An amazing kind of soft-psychedelic breeze must be blowing over whatever strange and mysterious land Numero Group call home as their two most recent recent deep vault discoveries have both sizzled in a soft psychedelic glow of vibrant color. Last time we heard from this always amazing reissue/rediscovery label it was the late 60's psych-pop delights offered by Pisces. This time out it's the early '70s soft psychedelic soul of 24 Carat Black. Conceived, produced and orchestrated by the amazingly talented Dale Warren whose delicate touch can be heard on various records released on Motown and Stax including choice cuts from Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Eddie Floyd and Albert King. As seductive and rich in his orchestration and production as fellow soul magic makers like Charles Stepney and Norman Whitfield, Warren also had a kind of vivid imagination and singular vision much like aQ fave David Axelrod. He took a little known Cincinnati group called The Ditalians under his wing and had them change their name to 24 Carat Black and released their 1973 album Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth on Stax. A record that has become big time fodder for rare groove lovers and was sampled by hip-hop artists like Digable Planets and Young Disciples.
While that record has enjoyed cult-status by a new generation, it was, sadly, a commercial flop, so the follow up record was never released. Luckily Numero Group has given this deeply satisfying record the day in the sun it so rightly deserves. This is a record filled not only with a soft psych-soul vibe but also such intense emotional weight and an overall feeling which should speak loudly to fans of What's Going On era Marvin Gaye, Rotary Connection and Ramp. We also get the feeling that if she hasn't already, Erykah Badu would find so much inspiration here, and these guys would for sure be kindred soul spirits. Truly a lost classic. Thank you once again Numero Group!
Following the Tetragon highlighted here last list, and other recent releases like Sergius Golowin and Guru Guru, what treat does the meritorious and meticulous reissue label Lion Productions have for us THIS week? Another obscure, freaky gem of dusty vintage, yes, but this time not krautrock, instead it's from another wonderful subgenre, that of Latin American psychedelia!
This Brazilian band flourished circa 1965-1978, starting off as a Beatlesy dance pop group called The Bubbles, before changing their name to its Portuguese equivalent A Bolha in 1970 and going for a harder, more progressive rock sound, inspired in part by the bands they'd seen on a trip to England, at the Isle of Wight festival. All this according to the extensive liner notes in the thick, illustrated cd booklet, which provides plenty of info about the band and their career, including their stint as backing band for Tropicalia star Gal Costa. But history aside, what matters is the music, and even today A Bolha's lively grooves are pretty great!
This album, Um Passo A Frente, was recorded and released originally in 1973, and is rightly considered a Brazilian rock classic of the era. These tracks (7 from the album proper, plus fantastic 2 bonus cuts included on this reissue) range wildly across the spectrum of pop psych / hard rock / Tropicalia, incorporating laidback vibes, vocal harmonies (all songs sung in Portuguese), sudden prog rock changes (and song lengths, a couple up to 9 and 10 minutes), swirling organ, acid rock guitar soloing, honkytonk piano plinkery, frenetic percussion, countryish blues moods, bubblegum boogiewoogie, and even some free jazz squealing sax (such as during side two's epic "A Espera", which also has some really great freak out moments for all of us flute fanciers!). If we had to pick, our favorite track might be "Tempos Constantes", mixing fuzzy guitar riffage n' rippery with out-and-out uptempo sunshiney pop, but it's a tough call. And then there's the bonus cuts. If anything, those two tracks from A Bolha's debut 1971 single are heavier / druggier / jammier than the preceding cuts on this disc, the band apparently lightening up a bit for the album two years later. Worth it for those two alone, almost!
Definitely one for fans of South American psych all told, if you like the likes of later Os Mutantes, Los Dug Dugs, Bango, Embrujo, Som Imaginario, Color Humano, Miguel Cantilo, et. al. And in some weird way, we're even reminded a bit of recent Comets On Fire output!
NB Although what we said above about Lion Productions being meticulous with their reissues is generally true, we did discover that despite their best efforts, the track listing and disc programming here is screwed up, for one thing tracks 6 and 7 appear to be switched around. Whoops! Lion is quite chagrined and will post corrected information to their website asap.
