This time out the mighty Eccentric Soul series focuses on the dingy and delightful venue Smart's Palace, located in Witchita, Kansas which during the years of 1963-1975 was ground zero for all the best sweaty, sensual and romping soul being played around that town. While the club did get a few big names in their time, both James Brown and Aretha Franklin once played there, its bread and butter were the nationally unknown but completely talented soul artists located in the tragically underrated scene going on down in Kansas.
The man behind Smart's Palace was Dick Smart who not only ran the club but also played music himself, promoted most of the shows AND ran his own label. In true DIY fashion he helped cultivate one of the richest soul scenes around, totally overflowing with true but untapped talent. This has got to be the sexiest, sweatiest, most romantic, sultry and sexual set of songs that has come out of the Eccentric Soul series yet. So many amazing voices on here, some as smooth as butter, others as commanding as a drill sergeant of love. Fans of folks like Eddie Kendricks, Al Green, and Curtis Mayfield will find so much to dig as as the new to us artists here like Baby Neal, Fred Williams and Kenneth Car offer up songs that we could listen to over and over and still get down and dirty with their raw yet flawless true soul grooves.
Awesome collection of singles originally released as 12"s in Man Recordings Funk Mundial series. This is chock full of high energy Baile Funk done so totally right! Daniel Haaksman who started this series has a great ear for the best of the bangers, so it's kind of like getting someone to cut the weaker stuff out and hand you sixteen of the most sizzling, grooving thrillers that have come out of the Baile Funk scene over the last few years.
We were only familiar with a few of these artists like Crookers and Chancha Via Circuito but all the new artists to our ears for sure have been making us shake our stuff. Mixing elements of tech, hip-hop, booty bass, rave culture, all with a frenetic energy that's so damn infectious. We love how this scene seems to be mixed equally with fierce females and charismatic males. While still full on crazy fun, these tracks come off a bit more musical and memorable then the tracks on the Rio Baile Funk comps put out by Essay, we still love those comps but right now Funk Mundial is giving us the goods in a way we can't resist!
This isn't quite what we expected, but it is amazing and beautiful and we can't stop listening to it in the store. So what were we expecting? Well, from the title, we thought this would be a compilation of some Impulse, Actuel, ESP, and Black Jazz label style majestic free jazz, a la John and Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, Philip Cohran etc. And to some extent it is, but looking at the track listings, we hardly recognized any of the people or groups on here, except perhaps for Ronnie Boykins and Salah Ragab & The Cairo Jazz Band. Other folks like Mor Thiam, The Frank Derrick Total Experience, The Lightmen Plus One and Ndikho Xaba & The Natives among many others were completely new to us. And while at times the music here is majestic, it focuses less on the cerebral, higher minded forms of free jazz, and more on the burgeoning post-Coltrane musical underground that fostered from the communal spirit, personal reform and the celebration of African heritage prevalent in the African-American community following the civil-rights era. Culled from rare 45's, private press lps and obscure studio albums, seriously, this is some groovy shit! Sengalese percussionist and bandleader Mor Thiam's infectious "Ayo Ayo Nene (Blessing For The New Born Baby)" is definitely one of our picks for jam of the year! Other highlights include Bay area based, P.E Hewitt Jazz Ensemble (featured on the Record Store Day Comp, This LP Crashes Hard Drives!) and the funk groove of the Ohio Penitentiary 511 Jazz Ensemble, a group comprised of prison inmates. There are a great selection of tracks using unusual Asian and African instrumentation such as Diembe, Santur (a 72 stringed Iranian dulcimer like instrument), something called a Seaweed Horn, and of course mbiras, flutes, congas, vibes and horns aplenty. We've been getting a lot of awesome spiritual free jazz in the store lately from the recently reissued Don Cherry / Latif Khan collaboration (reviewed on this list as well, Record Of The Week in fact) and The Pyramids reissues (two of which are also reviewed elsewhere on this list) and this fits in quite nicely. So good!
