, elegiac guitar part, simple and stripped down, like it could be a black metal intro, until the organ comes in, wheezy and warbly, giving the track a weirdly lo-fi almost industrial vibe, definitely had us wishing it was in fact more than just a two minute intro.
That is until track two, "Ghost Repeater" takes over. An epic slow motion drift, strange echoey sounds floating in a warm muted sea of buzz and drone, glitched out bits of electronics, and eventually, a very epic black metal riff, that remains off in the distance, repeated and repeated until it too simply becomes another layer of sound.
"Barren Temple Obscured By Contaminated Fogs" (another great title), begins again with some creepy spindly guitar, draped over a deep pulsing low end, before transforming into some seriously abject and WAY abstract blacknoise. Shrieked distorted vokills over that same spidery guitar, Abruptum like ambience meets warped Goblinesque synth drones, the whole track twisted and warbly, eventually the vocals dropping out, leaving the buzzing guitars and wheezing keyboards to play out a super haunting horrorscape. "Epicedium" is delicate and crystalline, noodly guitar lines looped beneath a glimmering softly throbbing drone, peppered with fragmented strums, soon the track begins to grow gradually more and more distorted, the guitars more tense and frantic, the mood so haunting and weirdly beautiful and so subtly dramatic, reminding us of a super twisted soundtrack to some lost Giallo.
The record proper ends with another awesomely titled jam: "Obsolete Elegy In Cast Concrete", tolling bells, space kraut drones, all washed out and shimmery, the bed for some seriously corrosive guitar buzz and grind, adding layer after layer of crunch and rumble, but also slipping to some seriously black chug, joined by still more harsh hellish vox, a strange combination for sure but manages to be both beautiful and brutal, until the very end, where the track shifts gears and becomes all dramatic and melodic and weirdly majestic.
The cd features a bonus track called "Greyfield Shrines", which is nearly as long as all of the other tracks combined, a sprawling slow building blackened world of sound that slithers from hushed drift, to fractured buzz, to woozy moody ambience to blown out speaker shredding crunch, absolutely epic, super cinematic, mysterious, and even at it's noisiest, still quite melodic and blackly beautiful. Most definitely a track that could have been (and we think maybe was) a record all on its own.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Cool fold over arigato-pack style sleeve, with a full color printed booklet. And for anyone going to the Matchitehew metal/noise festival in Chicago in a few weeks, you'll be able to catch these guys live.
LONGMONT POTION CASTLE IS BACK!!! Longtime readers of the aQ list know how much we love this twisted master of the crank call. Maybe the only crank caller worth our continued attentions. Hilarious, tripped out, nonsensical, infuriating, straddling the line between totally genius and hilarious, and completely ridiculous and stupid. Confusing innocent victims, picking fights with some of them, befriending others, posing as the UPS man wanting to deliver some sod, or acting as a representative of City Search offering a service to reverse negative feedback, for only $1300.
Mr. LPC always sounds so laidback, like maybe he's stoned, or drunk, but even when things get heated, he never gets riled up, delivering his confusing threats as coolly as if he was ordering a pizza. And he's always ready to spit out another totally classic line, which with repeated listens will turn into things you and your friends end up quoting all the time: "I'm a webmaster, do you know what that means?!", "I'm on 9 now, I don't want to go to 10 on you!", "I was trained in fruitland", "Are you ready to peep my growth?". And the response from the folks on the other end of the line are usually just as hilarious if not more so than the stream of brain melting non sequiturs coming out of LPC's mouth. It's hard to explain exactly what makes LPC so much better than pretty much all other crank calls, give a listen to the sound samples, check out the reviews of the other releases. Part of it, as we may have mentioned before, is that it's anything but mean spirited, weirdly playful, poking fun, and even when the 'victim' starts swearing up a storm, offering to beat the shit out of LPC, dude remains cool, and definitely threatens back, but usually his threats are so confusing and WTF, that they often diffuse the tension, and they ended up having a somewhat friendly, and WAY weird conversation.
Number 7 is peppered with LPC "medleys" and "themes", which are basically, classic calls chopped up and collaged into bizarre free form soundscapes of demented zingers, irate freakouts, mumbling weirdness, all set to music, and doused in reverb and delay. Those tracks are almost as fun as the phone calls proper, and are definitely packed with some of LPC's best, and most awesomely insane lines EVER.
Also as a bonus, the final track is an awesome drum machined speed metal jam. On past records, the phone calls were split up between killer chunks of thrashing home recorded metal, but this one "Interlude Encore" might be the raddest yet. Totally shredding, chugging Slayer guitars, swooshing ambience, shredding wah wah leads, and furious frenzied drum machine double kick blast beats. We'd definitely be up for a whole record of jams like this.
Needless to say, Longmont Potion Castle rule, the music, the calls, the vibe, the mood, the concept, it's hilarious, baffling, funny as fuck, and so fun to listen to. Might even win over the anti crank call haters out there. Probably not though.
As always. WAY WAY WAY RECOMMENDED!!
We don't always know what to expect from a Rune Grammofon release, other than snazzy graphic design of course. The music is usually really nice too, but what genre? Sometimes drone, sometimes electronic, sometimes improv jazz... In this case, we still couldn't tell you after listening to the first few songs. The opening track is an instrumental, and seems like some sort of jazzy techno rock, with a dash of surfy skronk. Pretty cool, modern prog we'd guess we'd call it. It's like something on the early '70s Vertigo label given an electronica update. Then track two is glitchier and noisier - but also poppier, with sweet, finger snappin' female vocals in English. Track three introduces male vocals as well, singing about Star Trek's "Geordie La Forge" (???) over a slightly excited motorik beat. That one's a bit like a more mild mannered Circle, but gone indie rock, or something. Track four, meanwhile, is much moodier. The songs that follow incorporate all of that stuff and more... What IS this? Well, we're not entirely sure, but we know it's growing on us.
We also know that Norway's The Low Frequency In Stereo is a five piece band, everybody playing organ (among other things), plus guests including violinist Nils Okland and sax player from Ultralyd. And it seems that producer Sir Dupermann may well play a crucial role on this album as well, he's credited with "samples and sounds everywhere" and those are definitely all over the place here. TLFIS's busy pop songs are full of sound FX and samples, things like sawing strings and birdsongs and outer space electronics. While the male and female vocals are usually quite calm and melodic, the music is much more nervous and noisy. It always sorta sounds like there's a clock ticking someplace in the mix. Alongside the band's assorted guitars, throbbing bass, trumpet, piano, & all those organs, etc....
In the comparisons dep't, we can offer that maybe LFIS is like a groovier, pop version of another RG band, Shining? Referencing a couple other Norwegian acts we like, When and Salvatore, also seems valid. Throw in a little bit of the B-52s and that's getting closer to what's going on here. Recommended, though we'd have probably preferred it if they'd done all the singing in Norwegian, for added mystery.
Attention Neko Case fans!!!
After a couple of tour drumming stints with her Vancouver pals Cub got her feet wet and got her music wheel spinning, Ms Case launched her own ass-kickin' girl trio with two other awesome ladies C.C. Hammond and Tobey Black. This was years before The Boyfriends! Hammond, Black and Case were originally known as Meow, but there was apparently another band who'd already laid claim to that moniker, so Maow it was! Kept their fans in stitches... no, not from their fierce kick-boxing skills but moreso from their hilarious rough'n'tumble stage banter and garb, unforgettable press photos, and blisteringly catchy garage pop tunes. Released in 1996 on Mint Records, The Unforgiving Sounds Of Maow was their only album, and a fleetingly short one at that - clocking in 14 songs in just over twenty minutes! A little bit country and a little bit rock'n'roll, but there ain't no chance of these naughty hellions being mistaken for Donny and Marie. You definitely don't wanna miss "Ms Lefevre"! Come and get it, fans and funseekers!
Psst, we've also just gotten in a few other new and new-to-us titles on this fine Vancouver indie label by The Awkward Stage, Buttless Chaps and Immaculate Machine!
Ms Maya (pronounced May-ah) is a dear friend of Edison Woods' Julia Frodahl, and the two artists definitely are of kindred spirit albeit the former is a bit more heady, mystical and dusky than the latter. On the front cover she may bear a strikingly waifish resemblance to actress Mia Farrow, but her vocal delivery is strongly reminiscent of Kendra Smith, Rose McDowell and perhaps Carla Bozulich, particularly when she's singing the lower octave layers of her multi-tracked vocals. Y is comprised of four ethereal numbers steeped in shadowy somber atmospheres. String and piano tendrils wind gracely around her voice. Utterly captivating. The music may be slow creeping, but you should act fast because this release is limited to 500!