Are they? After all, how much of an experiment can it be after you've made, like, several hundred albums? Is it still an experiment the 1,000th time you do it? Though we can usually guess at the results of any "experiment" by this prolific Japanese hippie psych outfit, it's not like we don't want to hear that sound of theirs again and again and again. However, this time 'round it DOES seem that they're going a little further out than usual, and the title isn't simply an excuse for cover graphics parodying the Jimi Hendrix album... The eleven tracks found here are pretty weird, many taking a kitchen sink sound collage approach that just might incorporate everything from blown out freek guitar scramble (of course), to acoustic flute folk, to echoing sound FX, to chaotic cocktail jazz, to garbled electronics and tape manipulations. Not necessarily nothin' they haven't done before, but not quite like this. It comes closer to some early Boredoms stuff or even Hanatarash cut-ups than it does the extended jam-outs of most AMT releases. So yeah, they are experimental. And successfully so, in our pseudoscientific opinion. At least, we found this quite intriguing/entertaining. Welcome to the Acid Mothers Laboratory!
Ok, we know what you're thinking (maybe). Alice Cooper? Aquarius Record(s) Of The Week? Two of 'em?? If you're not familiar with these albums, you might be wondering... and while we know that many loyal AQ customers are of course extremely knowledgeable about all sorts of cool music, just as much or more so than any of us who work here, we also wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of you had never been exposed to these first two Alice Cooper albums before. Which is why we HAVE to list them and make them Records Of The Week!!�After being out of print for far too long, they've now been newly reissued on cd (in limited editions, see below for more about that), and we're excited to be able to tell you about 'em.
So, when most people think of Alice Cooper, what comes to mind? The big '70s shock rock act, up there with KISS, the guy who was the Marilyn Manson of the '70s, or maybe the regular on Hollywood Squares, or even the early '90s hairmetal Alice, of Wayne's World "we're not worthy" fame. Campy and kitschy and scholocky and alcoholic, with snakes and blood. All good things of course. But even if you are a fan of the Alice Cooper classics from the '70s, albums like Love It To Death, Killer and Billion Dollar Babies, the Alice Cooper Band's 1969 debut Pretties For You and its 1970 follow up Easy Action are often overlooked, and underrated. Originally released on Frank Zappa's Straight label (and whatever you might think of Frank Zappa, he had a good track record for releasing freaky music by other folks, Captain Beefheart ferinstance!) this early Alice Cooper stuff is NOT the heavy metal hard rock you might be expecting. That was a direction AC went in really only after moving from LA to Detroit and hooking up with producer Bob Ezrin. There's hints of heaviness, of course, but this is waaay more psychedelic and poppy and proggy. And weird. If you think you know what to expect, think again. You're in for a bizarre treat indeed. (Some Alice Cooper fans might not agree, but we hope most open minded AQ customers will!)
The front cover of Pretties For You has a painting that make it look like a Robert Wyatt record. And on the back cover, the band, posing in a gallery of strange modern sculptures, show off a visual style that makes 'em look something like a cross between Blue Cheer and Roxy Music. Intrigued? Throw the album on, and you're confronted with the first of this album's many non-sequiturs, the orchestral fanfare of "Titanic Overture", which segues into the why-be-normal, twisty-turny psych piece "10 Minutes Before The Worm" (actually only 1 minute, 40 seconds long). They weren't trying to ease anybody into their "thing" it seems. Better yet is track three, "Swing Low Sweet Cheerio", the album's first true pop gem, and still plenty weird. And that's what this is, a pop album, full of great pop songs, super Beatlesy, hummable stuff. But it's Beatlesy in a tripped out Sgt. Peppers way. And wait a second, Pretties For You? The Pretty Things' "SF Sorrow" might also have been an influence. There's a lot of quirky dynamics, theatrical art rock gestures, cryptic humor, wild psychedelic effects, screaming fuzz guitar, strange stops and starts... it can be off-putting at first, probably difficult listening for some, with as much in common with Amon Duul II or even Olivia Tremor Control as they do with Alice Cooper's later million-sellers. But, you like '60s garage psych right? Well early AC were really a Nuggetsy garage band (originally called The Earwigs, then The Spiders, and then The Nazz, finally settling on Alice Cooper following a legendary Ouija board session). Doing their thing on the Sunset Strip in LA, they gradually got nuttier and nuttier, more psychedelic and experimental. If AC hadn't gone on to such later success, we're certain this would be regarded by psych lovers as an obscure cult classic of late '60s freakdom, like 50 Foot Hose or West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band or something. Instead, it's the record that probably confuses average Alice Cooper fans, and isn't heard by anybody else, which we think is a shame...
Alice Cooper's swaggering second effort, Easy Action, is just a bit more straightforward, more of a "rock" album, proto-glam in fact, AC maybe trying to take on T-Rex? On it, with some wicked lyrics, Alice starts to develop his better known, "mentally ill" or "evil" sick humor persona, in a wittier way though than the cartoonishness that later took over in later years. His ever-so-slightly-raspy, steeped-in-decadence voice, of course, always had star power from the very beginning, but here he occasionally breaks out a snarl that never surfaced on Pretties, amidst more melodic crooning. And one of the tracks, the spasmodic tour de force "Still No Air", foreshadows Alice Cooper's later West Side Story obsession on School's Out.