We're so glad to finally see this available, the lovely 1971 debut of Spanish female psych-folk duo, Vainica Doble. One of Spain's most collectable and sought after soft-psych artifacts, Vainica Doble combine Beatlesy pop with Incredible String Band like whimsical flair, often sounding like the prettiest moments of Os Mutantes, the groovier moments of England's Sunforest or even early Abba at their most balladic, due to the singers' beautiful dual harmonies. Featured on the Finder's Keeper's comp, Folk Is Not A Four Letter Word vol. 2, it's about time that this venerable Spanish duo finally gets some deserved recognition outside of their homeland. Included here are the 12 tracks from their original album and 8 bonus tracks comprised of rare singles, including a track by their backing band, Tickets (who recorded a song written by the duo) as well as an awesome fuzz-pop stomper called "Someone Like Me", that makes this amazing reissue even more worthy of your time!
Our definition of pure pop perfection would have to be Scotland's Vaselines! They embody everything a perfect pop band should be. They are charming and clever, dirty and sweet, sensitive and sassy. They have the ability to rock out or get all dreamy with equal potency. Coinciding with their reunion tour that will find them playing San Francisco in just a few days, Sub Pop has compiled pretty much all of their material onto this 2 disc collection. The first disc includes all of their studio recordings (the Son Of A Gun EP, the Dying For It EP, and the full length Dum Dum). The bonus disc includes three demo versions and two live shows from '86 and '88. Fair warning to fans, the first disc is identical to the Vaselines collection that came out a few years back, so if you have that, you'll be getting this for the demos and live stuff on disc two. Or cause you want it on vinyl, if you opt for that format. And if you have no Vaselines, well, needless to say this is ESSENTIAL.
Now that we have all that out of the way we can go back to gushing about why The Vaselines are the perfect pop band and how they pretty much influenced all the rad underground (and overground) pop stuff we've loved in the decades since they first hit the scene. Nirvana, Belle And Sebastian, Yo La Tengo, Hole, Vivian Girls, Beck, Dum Dum Girls, The Breeders and so many more owe so much of their sound, style and aesthetic to the Vaselines and everything they created during their short existence from 1986-1990. They predated the era when indie bands began to experience more widespread success and appreciation, but their songs and style pretty much set the blueprint for the alternative nation that would explode in the years following their breakup.
Listening to these songs is like hearing some crazy greatest hits collection as every single song is so totally classic and memorable, hard to believe that it's actually just their complete discography. Every song was truly unique and so goddamn catchy. Some of their songs were popularized when Kurt Cobain declared his undying love of the Vaselines and had Nirvana cover "Son Of A Gun", "Molly's Lips" and "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam". The Vaselines had a charisma that makes their songs appeal to such a wide cross section of music fans. They are the band K records wish they could have had, and have been trying to sign ever since. The Vaselines had the wit and smarts so many of their Glasgow followers try a little too hard to emulate, but most of all they had SONGS, songs that are so damn endearing and so completely timeless!
Yay, more primo scuzz n' swagger from Chicago punkers Vee Dee (not to be confused with another band we've listed called Veee Deee), rockin' at us from even deeper down the dark Midwestern hole of nihilism and negativity they inhabit, a place littered with cigarette butts, empty beer cans, and dogeared collectible copies of '70s punk rock fanzines. We'd been wondering when we'd hear from 'em again. Their 2004 debut Furthur was a surprise hit here at AQ, proving to be as catchy as the band's namesake. This new double vinyl gatefold lp (which comes packaged with a handy compact disc containing all the music too) maybe due to its expanse is not quite as immediately catchy, taking a few more spins before the singalong aspects start to sink in, but they do, as Vee Dee churn out 4 sides, 13 songs, of raucous psychedelic punk, heavy on the glorious guitar distortion. Perhaps imagine a cross between Pissed Jeans and Plastic Crimewave? The Heads and Mudhoney are possible references too, with Black Flag and Misfits and the Electric Eels being necessary ones, along with various and sundry obscure bands who left bloodstains across the Midwest back in the '70s... Oh and their song "Into The Void" isn't a Sabbath cover, instead it comes closer to sounding like the Stooges, obviously another big influence.
