Debut release from this New York label and it's a doozy. A long lost post punk gem from Belgium. The band is called AA, and this, their first and only record, was originally released in 1981 and even then was limited to 900 copies. The second we heard "Suicide Fever" we knew we had to get this. More on that track in a second.
Taking cues from their contemporaries, Joy Division, the Fall, Wire, and of course their labelmates Cultural Amnesia (whose reissue we reviewed her recently), the sound is total stripped down, minimal raw new wave post puck rock, jagged chiming guitars, simple motorik drumming, thick buzzing bloopy basslines, and weary heavily accented sung/spoken vocals. Simple effects warp the sound, delay, flange, reverb, echo, each track is short and sharp, one part, MAYBE two, the melodies super catchy, the songs totally mesmerizing, groovy and coldly Teutonic, but always with some strange but of melodic warmth just below the surface.
"Suicide Fever" is the jam though, sounding a little like a less sludgey, more new wave Brainbombs! Total minimal punk pop genius, with a super haunting and hooky main melody and guitar line, those vocals way up in the mix, the lyrics nihilistic and grim, delivered so jadedly, while the bass and drums are locked solid, and the guitars ring out, soaring and chiming, so great. Most definitely the 7" reissue of the year!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one hand numbered.
Electronic. Muysic. Finland. When we see those three words, which appear in small type on the top right corner of the cover to this album, we get pretty excited. Even when Music is spelled Muysic. ESPECIALLY when it's spelled like that. 'Cause that's means it's an Aavikko album. The mostly instrumental Finnish synthesizer/synthesizer/drums trio's new disc, Novo Atlantis, is finally here! Now, each album of theirs has always been a little bit different, but we've always loved Aavikko, from their early "maniacal monkey jazz" days as a lo-fi Casiocore band circa 1997's Derek to their more recent and polished productions of space age bachelor pad exotica like 2005's Back From The Futer.
So what's in store for listeners on Novo Atlantis? Initially we were struck by this album's even MORE electronic sound, taking Aavikko into techno-disco territory, more computery, less live band sounding. Though human metronome Tomi Leppanen (also the drummer for AQ faves Circle) is still behind the drum kit, there's plenty of purely electronic beats and rhythms on here it seems. Yet at the same time, this album also features French horn, trombone, trumpet, tuba, and even church pipe organ!! So while on one had it's all very futuristic (in a spaced out cosmic disco way), this also takes inspiration from way way back, the pre-electronic, classical music era in fact. You could call Novo Atlantis the "switched-on Bach" version of Aavikko, or more precisely, "switched-on Hoppel", Egil Hoppel allegedly being an obscure Finnish composer of the baroque period, discussed in the sleeve notes of Novo Atlantis. Supposedly he was some sort of child prodigy (he only lived 1722-1737!), an organist whose music has apparently become a major influence on Aavikko's new direction. We say allegedly and supposedly since we halfway suspect they made him him up, that he's a hoax much like those "funerary violin" fellows. Probably some quick Googling would resolve the question, but we prefer not to know for sure. If Aavikko invented him, they certainly were thorough about it - there are two purported Hoppel compositions included on the cd format as a hidden bonus track (we won't tell you how to find it, but check out our review of the most recent Agoraphobic Nosebleed disc for a clue!). And having heard those, it does seem like you can hear Hoppel's purported influence right in this disc's very first track, "Syntaksis", which definitely has an Aavikko goes classical feel, like a lot of the stuff here having shades of the "classically trained" approach of all those Moog-laden '70s prog keyboard bands a la ELP and krautrockers Novalis... But don't let that make you think this is somehow stuffy, over-serious or highbrow or whatever, nope not at all, far from it as any Aavikko fan would guess. While it's got its moody moments, most of Novo Atlantis is percolating, infectious electronic fun. Super groovy, quirky, krauty - in the Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder sense of krauty.
The album ends with what must be Aavikko's longest track ever, the 15 minutes of "Novo Atlantis II". Wow, quite an epic, with echoes of Joe Meek's "Telstar" in its melodies, and long mesmeric burbling sequencer trance-outs, something like early '80s Tangerine Dream, Wolfgang Duren, or Zombi's "Sapphire". A Lindstrom remix seems to be in order, where is it? Certainly Aavikko's new album fits nicely into the current disco craze. It also goes well with our obsession with skweee, too. Electronic muysic Finland, hooray!
Recorded back in 2001-2002, Loverboy was originally released as a bonus second disc with the first pressing of the House Arrest album. Later pressings did not include this record, and led many folks to freak out and obsess and do everything in their power to track it down!
So it should come as a delight to outsider pop lovers and Ariel Pink fans everywhere to discover that Loverboy is finally getting a proper release, as a super deluxe double lp. It's the one Ariel Pink record that features the most musical input from his buddy and bigtime AQ favorite John Maus, who co-wrote a few of the tracks and whose instantly recognizable deep croon can be heard on a few other tracks as well. AP also gives a much deserved nod to one of his idols, R. Stevie Moore, kicking out a cover of "Hobbies Galore", and on top of all that, it's also the record where we first got a sneak peak what would become the Holy Shit record that AP would make with Matt Fishbeck, as the track "I Don't Need Enemies" from that record first appeared here.
Like a boy-man running wild in a bedroom filled with demons and a busted 4-track, Loverboy is that boy-man's warped take on AM radio if it was programmed by drugged out visionaries from another planet. Loverboy has some of our favorite Ariel Pink songs to date, and definitely displays AP's range, from the absurd to the profound, hinting at his true potential. Like most Ariel Pink vinyl we're never sure how long these will stay in print, so best act fast if you want to get one of these for your collection.
Oh, the misery! Vying with the likes of Moss and Marzuraan for the title of Sludge Lords of England, Atavist offer up their second full-length (hence the title), following a split with Nadja not long ago. But Atavist are a complex beast with a tortured soul that in some ways is really less about sludge than it is about sheer sadness, opting for beauty over brutality much of the time.
Drums echo. Acoustic guitars weep. And then the walls of doom-drone (droom?) riffage come closing in, crashing down. But although there's heaviness galore, with gruff vokills raging, the gentle side to Atavist is nakedly displayed here too. Tranquil, haunting, Atavist possess almost a campfire drone post rockishness that curdles Khanate-like when the heaviness is let loose. All seven tracks, together something of a continuous emotional breakdown, demonstrate definite extreme mood swings, all of 'em melancholy and majestic, some of 'em massively metal. Actually it's a six-part dirge, plus a bonus track at the end, appropriately enough a cover of "I Hate The Human Race" originally by Boston sludge merchants Grief.
For fans of both Mogwai and Asunder for sure. So good.
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These 4 tracks, built upon signature William Basinksi loops date back to September 29, 1982 (hence the title), and like so many of his recent releases of archival material, they ask the question, "why did it take you so long?" The answer may not be as interesting as the question itself, but the nostalgic look back for Basinski to his own past certainly resonates beyond any notions of solipsism and speaks to something downright universal: an optimism of a half-remembered past. Unlike the masterpiece of the Disintegration Loops, the tracks on 92982 don't crackle and crumble apart as the pieces move forward; but the dust, hiss, and fuzz that have been the trademarks of Basinski loops are all present. The first track centers on a loop of a spacious piano waltzing out of the softened drones of accumulated hiss and soft focus white noise pushed deep into the shadows. The second is a graceful swoon of a composition with delayed rhythmic pock that phases against a swelling ambient loop and occasional interjections of police sirens and helicopters, presumably recorded directly out of Basinski's open window. Another piano loop grounds the third track; this one painfully sad and lilting and made more so by the patina of tape hiss, soft static, and degradation of the source material. An elegant two note loop with a hallowed drone of floating dust completes yet another fantastic William Basinski record. Fans will not be disappointed!
Fuck YES! One of the most unstoppable and prolific projects in recent memory returns with full length #2... we think. Regardless, after a slew of limited run eps and singles, we were curious to see if Blank Dogs could handle the full length format as well as they - sorry, HE - did with the awesome On Two Sides lp a while back. It seems like some people were expecting Blank Dogs to crack under the pressure of increased exposure or in the face of a fiery hipster backlash. Well, we are happy to report that Under And Under more than ably delivers on all of the initial promise, another winner loaded with classic Blank Dogs and one of the most thrilling releases we have heard this year. It's pretty insane to think that someone could just keep churning this stuff out at such a rate with continually awesome results, but Blank Dogs sound as confident, or at least as melancholy, catchy, and propulsive as ever here. In terms of the actual sound, things haven't changed that much, which we consider a very good thing. The fidelity is maybe slightly higher, but just barely. The songs are a little tighter and more suited to a full length rather than an ep, making this one that will undoubtedly bring out more with repeated focused listens. But overall, this is just more of what we have loved since we came across Blank Dogs, with wandering bass lines, reverberated drum machines, super melodic single note guitar leads, and that awesome monotone voice all here in spades. In the end, Under And Under is a sure indicator that when it comes to actual songcraft, the man behind this project is clearly a cut above most others doing the lo-fi garage thing.
It's pretty accurate to mention bands like Joy Division and the Cure when describing this, but the more poppy numbers seem to follow a more Buzzcocksian approach while the transitions to the anthemic choruses are just classic pop. Some of these songs sound like fractured love songs, all warbly with upbeat guitar leads and weird spooky keyboards. They may be for all we know, though lyrical clarity has never really been an issue for Blank Dogs, the voice de-emphasized within the throbbing lo-fi recording almost like another instrument itself. These songs provide a nice contrast to the more menacing numbers, like the acknowledged hit (around these parts anyway) "Setting Fire To Your House" with its ominous bass and distinctive organ lead. Lo-fi but dense, Blank Dogs still sound like a lost Factory Records band being transmitted from some far away galaxy, but the whole album exudes a beautiful dreaminess that just can't be denied. There appears to be no end in sight for Blank Dogs, and we aren't complaining one bit.