And Easy Action proves to be still pretty darn trippy and weird, with plenty of progtastic twists, just like Pretties. Heck, "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye" is 7+ minutes of pretty much just sound FX laced freakishness. This album boasts several more glorious psychedelic pop gems like "Laughing At Me", the piano ballad "Beautiful Flyaway", and the very Beatlesy "Shoe Salesman", alongside the harder rockin' likes of "Return Of The Spiders"... Oooh so many good tunes. Compared to the debut, it's perhaps a more confident, slightly less confusional record, that set them up for major label success of their next album, another huge favorite of ours, Love It To Death, recorded with Ezrin after their relocation to Detroit - a move that made sense, considering they did have a lot in sonically common with The Amboy Dukes and even the MC5. You'll also hear parallels to very early Blue Oyster Cult and David Bowie... And (moreso on Pretties) an American version of Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett era mind you...) or even a more obtuse The Doors...
While Alice Cooper (both the man and the band) made a lot of classic music in their career(s), no other Alice Cooper records were ever quite as arty and bizarre, with the unique one foot in the psychedelic sixties mix of throbbing manic energy and melancholic moodiness that's found on Pretties For You and Easy Action. Are we going out on limb by making 'em Records Of The Week? Nope, what could be more AQ?? These have been favorites here for a long time, but rarely available. And Jim and Allan bonded over these back when they both first started working here years ago. Also, we know the guys in Harvey Milk will have to be stoked to find that their new album got ROTW honors alongside these two!
And by the way, we insist on filing these under A, not C. It's the Alice Cooper Band dammit. Alice himself didn't go solo 'til Welcome To My Nightmare in 1975. The original act, featuring guitarists Glen Buxton and Mike Bruce, bassist Denis Dunaway, and drummer Neil Smith, alongside the former Vincent Furnier on vocals and snake handling, deserves their due! One of the great American rock bands.
One final note: these reissues on this new Rhino "Encore" imprint are based around the (dumb) idea of doing releases that are only available for a limited time. It's like the way Disney puts out DVDs. So, all the more reason for us to shout from the rooftops about these two albums -- in six months, according to the label, these reissues will be out of print, again!! Argh. So get 'em while you can, if you don't already have them in your collection!! And buy a copy for a friend!
Most aQ customers are familiar with Roland P. Young, whose Isophonic Boogie Woogie album, reissued a while back on EM from Japan, blew our minds sky high. The ultimate culmination of Young's quest to create what he called "Afro spiritual minimal electronic space music" which is exactly what it sounded like, minimal free jazz, but cobbled together out of strange unlikely instruments, woven into long stretches of dronemusic, or freaked out almost psychedelic sounding swirling murkiness, the whole record was an otherworldly mind expanding avant jazz masterpiece for sure.
So somehow it makes perfect sense, that Altz, an electronic musician and DJ from Japan, who we know mostly from remixing the Boredoms, wanted a crack and remixing this records and creating his OWN isophonic boogie woogie. So here you go.
It's kind of a tall order since the original is pretty awesome, and way wacked already, but what the heck, Altz does his thing, chops and edits, adds effects, loops flutes and introduces fuzzy synths and skittery bits of buzz, distant voices, but what he does mainly is add beats, it's definitely cool and groovy, but does tend toward the cheesy here and there. The best moments are weirdly enough the most beatless, where the free jazz is matched with some seemingly free drum freakouts, or when the original drums are somehow looped into a fragmented beat, or when the various elements are blurred into a weird buzzy drone, rife with buried horns, and rumbling bass. A lot of the more beat heavy tracks chop up and recontextualize the originals so much, that if you weren't familiar with the Young original, you might not even know they were samples, you might just assume they were some cool weird sounds. Which they most definitely are. Check out the sound samples. This won't necessarily appeal to the same folks who loved the original, but if you're in the market for some twisted up free jazz avant beatmaking, then this might just hit the spot.