Public Health Mental System has got something of a cosmic / drug vibe, due to song titles like "Glimpses Of Another World", "Cleveland, Outerspace" and "Teens O.D." we guess, plus of course all the fuzzed out soundz. Pharoahs and pyramids are also mentioned. But there's no color, the cover art and the music too is all still in brilliant black and white, a la space and night. Inner space being the place they're really headed, on a bad trip, yet Vee Dee's psych-ological bringdown music still rocks with gleeful abandon, 'cause, fuck it.
Ever wake up from a late night out on the town with that hazy, fucked up feeling in the head? Of course you have, so imagine that feeling translated into a an album of super damaged, super woozy garage filth. Kurt Vile and his boys the Violators bring us the Hunchback EP, an unholy combination of mid '70s Stones and a more gritty Spacemen 3. And even though the first couple tracks don't veer to far from the new wave of lo-fi garage rock, as the album plays through it dips into more cosmic and spacey realms of dreamy guitar. Makes us think of nighttime alleyways, smokey barroom depression, a drugged-out fried-out bad trip kinda vibe, all nicely put together with catchy riffs and tough guy in a leather jacket at-all-times kind of vocals. Dingy parking lot car show rock n' roll, with a fitting black and white photo of Vile on the cover in some empty lot in Philly (looking quite damaged himself). It's a perfect match for any fan of Thee Oh Sees, Wavves, or Wooden Shjips. Oh and make sure you play this sucker loud, definitely something you'd hear blasting from the rager next door. Recommended.
Zach Wallace is half of the group Sun Circle, whose s/t debut (first cd-r, then lp) we raved about a while back right here. Gorgeous, organic, ritualistic, raw and intimate dark and droning minimalism, one track was a dense thick drone constructed from just voices, the other a delicate drift of weightless tones distant chimes and hushed shimmer.
This solo disc from Wallace reminds us a bit of that second track, another soft focus swirl of ethereal sounds, and warm muted tones, although here, all of those tones are created on a home made glass armonica, hence the title. Wallace's glass armonica, is based on Benjamin Franklin's original design from 1761, but is made from thrift store wine glasses, and salvaged bits of lumber. The glasses are arranged by pitch, and Wallace's version of the armonica has been expanded for up to 12 players.
Most of us have played a glass, rubbed the edge of a partially filled water glass at dinner, and made a cool little sound. And while the concept is the same, the sound here is so much more expansive and lush, a symphony of microtones and overtones, the various notes and sounds, buzzy and metallic, warm and muted, pulsing and throbbing, intertwining, weaving in and out of mysterious melodies, hypnotic and otherworldly, sounding like insects one second, singing strings the next, the interactions creating strange subtle rhythms, the tones slipping in and out of warm whirring harmonies, sometimes tense and dramatic and almost dark, other times ephemeral and surprisingly melodic, the timbre and tone shifting subtly from thick and dense and powerful, to crystalline and barely there, all three tracks so lovely and so easy to lose yourself in.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Cool fold over cardstock sleeves, silver metallic screen printed with photocopied insert.
If you were sad to hear the end of Iowa City's Raccoo-oo-oon, have no fear, for Shawn Reed and Ryan Garbes have returned to the trance-punk altar with a new band, Wet Hair. With two synths, a drum kit, and some hazy distorted vocals the duo offer up Dream, their debut lp, a kraut punk offering of free synth meanderings and cosmic filth, all thrown together in some dusty garage. Pretty cool sunny day avant-punk improv for the deep dreamers, already out of print from Not Not Fun, we managed to get our grubby hands on a few, so act quick if you want one.
We had never heard of this NY band before but HOLY SHIT. A serious new contender for sure in the ever expanding world of crushing slow motion ultra doom-dirge-dronemusick. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, SUNNO))), Skullflower, Khanate, Wolf Eyes, Bunkur, etc. Any of those names get your blood boiling, then WKW just might be your favorite new band.