Paradigms continues to expand their sonic scope, while continuing to champion awesome and obscure heaviness. A look at past Paradigms releases reads like a list of aQ faves: The Angelic Process, Decrepit Spectre, Fog In The Shell, Gnaw Their Tongues, Hjarnidaudi, Wraiths, Woburn House, Ondo, Titan, Throne Of Katarsis, Utlagr and more, and the oddly monickered Bosnia fit right in. Hailing from Denver Colorado, this trio specialize in filthy, downtuned blackened doom crust, equal parts, Neurosis, His Hero Is Gone and other purveyors of gritty doomic filth, but these guys also inject some serious blackness into their crush and pummel. Woozy clean guitar parts wrap around tribal drumming, before launching into a lurching sprawl of blown out doom-ed black buzz, the vocals a monstrous guttural howl, the arrangements complex and a bit mathy, with stretches of lumbering chug bookending chunks of funereal slow motion crawl, leading straight into awesomely tangled obtuse melodic breakdowns, before exploding into raw feral bursts of punkish blackened pound.
Bosnia might be a bit too punk for the more troo grim metal hordes, but folks who dig shit like Kylesa, Baroness, Minsk, Damad and even sludgier shit like Eyehategod and the like, will probably dig this BIG time.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
A NEW FUCKING BRAINBOMBS RECORD!! And it rules. Heavy and droney and hypnotic and dirgey and AMAZING. Too bad it was limited to 630 copies, of which we only got 8 copies the first time around, when we tried to order 50. Somehow, it's available again, not sure if they found a bunch or pressed up some more, but this time we managed to get a whole TWENTY copies, and again, if we had our way we would have gotten at least twice that many, so needless to say, Brainbombs freaks, and we know there are more than 20 of you out there, you're gonna have to be quick on the trigger, as these might be the last copies we can get, and most likely if they're not gone already, they will be by the time you finish this sentence.
(We can only hope there will be a cd version soon...)
It's great to see these first three essential Sandy Bull lps on Vanguard finally get reissued, as his influence has been felt more and more lately. You can hear Bull's pluralistic presence especially in Sir Richard Bishop, as Bull was among the first key guitar players, along with the UK's Davy Graham, to combine styles and ideas from Middle Eastern, classical, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, chamber music and Appalachian folk sources. Yet Bull wasn't a purist, often pushing and pulling these wide-ranging ideas across instruments both acoustic and electric in ways that searched for the interior truth of the material. These were best expressed in his side-long excursionary tracks called "Blends" accompanied by jazz drummer Billy Higgins. Sadly, Bull had a short-lived career plagued by drug problems and illness, but these records are solid proof of his pioneering role in the solo-guitar genre.
There's even a documentary playing in San Francisco soon made by his daughter, K. C. Bull, that folks should definitely check out!
E Pluribus Unum from 1968 is the most experimental of Bull's recordings and perhaps our favorite. Comprised of two side-long tracks, "No Deposit, No Return Blues" and "Electric Blend" this is Bull's full on electric raga record. Using electric guitar and oud through vibrant tremolo effects, as well as Middle Eastern percussion and finger cymbals, Bull explores some psychedelic Bo Diddley territory channeled through the exotic mystique of Hamza El Din. Similar in vein to what was performed in the recently released live recording from 1969, Still Valentine's Day, time has been good to this recording as it sounds like something far more contemporary than its original critics gave it credit for. Perhaps its abandonment of classical sources and acoustic instruments in favor of more populist and drug friendly musical territory turned the more academically-minded musical purists off. And those druggy influences DID send Bull on a path he was never to return from, only recording one more full album after this one. Yet this record, like no other, captured his furthest exhilarating push into the depths of his musical being before he lost himself for good. Highest recommendation!
It's great to see these first three essential Sandy Bull lps on Vanguard finally get reissued, as his influence has been felt more and more lately. You can hear Bull's pluralistic presence especially in Sir Richard Bishop, as Bull was among the first key guitar players, along with the UK's Davy Graham, to combine styles and ideas from Middle Eastern, classical, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, chamber music and Appalachian folk sources. Yet Bull wasn't a purist, often pushing and pulling these wide-ranging ideas across instruments both acoustic and electric in ways that searched for the interior truth of the material. These were best expressed in his side-long excursionary tracks called "Blends" accompanied by jazz drummer Billy Higgins. Sadly, Bull had a short-lived career plagued by drug problems and illness, but these records are solid proof of his pioneering role in the solo-guitar genre.
There's even a documentary playing in San Francisco soon made by his daughter, K. C. Bull, that folks should definitely check out!
Fantasias (for guitar and banjo) was originally released in 1963, a year before John Fahey's debut turn on uncanny Americana, Blind Joe Death. It's often stuffed in the drawer behind Fahey's dirty socks though, such as it is that over the years, Fahey has taken a larger chunk of real estate in the guitar soli zeitgeist. But if Bull were to be compared with anyone, his playing style is much more influenced by Pete Seeger. Banjo was Sandy's first instrument and it was with a banjo that he first made an impression on the public as a precocious college freshman. Bull freely admits Seeger as being a mentor of his, and his "Carmina Burana Fantasy" is certainly inspired by Seeger's arrangements of classical pieces that were included on his "Goofing Off Suite" LP (released in 1955). But influenced or no, Bull had his own unique style and both his original compositions and arrangements of existing works are as good as much of the works of either Fahey or Seeger. "Blend", the first track which takes up all of side one (22 minutes), is a beautiful Sudanese-esque duet between Sandy on an open tuned guitar with jazz drummer Billy Higgins accompanying. A track that would make the Sun City Girls blush, "Blend", alternates between dark and slow musings from Bull to intense repartee between Bull and Higgins. Higgins does an excellent job of filling in, and avoids breaking the aesthetic by playing sans snare. The remaining four tracks on the album are all solo banjo and or guitar. Along with the aforementioned "Carmina Burana Fantasy", Bull pulls off a nice overdubbed arrangement of English Renaissance composer William Byrd's "Non Nobis Domine" on guitar, a rousing rendition of Appalachian folk ballad "Little Maggie" on banjo and a final piece simply entitled "Gospel Tune" played on a tremelo laden electric guitar.
It's great to see these first three essential Sandy Bull lps on Vanguard finally get reissued, as his influence has been felt more and more lately. You can hear Bull's pluralistic presence especially in Sir Richard Bishop, as Bull was among the first key guitar players, along with the UK's Davy Graham, to combine styles and ideas from Middle Eastern, classical, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, chamber music and Appalachian folk sources. Yet Bull wasn't a purist, often pushing and pulling these wide-ranging ideas across instruments both acoustic and electric in ways that searched for the interior truth of the material. These were best expressed in his side-long excursionary tracks called "Blends" accompanied by jazz drummer Billy Higgins. Sadly, Bull had a short-lived career plagued by drug problems and illness, but these records are solid proof of his pioneering role in the solo-guitar genre.
There's even a documentary playing in San Francisco soon made by his daughter, K. C. Bull, that folks should definitely check out!
Inventions (for guitar, banjo, oud, electric guitar and electric bass) from 1965 is considered to be Bull's best record as it fully covers his wide-ranging tenacity in interpretation and composition. Beginning with "Blend II", another side-long composition accompanied by Billy Higgins, the playing is born of a dark mystique, carving out bits from free jazz melodic motifs, and early-American folk tunes to Lebanese music and North African popular songs. The interplay between Higgins and Bull is more complex than the first "Blend" on Fantasias, with Higgins' standing on his own as a performer rather than a mere accompaniment. Side one ends with a short electric version of Bach's "Gavotte No. 2", which is repeated in a longer acoustic form at the beginning of side 2. The interpretation of Luiz Bonfa's Brazilian classic, "Manha de Carnaval" shows Bull experimenting with multi-tracking as he plays acoustic guitar, bass and oud. Here, Bruce Langhorne and Hamza El Din display their guiding hands on Bull's playing as Langhorne taught Bull the song, and El Din, the oud itself. "Triple Ballade" is a piece by renaissance composer Guillaume de Machaut, a gothic chamber piece performed with guitar, banjo and oud, while the final piece is Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennesee" a tremelo-laden rocker with Billy Higgins again on drums that sets the stage for the full on raga blues of Bull's third record, E Pluribus Unum!
A new installment of "oppressive necro electronics" from Burial Hex, aka Clay Ruby, who when not whipping up these abject clouds of filthy black ambience, spends his time rocking out psychedelically in Jex Thoth, getting filthy metal in Wormsblood, and creating all manner of folky weirdness in Davenport (besides running the kick ass Skulls Of Heaven label).
But Burial Hex is so far removed from Ruby's other combos, they barely warrant mentioning. Burial Hex is the sound of some ancient black ritual, some sick sonik sorcery, where, guitars wind around electronics, and are all smeared into thick heaving slabs of doomdronedirge. The first of two tracks here however sounds bit different that what we're used to, introducing vocals, a howled feral wail, that ends up making this sound like some post industrial blackened Oxbow, minimal guitar strum, bursts of static, fragments of electronic skitter, creepy and atmospheric but super ethereal and hauntingly tense.
The second track returns to more familiar territory, a long sprawling slow motion doomscape, downtuned guitars draped over fractured electronics, bits of shuffling minimal percussion, warm whirring church organs, samples and found sounds, all very mysterious, subtly folky, damaged and abstract, and very very cinematic.
Never heard of Zola Jesus before, but they're a good match for Burial Hex, countering with their own sort of blackened soundscapery. A softly whirling cloud of glitched out electronics, disembodied vocals, almost choral sounding, swirling swooping effects, shards of new wave-y synth, eventually transforming into a nightmarish industrial creep, doused in more effects, all wrapped in thick billowy sheets of downtuned rumble, slipping from spaced out otherworldliness to grim, blackened, doom drenched dronemusick.
Pressed on super thick vinyl and housed in gorgeous matte sleeves, all the text printed in clear reflective ink.
Latest from this one man UK avant black metal outfit, whose Temporary Antennae record on Profound Lore we raved about a while back, a four song ep that like Temporary Antennae, and most of the other Caina records, veers all over the place, taking seemingly disparate sounds and parts, and weaves them all together into something cohesive and compelling, mysterious and a bit bizarre.
The record opens with some sunshiney post rock, all warm sun dappled synths, simple drums, whooshing major key shimmer, epic and majestic and pretty, which only makes the second track that much more menacing, with it's overdriven crumbling guitars, its growled demonic vokills, its weird spaced out arrangement, more doom than black metal, until the song revs up and blasts blackly before slipping into something much more abstract, the vocals remain, but the music transformed into something more jangly and poppy, the sound once again shifting back toward something blown out and blissy, a soaring emotional coda that does not at all match the song's ominous beginning.