A name like Megasus can only mean one thing. METAL. That's right, pounding, thrashing, ass kicking head banging metal from Providence Rhode Island, which just so happens to feature Brian from Lightning Bolt on drums. But NOT Brian Chippendale, nope, that's bass player Brian (Gibson!) pounding the skins, and hot damn, he's a pretty sick drummer for being such an insane bass player.
For those of you out there that play Rock Band or Guitar Hero, odds are you've probably heard Megasus before, one of their tracks was a huge hit on one of those games, downloaded about a million times, but for us, Megasus came out of nowhere, and proceeded to pummel us into submission!
Shredding classic style heavy metal, with a definite punk rock flavor, reminding us a bit of bands like Karp, that sort of punked up metal vibe, although with Megasus it's mostly the vocals, for the most part this is some seriously TRUE metal. Wild soaring leads, guitar harmonies, relentless drum pound, lots of chugging riffage, proggy arrangements, some stretches of doominess, the vocals a distorted howl, but for the most part this is just some seriously kick ass metal radness!
And the packaging, we talk about amazing packaging all the time, but wow, does this take the cake, an full color eye popping outer gatefold jacket, some sort of bloody winged goat, the logo and song titles embossed and stamped with gold foil, printed inner sleeve, pressed on 180 gram swirled orange and black vinyl, comes with a poster, sticker AND a patch. As well as a full album download. Phew. Also LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. We got about a dozen, might be the last we see of these.
There's something strangely addictive about the skull crushing, mind numbing effects of harsh, droning nooooise. And while avant-noisemakers Skullflower and Hototogisu are perfect examples of some folks who do it best, Metal Rouge is quickly establishing themselves as likely contenders for the noise/drone throne. This is Ephemeroptera vol. 4, part of a five cd-r series being released on Seymour records. Limited to only 50 copies, we managed to snag a few, and we're glad we did. Seems like the duo is heading into more damaged, blown out territory, abandoning their quieter improv-y ways for blistering, electric melt-downs and cosmic sizzle. Complete with a cool drawing of a whirligig beetle on the cover, this cd-r will be gone in the blink of an eye, so act fast.
A brand new issue of one of our favorite rock mags, the almighty Mojo. On the cover this month, John And Yoko, featuring tons of unseen photos, a lost interview and more! Also Antony And The Johnsons, Pearl Jam, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jackson C. Frank, and a killer article on Mott The Hoople. Comes with a cd (complete with sleeve and jewel case) featuring some "seriously street tough '70s British rock'n'roll bovver" with bands like Mott, Slade, Roy Wood, The Sensational Alex Harvey band, Be-Bop Deluxe, T. Rex, Motorhead and more...
And as we've mentioned before, the cool thing about Mojo is no matter how uninterested you think you are in a particular performer or musician, undoubtedly, you'll end up reading every bit of every issue, even those pieces about bands you might not even like. Hail Mojo!
There was perhaps a time, when Japanese post rockers Mono were just that, a post rock group, but that time is long gone, now, they are anything but, or more accurately, so much more.
Mono take the soaring sweeping epics of groups like Godspeed into an entirely different dimension. Their sound is so grandiose, so emotional, so absolutley and stunningly epic, that it almost ceases to be rock. Sure there's plenty of rock like bombast, many of the songs culminate in a huge flurry of crashing drums and soaring guitars, but in the grand scheme of Mono's sound, those moments are fleeting. Like the old adage that it's more about the journey than the destination, the sound of Mono is all about the journey, the band weave elaborate soundscapes, that smolder and glow, rhythms pulse and throb, guitars are blurred into lush sonic backdrops, melodies are delicate and crystalline, the sound while instrumental, manages to sound choral, a sky full of weeping strings and angelic hymns. We can only assume that if Arvo Part, or Morton Feldman started a rock band, it would sound something like Mono. Hymn is like some post rock score to a massive role playing game, Final Fantasy 100 or something.... How can you not envision sweeping vistas, endless seas, crumbling cities, heaving seas beneath blackened skies, these sounds evoke so much emotion (this is REAL emo!) and passion, it does seem almost too reductive to call them a post rock band, or to call this 'rock', to us it sounds more like a symphony played by a rock band, or better yet a symphony attempting to play rock music, the result is grand, majestic, moving, stirring, something more momentous than a mere record, or a rock concert, Mono manage to conjure up a sound that seems to be alive, living, something capable of adapting and growing, every song sounding like a collection of sounds blossoming into still greater sounds, eventually a field of blossoming sound becoming Mono. It sometimes sounds like the most dramatic moments from every film you've ever seen distilled and converted into sound, then arranged into music... hyperbole? Probably. But the more we listen to Hymn To The Immortal, the more we're convinced that there's something truly magical going on here. And somehow, without even realizing it, we've listened to this record about 20 times in the last few days, which is most definitely saying something...
Proprietor of the Framework radio show on Resonance FM for many years now, Patrick McGinley has implored his listeners to "open your ears and listen" to the world at large, presenting an impeccable series dedicated to field recordings and its use in composition. So, it goes with out saying that the field recording and the found object are commonplace within McGinley's own sound art constructions which he records under the moniker Murmer (and not Murmur, mind you!). Given his predilection for wandering throughout the European countryside for all that it has to offer (not just limited to environmental sound), his recorded output has been somewhat limited. We Share A Shadow is his first proper solo album in almost three years, although his collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough did stand out as one of the dronemusik highlights of 2006. Consisting of two very long pieces, We Share A Shadow is a notably restrained album whose dark beauty reveals itself with a slow and deliberate pace. The first untitled piece opens with sheets of cold rain scuffing the smooth arcs of bowed metals, whose Feldman-like swell and collapse recalls the late period work of Bernhard Gunter. As the rain gently fades, a composite drone emerges out of those rasps and vibrations from the bowed metals and intensifies through dissonant timbres subtly agitating the shimmer and filigree of the gilted drone. Throughout, windswept debris ricochets across the stereo field casting an ominous cloud onto the sustained tones. The second piece is an even darker affair with a motor grinding against a piece of metal in the distance while a somber, almost doomscape piano plods in the foreground. With plenty of low frequency rumbles and spectral activity lingering in the background, this piece is almost like KTL remixing Xenakis at 16 RPM. Needless to say, this is an incredible album.
Gorgeously packaged in hand water-colored / letterpressed sleeves, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
It's always exciting to get a new disc of droning mystery from soundmaker Brendan Murray. We went pretty nuts for past releases, which is saying something as it takes a lot these days for a drone record to really get to us. And for a drone artist to consistantly hold our attention record after record. Of course we love drones, so as a sound, we're as likely to be entranced by a huge humming piece of machinery as a meticulously crafted chunk of ultra minimalist dronemusic (hmmm, what exactly does that say about us?), but we're of course partial to the artists who can deftly fashion drones into new and fascinating shapes, or who create music using drones as just one of many elements.
Which is precisely what makes Murray's music so special, just that, it's incredibly musical. He's perfctly capable of kicking up a Sunn 0)))-like wall of downtuned dirge, or fashion a skeletal bit of hushed murmur, but even then he infuses those all to common sounds with strange melodies, and abstract textures, transforms simple tones and chords into strange sprawling beasts, sounds become actual songs, with melodies and parts, distinct beginnings and ends, each song is a journey, through thick fields of warm hissy blur, caustic crumbling crunch, chiming crystalline shimmer, deep machine-like industrial whir, clangy and clattery abstract angular guitar flecked noise rock, very Dead C here and there, gorgeously murky and lo-fi, and weirdly looped sounding, intense wall of pink noise whir and billowing clouds of near static organ hum. Dark and dense and mysterious and intense, but always so so gorgeous.
While they last, we have the limited version, that comes with a bonus cd-r, featuring a 30 minute live performance recorded last year, a super intense, ultra heavy exploration of some seriously woofer destroying bassiness. Deep rumbling whirs, sprawling into massive reverbeating slabs of black hole low end. Wow.
Like the Poobah reviewed last list, here's another, though much moldier, oldie previously reissued by Monster Records, now made available again by Rockadrome. The Monster version had different art/graphics and was titled The Living Dead Years, but these are the same tracks. And since the main reason collectors are into Negative Space is probably because their 1970 private press album was called Hard, Heavy, Mean and Evil (aren't YOU intrigued?) it's a good idea for Rockadrome to use that title for this edition, which includes that very album plus bonus tracks from post-Negative Space act Snow and other related stuff.