This WKW's self titled debut, and is in some ways even heavier and more blown out than Flydust (reviewed elsewhere on this list). The root sound is similar, a heaving morass of crumbling superdistorted guitars, but where as Flydust is murky and muddy and washed out, the sound here is prickly and cacophonous, abrasive and sort of sharp. The sound is also more propulsive, more distinct riffs, dripping with in-the-red distortion and twisted FX. The opening track is one single ascending riff, looped over and over and over and over, pounding its way through a dense cloud of impossibly thick buzz, the drums a buried plod, the vocals, barely audible through the churning mass of unfurling riffs and a constantly expanding wall of sound. The strange thing is, there is a definite groove lurking underneath, loping and lurching, but groovy nonetheless. Think Godflesh or Pitchshifter mixed with Ramleh and Wolf Eyes, but super charged and revved up, and dipped in a psychedelic concoction of tripped out prismatic psychrock filigree and blown out amp destroying drone drenched doom.
But the second track is a whole different beast altogether, a stretched out slowed down distorted riff, unfurled in slow motion, very reminiscent of Earth 2, but peppered with simple spare drumming, only barely, until about halfway through when the sound is swallowed up but a wall of distorted sound much more like the opening track, and suddenly the sound is transformed into a blown out acid-doused blast of crumbling blacknoise.
The last two tracks offer up more of the same, varying degrees of forward momentum, of spaced out ur-drone, of in-the-red effects, pounding abstract percussion, all draped over near static whitenoise buzz, weird krauty grooves, woozy metallic crawls, pulsing metallic ambience, and heavy heavy hypnotic dirgedoomdronemusick.
The lp is limited to 490 copies, pressed on purple vinyl, the cd is limited to 1000 copies.
Fresh & Onlys' Tim Cohen and Ray's Vast Basement's Jon Bernson have joined forces to become Window Twins! The results are a crazy kaleidoscope of ever-shuffling sounds and moods. If taken literally, we can attest that the twins in their name are definitely not identical, and the window in their name is probably of the bubbly textured glass most found in old office doors. You know the kind that obscures your vision, turning people and things into mysterious figures and abstract shapes? I'm This Tall City keeps the listener guessing. It's an off-kilter, loosely stitched patchwork of loping loops and impromptu songs immersed in hazy soundscapes that shift in and out of focus. Quite reminiscent of the shuffling folk pop shambolics of early Badly Drawn Boy and Elephant Six Collective. but a bit more darker hued and brooding.
Latest from these Midwestern noiseniks, this time with a full complement of assistant noisemakers, including Rich Hoak (Brutal Truth, Total Fucking Destruction) as well as folks from Fuck The Facts, The Endless Blockade and 7000 Dying Rats! Sounds like a seriously noisy nasty party indeed.
The last Winters In Osaka we reviewed was Orchids, and unlike a lot of noise music, it was way more rhythmic and textural, offering up a series of sort of fractured skitters and looped grooves, all liberally doused with plenty of noisiNESS.
But we knew these guys were capable of kicking up a serious din and they do just that on Molded To Crawl. Opening with a 17 minute epic, that begins with muted percussion, samples, buzzing electronics, which quickly builds to a full on face melting skree, but within that skree, synths squiggle, vocals howl, guitars feedback, sirens wail, the chaotic blowout does seem to occasionally almost slip into something drone-y or almost riff like, but for the most part, it's a thick dense wall of sound that is not for the faint of ear.
The other three tracks are shorter, and tend toward the darker and the dronier, again rooted around plodding percussion, and layered buzz, the sound veers from lurching machine like industrial lumber, to Godfleshy stomp, to haunting Eastern music box over roiling blacknoise, to thick whirring buzzscape, to wildly careening and crumbling wave of low end crush, to skittery crunch and glitch, to thick windblown wasteland sountrack, to chopped up plunderphonia, to haunting hushed drift.