The absolute hardest albums to write about are those we hold in the highest esteem and though we have an aversion to the general notion of a "desert island selection", this Amon Duul II disc is one of those albums that we could see as an definite inclusion on
Anaal Nathrakh isn't just "extreme" metal. It's extremely extreme metal. And only an extremely extreme metal band could manage to combine all the stuff that AN do, ferinstance just in the vocal/vokill dep't, everything from necro black metal shrieks to death metal grunts to, yes, clean majestic melodic singing too. And the vocals are only ONE of the insane things about this album. We can't really classify this UK band, they're part hyperspeed grindcore blurr, part black metal mayhem, part power metal majesty (but that part is buried and rotting under even more blasting black/death brutality). Let's just say our extreme metal needs have always been met by a session of Anaal Nathrakh abuse, and THIS album is definitely doing the trick as expected... A dense, chaotic, utterly over the top assault of very very extreme, very very metal. Yet amidst all the intensity, Anaal Nathrakh somehow can cram in a catchy chorus or melodic hook (or weird electronically glitched out part) alongside each ultra distorted, utterly outrageous throat-torn scream or chunk of crushing grind frenzy. Fans familiar with their last few albums know the score. For those new to Anaal, we could say maybe imagine old Carcass mixed with Watchmaker mixed with Immortal mixed with something with actual singing, sometimes. But nothing you can imagine will really quite prepare you... you've been warned. The liner notes say it best: "We will fucking kill you."
Ah, France. Home to the sugary pop sounds of Phoenix and the stately elegance of Air... But scratch the surface to the French underground, and you're faced with the harsh realization that things may be way more fucked than you ever imagined. Festering like an open sore is the Anals, a nihilistic duo from Metz capable of whipping up an ungodly racket with only drums, synthesizers at their most basic functioning level, occasional guitars, anguished Frenchman vocals sung in English, and a whole FUCKLOAD of sheer, agonizing noise. After listening to these hateful miscreants, it makes total sense that they were shat forth from the same land that brought us the Marquis de Sade, Celine, and Gerard Depardieu.
Looking at the lyric sheet to Total Anal may be the deciding factor for just how much you can take from these guys. Those into pushing the limits of decency and comfort with bands like the Brainbombs or the Country Teasers, however, will probably find much to love with this one. The album begins with "Commando Of Love," a little ditty musing poetic on a love triangle set in a concentration camp. The song is comprised of a creepy, tense synth whir that is eventually met with pounding cave man drums and vocals that sound more exasperated than enraged. Like many of the other songs on the record, the melodies are almost perceived, as the songs are pretty much made up of earsplitting noise, carried forward by a relentless thump and cacophonous vocals. Other parts of the record sound like This Heat being beaten up and reinterpreted by a couple of French street thugs armed with sound generators and Six Finger Satellite records. The incessant drumming and unrestrained feedback make it feel like your heart might blow at any moment. Strangest of all, however, is on songs like "Vaginal Death Tunnel," where you realize that though this is noise rock with an emphasis on both the "noise" and the "rock," the Anals are creating music that somehow manages to fall within the approximation of a pop song structure, in the same way a group like the Dead C was able to achieve on some of their earlier records. Not that this would ever be mistaken for pop music...
Coming to us from the killer Chicago store/label Permanent Records, who introduced many of us to the glorious sounds of Cave, Total Anal also comes with a free download in a nod to the turntable deprived. Highly recommended listening for those who like things on the dirty side, in every imaginable way.
Antony's most recent live appearance in San Francisco transpired earlier this year at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, and it will most likely go down as one of THE concerts of the year for many of us who witnessed it. Besides having William Basinski as his opener and then playing an incredibly rich, intimate and moving set, one of the highlights came when Antony and his band did an amazing version of the Beyonce hit "Crazy In Love". After they played it someone in the audience yelled out, "You are so much better then her" to which Antony immediately replied "Excuse me?! She is extremely talented!" Haha. We totally agree and that made us love Antony even more, if that was even possible. This single offers up a studio recorded version of that amazing cover as well as "Aeon" from the latest album The Crying Light.
Ok, you've seen the documentary by now, haven't you? Anvil: The Story Of Anvil (we blogged about it, c'mon... plus it was huge, all over VH-1 and everyplace). And if so, you know you now need some Anvil in your collection - if you didn't have it already, like us longtime Anvil fans.
This one is about our favorite. No, it doesn't have "Metal On Metal" on it (that's on the album Metal On Metal, naturally), but after watching the movie you've heard THAT song like 1,000 times on the soundtrack and don't need to hear it again for a while anyway. Forged In Fire has a lot of other Anvil gems on it, however, including the crushing title track, "Motormount", "Winged Assassins" and "Hard Times - Fast Ladies" among others. Also the unfortunately titled "Butter-Bust Jerky", hmm, which is as heavy as it is sleazy.
While in the movie Anvil might seem like delusional, washed up, emotionally fragile (though still quite scrappy and charismatic) old rocker dudes way past their sell-by date, THIS early material will help to confirm why thrashers like Metallica used to look up to these Canadians as being the fastest and fiercest of underground metal bands in the land. The back of the album proudly proclaims: "If it's too loud, you're too old. Get the hell out cause you've been told". Obviously they had no idea they'd still be headbanging in 2009! And with a surprise second wind thanks to a fantastic documentary film, that's like a combo of Some Kind Of Monster, The Wrestler, and of course Spinal Tap.