The third track is the most fucked up of the bunch, beginning with some plodding, weirdly melodic depressive black metal, before everything drops out leaving just the guitars, to unwind some folky fluttery melodies, over subtle bass throb, and warm synth swells, eventually dropping out completely, leaving just some sampled voices, which just so happen to be Jim Jones from the People's Temple recorded in Guyana, creepy and fucked up for sure, the music shifts to match, a lurching start stop that sounds a bit like the recent Funeral Mist.
The final track begins with some almost-cheesy Goblin-y soundtracky synth, laid over some simple shuffling drumming, spidery minor key guitar, post rocky and drifty and dreamy. About halfway through, some warped metallic chug gradually builds into a pounding math metal workout, again all very major key and epic sounding, gradually becoming less and less epic, as the sound shifts slowly toward a more raw and blasting blackness.
Cool stuff, definitely twisted and confusional, but we're beginning to think that's precisely why we dig Caina so much...
Lula Cortes will always be a big time AQ favorite for two reasons: the beautifully blissed out album he was involved with in the group Satwa, and the amazing record he made in 1975 with Ze Ramalho, Paebiru. That was an album that foreshadowed much of what would be heard in the underground music scene for decades to come and still sounds so mystical, mysterious and engaging all these years later. Rose De Sange is a 1980 album by Cortes that finds him in much more of a song based mood, but still displaying a healthy dose of weirdness and armed with a distinctly unique musical vision. There is a more prog-like feel to the sound of this record which also showcases his vocals way more then we heard on Paebiru. It's definitely an album that takes a few listens to really get into, but once you're in, it for sure holds up on its own, as opposed to constantly being compared Paebiru, because it's a much different beast, yet still filled with enough of its own magic to make it a worthy addition to any eclectic music lovers collection.
On first glance, you might assume this was a black metal record. The cover is all black, with intricate metallic silver inked designs, a strange pentagram like shape in the center, pentagrams on all four corners, there's even an upside down cross in the band logo. But then you realize the band is in fact called Cough. And that all around that strange pentagram like sigil in the center are the distinct shape of pot leaves.
Then the music starts with a solid 15 seconds of high end solid state feedback, before the band kicks in, and we are suddenly in druggy slow motion ultra stoner doom country, and we like it. In fact it's almost three minutes of nearly continuous Eyehategod style feedback, separated by the occasional crash of the band, before the song really kicks in, and then the band lock into a lurching druggy stoner groove, more Electric Wizard than Eyehategod, but still plenty of both. Clean vocals carry the melody, but harsh blackened shrieks pepper the landscape, the riffs huge churning downtuned black swells, about as slow as a band can get while remaining even slightly 'groovy'. And don't worry, throughout, the band pause now and again to unleash lightning bolts of high end feedback, before lurching back into action.
And so it goes. Six long songs, each blessed with a handful of kick ass riffery, oozing hate and distortion and filth and crust, the rhythms staggering from doomic plod, to druggy slither, to an almost rocking pound, the riffs slipping into Sabbath territory, but usually straying much further south. The band dabble here and there in tripped out space rock, getting a little psychedelic, the vocals wreathed in effects, the melodies crazy catchy, but no matter what, they thankfully never wander too far from their gloriously filthy fucked up drug drenched doom-ed sludge.
The truly "true" amongst you, metal-wise, should already be familiar with the German hellions known as Sacred Steel. We've given horns-up reviews to several of their more-metal-than-thou albums in the past. Dawn Of Winter is Sacred Steel's doom metal side project, featuring two members of that band, guitarist Jorg Knittel and, crucially to our enjoyment of it, vocalist Gerrit Mutz, whose unusual wavering wail, as we've said before, comes off like a cross between Scott Reagers (Saint Vitus) and Jello Biafra!
Dawn Of Winter have been around for years and years (since 1990) but haven't made that many records, possibly 'cause sloth is their modus operandi, playing as they do the lethargic, lumbering strains of traditional doom metal. This is only their 2nd full-length. You could say we were slow too, in reviewing this, as The Peaceful Dead came out last year ('twas in heavy rotation in Allan's iPod around Christmas time). Perfect for the bleak winter months of course, but now it's gotten better US distribution and we've managed to get a few for the store.
Whilst Sacred Steel are almost always speedy, with the occasional doomy detour, in this band Knittel and Mutz fully indulge their love of all things slow and low. Indeed, opening track "The Music Of Despair" is a doom/cult metal shoutout of sorts, the lyrics making references both subtle and overt to a bunch of DoW's favorite bands, including Penance, Manilla Road, Witchfinder General, Mercyful Fate, Angel Witch, Cirith Ungol, Pentagram, Saint Vitus, Pagan Altar, Reverend Bizarre, Candlemass, and of course Black Sabbath.
The other nine tracks here pretty much do their utmost to live up to all that, with plodding tempi, gothic imagery, loud-soft dynamics, and dramatic crescendos. Soooo dramatic! Mutz's hammy (but sincere) thespian delivery is perfectly suited to the melancholic majesty of this music, songs that are seemingly weighted down by the crushing distortodoomidelic guitar accompaniment, o'er which Mutz' emotive vocals are declaimed.
So, if the epic doom metal of the Heaven & Hell and Candlemass albums reviewed here recently has whet your appetite for even more in the way of hoary, Sabbathy riffs and wizened wizard vocals, and you're down for something a little more underground as well, then Dawn Of Winter might be just the ticket.
We'd have highlighted this, too, but are aware that DoW are only for the "true"!
If two albums released at the same time (Microcastle/Weird Era Continued) wasn't enough Deerhunter for you, then here are five more hazy gliding pop gems for your pleasure! More rocking with less sheen, Bradford Cox and the boys seem to be channeling classic-era Breeders with sharp songwriting and satisfyingly shimmering pop hooks. Perfect Summer Listening!
It's weird to think that in the current climate of rock reunionism, there's probably not a single band you loved when you were younger that you can't imagine reuniting, touring, even making a record. It's even weirder to think that once that band did get together, they might make a record the rivals any of their classics from decades earlier, and while Farm is no Bug or You're Living All Over Me, it's really not that far off. Especially considering what you might expect from a band making a new record nearly 25 years since their debut. Even harder to believe with a band like Dinosaur Jr, whose acrimonious (to say the least) breakup had most of us assuming they would never speak again, let alone write and record and tour.
But here it is, record number two since the original Dinosaur lineup reunited. 2007's Beyond was great, and Farm just rules. It's heavy, catchy as hell, the band are tight, Mascis' voice sounds exactly the same, his leads are wild and all over the place, and while we never thought we'd be hankering for some seriously jammed out guitar rock, Dino Jr. makes us wonder how we did without it for so long. Some of the tracks on Farm ("Pieces") are so catchy and so rocking, they sound like they could have been Bug outtakes. Farm is even more like an old Dinosaur Jr. record as bassist Lou Barlow (Sebadoh, Sentridoh, Folk Implosion) contributes a couple of his old songs, and unlike the old days, when his tracks were gorgeous sad boy 4-track loner folk gems, his two tracks here are dense and intense, super heavy, super catchy melancholy rockers, that sound like kick ass Sebadoh jams, and have us hankering for a new record from those guys too!
We're getting tired of reunions like everyone else. Not every band we loved needs to come back from the dead, and most already have a catalog that's pretty perfect without adding some modern sub par attempt at relevance, but fuck, it's tough to argue with a record as good as Farm, and a band who still kick as much ass as Dinosaur Jr.
While they last (not long we're guessing), we have the deluxe version, with a 4 song bonus track, which includes two Dino originals, a Zombies cover, and a cover of a psych pop classic by Elyse Weinberg.
A strange mixture of soaring vocal harmonies and odd rhythms, the Dirty Projectors genius lies in surprise. Surprising rhythms, surprising changes, surprising harmonies, some of which can take a few listens to really understand. What gets stuck in your head, though, is a vocal line here, an "oooohhhh-ahhhhh" there. The musical backdrop, at times, is almost Shaggs-like in its jerky stagger and serves as a counterpoint to the chorus of female vocal layerings. There's a lot of great guitar work in the quieter moments, sort of a what-if-Devendra-Banhart-played-in-Animal-Collective vibe. "Two Doves" takes the band on a Nick Drake guitar-and-strings trip, except with female vocals. Dirty Projectors have been compared to the Talking Heads and there is definitely some similarity in both band's artistry and skewed takes on traditional pop.
The always intriguing and aesthetically striking Utech label is on a rumbling roll! Of their three newest releases, we made Aluk Todolo's Finsternis a Record Of The Week last week. Gog's Mist From The Random More is one of this week's Records Of The Week too. And then there's this, which is pretty awesome too, if you're into the more extreme end of textural abstract electric drone-groan. Three-for-three for Utech as far as we're concerned!
You might expect "holes and disused shafts" to be quiet places. Not so, if the ominously noisy soundscapes of French experimentalist Olivier Dumont are any indication. The holes where he goes are alive with chaotic crackling electric intensity, densely detailed distortion. Utterly satisfying stuff for those of us into this sort of sonic grit.
Dumont's Utech debut consists of five tracks, about 44 minutes total, all varied in approach and relative levels of "noisiness". It starts off with perhaps the most menacing cut, "Room 237", recorded solely with "buzz cable" (probably a patch cord connected to an amplifier, though we also could imagine something more massive and industrial, like some sort of repurposed undersea telecommunications cable). Switching to tape recorder and then feedback guitar for his sound sourcing, Dumont conjures sounds like buzzing airplane motors and swarming mechanical bees as this disc progresses. The final two lengthy tracks, the 16 minute "R-Grey" and the especially atmospheric album ending title track (9:30), are on the more subdued side, being mysterious organic improvs that draw the listener in rather than grind them underfoot. More beautiful than brutal in the end, this disc is quite recommended for noiseniks.
Nicely packaged in a slender, slightly oversized sleeve typical of Utech releases, with the usual black & white (mostly black) graphics, this is limited to just 500 copies.