Unfortunately, not much of this is actually all that hard, heavy, mean or evil. Unless you think garage psych covers of "Summertime" count (track two here, pretty laid back but for some sudden eruptions of fuzz guitar distortion). There's a song here with a title that would seem promising, "The Long Hair", but that one's actually way mellow. While this is still a cool underground artifact of grungy garage at the dawn of the seventies, let's just say Sabbath had nothing to fear from these guys. Negative Space at their heaviest are more like a scuzzy Steppenwolf. Rather than being proto metal, these guys were already sounding retro in 1970-71 (among the bonus tracks there's covers of "Light My Fire", "Purple Haze", "Johnny B. Goode", and also Hoyt Axton's "The Pusher", a hit for ol' Steppenwolf y'know).
The tracks that ARE heavy ("Calm Before The Storm" and "Forbidden Fruit" in particular) WILL get Blue Cheer fans excited. But the solo acoustic demos from NS leader Rob Russen tacked on at the very end of this disc might kill that buzz. Heck, we don't really mean to slag this, it IS cool for what it is. Just be aware, it's not exactly what the title and band name and wishful thinking might lead you to believe. It's certainly ultra distorted and wailin' at times, but only at times, otherwise just a bit bleak and moody. Their mean & evil, hard & heavy reputation probably had more to do with their live show. In the cd booklet (packed with lyrics and liner notes in thorough Rockadrome tradition) mention is made of a studio engineer asserting "how impossible it was to capture and contain the power and fury of Negative Space's music". Apparently so, since so much of this is not-so-hard hippie rock, with its own rough hewn charms however, plus ever-lurking fuzz blasts to tease those here only for the heavier fare.
Finally, the older earlier records from our favorite Transylvanian black metallers are getting their due, some super swank deluxe reissues packed with extras. For the longest time, we carried the cd box, which we got direct from the band in Romania, which contained Negura Bunget's first three albums and an ep. Lots of long time aQ list readers no doubt have that box, as it's some of the most essential black metal we've ever heard. But for years now, we've been unable to get those boxes back in, and now we know why. Lupus Lounge has decided to re-issue all of those records, with extra tracks, and in the case of a couple of them, extra discs containing whole extra alternate mixes of the records proper. Also, the new versions are now housed in super nice multi panel full color digipaks.
We have all four (one of the original three, was split back up into its original two separate parts) in stock, in very limited quantities, have a look at the 'in stock, not yet reviewed' section, if you want to go nuts and get all of them (and why wouldn't you?!) but for now, we're gonna list/review From Transylvanian Forest first, and get to those other ones later. And this is as good a place to start as any. An ep from 2000, which was in fact a remixed and remastered version of a demo by PRE Negura Bunget outfit Wiccan Reed, before they changed their name, but already, their unique sound was fully formed.
For those new to Negura Bunget, here's how we described the band on more recent releases: Dark, ambient rumbles evoke the spirits of the forest before the music kicks in sounding a bit like Don Cab, with spastic drums, way up in the mix while grainy guitars saw wildly away. Eventually BIGGER riffs come tumbling down like a black metal avalanche and the whole thing becomes a swirling, bloodied whirlpool of octopus-armed drumming, possessed keyboards and buzzing mosquito riffs. Occasionally the metallic fury abates allowing gently strummed acoustic guitars and field recordings to weave simple melodic soundscapes in the lulls. While there are moments of black metal familiarity here and there, there's just so much strangeness, even just in the way instruments sound or how they play certain parts. Some seriously twisted, rhythmically bizarre, completely damaged, grandiose and melancholy black metal supposedly inspired by 'Romanian mysticism'.
On From Transylvanian Forest, and all of these older records in fact, the sound isn't quite as polished and fully realized as on the newer records, it's actually a lot rougher and simplistic, but perhaps because of that, it's also a whole lot weirder, grim and creepy but damaged and freaked out. Keyboards play a much bigger part, huge swaths of buzzing melody laid over the thrashing metallic onslaught. Probably the most interesting aspect is how much Negura Bunget sometimes sounded like SF black metal legends Weakling. Whether it's the agonisingly wailed vocals, or the epic droning riffage, you know that sounding even remotely like Weakling is a REALLY good thing.
WAY WAY recommended. As are all four of the reissues!
Record number two from this grim one man nekronoise black metal horde from Australia. We raved about the first one, Into The No-Man's Sphere Of The Ancient Days, a few lists back, but we're led to believe that a handful of you may have not made it past the first paragraph, the intro, the hook. If that was you, well, you should be regretting it now, and when you finish reading this review, listening to the sound samples, and most likely buying one of these, go back to the No-Man's review, skip the beginning and jump right in and read the whole thing. And everything will be right.
The point of that intro, and that review, and to a certain extent this one too, was that adding noise is not always as simple as just, well, adding noise. Mixing to genres, even if they're related, just as often leads to something messy and pointless, as it does to some genius fusion. And there is definitely plenty of noisy black metal, but much of it is either thick noise over shitty metal, or just metal, with the noise an afterthought. One must have a serious handle on both THE NOISE and THE RIFF to make it work. And if you hadn't figured it out by now, Nekrosov is most definitely a master of both the noise and the riff, and manages to fuse the two into something blackly transcendent.
That said however, the opening one two punch here are a bit misleading, in that the noise and the riff are kept well separate, the first, an ominous glitched out landscape of bleak minimal buzz and drone, hiss and crackle, almost like a black metal Philip Jeck, and the second track, the furious buzzing blasting "Mountain Ash" sounds amazing, only noisy in as much as black metal is inherently noisy, super well produced, the riffs HUGE and heavy, the drums lightning fast, erupting in squalls of impossible blasts, the vocals grim and harsh, the melodies soaring, even some hooks buried beneath the buzz.
The next track however finds Nekrosov returning to more familiar blacknoise ground. Deep swirling waves of static buzz, the vocals stretched into sheets of abstract whir, churning and roiling, beneath melodies lurk and struggle to surface, held under by the buzzing blackness. It's almost like some black metal song was frozen, a single moment played over and over stretched into some sort of infinite loop, but it's not a loop as it slowly grows and sprawls and spreads out into something expansive. It's almost ambient, and strangely soothing in its droniness, without losing any of its grim buzz or black mystery.
The next few tracks veer back and forth between, blown out soundscapes of samples and percussion, blurred into a windswept buzz, what sounds like ghostlike vocals underneath processed sounds of whipping winds and the click clack of a railroad, to noise drenched old school raw black metal crush, to slow burning deep ambience, to full on classic eighties style riffing, the old masters rendered in new shades of black and buzz, finally culminating in the twenty minute closer, which begins as some bleak, post industrial Wolf Eyes-an dronescape, all haunting whirs, and strange clanks and clunks, distant moans, bits of percussion and mysterious samples, building to a wall of white hot blackened buzz, sheathed in streaks of feedback and pulled apart riffs, this is the sort of shit that would put most cd-r dronescapers to shame, but it's not over yet, the wall of noise slowly takes shape, riffs emerge from the murk, drums explode from beneath the veil of hiss, the track barreling along churning wildly, riffing and blasting, but gradually sinking ever deeper into a morass of gorgeous textured noise, crackle and buzz and hiss, blown out and super distorted, eventually swallowing the blackness whole, leaving just a brief glimpse of the black buzz, before blinking out.
Fucking AWESOME! Absolutely essential. As is the first disc, if you haven't gone back and re-checked that one out already.
Killer handmade packaging too. The cd housed in a printed fold over black and white cardstock sleeve, that sleeve, housed in an oversized sealed envelope, hand painted black and red and silver, very abstract, and super striking. And as you might have guessed. ULTRA LIMITED!!! But the special print handmade versions are limited to 100 copies and we have the very last copies. Once these are gone, you'll get the normal version. Same music, mostly the same packaging, just minus the painted outer sleeve...