It's funny, right after we first saw the Anvil movie, we tried to get copies of the NEW album, the one they're working on in the documentary, to sell here. Y'know, just to support 'em. We contacted the band directly, they were nice but wanted WAY too much money per cd. We'd have to have sold 'em for like $25 each. So, we said forget it, and anyway we'd rather stock their classic '80s albums - but couldn't, 'cause those weren't available at all in the States, either... but now with the success of the movie, we noticed our regular, non-metal suppliers carrying 'em! Cool. So here you go, Anvil's Forged In Fire, it's their third album, from 1983, and the apex of their musical career if you ask us.
Latest from this NZ noisemaker, and only the second actual cd release (the other one Butta Days is out of print) after a ton of cd-r's. Armpit is the work of one Clayton Noone, who also plays in CJA and the Futurians, but unlike the minimal droney drift of CJA and the fractured new wave of the Futurians, Armpit, is, as the name might suggest, dank and dark and sweaty and, well you get the picture, Armpit is all free noise and abstract sonic experimentation, we've been blown away by pretty much every Armpit record we've heard, including a massive 5cd-r set, so we were super psyched to get our ears around this one. And it's another sprawling expanse of strange sounds and mysterious noises, expertly woven into thick layered soundscapes and abstract clattery anti-songs.
The title track, on first listen, sounds like a soft cacophony of clink and clank, but soon rhythms emerge, a strange minimal lo-fi industrial loop, laid over a strange moaning foghorn melody, and lots and lots of tape hiss, soon the clatter dissipates leaving a warm hissy expanse of drone-y murmur and distant electronics, that eventually coalesce into a bit of skittery drum programming. Weird. "Rainy Romm To Room" is a warped organ driven slow jam, all mumbled vocals, atonal melodies, detuned guitar, woven into a sort of Wreck Small Speakers kind of ballad. "Whiskey Bottle" is like a low tech stab at some sort of SUNNO)))-like sludge, almost pulled off except for the fact that any noises near the microphone reveal that the recording is from the back of the room on a handheld recorded, which only makes it sound cooler, not to mention the mysterious drop outs, and occasional voices. "You & I" is another sort of ballad, all aggressively strummed acoustic guitar, and weary crooned vocals, muted percussive thumps, and a sweet sad melody. "Hung Burning" is another live one, and is another HEAVY one, a noisy feedback drenched Dead C like chaotic noise jam, which quickly gives way to album proper closer "A Strange Girl", a brief lo-fi bedroom folk, plastic pail percussion dream jam, all hazy and warm and washed out. So nice.
As a bonus, tacked on to the end is an 8 track, nearly 20 minute ep collecting various recordings from the late nineties up until 2001, featuring more of the same, a dizzying mix, of fractured lo-fi anti-pop, dense collaged soundscapes and thick swirling soft focus noise...
Yeah, it's a bit price-y, but then for some reason Ultra Eczema lps always are. The thing is though, they're generally also gorgeous looking, deluxe sleeves with wild wacked out eye popping covers, ultra thick vinyl, and in most cases, especially this one, the grooves are packed with sounds to match. That is to say wild and wacked.
The newest record from forefathers of the Finnish free folk scene Avarus, is not in fact a new record, but instead a document of Avarus' recent trip to the states, in particular a live on the radio session for Brian Turner's show on WFMU. Two side long jams, the ever fluctuating collective trimmed down to a mean lean trio, on the first, they capture here their most primitive side, lots of rattles and percussion, thumps and clicks and creaks and moans, all accompanied by strange inhuman vocalizations, sounding like humans discovering speech for the first time, howling, crooning, mewling, grunting, all that tangled up with some super abstract free jazz drum skitter, some detuned string plucking, which builds to something much more substantial, a cacophonous squall of horns and even more strange vocalizations, a garbled transmission of alien folk free jazz confusion, that manage to some still sound hypnotic and cohesive. The final few minutes are an awesome skittery croaking looped outro, that we sort of wish would have gone on for longer.
The flipside starts off with more caveman jazz, strings scraped and plucked, drums splattered here and there, those alien vox, but peppered with warm reedy buzz and all manner of other abstract sounds. After a brief bit of garbled gurgling, the song sprawls into a gorgeous super skeletal, percussive workout, this too with the feel of proto-humans discovering rhythm, primal, primitive, tribal, super spare and spacious and weirdly mesmerizing.