Who would have thought that legendary, drug fueled dronemetal miscreants Earth would grow up to be a super tight and twangy, modern cinematic country drone gospel ensemble? But that's precisely what happened. Dylan Carlson and company now evoke sonic landscapes that have more in common with Ennio Morricone or Scenic or Savage Republic or, heck, even Friends Of Dean Martinez or Calexico. These days it would make more sense for Earth to tour with Calexico than Moss or Monarch. They're a new band, one we love, quite a bit, but there is very little of Earth 2 or Extra Capsular Extraction left in their sound.
Beyond that, the new band is stellar, amazing musicians, who apparently can play a live set so perfectly, that we could barely tell it apart from the records proper. Such is the case with Radio Live, an ultra limited live lp, featuring recordings the band in Vienna, Austria in 2007, and live on KFJC in 2007. The KFJC set features guest Trey Spruance from Mr. Bungle (on baritone guitar and sitar!), but even then, these songs sound perfect. If it weren't for the crowd sounds, the applause, and the brief bit of stage banter from Carlson, we NEVER would have guessed this was a live album. More like a collection of alternate versions. That said, this IS truly fantastic, more of Earth's dreamy drone-y cinematic twang, atmospheric and emotional, haunting and musically mysterious.
As with all things Earth, extremely limited, 3000 copies, originally released on cd, but so limited we never even saw a single one, cool cloth-like jackets, with reflective metallic foil stamp artwork, ONE PER CUSTOMER!
This could be a risky proposition: a live band interpreting instrumental versions of songs by one of the most iconic hip-hop groups ever, The Wu-Tang Clan. But the risk pays off, because this band is not only super tight, but they approach the material with an economy of touch, keeping the arrangements minimal and the grooves mean but still highly cinematic. Led by Brooklyn organist and drummer, Leon Michels (who also co-runs, the Truth and Soul label), the El Michels Affair really know how to tap into the sounds of hip-hop source material, the rare groove of '60s and '70s soul, jazz and deep funk, without it being pastiche. Their 2005 debut, Sounding Out The City, proved this was the soul-jazz group to watch, having previously released a single on the Daptone label. It was Raekwon, from The Wu-Tang Clan that tapped El Michels Affair to instrumentally rework Wu-Tang beats for a series of 12"s called The Shaolin Series which led to this full record. Peppered with samples from martial arts movies, the group even venture into some of the Wu-Tang offshoots, including an amazing version of Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" with a chorus sung by kids. Also be sure to lookout for the hidden 37th track! This kills!
Lion Productions' extremely welcome krautrock reissue campaign continues! This reish is another from one of scenemaker Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's labels, Pilz (after one by Guru Guru originally on his OHR label and Sergius Golowin's album on Kosmic Kuriere), and is appropriately trippy. Indeed, it's a minor masterpiece of cosmic-folk that no less an authority than Dag Erik Asbjornsen's encyclopedic krautrock tome Cosmic Dreams At Play calls "absolutely essential".
Emtidi were a hippy duo, Maik Hirschfeldt from Germany and Dolly Holmes from Canada, supposedly brought together by their participation in the Berlin production of Hair (not the first time we've heard such a story about artists from that era!). Emtidi made just two albums in their brief career, a self-titled, not-so-cosmic acoustic folk debut in 1971 (which has also recently been reissued by the way) and then THIS one.
1972's Saat is so special in part because they labored over it in the studio with well-known producer Dieter Dierks, creating a multi-tracked, synth-floating, electronically treated environment to support Dolly's airy and delicate vocals. Her sweet singing reminds us of UK folksters like Sallyangie and Pentangle, while the spaced out music is far freakier (generally placid, but including some acid rock guitar eruptions).
Maik plays vibraphone, synthesizer, bass, flute, guitar, percussion, and also contributes rougher, accented vocals, dueting with Dolly on several of the tracks, taking lead himself on the German-language closer "Die Reise". Dolly, as well as singing so beautifully, plays keyboards, Mellotron, organ and piano. And Dierks also performs on several instruments as well, including more Mellotron.
The album's centerpiece is the blissed out shimmer of the nearly 12 minute "Touch The Sun" but the cosmic journey actually begins with a walk in the park, on opening track "Walkin' In The Park". The combination of mellow, effected guitars/keys and the gentle vocals of Dolly (joined by Maik partway along) belies the stoned humor of the lyrics, something to the effect of: "There's a sign here... keep off... don't sit on the grass, it's too cold for your ass"! Though they do sound quite earnest about it.
As with all Lion reissues, this one boasts a thick cd booklet, with original album graphics, extensive liner notes, and a discography of the Pilz label.
Much black metal has been coming out of Cascadia lately, Wolves In The Throne Room, Fauna, Echtra, but not all is grim and frosty and cold and buzzy and black in the Pacific Northwest. Fearthainne is the work of the two players who make up Fauna, whose Rain record we raved about a while back. But in Fearthainne, all of the buzz and lbuster have been replaced by delicate crystalline guitar, gruff emotive vocals, deep ominous drones, all woven into a slow, drifting, meditative mountain folk.
On the same label that in the past has brought us mysterious sounds from At The Head Of The Woods, The Elemental Chrysalis, Ruhr Hunter, Alethese and Beneath The Lake, Fearthainne sound right at home, blending dense whirring minimal soundscapes, with gentle meditative folk rituals. Long long tracks that slowly blossom, smoldering, clouded in warm browns and cool greys, strings weep and moan, effects gently cradle the various elements, adding texture more than changing the sound. Mesmerizing, trancelike ruminations on nature, on death, on the beyond. Simple percussion demarcates sprawling folk strum and fields of lilting shimmer and and delicate flutter. The vocals are a strange contrast, almost atonal, moaned more than sung, reminding us of solo records by either of the Neurosis frontmen, giving the proceedings a much more ominous vibe, ritualistic and hauntingly spiritual.
Gorgeous in its simplicity, mysterious in its minimalism, Fearthainne is the soundtrack to a land outside of time, of trees towering over a world unspoilt, clouds drifting across empty skies, night turning into day, the cycle of life continuing on, the world and the universe around it gradually moving into a new, more magical existence. Beautifully sublime.
Incredible packaging, full color 6 panel oversized sleeve, amazing images of ancient forests, late night rituals, and the band gathered beneath a mighty tree, cradling a baby, dressed like witches, and looking like a band of bearded forest dwellers (which they may very well be!).
The second release from Jan Jelinek's Faitiche imprint. The first being the too-good-to-be-true, past Record Of The Week, Ursula Bogner collection, a supposed archival compilation of various recordings made by a 40 something housewife who dabbled in electronic music in her spare time. We like to believe it was all real, and not some meticulously assembled hoax, but hell, even if it was in fact Jelinek, it was so well done, it almost makes it better. Almost.
For release number two, Jelinek has convened an imaginary body called the Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples, or Society For The Emancipation Of Samples, more an idea than an acting body (although it seems like Jelinek imagines it eventually being real, or maybe he's just messing with us again), the Society would exist to address the idea of environmental recording, when that recording contains copyrighted sounds. For example, a field recording of a state fair, where one of the rides just so happens to be blasting ZZ Top. Is ZZ Top then entitled to royalties from your recording of the fair? So Circulations is a sonic experiment of sorts, setting up similar situations, where various bits of recordings and samples are broadcast, projected or played in public spaces, which are then recorded, capturing not only those sampled sounds, but also the ambience, voices, footsteps, the sample becoming simply another found sound in a world of sounds waiting to be found. All very interesting for sure, thankfully the actual recordings are pretty fantastic as well. Not sure how much light they shed on the problem/issue, but from a purely listening standpoint they are super cool. Much of the sampled sound seems to be from exotica records, but they are broadcast in various locations which affect the sounds differently, sometimes it's a looped cartoon sounding oboe, wrapped in hiss, with a conversation taking place in the background, other times, there are the sound of footsteps, hidden behind what sounds like a blur of birdcalls and strange malfunctioning computers. Crackling lullaby like melodies wrap around machine like rhythms, the room sound adding all sorts of natural reverb, moody minimal dub loops wreathed in buzz and static drifting through what sounds like a big empty hallway, glitchy electronics and dramatic strings being broadcast amidst the clinks and clanks of a kitchen or restaurant or supermarket, minimal classical music underpins wandering couples, swooping backwards calliope music ringing out in what sounds like a mall or department store, regardless of place, or technique, the sounds and songs here are gorgeous, playful sometimes, haunting other times, the various sounds as important to the pieces and the overall sound as the samples, both elements blurred into one truly fantastic listening experience.
Beautifully packaged in a mini digibook, with extensive liner notes, in multiple languages, a few illustrations and even some footnotes.
Though it's been surprisingly cold here in San Francisco as of late, things are starting to warm up nicely, and if we needed any reminder that summertime is IN EFFECT, Ganglians' Monster Head Room does just the trick. This Sacramento group's lo-fi but somewhat orchestral approach to making bouncy, feel good pop is perfect for this weather, with a playful experimental side (check out the cool sound collage of "The Void" and the field recordings used in "To June") and breezy Beach Boys-esque harmonies blending expertly into the mix almost like another instrument altogether. Even at their more "out there" moments, Ganglians' songs are firmly in the pop realm and will no doubt appeal to fans of Animal Collective, good old '90s indie rock, and even the current crop of Shitgazers. There are plenty of mellow folky moments, but the band is not afraid to rock out either, like on the pounding, white hot "100 Years". Throughout it all, Ganglians have created a shimmering set of densely layered pop gems that we can't get enough of. Recommended!
In a world (our world at least) full to overflowing with drone records, dirge records, doom records, and yes, dirgedoomdrone records, the mysterious Gog have somehow always managed to transcend. From their very first release, the subtly spectacular Noriah Mills, Gog have continued to mine similar territory as so many other soundmakers, but with the resultant whole so much more than its constituent parts.