We just got in a handful of these super limited cd-rs from Australia's Nekrasov, the project of one Bob Nekrasov (no, really), formerly of Melbourne based doomsters Whitehorse, and current purveyor of abject post-industrial blackness. Tramp And Void is, as we like to say in the business, a real motherfucker. This ep is just teeming with filth and despair, the sounds within melding noisy as hell blackened ambience with super heavy black METAL. The first song is an awesome slab of crumbling electronics abuse with hateful vocals gurgling about in the slowly rumbling chaos, very cool and somewhat reminiscent of that Cities Last Broadcast cd we reviewed a while back. But when track two kicks in, it's like being launched out of an abandoned high rise and into a waiting hurricane. The sound is like a more traditionally metal WOLD meeting up with Australia's psychedelic doom/grind lords diSEMBOWELMENT. In a dog fight. Or something. Pretty intense stuff, regardless, the non-stop double kick drum gives you the impression that you ain't coming out of this one alive. Track 3 sounds like the last day of existence, with windy electronics dominating as Mr. Nekrasov spews out anguished, hateful musings until everything is overwhelmed by electronic skree. Following another vignette of slowly moving ambience, Tramp And Void concludes with an ultra depressive, mid-tempo dirge, the relentless kick drums once again letting you know there is nowhere to hide. The piece is brutal but melancholy, not to mention quite beautiful, and one of those perfect songs to end a record as you assume the fetal position and wonder what horrors await. Though brief, this ep is an intense and demanding piece of work, refusing to confine itself to any one genre in particular. That said, forward thinking metalheads will be scrambling to get their grimey hands on this one.
Again, this thing is insanely limited, not sure how many were made, but you're gonna want to act fast. Comes packaged in an awesome black and red mini-poster with an image of a forest dwelling black winged angel staring right into your soul.
So, apparently Australia is more than just adorable animals and funny accents. No, many bands from Australia are simply scary as shit! And what better way to throw yourself headfirst into the maelstrom than with this KILLER 3 way split, featuring some of the island continent's most depressive and unsettling blackened exports?
The Haunting Resonance is, as the liner notes briefly explain, a conceptual album "regarding the matter of ghosts, spirits, and phantoms" and what role, if any, they would play if the earth was wiped clean of all humanity. Pretty upbeat stuff, huh? And while it is impossible to discern just what is being sung, the music more than ably conveys this dark subject matter.
Nekrasov, whose awesome Tramp And Void ep is reviewed elsewhere on this list, inaugurates the affair with "That Which Hunts...", a burly juggernaut of a song combining Wolf Eyes-styled electronic terrorism with esoteric black metal. This song is like a continuously swirling black hole, constantly turning on and devouring itself. The song shifts, without a moments notice, from creepy, slow moving ambience to full on black metal fury, with gothy keyboards smeared across the landscape. The end result is like the soundtrack to dying alone in the wilderness, where instead of finding some source of divine strength, you simply realize that this is it. The last half of this psychedelically informed piece is a haunting, droney loop with all kinds of high end to make you nice and uncomfortable. Its repetition is its unsuspecting source of power, and before long, you are lulled into a trance where you are powerless to do anything but adjust your body to the ominous rhythms of your dying breaths.
The middle part of the trilogy is represented by Moon, who follow a similar approach to merging black metal atmospheres with more contemplative noise elements. "Forgotten Spirits" drones about as labored pulses carry the piece to a more metal (but still really weird and avant-garde) second half. While not quite as furious as Nekrasov, Moon's contribution is equally creepy and unsettling, with what may or may not be a human voice howling incessantly until the song just stops.
Bringing The Haunting Resonance to its grim conclusion is Nekros Manteia with the song "The Final Ghost". Slow, focused drums hold the foundation while delayed guitars float amongst rumbling drones. Stylistically, it makes sense when you realize the song features guitar work from Bonnie Mercer of Grey Daturas. Both bands follow a psychedelic approach that manages to sound both expansive and concentrated within its own realm of noise. Eventually, the band locks into a crusty, doom laden groove before switching to a sparse, post-rock dirge with weird, croaking vocals.
While not exactly the feel good hit of the summer, The Haunting Resonance is a worthwhile listen in its own right, and sure to appeal to those willing to explore the darker realms of noise and the more insular, lonely aspects of outsider black metal. Recommended. And apparently quite limited as well. We got a bunch of these, not sure we can get more when we run out...
So this is one of those records where the cover totally gives away what's hiding inside. These Philadelphia drift-heads sent us this disc a few weeks ago, and we were totally blown away. The music so nicely reflects the cover photograph: beautiful, expansive oceanic horizons, almost glowing with a looming grayness. With keyboards, violin, three electric guitars and a bass, this five piece really hone in on a super liquidity, an organic, fluid type of drone composition. Their third album out of four, The Distance Brings Us Closer resonates with long, lush tones and delicate melodies that seem to blend and form chords in mid air. Always moving and turning like fog creeping along the forest floor, Northern Valentine has a distinct sound that kinda reminds us of a more darkened and coastal Windy and Carl playing with Rameses III in some giant cathedral. Very dark and mysterious, the record travels through blissed out walls of trance inducing drones and into more textural noisy Fennesz-like atmospheres. Though they call themselves a post-rock band, the guitars and instruments used are so dripping with reverb and delay that it might be more accurate to describe Northern Valentine as a dark and drifting ambient group. At least that's how they sound on this particular record, as word on the street is their other albums have drums and are more propulsive and less drifty. Either way we dig what they're doing A LOT, and couldn't wait to share it with all of you! If you like anything Type records related or that recently reviewed Elegi, you'll love this too! Completely and utterly recommended!!
You can sense it right away when you're hearing an artist truly find their voice, and in doing so, managing to create something magical that outshines everything else they've done before.
A Ways Away is by far Tara Jane O'Neil's most realized outing to date. While she has a healthy back catalog of woozy and pretty solo outings plus some fine recordings with her old bands, Rodan and Sonora Pine, up until this point she's always been an artist we liked a lot but would never say we love. That has changed - we declare our full on love and devotion to Tara Jane with this totally gorgeous album. She has found a way to inject so much more mood and atmosphere into her songs, drifting and dreamy, rustic and lingering. Like she's tapped into the magic of those Georgia Hubley soothing and sad moments on Yo La Tengo records or when Mimi Parker takes to the mic for slowcore beauty with Low. Nothing sounds forced or out of place, the songs are given the room to breathe and circulate and Tara's vocals are as pretty and understated as ever. The instrumentation is as potent as the vocal delivery, making us think of what it might sound like if Mirah and Steven R. Smith joined forces or if Grouper got more rustic and even more song orientated but still left trails of such dreamy and hazy delight. Simply beautiful!
NOW BACK IN PRINT WITH A BONUS DISC!!! Promoted as O'Rourke's electronic glitch album back in 2001, I'm Happy, And I'm Singing, And A 1, 2, 3, 4 is finally available again, and instead of being on Mego, it's now on Editions Mego, essentially the same label, but a new revitalized version. Just like Mego's uber talented Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke fuses elements of antique melodic signatures within a Powerbook generated disfiguration into complex networks of sound that retain the timbre and colour of the original sounds in spite of the digital glitch manifestation. Initially, this album is nothing more than another pleasantly playful recombination of the millenial glitch aesthetic. He applies digital treatment to an accordion to dislocate the source material with a fluctuating system of interlocking repetitive samples sounding like a digitized update of Frippertronics or even Terry Riley's time lag generator. Nice, but it's completely overwhelmed by the same idea found on the Keith Fullerton Whitman album "21:30 For Acoustic Guitar" He follows this up with some fey dinner jazz piano lines and summertime guitar picking run through gossamer digitalized syncopations. Again, nice but nothing that Stephan Mathieu, Ekkhard Ehlers, or Fennesz haven't done better. *However* if you were to stop listening to these two tracks, before getting to the 20-plus minute finale, you would miss out on one of O'Rourke's finest moments alongside the criminally overlooked Disengage and slowly antagonistic Happy Days. "And A 1, 2, 3, 4" (it appears that the song titles are just fragments of the album's title) is a beautiful digital threnody with sombre violins passing through a Feldman like alternation through a harmonic series of notes.
The second disc begins and ends with some polite digital renderings of cutie-pie pixel pointing that erupt (on the first track) in a very Mego sounding blast of digital noise and Max/MSP irritation. The first cut is a track that only lasts for about 4 minutes before the highlight of the second disc begins. "Getting The Vapors" is a gaseous 40 minute, tonal excursion of long-form digitally agitated drones that cross-pollinate the Pop Ambient ethos with the arcing structures of Charlemagne Palestine.
It's been raining Oh Sees around here lately, culminating in their most recent record Help being an aQ Record Of The Week. And here we are a couple weeks later, and whattayaknow, another new Oh Sees, although this is not quite a new record, instead it's a collection of odds and ends, home recorded experiments and unused songs, demos and that sort of stuff. We were warned that it was harsh and noisy and it sort of is, but some of these songs RULE, in fact, the more we listen to this, the more it might begin to give Help a run for its money as our favorite Oh Sees record.