The sleeve as mentioned above is indeed eye popping, green on orange eye torture, a killer super tripped out psychedelic illustration, mirrored in black and white on the lp labels, and of course extremely limited. ONLY 300 COPIES!!!!
Second of two releases on the newly launched UK label Tapeworm, the other being a killer solo bass record from long time aQ fave and turntablist, Philip Jeck, while this one, well, this one is a bit harder to describe. A spoken word record by two mysterious ladies called Patrica And Ellen, reading a work by legendary (anti) post modernist Jean Baudrillard. Recorded By Vicki Bennet of People Like Us, these readings are riveting, due in no small doubt to Baudrillard's tangled wordplay, but also due to the strange delivery of the two women, who take turns, in their thickly accented voices, reading the texts, sounding like they're perhaps seeing those words for the first time, struggling through pronunciations, little giggles and asides, brief breaks as one hands the text to the other. We'll be the first to say, that we're not much for 'spoken word' records, but somehow this transcends, becoming some sort of art, or sound poetry, especially when the two are reading together, those moments are fantastic, playful, silly, and the delivery of the two, slightly off, with both randomly dropping out, or stopping for a breath, makes the reading sound less 'read', and more weirdly musical.
Obviously, this won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it's definitely fun, and interesting, and quite strange! Like the Jeck tape, LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, we got about a dozen...
All these Beastie Boys reissues are reminding us just how damn good and timeless this stuff sounded and STILL sounds. With the utmost love and respect for classic hip-hop culture, the Beastie Boys managed to be pioneers as well, infusing elements of punk, rare groove, Latin music, and even Tuvan influences into their sound, resulting in this classic album, originally released in 1994.
In an age where bands seem to release a new record every few months, one of the strengths of the Beastie Boys, and no doubt a key component to their incredible sound, was that they've always given themselves ample time to really hash out and construct their records, with always at least a couple years in between releases. And that time and care definitely shows, the sound so layered and lush, so catchy and so totally unique. It had been ages since many of us had listened to Ill Communication but once we threw it on again we were all immediately transported back, to a time where this was all some of us listened to. Hearing it again with fresh ears, it still sounds fantastic, groundbreaking even. A rare example of a group with big time mainstream success but with their musical integrity fully intact.
The cd version of this comes with a bonus disc of remixes and a few live tracks. The vinyl version is a double lp, remastered and pressed on 180 gram vinyl.
We've carried this longtime aQ fave several times over the years, in multiple formats, in varying degrees of availability, unfortunately, it never seemed to stick around for long. For a while we were even in contact with Beausoleil himself via his wife who was handling his business for a while, trying to get copies. Well, now you can thank the fine folks at Ajna, who have not only reissued it again, but added TONS of unreleased material, included all sorts of new, original artwork, pressed it up on VINYL and packed it all in a super deluxe box. These are expensive, but so worth it, after all, it's the only way to currently get Lucifer Rising, and of course it's a limited pressing, so these won't be around forever...
Ahhh Lucifer Rising, the rare soundtrack to cult underground director and Crowley-ite Kenneth Anger's film Lucifer Rising (begun in the mid-'60s, completed in 1980). Originally Jimmy Page was supposed to do the score, but he bowed out and the music was instead handled by another cult figure, the musical visionary and imprisoned killer Bobby Beausoleil, who composed and performed this spacey psychedelic opus with his Freedom Orchestra (presumably all fellow prisoners with Bobby).
Bobby and the Freedom Orchestra play electric guitars, Fender Rhodes electric pianos, some synths and bass...there's two drummers, and a trumpet player. The result is a sometimes sinister, sometimes blissful, always beautiful and "cosmic" drifting soundscape. Gurgling old-school electronics blend with propulsive rock drumming, while psychedelic guitar soloing tears across the sunset horizon created by the synths...The combination results in what you might imagine an early '70s Tangerine Dream/Ennio Morricone collaboration might have sounded like. It's indeed a lost classic. And the composer's life story is at least as weird and interesting as the music...
In the late Sixties, Bobby was a rising star in the LA rock-pop scene, hanging with Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Love. But then a drug deal went bad and he was sent to death row for murder, arrested 3 days before the Manson killing spree. Fortunately for him, his sentence was eventually commuted, but he's spent like the last 30 years in jail. He's been a model prisoner, pursuing his talents in music and art despite his incarceration, and you'd think that the parole board would have let him out by now (he's been paying his debt to society longer than anybody else has for a similar crime, we're told) but sadly for Bobby, he's got to deal with his association with the notorious Charles Manson. While never a member of Manson's Family (a common misconception), he did play in a band with Manson, and the media hype surrounding anything to do with Manson hasn't helped Bobby's case, as you might imagine! (At least that's the way Beausoleil tells it. But the more one delves into the story of "Lucifer Rising", the weirder things get -- for instance, apparently Bobby was supposed to PLAY the role of Lucifer in the original 1966 version of Anger's film, but the two had a falling out and Bobby allegedly stole the footage and buried it in Death Valley! How this jibes with him later writing this soundtrack, we don't know.)