The music of Gog, while on the surface, perhaps seemingly simple, minimal, abstract, is the sort of sound that requires deep listening, upon which, the guitars then reveal themselves as so much more than electronic tone generators, the long strands of feedback and the layers of dense billowy buzz, so much more than just texture and timbre. And while on past releases, the band hinted at something a bit more black, their occasionally blissed out ambience drifting into darker and darker greys, on Mist From The Random More, the band have fully committed, creating what for them is a haunting otherworldly black metal suite, a droned out, blissed out, buzz drenched, almost static expanse of smoldering grimness, shot through with glimmering glistening effulgence, a bit like wrapping a black gauze around an exploding sun, the results, again, transcendent.
The record begins with a gorgeous, slow burning bit of guitar drone, that owes more to the kosmiche sounds of krautdrone than the downtuned glacial fug of more doom-ed entities. These guitars soar and shimmer, warm gouts of feedback enfolded by deep rich sheets of coruscating soft focus heaviness, any other band would stretch this out to fill up a whole album, and rightfully so, we'd probably be gushing just as much if Gog chose to do the same thing, but these Sunroof-ian solar sonics are only part of Gog's grand vision for Mist From The Random More.
The title track, taking up the bulk of the record, finds Gog fully immersing themselves in black metal, or at least their (very) loose approximation of what black metal is, or could be. The sound is grim, and frosty, but only in the sense that it reflects much of the black metal that came before, in every other way, it's anything but, the guitars glow, the riffs are fluid, organic, wrapped in a soft burnished buzz, that reminds us a bit of Jesu or Nadja, but the arrangement is more Necks. In fact, a shorthand descriptor might be "a black metal Necks", which if you're anything like us, would be all it would take. Simple skittery minimal drumming, almost looped sounding if it weren't so abstract, beneath a roiling cloud of layered guitars, grinding and whirring and hissing, and within that cloud, some gorgeously melancholic low end melodies, difficult to describe the strange blend of loveliness and heaviness, but there it is, a distinctly lovely heaviness, washed out and blurry, and hypnotic and epic and melodic, within this seemingly static structure, the sound swings and slips through various incarnations, moving from total blurred buzz, to a more slowcore lope, always wreathed in swirling clouds of blackened shimmer, until the end, when the track explodes in climax of effects drenched psychedelic churn.
The closing track offers a chance to decompress, a strange assemblage of soothing tones, shot through with streaks of feedback, very cool and clinical, almost a Raster-Noton sort of sound, there's a brief burst of super distorted crumbling sonic chaos, almost Merzbowian in its intensity, transforming into a haunting post industrial doomscape, before again returning to the relative tranquility of the first few minutes, eventually leaving just a single upper register tone, which also finally fades into the shadows.
Another fantastic record from Utech (after a whole mess of incredible releases, including last list's Aluk Todolo Record Of The Week), gorgeous packaging, an abstract skull, rendered in some kind of white dust (cocaine?), on a spare black background, a gatefold with printed liner notes inside, and yes, probably limited...
Record number two from these Midwestern dronelords, with some loose connection to black ambient soundscapers Locrian, even if it doesn't go much beyond playing together and living in the same city. That said, if you dug the Locrian record from a few lists back, odds are you'll dig this to.
There's no black metal woven into the Golden Sores' sound, instead they offer up more of a spaced out krautdrone, ethereral, ephemeral, but somehow still dense and thick and HEAVY. Not sure what the instrumentation is, we'd like to think there are some guitars in there, but it hardly matters, it's what comes out of the speakers that matters, not what goes onto the tape. And what is coming out of our speakers right now is some gloriously heavy, throbbing, pulsating buzzing psychedelic dronemusick. The first track is just some totally divine spaced out new age kosmiche drone, the second is a wall of crumbling blown out distorted buzz, like taking the primordial ooze of Earth or Sunn, and hurling it into the heart of a dying star. The tracks shift after that from deep cavernous rumbles, to billowing clouds of blackened shimmer, to muted snarling buzzscapes, to glimmering outer space druggy drifts, and finally, to a gorgeously sprawling expanse of low end throb, crank the bass on your stereo and you'll have things vibrating right off your shelves, a sound so phsyical, after it's over, merely hearing music without actually feeling it, barely seems like enough.
Definitive deep drone listening for sure, recommended for those of you who gravitate toward the heavier, spacier side of the low end spectrum, as previously explored by the likes of Expo 70, Locrian, Vulture Club, Fear Falls Burning, RST, To Blacken The Pages, Karl Bosmann, Pussygutt and the like.
You know the notion of the wise old hermit sitting on a mountaintop? You'd expect to find an Eastern guru like that up on some Himalayan peak, but of course leave it to a bunch of Swiss and German hippies in the '70s to relocate that mountaintop guru concept to the Alps, and why not? These krautrockers, organized as one of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's "Cosmic Couriers" projects, found the perfect frontman, enlisting Swiss writer/folklorist Sergius Golowin (an expert on both Alpine myths and magic mushrooms, not to mention a friend of fugitive acid maven Timothy Leary) to provide mystic recitations over the Eastern-inspired druggy kraut bliss a-sprawl on this 1973 LSD dipped/tripped/hipped "supersession" happening. Said spaced out sounds generated, via flute Mellotron bongos electronics piano tablas organ glockenspiel & guitars, by a cast of musicians including folkies Witthuser & Westrupp, members of hard progsters Wallenstein, and last but not least, he of much kosmiche cred, Klaus Schulze! Actually, Golowin's echoey German-language spoken vox, while adding to the esoteric atmosphere, really take a back seat to the trancey music found on these three long tracks, the longest and most dramatic of which is the third, "Die Hoch-Keit", at almost 20 minutes taking up all of the original vinyl's second side. It begins like an eerie interlude from a particularly psychedelic Spaghetti Western soundtrack, full of abstract percussive sputter, cascading piano, and whispered vocals, its rhythms eventually coalescing into minimalist, Reich/Reichel style pulsations, having a looping, Moolah-like aspect. It and the other two equally freaky pieces on here make for mind expanding, maybe not exactly relaxing music, having a nervous energy that might have something to do with the general drug vibe... yet some portions of this album are quite angelic. While kraut fiends will want this 'cause it was one of the first of Kaiser's post-OHR Cosmic Couriers label albums, released after Ash Ra Tempel's Seven Up and before Walter Wegmuller's Tarot, even the less obsessed might find this an interesting Astral-Alpine excursion!
It's been reissued before, on Spalax, but this new edition boasts much more in the way of liner notes in the thick cd booklet, including some fairly recent interviews with the late Sergius Golowin himself, who passed away in 2006, a true hippie guru 'til the end.
Back in the early '90s, Robert Hampson made a very conscious transition in how he made music, willfully deconstructing the hypnotic psychedelia he pioneered in his defunct, but still awesome band Loop (whose last two records have just been reissued and are 2 of this week's Records Of The Week!). Initially, these deconstructed songs recorded under the new guise of Main spatialized texturally looped guitars, tricked out electronic effects, and heavy-lidded drones against an architecture of Spartan drums and downtuned bass lines. The first two albums - Hydra-Calm and Motion Pool - offered a competing strategy for what might be defined as 'post-rock,' nestling with the contemporary sounds in Disco Inferno, Seefeel, and the last Slowdive record as a confluence of avant-garde electronics, dark shoegazing ephemera, and British post-punk experimentation. There were hints of Loop's cyclical song-structure flickering within Main's barren albums, and Hampson seemed inclined to make a slow retreat from those rhythmic structures, leaving behind swarms of amorphous tones and vast expanses, razor cut into an homage to the musique concrete masters. Even though Hampson ended the Main project back in 2006, the same strategies are at work in Robert Hampson's "solo" venture. On Vectors, Hampson teases with repetitions of astronaut bleeps, electrical warblings, digitally vaporous static, and wisps of sound design that could build into something off of Hydra-Calm or Motion Pool, but don't. Many folks (including some here) have been frustrated by Hampson's work after Motion Pool, and that sentiment probably won't be changed with Vectors. The three lengthy pieces on Vectors are all commissions with lofty goals of avant electronics; and two of the commissions came by way of the legendary GRM studio in France. In this context as opposed to the Loop / Main axis, Vectors turns out to be a smoldering musique concrete album with acousmatic allusions to the work of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari.
So as Barn Owl made their way home from Austin, Texas this past spring, they made a pit stop in the ominous town of Tulsa Oklahoma to hang out with friend and owner of Digitalis records, Brad Rose. They got into Tulsa just in time, as a huge storm had followed in their wake. And with a dark looming sky of black clouds and the threat of a tornado touching down any second, what else could they do besides stay inside and record some dark psychedelic drooooones? And this they did, and the result is a new project called Hanging Thief, named after the giant, praying mantis-like insect that frequents Rose's porch. Barn Owl, Rose and his wife Eden together sculpt a slow rising monolith that gently creeps up from the cracked Oklahoma soil. Hazy vocals, faint synth sorcery and heavy guitar droning melt together into two 30 minute sides of slow building, grim atmospheric psychedelia. Limited to an edition of 150, this tape is pro-dubbed and decked out in killer hand drawn artwork by Eden, don't be sorry you missed out on this ritual offering of analog sorcery!
Following up their glorious, but sadly very limited edition 78rpm 10" record Foni Tu Argile, A Hawk And A Hacksaw present their latest full length via more modern technological means. As always, the band remain deeply reverent and faithful to the traditional Eastern European gypsy folk styles that they hold near and dear. Their songs rush by at a frenzied pace. It's almost faster than your toe can tap, but the music does spur your limbs into action. We found ourselves moving a bit quicker around the store while it played. Even without our morning coffee fix! So if you've been trying to kick caffeine, maybe consider this a healthy substitute... no, seriously! Check out the wild piano action on "Kertesz" and the twisting horns on "Turkiye". Amazing musicianship! Stunning stuff! They do slow things down briefly for numbers such as the mesmerizing "Raggle Taggle" (though it ends with an unexpected lively clip!) and "I Am Not A Gambling Man", only to start back up again at an even more frantic tempo! If you've dug their previous recordings, this will surely please you a-plenty! Also recommended for fans of Beirut and Gogol Bordello!
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
While they last, we have the super limited version, ONLY 100 COPIES MADE, of which we have less than 20, which includes a second bonus disc, featuring recordings from a sound installation that includes some of the source material for Sever.