Cool stuff, but definitely be warned, this is some seriously noisy shit!
This issue of England's indispensible music magazine The Wire is, as usual, packed with fascinating articles and interviews and reviews and so forth. Dubstepper Kode9 is on the cover, inside there's The Hospitals, Moondog, Belbury Poly, Pom Pom Records (techno from the Faroe Islands!), the Sublime Frequencies label and the UK tour of Group Doueh and Omar Souleyman, and more... There's a primer on music made with the Roland TB-303 bass synth, Momus talks about turning it down, and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh does the Invisible Jukebox feature - wherein all casual-like he mentions that someplace he's got a tape of Devo jamming in Conny Plank's studio with Eno, Bowie, and members of Can!! Drool.
Another way too limited release from one man blackened ultra-buzz merchant Wrath Of The Weak. As we've mentioned before in the past, before we had heard a single note, WOTW came highly recommended as perhaps THEE buzziest black metal band around, which was, and is still indeed to a certain degree the case, but as other bands are piling on the buzz, and black metal seems to be moving in a more blown out and shoegazey drone drenched direction, it's a bit tougher these days to truly be the lord of buzz.
Thankfully, WOTW is about more than just buzz, the tracks are dense and dark and thick and corrosive, often like a Wolf Eyes track transformed into black metal. Plenty of crunch, and abstract industrial whir, sheets of feedback, tracks sometimes collapsing into gorgeously grinding stretches of slow motion sprawl, haunting melodies buried beneath, everything rough and ragged and raw, but blurred into soft shapes and bleary warm sonic swells. Often not remotely black metal at all. This ep is the perfect example. The opening track is just guitars, a roiling and lush soundworld, no drums, at least none that we can hear, just a massive heaving wall of crumbling distorted crunch, wreathed in hazy clouds of buzz and hiss and whir, playing out a woozy minor key melody, but very very sloooowly, a smoldering slab of mind expanding divine and blackened space drone.
And as if to further make the case that WOTW is far from just another black metal outfit, the second track is a cover (we think) of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", less black metal, and more tripped out druggy psychedelia, those distinctive drums, long spidery streaks of sitar like buzz, all the sounds softened and smeared and stretched out into totally trippy tendrils, unfurling through swirling clouds of blissed out shimmer. A black metal band would likely be your LAST guess, we're hearing White Hills, the Heads, and other modern space psych combos. And finally, the record closes with what initially sounds like what could be the blackest track of the three, but the opening riff, instead of exploding into a frenzy of blasting and buzzing, stretches out into something much more dreamy and abstract, a sort of looped guitarscape, the initial riff becoming less and less distinct, as all sorts of other sounds and overtones surface around the main melody. WAY too brief at 2 minutes, that track definitely could have been extended to make this a full length and we would have remained happily entranced.
LIMITED TO ONLY 66 COPIES!! We got a handful, and we got every copy the label had left. The cd-r's are affixed to a block of wood, and the woods is housed in a screen printed and hand sewn fabric sleeve. So nice.
You know when an old friend buys you gift that you don't really need or want, and even though the gift sucks, you're kinda happy they thought of you. That's kinda how we feel about this new Neil Young album, Fork In The Road. I mean don't get us wrong, we're happy to see Neil has finally picked up the electric guitar again after a few years of playing strictly acoustic, and to hear him playing with some old members of Crazy Horse is pretty bad ass. But we have to be honest, while there are some good moments on the album (i.e. rippin' solos from Neil through his mostly homemade guitar rig) it skims dangerously close to the borderline of cheesy, dad-rock territory. Although we do have to say, here at the shop we've been playing it in the store, always in anticipation of this one incredibly awesome/hilarious moment when Neil starts to repeat "cough up the bucks, cough up the bucks" in this weird hip-hop type of chant. So freakin' good. But like a bad gift from a friend, it's the thought that counts, and you can't help but be charmed by the classy ways of Mr. Young.