Yet, not being one to simply sit in his cell and rot, Bobby has, as we said, kept quite busy within the clutches of the California Penal system.
This new vinyl box set, includes all the music on the various versions we've carried over the years, plus SO MUCH MORE.
This version includes newly remastered recordings spanning 11 years, from the original 1967 recordings to the Tracy Prison recordings in 1978. 4 lps, 2 of which are entirely unreleased material, nine new pieces of art by Beausoleil, 8 on the printed inner sleeves, and one 2 foot by 3 foot poster, a second poster, a massive booklet, with tons of new liner notes, and loads of photos, the box gorgeous and hefty, full color outside and inside, this is THE outsider lost seventies occult rock soundtrack holy grail for sure.
And although for obvious reasons Bobby wouldn't probably approve of the use of the word to describe himself and this soundtrack, in the aQuarius recOrds' musical context it's quite appropriate: CULT!
You would think that with not one, but four archival collections of Maurizio Bianchi's seminal work from the early '80s, all of these recordings would have been made available by now. Actually, an excerpt of Technology 1 did appear on the Vinyl-On-Demand 5LP boxset Archives 1, but nowhere has Technology 2 been reissued, barring the dodgy bootlegs throughout the past three decades. Technology 1 & 2 were originally self-released cassettes that Bianchi issued under his MB moniker in 1981.
For those not familiar with the work of MB / Maurizio Bianchi, Technology 1 & 2 actually works as an excellent primer into his industrial wastelands strewn with carcinogenic pathogens and primitive landmines. This Italian musician came to prominence through his initial work with William Bennett of Come Productions and later through a few releases on Broken Flag; and his recordings throughout the late '70s and early '80s were definitely of the 'Industrial' mindset as in Whitehouse, Throbbing Gristle, and SPK. But his references were less the detourned rock structures of those outfits, his influence came more from the German camps: Klaus Schulze, Cluster, Conrad Schnitzler, etc. In applying the death-culture aesthetic of those aforementioned Brits to the electronic expressionism of those aforementioned Germans, Bianchi had a jumping off point for a massive output, which is clearly why these tapes had yet to see the light of day.
Both Technology 1 and 2 are poly-dimensional explorations of searing hiss, robotic bleeps, turgid noise, and mechano rhythms. The first chapter throb with pulsing electronics that splatter across a hot-wired electrical field that almost engender the noxious energy of shortwave radio receptions of utility signals. These sharply rendered rainbow electronics are contrasted by the far more alienating shivers of electrical sound on Technology 2. Here, Bianchi sets up sheets of metallic vibration and rippling static for his insistent pulses of stun-gun blasts. Both of these discs are much closer to the Symphony For A Genocide and Mectpyo Blut album found in the MB box. Bianchi was true to the misanthropic attitudes of his youth on these recordings, presenting the sounds as the artifacts of technology that invade the body on a cellular level to destroy from within.
We made the brand new record by Spanish noise rocker and audio experimentalist Billy Bao our Record Of The Week last list, a dizzying collision of sludgey filthy Brainbombs like dirge, howling Whitehouse styled invective, and weirdest of all, a flurry of Fela-ish highlife horns, all tangled up with sheets of feedback, squalls of effects, and whatever else BB could whip up. The result was transcendent, and well worthy of ROTW status, managing to be punishing and heavy as fuck, but still catchy and blown out and super fun.
So here we have BB's preceding release, the wonderfully titled Dialectics Of Shit, and we're happy to report, that while the horns seem to be M.I.A here, everything else is present and accounted for, BIG TIME. A gloriously filthy, in-the-red, sludge fueled noise drenched monster. Weirdly produced, super chaotic, rife with sharp angular skree, pounding Neanderthal drums and a growled phlegmy vocal that seethes maniacally. All that stuff is locked around single, KILLER riffs, each track, a looped hypnotic crush, that riff pounded out over and over and over and over, while the various other elements swirl and careen all around it.