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Texas trippers Headdress have been stirring up quite the fuss lately. First Mexican Summer reissues their out of print Turquoise cd-r on wax, and now Brooklyn's infamous No Quarter offers up their most recent effort, an unexpected leap into new territory for this psych/folk turned heavy drone duo. Seems these former folkie nomads have traded their knapsacks and peace pipes for distortion pedals and tube amps, not sure if it's for the better as we really loved the airy country atmospheres the old Headdress did so well. Lunes begins with a buzzing drone that lingers on and on as layers of tremolo organ and distant electric guitar creep in and out. The band have definitely dropped their Brightblack influence and instead traded it for other, heavier influences like Earth 2 or Nadja, not exactly a bad thing, though it seems their new droneyness is a bit flat and lacks the depth of other drone outfits. Their signature shoegazy, dreamy vocals don't appear until the third track, accompanied by a repetitive twangy riff that plods on and on into infinity, like watching the sun fall behind a never-ending horizon, definitely our favorite track on the album as it reflects what really makes this band unique in our eyes. Complete with trippy psychedelic artwork in a nice looking cd gatefold package, don't miss out on this slow burning drift into the golden summer sun.
Two more sidelong tracks from these masters of metallic psychedelic and blown out krautnoise bliss. And as always it's a glorious earful.
The first side starts out all woozy and contemplative, spaced out, but somehow already epic, doused in distortion and feedback, the band build the sound into a dense tangle of muted riffs, murky and washed out, bleary and buzzy, they stretch it out, total trancerock for sure, before eventually blissing out into deep swells of smeared and streaked feedback and warm crystalline shimmer, finally exploding into some full on chaotic supernova psychnoise. But even at it's most freaked out, the sound is still warm and enveloping, all the jagged edges smoothed off, creating a mysterious cloud of sound that manages to be both heavy and intense, laid back and serene.
The second side offers up more of the same, but with the introduction of some dizzying machinelike chugging, draped over long strands of drifty cinematic whir, peppered with bits of spare percussive skitter, all very looped and hypnotic and very very krautrocky. Gradually, the sound expands into a fiery ball of chaotic drummage, wild steaks of psychedelic guitar skywriting and a thick, drone-y, sprawling looped churn that unfurls gradually to the end of the side.
Impossibly both heavy and dreamlike, as if the band we're playing full bore, amps to 11, but we're listening from the room next door, our ear pressed to the wall, or the sound being projected through loudspeakers inside a massive fogbank. Similar to how Skepticism turned doom into something more murky and choral then downtuned and depressive, Heavy Winged continue to drag their psychedelic krautrock through some underwater otherworld, the result something still psychedelic and heavy, but also truly transcendent.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Pressed on heavy transparent grey vinyl, in super thick full color sleeves.
Yet ANOTHER amazing slab of extreme, gnarled grim blackness from the seemingly bottomless depths of the French underground, this time from a horde known as Hyadningar. The Weak Creation is the second full length from these evil wicked warriors, and finds the band whipping up serious storm of grim, technical, melodic black metal, a strange mix of Deathspell-ish complexity, epic soaring melodicism, dour depressive miserablism, and even a hint of Viking metal hear and there.
That's a lot to cram into one sound, or one record, or even one band, but these guys pull it off, twisting those various sounds into something all their own, and then weaving them all together into some strange blackened patchwork. The first song veers from woozy clean guitars and soaring chantlike vocals, to lurching Burzum-y trudge, to haunting almost martial sounding breakdowns with tangled guitar harmonies, military snares, and haunting spoken word, but it all somehow flows, an expansive, complex bit of black metal chaos.
The vocals are frenzied and frayed, maniacal and feral, slipping from shriek to croak to howl, courtesy of Marquis, whose vokills might sound familiar from his time spent in Bethlehem, Funeralium and Ataraxie, and they perfectly compliment the twists and turns and ever shifting arrangements that make up these convoluted epics. Most of the songs here spend the majority of their time blasting along furiously, the guitars dense and jagged, the drumming impossibly mathy and complex, the melodies mournful and intricate, but the band continually mix things up, whether it's a sudden shift into a soaring melodic crooned breakdown, or a warped bit of folky flutter, or exploding into a totally epic almost psychedelic blast of heart-of-the-sun black majesty.
You don't see too many street music ensembles with this kind of pedigree. This Chicago-based 9 piece jazz group, who have spent years touring and honing their craft on street corners worldwide, at least when they're not backing Erykah Badu on a song or opening for the recently reunited Blur at Hyde Park, also features eight sons (from two different mothers) of legendary Chicago trumpeter and A.A.C.M. co-founder Philip Cohran on horns! 2 trombones, 4 trumpets, one sousaphone and a euphonium. The drummer is the only member not related to the jazz great. Formed over a decade ago, after a tragic murder of a younger brother brought the rest of the brood back to Chicago, the brothers united and have been performing and touring ever since. Three self-released and recorded cd-rs have been in circulation since 2004, but this is their first studio effort, afforded them by Alan Scholefield of Honest Jon's who first heard them outside his London Record Store. Not jazz exactly, what the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble play is a form of complex instrumental hip-hop, one player locking in on rhythmic loops and grooves while some orbit in and around the center and others keep the low end steady. There are no solos or "out" moments, the ensemble performs as a single interlocked unit. We bet this would be really amazing live! As a studio effort it sounds great, but like listening to any full on brass ensemble or marching band, there is minimal overall variation, so the sound tires out a bit after awhile. But still, you don't see horn ensembles like this too often, and with pieces by Moondog and Philip Cohran himself, this is still quite a worthwhile listen!
This is a really nice split LP from two up-and-comers in the ever blossoming US post-noise scene. Infinite Body is the work of Kyle Parker, who constructs sustained swarms of sun-blinding guitar noise that sparkles upon undulating surfaces from crosshatched delay patterns. Belong and White Rainbow stand as Parker's closest neighbors, yet his crystal cracked noise enjoys a knife sharpening quality to the overblown distortion that nudges the work just a little bit outside the realm of post-shoegazing psychedelics. A brief Devendra Banhart-like falsetto recorded on a crappy tape recorder emerges between two extended fuzz tracks as a teasing piece of emotional excess despite its brevity of barely 15 seconds.
It's nice to hear more from Emaciator (aka Jon Borges), who had blown us away with his Reflection 2lp not that long ago. Like Parker's Infinite Body, Emaciator transmits a constant stream of overblown noise, but sourced from analog synth and crusty filter boxes. Deftly transitioning through his distorted, shimmering drone with a dense harmonic interplay and almost subliminal melodic passages, Borges creates an entrancing and hypnotic piece that's equal parts Birchville Cat Motel and LaMonte Young. As his blizzard of electricity draws to an end, Borges picks up the guitar with a sadly elliptical chord that winds down gradually.
Excellent stuff to be sure!
It seems like a funny way to discover a band, but somehow we knew we had to hear this Dutch depressive black metal trio based entirely on their logo alone. It's incredible, a miniature forest of textured trees, almost cartoonish, like Christmas trees, with a complex tangle of roots and branches that somehow spells out Irrwisch. In a world full of black metal bands that all have the same basic logo, ooooh some upsidedown crosses, ooooh an iron cross, oooooh we're so kult no one can read our band name. So yeah, a gorgeous stylized foresty logo goes a long way.
Thankfully, these guys make some pretty decent noise as well, a washed out murky grim buzz, that slips from primitive pound to woozy Burzumic lumber, plenty of haunting atmospherics as well, swoonsome synths, the sound of crashing waves, of wind through the branches, some dreamy folky drift, all clean guitar and the sound of rainfall, crickets, birdsong, as if the band were recording in the forest that spawned their logo. But for all that loveliness, these guys can definitely get raw and filthy and frenzied, exploding into furious blasts of relentless black buzz, pounding squalls of gnarled riffage, and the vocals, typically black metal for the most part, but they too come unhinged here and there, slipping into a harrowing howl, the band buried beneath a murky haze, which gives the proceedings a gorgeously blissed out vibe, even when they're spitting black gouts of buzz drenched heaviness.
Strange that we, of all people, didn't realize this before - the Jason Kahn who has been producing extraordinary minimalist compositions and beautifully subtle sound installations in recent years is the same Jason Kahn who had stints as the drummer for mid-'80s, SST bands Trotsky Icepick, The Leaving Trains (one of Andee's all time faves!), and Universal Congress Of. Believe it! Around 1990, Kahn moved to Europe, dropping out of the US art-punk / post-hardcore scene and effortlessly transitioning into the avant-garde improv community in Zurich. He soon began experimenting with feedback systems resonating within the architecture of his drum kit, discovering a vocabulary of noises that have become the building blocks for his current body of work. A man of numerous collaborations (Gunter Muller, Ralph Steinbruchel, Asher, Steve Roden, Kevin Drumm, Jon Mueller, Toshimaru Nakamura, etc.), solo Jason Kahn records don't happen ever so often; and this one on 23five is exquisite!
On Vanishing Point, Kahn's techniques shift a little bit from the feedback bouncing around the innards of his drum kit to a series of colored noises generated from his custom built, patch-bay synth. The album reveals itself as a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned softened noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn's surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
For those familiar with the 23five catalogue, this fits snugly next to those awesome records on 23five from Jean-Francois Laporte and Tim Catlin; and for those who are not, the calm surfaces of Kevin Drumm, the crackled surface noise of Loren Chasse's Hedge Of Nerves, the spectral reflections from Alan Lamb's wire recordings, and even the placid side of Taiga Remains could be jumping off points into this excellent album.
The 2009 return of Germany's completely unhinged Katharsis has proven to be one of the year's best and most evil surprises. The awesome recent split with Antaeus had metalheads wondering what Katharsis had been up to since their essential VVorld VVithout End album from 2006, but like the return of the similarly amazing Funeral Mist with Maranatha, folks everywhere were getting ready to shit all over Fourth Reich based on some vague initial responses from people who obviously have no clue what they are talking about. The big griping point seems to be that Fourth Reich is not as frantic and universe destroying as its predecessor, and there's no denying that the boys from Saxony had their work cut out for them. But after two spins of Fourth Reich it is clear that what we have here is one of the best metal records of the year, no question. Perhaps it is *slightly* less insane than VVorld, but more than anything it seems like the logical extension of that unruly beast, sounding exactly like what you would expect from something recorded at "Rape of Harmonies".