A constantly shifting swirl of super lo-fi effects, dubbed out rhythms, pounding in the red garage rock jams, falsetto vocals, everything delayed, reverbed and blown the fuck out, feedback, warped buzz, clatter and clang, processed alien vox, angular riffage, flutes, jazzy grooves, all tangled up into a constantly shifting hodge podge of sonic lo-fi garage pop detritus, but, and it is indeed a big BUT, within all that wild freaking out and experimentation, are some seriously catchy tunes, only made all the cooler by all the noise and chaos, a bit like the old Iran records, total pure pop, doused in sonic chaos. Needless to say, if you're a fan, this is another essential release. And we have the last 20 copies, though it is being repressed sometime soon, so when we run out, it won't be long before we get more.
PLUS, this lp only release comes with a cd too, a compilation of singles, songs from splits and compilations as well as some unreleased stuff as well, so all the Peanut Butter Oven songs, the songs from the split with the Intelligence and more more more!
That crude & spooky, black & white linocut (?) cover art looks like some cult black metal cassette or floorcore noisepsych lp from nowadays. But it actually heralds an album of '80s Italian underground metal weirdness, which is basically one of those obscure microgenres that we here at Aquarius might just be getting a bit obsessed with (other examples: Scandinavian skweee, field recordings of frogs, Sheffield black psychedelia, singing saw music, and the New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal). Well, at any rate we're into a few weird '80s underground Italian metal bands, previously having written about Black Hole and Dark Quarterer... We'd put Flames Of Hell in there too but they were from Iceland, not Italy, though somehow seem like they'd belong. There's also the likes of Death SS and Bulldozer, and going way back Jacula, but it's Old Yron that we should be talking about right now!
That's the band responsible for this record, originally released in quite limited fashion in 1989, though it sounds somewhat older than that (Old Yron actually having their beginnings back in 1974). Six tracks suffused with traditional metallic atmosphere and amateur charm. Being Italian, it's got a classically influenced, proggy bent to it, but that's filtered through an extremely budget DIY production, enhanced perhaps by what may be the crackle of the vinyl from which this (fully legit however) cd reissue was probably transferred.
Old Yron deliver the goods in the form of high pitched screams and Yngwiesque guitar shred, on such songs as "Old Yron", "Crazy Lady", and "Strange Vision"... strange vision indeed, as OY seem to be all about taking their mundane existence and finding something dreamlike and weird about it, particularly involving women if at all possible, in which case they are voluntarily "Slave To Dream"! Speaking of women, their regular singer's histrionic, operatic stylings are joined by the atypical "jazzy" singing of a guest female vocalist on "Window In The Dark" which is probably our favorite track here, for sheer eccentricity.
The album ends with the Paganini inspired instrumental "Up-Start", which sets us up for this cd's two bonus tracks, modern (circa 2003) recordings of classical guitar by OY mainman Antonio "Tony" Ferrari. While much slicker than the original Old Yron album itself, they can be seen as a progression from it, and/or perhaps can be considered a palate cleanser after all the very metal, lo-fi, yet cultured wailing of the album proper.
The cd booklet includes thorough liner notes by Ferrari, presented in both English and Italian. Thanks for Shadow Kingdom for digging this up, how they discovered it we don't know, but it's a unique find and we're glad to have it, it'll certainly serve as our '80s Italian underground metal weirdness fix for a little while!
Final recordings from these East Coast, ultra doom sludgelords, and holy shit do these two tracks utterly destroy. We never managed to review their only full length, from back in 2004, but we raved about their more recent splits, one with Japanese heavies Coffins, and more recently, the Four Burials comp with fellow doom brethren Loss, Orthodox and Mournful Congregation. In fact, these two tracks here are from the same sessions that produced their Four Burials track. And like was said, these songs are massive, epic, sprawling, intense, and so so heavy.
It kills us these guys are no more. The first side/song is ultra heavy, sloooooooow, crushing heaviness, with some insanely gurgly vokills, somehow it manages to be surprisingly melodic at the same time, the guitars ringing out, spacious and measured, eventually slipping into something more slowcore, sounding a bit like Khanate covering Codeine, but infused with plenty of classic doom melodies and grooves, a strange combo, but it works so well.
The second side/track begins with a wall of feedback and then a wild tangle of gnarled psychedelic guitars and spazzed out drum-age, before smoothing out into a doomy crawl. But throughout the next few minutes, the track continually erupts into super dense bursts of chug and churn, every time sounding like the start of a more frenzied jam, but always settling back into that slow motion lumber. The second half of the track gets super minimal, almost mellow, the guitars warm and low, laced with strange clicks and distant tones, all spaced out and spare, eventually building back up to a caustic corrosive crawl, the vocals even more sick and inhuman sounding. So goddamn good.
One of these cats is now in Serpent Throne, but here's hoping the rest of Otesanek start up something this heavy and intense. Too bad this is the end. But what a way to go.
The packaging is amazing as well. Super thick cardstock sleeves, screenprinted with super intense woodcut, fold out the lp to see the whole image of an impaled woman, her hair a tangle of foliage, the hilts of the swords super dense and intricate, inside liner notes and lyrics, also woodcut style. And included are a couple printed inserts. SUPER LIMITED of course, not sure we can get more when we run out.
We're pretty excited about this new vintage reissue label, Monk, that's releasing these nice deluxe vinyl versions of early recorded music that are hard to come by these days: blues, folk, country, bluegrass, Western swing and early jazz. Sure there's Mississippi records, but these have nicer packaging, are well researched, and compiled, and just a bit more, well, deluxe. Plus Monk also seems to be focusing on the veritable stars of these genres like Charley Patton, Charlie Poole, Dock Boggs and Django Reinhardt, providing a fine selection of their best early recordings.
Of course everyone should know by now that pretty much everything about the Mississippi Delta Blues tradition began with Charley Patton. From his gravelly voice, his mean bottleneck slide work and his rock-star style stage antics (playing his guitar down on his knees, or behind his back), he influenced plenty of the stars of the next generation including Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, and John Lee Hooker as well as John Fahey, who wrote a book about him. Plus Patton's off-stage womanizing, hard-drinking and death at a young age pretty much established the template for rock and blues idols to come. Fourteen of his best tracks are included here on Prayer of Death including his first bonafide hit, "Pony Blues". You can hear the devil calling in each exquisite note!
We're pretty excited about this new vintage reissue label, Monk, that's releasing these nice deluxe vinyl versions of early recorded music that are hard to come by these days: blues, folk, country, bluegrass, Western swing and early jazz. Sure there's Mississippi records, but these have nicer packaging, are well researched, and compiled, and just a bit more, well, deluxe. Plus Monk also seems to be focusing on the veritable stars of these genres like Charley Patton, Charlie Poole, Dock Boggs and Django Reinhardt, providing a fine selection of their best early recordings.
Considered one of the grandfathers of modern country music and bluegrass, Charlie Poole, singer and banjo player, with his North Carolina Ramblers recorded over 60 tunes for the Columbia label during the 1920's. Though he didn't write any of his own tunes, he was a mean interpreter, often changing lyrics and tempos of traditional songs and making them his own, becoming one of country music's first stars, influencing the next generation of country music from Bill Monroe to Hank Williams, before dying at an early age due to achohol-induced heart failure. Husband and Wife Were Angry One Night covers 16 of Poole's finest recordings detailing the hard-living and hard-loving life that we love to hear in early country music!
This cd reissue of a 1969 lp documents the Japanese answer to the British blues rock boom of the late '60s. It's from a band called Powerhouse, featuring future members of underground Japanese psych units Food Brain, Strawberry Path, Flied Egg, and Speed Glue & Shinki. Pertaining to the latter, this album's definite selling point is the fuzzed out guitar wailin' of axe-meister Shinki Chen. Though, in keeping with the blues theme, there's plenty of harmonica blowin' too, including on their rendition of the Beatles' "Back In The U.S.S.R.", which is blusified enough to fit comfortably next to the version of "Hootchie Kootchie Man" that follows it on this record. Hmm, a bluesy "Back In The U.S.S.R."? That's maybe not something we think most folks are in the market for these days...
The album's in fact all covers, all of 'em with heavily accented English language vocals. There's more Beatles ("Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da"), and Hendrix ("Foxy Lady"), and a bunch of blues standards popularized by the likes of Cream and the Yardbirds. While "Ob-la-di" can't help but be fairly upbeat, many of the other tracks here tend towards the groggy and lumbering. Their version of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful" is downright sludgey, and clocks in at over 15 minutes. Also given an extended (16:08) workout is Sonny Boy Williamson's "Good Morning Little School Girl", doubtless inspired by the Yardbirds' version. Another Yardbirds nod is "Mr. You're A Better Man Than I", Powerhouse's lovely version possessed of the melancholic vibe that Japanese psych bands old and new seem to be so good at.