Three of the five songs here clock in at over 10 minutes, giving Katharsis plenty of time to sear your face off with their furious, unrelenting attack. Things kick off as out of control as you could ever hope for in a record with "So Nail The Hearts". In classic Katharsis fashion, the song is blazingly fast and like a tornado taking in everything in its path. And then of course there are those vocals... Try to imagine the general approximation of a demon clawing its way out of Hell, punctuated by moments that sound like a hysterical witch being tortured with some sharpened medieval object. Lyrically, the song tells a tale of blasphemous, Satanic destruction with choice couplets like "Our throats becometh an open grayve; vve'll use our sperm to deceive/the venom of asps is to be under our lipps; vve'll be armed vvith lyonne teethe." Woah. There is a brutal midtempo part halfway in, but even as the band slows for a brief moment, the super windy ambience of the recording keeps you firmly aware of Katharsis' cosmically blackened powers. Most unexpected with this song are the female vocals towards the end. STOP: we already know what you're thinking, and just be aware that this is nothing like what you generally find screwing up lots of black metal. Instead, the presence of the undeniably beautiful voice does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to change the vile tone of this number, in fact, as Katharsis buzzes their way to the song's conclusion, it almost seems like the female vocals are simply there as some sort of religious mockery. Which, you know, is totally fucking awesome.
Next up we have "Eucharistick Funereall", beginning with a punkish riff and more unbelievable shrieking. It's so rad, and impossible to ignore, as we observed with customers desperately trying to focus on which record to buy as this beast buzzed all around them. The guitars are like napalm, and things eventually lead into a super thrashy groove with an uber-heavy D-beat brutalizing your skull. There is a gloomy breakdown with surprisingly melodic guitar melodies wrapped in the non-stop riffing before an awesome rock n' roll ending.
"Reckoning" is pretty much the sound of the black metal holocaust, an unwavering, hypnotic buzz of psychedelic proportions followed by the unexpected synthscape of "Emeralde Graves". Strangely majestic, but also ominous as hell and just plain creepy, this piece is quite cinematic and plausible enough reason to believe that the dudes in Katharsis may own a Goblin record or two. It serves as a cool segue before the final song, "Sinn Koronation", a perfect closer that is slower, dirgier, and maybe even heavier than anything else on the record. Of course, things do reach lightspeed eventually with a very METAL guitar solo, but after a few minutes, Katharsis go back into their hateful lurch. Interestingly, their slower moments are incredibly powerful, not only on their own, but especially in contrast to the majority of the record. When Katharsis get all doomy toward the end of the song, it's like they've decided to just leave your mangled body in the wreckage they created, and then synths take over for a beautiful ending to an ugly, ugly record.
You get the impression that this band is unstoppable. They certainly sound like it. When one thinks about how reactionary parents have responded to metal over the past four decades, it usually turns out to be a whole lot of concern over nothing; Katharsis is exactly what they *thought* you were listening to all these years. So basically, we're giving this one our highest possible recommendation.
Few cosmic sonic explorers can evoke the mysterious druggy sounds of the astral plane quite like New Zealand space drone raga one man project Lamp Of The Universe, who has returned once again to guide us on this, our latest journey through a warm whirling tripped out soundworld of acoustic guitars and buzzing sitars, of chantlike vocals and simple hypnotic rhythms, of glimmering effects and washed out dreamlike drift.
It's been almost two years since we reviewed the last LOTU, and since then the Lamp seems to have undergone a bit of a change, most of the sounds are still present, and still sound divine, but now vocals play a way bigger part. We were wary for sure, we prefer our spaced out dronerock instrumental generally, or if there must be vocals, then just chanting or some sort of wordless vocalizing, but LOTU manages to pull it off, there is in fact actual singing. LOTU mainman Craig Williamson has an appealing reedy croon, that is not heavily effected, but just enough, draped in reverb and echo, there are plenty of oooooh's and aaaaah's, but the vocals proper are pretty cool, in fact, the main thing the vocals do is make this sound less like some abstract space drone record, and more like some lost seventies raga folk record, which is definitely a good thing.
While some of the tracks are still washed out drifts of buzzing synth and sitar, others are haunting laments, populated with banjos and fluttering flutes. Gorgeous.
If you ever wondered what it might sound like if some seventies British raga folk got all tangled up in some dreamy ambient drone-y space rock, well then this will most definitely hit the spot.
We all went pretty nuts for Josh Lay's Poison Drinker, a glorious slab of decaying black noise, but not like SKKKKKRGGHHH noise, no this was something much more nuanced, still harsh and grim, but layered and tripped out and psychedelic and damaged and demented and buzzy and droney, THAT kind of noise. A follow up 7" offered more of the same, but with some added blackness, even some fucked up evil vokill action. Besides creating all this sonic sickery, he also plays drums for the mighty Cadaver In Drag. Needless to say, we figured we oughta track down anything we could get our hands on by this guy. There's a new full length cd coming soon, but until then, we have this limited cassette to tide us over. Well at least a few of us. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, they're almost gone, we got the last little handful, so if you want one of these, gotta be quick. And believe us, you DO want one of these.
Thick, grinding, crumbling dronescapes, textured and layered, thick and constantly changing shape and sound and timbre, buried melodies, throbbing muted rhythms, the various strands occasionally coalescing into something almost metallic, sometimes splintering into jagged shards of pulsing low end buzz. Streaks of skree stretch across the sky, a delicate sonic latticework in the background, while up front, an oozing, whirring black cloud of muted crunch, and smeared chaotic shimmer are fused into a heaving expanse of suffocating doomdrone sickness. Warm and woozy and noisy and intense and epic, and like everything else we've heard from Lay, fucking awesome.
Again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. We have maybe 8 left. Blue tapes, full color J-cards, each one hand numbered.
The final two installments in the long overdue comprehensive Loop reissue campaign are finally here. World In Your Eyes, the newly expanded 12" collection, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this right here, the final proper Loop album, A Gilded Eternity.
Contemporaries of legendary drug rockers Spacemen 3, Loop took the same sonic influences but rocked a little harder, opting out of the extended soporific drifts the defined the Spacemen, (although they were perfectly capable of blissing out with the best of them) and instead creating looped, krautrock spacejams, that were downright heavy, as well as being space-y, druggy and surprisingly catchy. Guitars were fuzzed out, vocals way down in the mix, reverb and delay EVERYWHERE, riffs often processed into stuttering textures and looped rhythms, the drums alternatingly motorik and skeletal, and pounding and explosive, all wreathed in a glorious otherworldly haze.
A Gilded Eternity, their final record, originally released in 1990, might just be their heaviest and most rocking yet, definitely their tightest, album opener "Vapour" has one of those riffs TO DIE FOR, the main melody is so completely catchy, the song a woozy, repetitive chunk of gloriously propulsive dronerock, less space-y than much of what came before, but definitely more rocking and relentless. the next track "Afterglow" pushes that new heaviness even further, sounding not unlike Swervedriver, big crunchy distorted guitars, pounding tribal drumming, the arrangement a lurching start stop, that slips into cool washed out breakdowns, before exploding right back into the stuttery groove. And so it goes, the band unfurling their masterwork, in a career of masterful works, "Blood" is total abstract minimal krautrock, the guitars stripped away, leaving just a super spare drum part, wrapped all up in processed vocals and swirling effects, another jam that easily could have gone on for 10 more minutes. But then just like that, the band slip back into "Breath Into Me", whipping up another killer riff, the track a looped space garage groove that rivals record opener "Vapour". The record proper ends with the nearly 10 minute "Be Here Now", the Loop version of a slow jam, beginning with some strange processed guitar, the band ease into a languorous groove that drifts druggily through soft focus clouds of lysergic buzz, brief squalls of wild wah guitar, but remaining locked and looped, the weary vocals drifting above the warm endless buzz.
A Guilded Eternity comes with a bonus disc as well, perhaps the least critical of the bonus material, considering it contains 5 demo tracks and 3 Peel Sessions, BUT, it also includes the Loop track "Shot With A Diamond", which happens to be Jim's favorite Loop track alongside "Arc-Light." This track provides the perfect sonic segue between Loop and the sounds guitarist Robert Hampson would later explore with his post Loop solo project Main, an ominous bit of electronic sample laced dronemusic, creepy and haunting and so fucking awesome. Previously only available as a 7" single, and as a bonus track on the original cassette version. Essential!
In fact, all four of these Loop reissues are absolutely required listening for anyone with even the mildest interest in sounds space-y, druggy, metallic and psychedelic!!!
Finally!! Ever since the first two Loop records got the deluxe multidisc reissue treatment, we've been anxiously awaiting the last two, their final record A Gilded Eternity, and this one right here, many folks around here's favorite, a compilation of 12"s called World In Your Eyes. Originally released in 1987, the updated World In Your Eyes, is even better, a TRIPLE disc collection of 12"s, 7"s, bonus tracks, unreleased tracks, demos, and covers.
Seemingly always (unfairly) overshadowed by their sonic brethren the Spacemen 3, Loop managed to give the drugged out drone rock thing their own distinct spin, infusing some serious krautrock mesmer and some metallic muscle into their slow burning drones and effects drenched psychrock workouts. Slipping easily from super dreamy one riff blown out hypno rock, to in-the-red space garage pound, to hushed soft focus inner space drift, Loop were masters of modern psychedelia.
Take the 10 minute drug drift of "Burning World", with its processed guitar chug, the swirling clouds of effects, the blooping bass, the motorik drums, like the perfect mix of Can and Hawkwind. Or "Brittle Head Girl", which sounded like a spacier more tripped out Galaxie 500, its lazy drawled vocals, and woozy guitar hook, and that irresistible bassline. Or "I'll Take You There", a super fuzzed out bit of garage-y space groove, the band easily out spacing the Spacemen themselves. We could probably go track by track, every one here is a gem, and the extras! Holy shit. Where to start? Besides a plethora of demos, live tracks and the like, this collection also includes some incredible covers, A spaced out version of a Pop Group track, Neil Young's "Cinammon Girl", Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" and Can's "Mother Sky (which Andee sez is better than the original, yeah we know, we know). Then there's the Arc-Lite 12" that takes up the first half of the third disc, one of our favorite Loop eps, and the track "Arc-Lite (Sonar)" is one of the best Loop jams ever, with its relentless riffing, it's strange flurries of tribal drumming, the echo drenched vox and the swooping streaks of effects, a 4 minute song that could easily have been ten times that. The song is reimagined as the "(Radar)" version, getting sort of supercharged, heavier and fleshier, less spare and skeletal and jangly than the original. There's a third version still, that gets all remixed into something less space rocky and more tripped out and dizzying. Let's not forget the ten minute "Sunburst", a sprawling bit of lysergic minimal krautdrone, woozy and druggy and slow burning. There's also the legendary live Prisma Europa Live 12", and finally, to top it all off, Loop's Godflesh cover, from their Loopflesh split 7", where each band covered the other, one of our Holy Grail 7"s, if anyone out there has one they can part with, we will be forever in your debt, and of course it's a killer, Godflesh's "Like Rats" transformed into something much spacier but no less menacing, in fact, it's most definitely the heaviest meanest slab of Loop-age ever, while still retaining plenty of that Loop-ed FX drenched shimmer. So goddamn GREAT.
These reissues have been shuffling tracks around enough to cause a little confusion, as some of the tracks on the original issue of WIYE are left off here, but are tacked on elsewhere on the other reissues, and disc 3 here seems like it could have been included on the Gilded Eternity disc as this disc highlights one of our favorite Loop tracks, the above mentioned Arc-Light, originally a 1989 single, which was lumped onto the cd edition of A Gilded Eternity which came out a year later in 1990. But who really cares, as long as it's all here, and it's ALL here, and then some. Space rock and drone rock and psychedelic rock fanatics should buy all four, one of the most supremely transcendent and kick ass bodies of work in rock. Hyperbole? We think NOT.
Killer packaging, three paper sleeves with various reproductions of the included 12"s, all housed in a slipcover, with a booklet that includes track listings credits, but sadly, not much in the way of liner notes.
Supergroup - or as Julian Cope would put it, stuporgroup - doom action here folks! Even before we heard it, we were chuffed about Lord Vicar's debut full length. We'd already had a taste of the Vicar via their 7" last year on I Hate Records, and so as soon as we heard there was an album out we HAD to have it... we made contact with the label in Germany directly, and now some weeks later here they are. Even if we hadn't heard that 7", this is a no-brainer for anyone (like us) into traditional doom metal, just based on the heavyweight pedigree of the band's members. From Sweden, singer Christian Lindersson aka Lord Chritus, former frontman for Count Raven, Terra Firma, and (on the album after Wino left the band) the legendary Saint Vitus! From Finland, guitarist Peter Inverted formerly Peter Vicar, of Reverend Bizarre (R.I.P.) as well as VDGGish progsters Orne. From England, drummer Gareth Milsted of Centurion's Ghost. Also from Finland, there's bassist Jussi "Iron Hammer" Myllykoski who is not from any band we know of, but makes up for it by having a cool nickname. And then, giving this even more cult cred, there's a guest guitar solo on one song by Don Angelo Tringali of Slough Feg and Cold Mourning from the USA.
If any of these names mean anything to you, you know you're gonna be well and truly doomed when you put this on. There's slo-mo, mouldering witchburning riffs played on loud, fuzzed out axes, hand in cloven hoof with the weepy, whiney, sometimes effected and always affecting vox of Lord Chritus, extremely Ozzy-esque yet utterly distinctive. Anything with these guys is gonna be steeped in Sabbath-iness. And as Peter Inverted's post-Reverend Bizarre project, this basically sounds a lot like his old band (and thus also like Sabbath, and Sleep, and Cathedral...) but with a few new wrinkles. The songs on Fear No Pain range from the super sludgy to a plodding swing to even more uptempo ("The Last Of The Templars" is in the rockin' mode of "Cromwell" by RB for sure). In addition there's some morosely folky parts that also remind us of Witchcraft, Lord Vicar certainly having supped from the same '70s folk-prog nectar-filled chalice as those Swedish retro doom sensations. Especially on this album's last track, the truly epic 14 and a half minute "The Funeral Pyre" which begins all acoustic-guitary before eventually unleashing monumental riffage (echoing Sabbath's "Lord Of This World" perhaps), all of which is graced by Chritus's most raw and lachrymose performance, almost a la Paternoster, ending this album with a heavy '70s prog vibe indeed...
For fans of all the bands abovementioned, no doubt, also the likes of Witchfinder General, Electric Wizard, Solstice... heck you get the idea. Highly recommended to all doomhounds.
Flailing long hair, jamming guitar solos, and gruff vocals (in Spanish). Weirdly looming desert cacti with electric instruments. Astral drug trips to the tops of holy mountains. Thick clouds of marijuana smoke forming into the shapes of totemic birds and animals. Campfire acoustic ceremony. And utter, utter HEAVINESS. Oh yeah, these guys from way down south in Argentina are one of our favorite "stoner rock" bands ever. We sound stoned just talking about 'em.
We've been fans of Los Natas for around ten years now, ever since we heard their 2nd album, Ciudad De Brahman, released in 1999 by thee primo purveyors of stoner rock, Man's Ruin, now defunct. In a world of approximately 1,257,523 Kyuss clones (about half of 'em from Sweden, according to the most recent data we have available), Los Natas stood out as particularly excellent example of the Kyuss style desert rock thing, fat guitar tone and all. And then, they took that sound and went all wonderfully weird with it, releasing a couple "Toba-Trance" discs of folk-flecked, pot-headed, spaced-out '70s sounding progginess on the Finnish label Ektro, run by another AQ fave band, Circle. And yet they also managed to get even heavier and more aggressively metallic elsewhere on other albums, like Corsario Negro and Le Hombre Montana. It's been three long years since we last heard from 'em, and wow, this new one could be their best yet!
As displayed by the fierce urgency of the storming, spiraling, and very metal instrumental "David Y Goliath" to then the hushed and lovely contemplative string-pluck of "Bienvenidos" that immediately follows it, El Nuevo Orden De La Libertad provides everything we want from these South American fuzzfreaks. It's loud, pounding and grinding, sooo heavy and rockin', yet with many memorable, melodic moments. And their interest in sprawling spaced out krautrocky improvs hasn't exactly abated, with detours into a nod-zone of blissful piano/acoustic guitar interplay (on final track "Dos Horses" ferinstance, that reminds us of Circle's Miljard) and stuff like that, as Los Natas wander about a mystic desertscape, dreaming and destroying with drug-fueled fervor.
We've said it before, and we'll say it again. As much as we love Japan's Boris, there's no reason that this equally heavy and psychedelic band shouldn't be as adulated.
We'd never normally accuse the Finders Keepers Label of being slow on the draw, having turned us on to so much stuff we wouldn't know about otherwise. But we thought it a bit odd that they just released this Jean-Pierre Massiera compilation so soon after the Mucho Gusto label released the two incredible Psychoses compilations (Discoids and Freakoids) showcasing the eccentric prog, pop and disco productions of this incredible French mad genius. Yet while there is some crossover (six songs here are also on the Freakoids comp; three are also on Discoids), there is about half of Midnight Massiera that's from other outfits not featured on those two previous comps. Some we've heard of (Les Maledictus Sound, who contribute two tracks), others we've heard of but didn't realize Massiera was involved in their production (Chico Magnetic Band and Chris Gallbert, the same track featured on the awesome earlier Mucho Gusto comp, Total Freak Out!), and finally there are a few groups totally new to us: the spaghetti western Moog weirdness of S.E.M. Studios; the one and only Jesus, who contributes two tracks - one loungey freak beat, the other melancholy folk; a percussive fuzz interlude by Atlantide, and the cinematic psych-folk of Afterlife. Visitors, Hermans Rocket, Human Egg, Basile (with two tracks) Les Chats, Les Monegasques, The Pyranhas, and The Starlights make repeat appearances. Folks who already have the two previous compilations (plus the Les Maledictus Sound, Visitors, and Chico Magnetic Band albums, as well as the Total Freak Out compilation), may not want to shell out more for this. But for a one-stop Massiera compilation, this is very wide ranging and well curated, featuring most of the best of the Mucho Gusto compilations, as well as our favorite tracks from Les Maledictus Sound. If you haven't already purchased any of the previous Massiera related releases available, and need a really good introduction, this one will do quite nicely!
Everyone loves the '80s right? Well, no, but that doesn't mean that we can't take the good stuff that the '80s created and turn it around and make it better. That's what Monozid (from Leipzig, Germany) does time and time again on their debut full-length. There's a few post-punk bits, an early Sonic Youth noise-guitar element, and a lot of Three Imaginary Boys/Seventeen Seconds era Cure, but all of it topped with a 21st century sensibility. Monozid is not re-hashing old tricks worn out twenty years ago; they're using what came before to make great modern pop music. Some songs are instrumentals, the remaining are either sung in German or English. With song titles like "Du Bist Mein Mann, Sabrina" ("You are my man, Sabrina") we wish we could speak more than infant-German to understand just what they're singing about! Recommended.
One of the four brand new Bardo Pond related releases on Important, Moon Phantoms is the mystically monickered dream team of Bardo Pond, Alasehir, and Japanese guitar noise masters Suishou No Fune! And if you're not totally sold yet, take it from us, this is two killer sides of dreary, drugged-out, improvised avant-rock for deep listeners only! Quiet guitar wanderings, distant bells and percussion, Suishou No Fune's signature vocal bursts, all slowly evolving into slow driven instrumentals with pounding drums and epic atmospheric noise guitar. Reminds us a lot of Hash Jar Tempo with a dark, sinister twist. According to Pirako Kurenai of Suishou No Fune, the band name came from a recent tour with Alasehir in which both bands discovered a peaceful likeness with the moon amidst the stresses of being on the road. Which makes sense because the album totally possesses this dark and ominous, but peaceful quality, like being at the beach at night or in a forest cabin in the dead of winter. Beautifully and masterfully improvised, this is all killer and no filler, each note lifted into the air and left to fall back to the ground with perfect placement. Beautifully epic and musically rich, limited to an edition of 500, don't miss out on this nocturnal gem!