Who has a more perfectly sinister and lascivious voice than the late great Vincent Price? Full of creepy intent and snide charm, it's no surprise that apart from a celebrated career in cinema that he would also thrive in the medium of radio, especially in the then burgeoning genres of suspense, mystery and, of course, horror! Three radio plays are included here, Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and The Pendulum", "Fugue In C Minor" and "Present Tense" with a full cast of characters and beautifully ominous musical accompaniment. Fully demonstrating Price's masterful craft of portraying both the tormentor and the tormented as they battle demons both supernatural and internal. Wonderfully creepy stuff!
We should say right up front, that Rose Pillar is probably the most beautiful Prurient record yet. Only tangentially 'noise', instead the sounds here are dark and brooding and evocative, haunting and heavy, thick and textured, drone-y and dense and so lovely. This limited release comes from the amazing Heartworm Press, and is a 10" housed in a massive, thick hardcover book. It's ULTRA limited, and very expensive, almost half of the pressing / press run is gone and it's only been out for a week or two, we can get as many as we want, but since it's so expensive, this is a PRE-order. If you want one of these let us know, we're happy to order one, but by ordering one you are definitely committed to buying one, and we'll be charging you a deposit for half of the cost, and because it's so heavy, it will have to ship and the higher multi item rate. But trust us, it's well worth it, believe it!
Based on the death of Prurient mainman and Hospital Records proprietor Dominick Fernow's uncle, the book is stunning, page after page of simple stark photographs, silver on black, with the facing page featuring a brief bit of text, more like lyrics, or poetry, a wandering narrative that seems to be focused on death, or loss, or loneliness. The book on its own is quite breathtaking, but then the record just pushes it over the top.
Beginning with a bit of warm warbly whir, all minimal and mysterious, the record slips into something a bit more familiar for fans of Prurient, some caustic vox, wreathed in distortion and drifting on bursts of hiss, but that noise element hovers amidst soaring majestic tones, almost martial sounding, strange muted industrial rhythms, delicate and dark, a cool and harrowing contrast, sounding a bit like a prettier dark ambient post industrial Whitehouse.
After that track, the noise component becomes secondary, with Fernow exploring all manner of dark low end mysteries, from thick blown out buzzscapes, all rubbery synths and thick layers of crumbling distortion, to thick warm, viscous flows of pulsing guitar melodies and pounding blackened rhythms. Super distorted and in-the-red, caustic and chaotic, all wrapped around muted minor key melodies, and at one point a gorgeous, almost new wavey loop, whispered vocals and off kilter, almost tribal sounding programmed drums. The record winds down with some slow burning downtuned guitars, draped over soft muted tones and stretched out into a loping sprawl, the only sign of the Prurient of old, is a smattering of crunch and clatter, sprinkled here and there, until finally, things finish with a brief bit of warped looped old timey melody, buried beneath sea of soft shimmer and long washed out drones. So gorgeous. And so haunting and melancholy. Perfectly matching the tone of the accompanying book. Speaking of the book, besides the photos and Fernow's text, it also features a super intense and moving piece written by Fernow's Father, about the death of his brother, heartbreakingly beautiful.
Again, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Half are gone already. We are only ordering as many of these as we get orders for, and this list will be your only chance to order them. We'll require a deposit, so only order one of these if you really want it and intend to buy it. And needless to say, HIGHLY recommended!
Finally available on vinyl!
This amazing slice of majestic tribal funk free jazz was briefly reissued on cd from Japan's EM Records a couple of years back, but due to legal disputes became quickly unavailable. We've been waiting patiently now for the proper reissues of this and the two other full lengths from this previously little known group, The Pyramids, biding the time by listening over and over again to the awesome 2cd set of The Pyramid's main founder Idris Ackamoor's solo output (also reissued on EM) ...and now finally they have reappeared in beautiful vinyl format (a long ago promised cd box set has yet to materialize!). Here's what we said about the cd reissue back when:
Originally released in 1976, we haven't been able to glean too much about The Pyramids, there are no liner notes (if that tells you how obscure this recording was/is) and a Google search turned up almost exclusively Japanese language sites. But don't let the lack of background keep you from enjoying this record, cuz it's definitely one of the most amazing rediscovered free jazz gems we've heard in ages. And it's not just free jazz, all wild swirl and skronk. Instead it's an exotic blend of Don Cherry's Orient, Funkadelic's Maggot Brian, some Art Ensemble Of Chicago, with wild Eastern sounding tribal rhythms, shuffling jazzy post bop, fluttering flutes and skronking horns, chanted vocals, droning buzzing ragas, seventies psychedelic free folk, propulsive krautfunk jams, some totally chaotic free jazz here and there, octopoidal drumming and wild shrieking sax, haunting percussive soundscapes, replete with strange creaks and whistles, and then before you know it transforming before your ears into what sounds like traditional African music with warm muted thumb piano melodies, chanted harmonies, bird calls, and sweetly melodic flute, rollicking bass heavy grooves under wild hand drums and carnivalesquee noisemaking. The final track, the 16 minute long "Black Man And Woman Of The Nile", is a mellow slow burning groove, with a throbbing bass riff, warm rich sax runs, shuffling percussion, the whole thing a laidback, sun drenched, barefoot funkjazz jam, warm and dreamy and hypnotic, with a short break in the middle for a brief skronky freakout, and then straight back into it, eventually drifting off into abstract ambience, softly moaning horns, dreamy melodies and barely there percussive chatter. Awesome!
We're super psyched to finally see these rare Pyramids LPs available once again! (Note, the there's a third one, King Of Kings, that we and suppliers have already run out of, but we should be listing it eventually).
Lalibela from 1973 is the first recording by this previously little known spiritually tribal free jazz unit, The Pyramids. Based in Yellow Springs, Ohio, before moving to Oakland, CA by 1975, The Pyramids were led by Idris Ackamoor on saxophone and his then wife Margo on flute and piccolo backed by four other musicians using an arsenal of African tribal instruments such as Clay and Talking drums, Ugandan Harp, Bailofone, and Masenqo.
That presence of ethnic instrumentation makes itself felt right away. The nearly thirty minute title track (comprising a side and a half of the lp) begins with some raucous Morroccan-style funk rhythm with horns and piccolos swirling over the top before some soft chanting and Ackamoor's sax lay down the key melodic figure. Then everything sets in at once, hectic sax skronk, the percussive rhythms undulating at times claustrophobic and intense filling the space then gradually separating, becoming airier, sparse and placid before laying down a more martial rhythm that once again collides into a cascade of bamboo flutes and chants, and cymbal washes that becomes a serene idyllic pool of intense calm.
The second track,"Indigo" is more lyrical, though it begins with some powerfully heavy drum fills, with lilting flute, melodic sax laying on top of lurching bass rhythm and percussion. The vibe is more majestic and pulsating then "Lalibela", with a lone shaker being the wildcard instrument for a bit as slow dramatic drums build, offset by metallic bowls and noises before the wooly skronk of the horns and woodwinds sets in and all the players ride that manic torrent before finally settling into a more subdued ending of call and response between Margo's flute and Idris's saxophone.
It's that intuitive dynamic between the players, how they stay afloat through recurring periods of noise and calm that make listening to The Pyramids such an enjoyable and worthy experience!
Another timeless folk beauty from Alasdair Roberts! Each of his albums is like a vivid trek across the country's Highlands and Lowlands - the mist of the ocean, the lush soft green and gold of the mosses and ferns, serene limpid lakes, the rugged mountain outcroppings. Spoils definitely carries on in that tradition Seriously though, if true British Isles folk is your bag, you really can't miss with any one of his full lengths! Roberts' lyrical tales are at once starkly intimate and cryptically poetic. Lilting, pure and indelibly Scottish!
In this issue of this more-retro-than-Mojo mag from the UK... Gene Clark of the Byrds on the cover, along with features on country-folksters like Great Speckled Bird and The Dillards and a list of the '10 Country-Rock Albums You Need'... also a retrospective on Zigzag, the underground UK rock mag of the '60s/'70s, an interview with 'soft pop siren' Margo Guryan, and part one of a two-part feature on classic British exploitation films, among much else, including loads of reviews.
Here's something we haven't had in a while, so it seemed worth highlighting again now that we've tracked down some more copies. It's the 1986 debut album (plus 2 bonus tracks) from an amazing French prog band with a shuddersome name, and sound. It combines the classical grandeur of their obvious influence Magma with looser, more experimental sounds. Very dark, heavy and ominous; creepy like Universe Zero. Spooky soprano female vocals give way to noise guitar freakouts and rhythmic passages that bring to mind This Heat. It's kind of mind-blowing, actually in keeping with the concepts of cosmic horror evoked by their H.P. Lovecraft-inspired band name (and if evoking Shub Niggurath weren't enough, there's also a song here called Yog Sothoth). Really, if you want something that sounds like Magma venturing into the realms of sanity-blasting horror, this is it. The first, nearly 17 minute track should have you knocking on the door of the nearest asylum, begging to be let in. Such ominous art rock. Definitely one of our all time fave "Zeuhl" albums outside of the actual Magma masterpieces themselves, indescribably infused with epic Magmoid drama, and that band's signature throbbing bass heavy rhythms.
The always interestin' Japanese label Doubtmusic has three new releases out, we'll get to the enka-sax-solos one by Kazutoki Umezu and the jazz-improv-with-flourescent-light-instrument one by the Kazuo Imai Trio on a upcoming list soon, but we picked this disc to highlight first, this time, 'cause we know how many eager Otomo Yoshihide fans there are out there, and this disc features Otomo teaming up with a hitherto unknown to us rhythmic progwave unit called Sim, a trio comprising Oshima Teruyuki on guitar, Ootani Yosio on electronics/computer, and Ground Zero drummer Uemura Mashiro. Together they encode an alien, mechanical glitch-funk, definitely something special for fans of This Heat, Starfuckers/Sinistri, Radian, and the like.
Fried and fractured, the mutant grooves of Sim are further gunked with grit and glitch spinning from the seemingly warped turntable action of maestro Otomo, who is also credited with the use (and abuse?) of a "self-made synthesizer". Otomo's turntables are also presumably the source of the cut-up vocal loops heard on this otherwise instrumental set, garbled transmissions of chatter and mumble from unknown entities.
But it's Uemura's percussive percolations that utterly underpin this futuristic FX laden fantasmagoria. With each frayed nerve beat seemingly counting down to some terminal fate for the listener, his drumming interlocks with chicken scratch guitar and throbbing (temple) low end pulsations, amidst a miasma of electronic noise textures: blips and bleeps, crackle and feedback, eerie squeak and creak. It's maddening and mesmerizing, music for some discombobulating no-wave-by-way-of-onkyo dance club. This Sim+Otomo network is dense and distorted, displaying staggered rhythmic freakishness that seems off, then on, speeding up and slowing down and phasing in and out of "grooves" with precise imprecision.
The packaging is perfect for this, a striking digipack design as is usual for Doubtmusic, featuring not one but two circular die cut holes, a big one offset on the front through which you can see the cd, a smaller one in the back right in the center of the clear cd-tray, both to go along with the artwork, elliptical orbits echoing the way the music on this disc syncs and spins.
Everyone has their own particular favorite Skullflower era, the pummeling Swans-like crush of the early records, the blown out free drone guitar skree of Obsidian Shaking Codex, the tripped out druggy riffy space rock of Exquisite Fucking Boredom and Orange Canyon Mind, or the full on face melting guitarnoise assault of more recent releases, as far as we're concerned it ALL rules, whether heavy or noisy, pounding and pummeling or drifting and shimmering, Matthew Bower and whatever other noisemakers he manages to assemble, are responsible for some of the most amazing OUTrock records of the last twenty years, if not ever.
One of the best is no doubt Last Shot At Heaven, released in 1993, which features the band as a trio, and looks ahead to the dirgey riffage of Exquisite Fucking Boredom, but mixes in plenty of druggy shimmer (lots of Sunroof! foreshadowing), post industrial pound and psychedelic guitar freakout. This is WAY out of print, but the label discovered a box of 40 or so stashed away, so we took all they had left (25 copies), needless to say, these are the last copies EVER, the label has no plans to repress, and we took every remaining copy, so if you want one, be quick!
Last Shot explodes right off the bat with "Caligula" a dirgey riff heavy groove, all massive plodding pound, and squalls of wah guitar, howled vocals buried in the mix, streaks of feedback, tangled guitar melodies, very metallic and definitely heavy, but still plenty space-y and krauty. The follow up "Get The Horn" is all looped shimmer and pulsing thrum, peppered with growling distorted guitars, and spaced out drum pound, the growling guitars intensifying over the near static "Baba O'Reilly" like synth part. "Dufus" is an ultra distorted lo-fi garagedoom dirge, Dead C style free rock recorded at the bottom of a well, still thick with swirling guitars and simple plodding drums. "Bad Alchemy" is total proto metal, a killer main riff, wrapped in squiggly guitar freak out, the whole thing a woozy metallic groove, locked into an endless loop, the vocals a thick effected drawl off in the distance, "Elf Piercer" is a bit of Hawkwindy style space rock, again, locked into a relentless loop, effects everywhere, the guitars wild and tangled, "Rotten Sun II" is a super blown out doomic dirge, with howled vox and super jagged caustic riffage, and rhythms buried beneath the crumbling distortion, "Mystic Eye" is all tribal drumming, buzzing guitar, throbbing bass, soaring melodies, the most straight up rock of any of the tracks, but once it achieves maximum volume, it again gets looped into a seemingly endless jam, and finally "Blown Dukes", a hazy guitar drift, all warm whir and warble, thick buzz, disembodied riff, eventually joined by spare drumming, before devolving into a free rock freakout.
One of the more accessible Skullflower records for sure, but fear not, still plenty heavy and noisy and psychedelic, and unfortunately, almost for sure, your last chance to get your hands on one.
As if we needed any more proof that Finland is and was a weird and wonderful place, producing some of the most far out sounds we've ever heard. It's no secret we have a thing for Finnish music, but c'mon, every record we hear, like this one for example, a reissue of one recorded in 1970(!!!) just proves over and over that Finland were always way ahead of the underground rock curve. Or behind it. Either way, the Finns have been blowing minds for 40 years now. (Remember that Psychedelic Phinland comp? There was a Sperm track on that...)
Sperm was the project of a fella named Pekka Airakinsen, and consisted of him creating gorgeously abstract and haunting dronescapes and twentieth century style classical sprawls, constructed from looped guitars, feedback, primitive samples, and various found sounds and invented techniques, the results are fantastic. Dark shimmering fields of suspended tones, of tripped out psychedelic delay, of deep undulating low tones, thick, buzzing rumbles, jazzy horns, chaotic squalls of skronk and skree, No Neck style rhythmic workouts, tons of space, very dark and moody and mysterious. Minus the first half of side two, which features lots of horns and fractured jazz-isms (titled coincidentally "Jazz Jazz"), the rest of the record plays out like something that could have come out on a cd-r this year, seriously genius free noise abstract dronescaping that pretty much puts the current crop of noisemakers to SHAME.
An exact reproduction of the original, with thick paste on, silkscreened sleeves, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Unfortunately already out of print. We only have 5 or 6, most likely the last copies we'll see.
The '60s/'70s psych reissue label Akarma comes through once again with this gem! England's Steamhammer had a heavy name and lotsa chops, but never really made the big time. Their first three albums were British blues rock incarnate, real good at that but not our cup of tea really. THEN came "Speech", their swansong. Something happened (lots of drugs, maybe?) -- it was real different. This is an unusual album for sure. Probably not what Steamhammer fans at the time were expecting: Psychedelic doomy prog-tastic epic instrumental slaying, with fuzz fx, jazzy percussion, and emotive vox. It's not metal but it's got a lot of what we like about metal that's for sure, and kicks ass on most of what came out in '72. Fans of some of the real heavy underground bands from the era like the Groundhogs, Lucifer's Friend, Socrates Drank The Conium, even Il Balleto Di Bronzo ought to check this out for sure! Unfamiliar with those obscurites? Well just imagine Led Zep gone off the rails. Creative, deftly timed/structured songs full of psychedelic atmosphere. From quasi-religious 20th century avantgarde interludes to manic guitar rippage, from gorgeous vocal lamentations to jammy improv spaciness, this is AQ-approved prog weirdness for sure. The 22 minute "Penumbra" that opens the record erupts from a spooky three minute intro into sheer pulse-pounding rock trio shred, then dives into a bass-heavy dirge from which a vocal chorus emerges...and on they go. Everytime we play this for someone who we think *might* like it, boy, they *really* like it. This gets a big thumbs up from all the heavy/psych/prog heads here at AQ!!!
If you've kept up with the prolific and often very limited and hard to track down back catalog of Sunburned Hand Of The Man you'll know that they're always eager to explore new territory and widen their musical horizons. But even so, we still think you'll be thrown for a loop, in the best possible way. In fact this disc has even won over a few of us here who had always been on the fence with these Sunburned fellas in the past.
What's important to know about Fire Escape is that it's just as much of a Four Tet record as it is a Sunburned Hand Of The Man record. Four Tet and Sunburned!? Huh! What?! Sometimes the seemingly oddest pairings produce the most creative and unexpected results. And wow, we've totally been swept away by the magic these two forces have created, each contributing the best of of their respected, yet disparate qualities.
Sunburned got to do what they do, improvising and travelling in all their drugged out and mystifying glory, while Four Tet then collected hours upon hours of their recordings and worked his own magic on them to create a final product that might be the most realized, colorful and immediate Sunburned record yet.
From the opening track, which had us all thinking of 23 Skiddo in all the best ways, and throughout the entire album, you get to hear a band who pride themselves on their improv abilities but with the much more careful and deliberate and musically astute filter of Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, who has proven over the years that he not only makes really great music, but that he understands and appreciates great music in so many shapes and varieties. It's almost as if his recent collaborations with free jazz legend Steve Reid opened him up to the possibility and power of improvisation while still allowing him to retain the great sensitivity to sound that his made him one of the most compelling musicians to emerge out of the electronic scene in the last decade.
It's so exciting and exhilarating to see this kind of creative energy exchanged and brought together by folks from two seemingly different scenes, sharing the common thread of aiming to make transcendental music that transports you to different dimensions and offers up all kinds of unexpected twists and turns. After their recent collaboration with Circle and this totally successful meeting of musical minds with Four Tet we have to say we are loving the collaborative spirit of Sunburned Hand Of The Man more than ever, and while there was all kinds of hype surrounding SHOTM a few years ago, we are happy to report that they just might be only just reaching their most realized moment right now!
They sure don't make pop music like this anymore. Or so we thought. A few months back, we heard just a tiny part of a single song from this record, and ever since, we'd been dying for this to finally come out. It was "Coast Of Carolina", first sound sample below, check it out, we'll wait....
If after hearing that, you're not totally in love with Telekinesis! (exclamation point part of the name!) then your pop heart is truly black and shrivelled.
That song is pretty much the ultimate fuzz pop super catchy summer jam of the year. These guys (or actually this guy!) oozes fuzzy Elephant Six style pop genius. Neutral Milk Hotel, Apples In Stereo, that sort of thing, crunchy and jangly guitars, slightly distorted drumming that pounds and swings, the songs soaring through fields of sizzling cymbals and sheets of ebullient pop glimmer and shimmer, the vocals heartfelt and boyish and swoonsome and just a little bit Death Cab, and the sound, a perfect mix of classic power pop, sad boy lo-fi bedroom strum and nineties style jangly indie rock. And every song here is catchy as all get out, hooks everywhere, if we were a bit younger and were going a courting, you know about half of these songs would end up on mix tapes for that special someone. Actually fuck it, we're gonna go make a mix tape right now. Courting or not, this is that rare sort of record that pretty much demands its songs wind up on a crushtape...
This is exactly what we were hoping the new Yeah Yeah Yeah's record would sound like when we first heard rumors that it was going to be a more synth based, dance oriented record, but sadly that YYY disc felt a bit flat to our ears.
But Telepathe do it right, tapping into hazy and silky dancefloor pop with enough interesting nuances and influences to make their songs stick! And to hold up so nicely on repeated listens. Makes perfect sense that TV On The Radio's Dave Stiek produced this as it's infused with the same kind of genre blending and avant meets pure pop aesthetic that he's perfected with his own band. You might be familiar with one half of this female duo, Melissa Livaudais who has been in tripped out and witchy outfits like First Nation, who put out a record on Animal Collective's label Paw Tracks.
It's definitely cool as of late for folks with very experimental backgrounds to embrace a more song based and catchy dancefloor aesthetic, as such, this reminds us a bit of the latest Gang Gang Dance outing, albeit with more sparkle and sleekness. We could totally see folks who dig on Italians Do It Better releases finding much to love on Dancemother. The high in the sky feeling of these songs makes for such a satisfying and captivating listen, just dripping with enticing pleasure.
We've actually been sitting on these for a while now, another victim of the too many records to review and not enough time problem we seem to perpetually have.
There Goes Neutro! is the project of aQ customer John Ira Thomas, and the minute we first heard about his Organelle record, we knew we had to hear it. One of those discs that we liked based on the description alone, having yet to hear a single note. C'mon, here's what it's all about (from the liner notes): "Thomas cut the advance frame noise from an old filmstrip record about the life of Jesus Christ, cut it into about 400 pieces, and with the magic of computers made something new out of it." Exactly. Jesus, chopped up records, noise, we knew it had to be good, or at the very least, interesting, lucky for us, it's both.
Obvious references would be Jeck and Tetreault and Basinski, especially since the main component is record crackle, and damaged vinyl, and the arrangement is a looped assemblage of stuttering chopped up bits, like a rougher more raw Oval. But it's not just hiss and crackle, the first few seconds of music are also captured, sounding a bit circusy, even more so once they get looped up and tangled. Four long tracks, all movements in one epic and fractured soundscape.
Woozy, trippy, warped and warbly and definitely a bit psychedelic. Super cool!
If Tom Waits were to put out a record of instrumental collaborations with Christian Fennesz, Torngat's Le Petite Nicole might be the result. There's just enough pounding drums to satisfy the thinking-person's need for rock, and enough contemplative sweeping synth pieces to make a rocker feel like an intellectual. Titles to songs without words are by definition abstractions, but the droning repetition of "6:23 PM" captures the essence of the early evening after-work-brain-fry perfectly, both in the sense of "this is exactly what I want to listen to" and "this is exactly how I feel." The previous song, "Afternoon Moon Pie", through jaunty percussion and a distorted Rhodes piano, also invokes a particular time and place, like late summertime light through the leaves of trees at the park. Torngat definitely has elements of (early) Black Heart Procession at work, as well: a little bit of minor-chord sadness, mixed with minimal drumming and guitar picking. A record not to be missed.
Not to be confused with the much more prolific Czech depressive doom-ed black metal Trist, German one man band Trist is the ambient drone side project of Benjamin Konig, who is also the frontman for Lunar Aurora, an amazing black metal band we love, but have yet to list here (which will be remedied as soon as possible, we promise).
Initiation comes via the same label that has been gradually re-releasing all the Paysage D'Hiver demos over the last couple years, and is a collection of various long out of print and even at the time barely available demos, recorded between 2000-2003. Nothing black metal here, but plenty blackness nonetheless, Trist explores slow, hazy, otherworldly ambience, black drones and delicate Lustmordian soundscapery, a sound that falls somewhere between the gauzy digitized smear of folks like Tim Hecker and Aidan Baker, and the abject electronics and post apocalyptic sonic sprawl of groups like Wolf Eyes and Emeralds, infusing it with that distinctive 'black metal intro' vibe. Not obviously synthy, and definitely not overly guitar based, the sound on Initiation is blurred and washed out, melodies exist but are only glimpsed fleetingly, the longform drones and extended drifts are heavily textured with, warm whooshing whir, distorted crumble, ethereal fields of hiss and click and pop and rough sandpaper like buzz, definitely very dreamy and moonlit, but also ominous and grim, very cinematic, evoking some alien wasteland, burnt and ruined beneath a smoke filled sky, something lurking in the shadows, the ground littered with death and destruction.
Folks who loved that Cities Last Broadcast from last list, will definitely dig this too, as it mines the same sort of wasted unpopulated barren planet vibe, and take the more abstract dronescaping of folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX and Xela and Aun and Svarte Greiner somewhere much more cinematic. Bits of new age seep in here and there, chunks of slow motion doomdrone now and again, mysterious loops and bits of glitch surface throughout, giving many of the tracks an avant turntablist vibe, like Strotter Inst or Jeck, this is certainly not what you might expect from a grim black metaller, instead Initiation plays out more as a dense and varied and layered work of tense instrumental minimalism, of gorgeous and harrowing experimental dronemusic, and of course bleak black ambience, maybe too abstract for metalheads, but folks into drone and doom and drift and all that cd-r floorcore rumble and shimmer would do well to grab one of these right quick.