Insane bursts of grinding crunch, thick sheets of Merzbowian hiss, long stretches of brittle jangle and thump that will suddenly get swallowed up by a blown out wave of sub sonic low end, or a cloud of white noise will well up obliterating everything in its path, all the while the bass and drums 'groove' churns away, often emerging from one of those disruptions a whole different beats, a sort of muted murky bit of surf guitar, some weird twang, everything off kilter and woozy and noisy and INTENSE. The guitars are sharp and jagged and rough edged, slippery and warped, the riffs seem to be melting, or crumbling to pieces before your ears, the whole record a stumbling, lurching, blackened dirge noise behemoth. All the while, little hooks, and insanely catchy flourishes surface here and there, keeping the record weirdly catchy, and almost poppy occasionally, the sound is schizophrenic, about faces all over the place, sudden edits, overlapping sounds that don't seem to fit (but somehow do), voices all tangled up in guitar melodies tripping over struggling drum pound, everything on the very edge of total collapse, somehow held together in one massive speaker destroying chunk of tweaked and twisted heaviness.
We were definitely a bit skeptical when we read descriptions of Spanish noise rockers Billy Bao as sounding like Brainbombs, Fela and Whitehouse. Even more so when we got the record in and noticed those were the three bands BB thank on the sleeve, we figured, okay, lazy reviewing, BB love those bands so heck, they probably sound like that, or at least sort of. So imagine our surprise upon actually hearing this, and realizing that the Fela / Whitehouse / Brainbombs was somehow, pretty right on. At least in as far as one can actually describe a band as awesomely weird and fucked up as Billy Bao.
The core sound is definitely Brainbombs, low slung fuzzy sludge bass, in the red, super distorted and impossibly blown out. The drums a Neanderthal pound that borders on the machinelike here and there, howled vocals, alternating shouting and sort of crooning a non stop stream of invective, the sound crusty and filthy and punk rock and garage rock, but with a weird electronic vibe, bordering on industrial now and again. The relentless crunch occasionally screeches to a halt, and launches into a weird super dynamic stop start thing, sometimes even getting all stuttery as the guitars dissolve into fractured electronics.
And the horns, did we mention the horns? Not like the moaning bleat of the Brainbombs' dented trumpet, these are full on festive high life horns, buried way down in the mix, sampled we're guessing, quite possibly actually Fela, but low enough in the mix that only the horns make it through the murk, except for a few moments where the horns / samples slip into the stuttery spaces, only adding to the off kilter chaos.
The B-side sounds like Burmese on angel dust, and since Burmese ALREADY sound like they're on angel dust, BAD angel dust, you can get an idea of how fucked up and fierce and bass heavy this side long jam is, the music a wall of blown out, super tangled, in the red bass riffage and low end buzz, so noisy that the song teeters back and forth between intense riffage and full on speaker shredding NOISE, over which the vocals are a feral frenzied Whitehouse style yowl.
Heavy and fucked up and noisy and genius. WAY WAY WAY recommended. A few more listens and we might just have us a new favorite band.
The sleeve is just a single long missive from the band, there are liner notes and thanks lists in there, but for the most part it's all a stream of consciousness rant against war and government and industry and copyright and loads more, the inside cover features two full color photos of just the sort of death and destruction and human misery they're talking about.
A brand new disc from this mysterious German outfit, long time aQ faves Black To Comm, who you might assume might be some sort of garagey rock thing based on their name, but nope, these guys make drones, epic twisting layered expansive beautiful drones, three guys, tones of instruments, but you might not know it by listening. Organ, tape loops, electronics, metal percussion, violin, toys, water, shruti box, bells, whistles, feedback and pictaphone, the recipe for sort of cacophonous Avarus style foresty free folk freakout is some hands, but in the hands of this trio, the sounds conjured up with those instruments is melted down, swirled and shimmered, smeared and blurred, into a looooooong single track. A gorgeously blissful hazy drift, at the center of it all is THE DRONE, a lush, softly shifting stream of layered tones, fluttering flickering notes and melodies, warm whirring textures and all manner of muted overtones, but all around it, a sea of other sounds swirl and spin, high end trills, mechanical creaks, slivers of feedback, glitchy electronics, and what starts out as serene and dreamy, grows ever so much more ominous, the sounds filling out, the edges sharpening, the heft seeming to expand exponentially.
Instead of some sort of lowercase minimal dronemusic, the sound here is epic, majestic, sprawling spacedrone, blinding blistering sonic effulgence, a whirling ur-drone rife with strange FX, and a dense throbbing core.
The last few minutes finds the spaced out drone wreathed in a soft cacophony of blurred noise, a patina of washed out distortion, a wild tangle of squiggly high end, the entire track a lurching, slow swelling spaced out loop, totally mesmerizing, and in its own way heavy and dense and intense. It's hard to get a feel for the power at work here with only a fleeting listen, but taken as a whole, these sounds surround you, and suck you in. Strap on your headphones and you'll find yourself falling willingly under Black To Comm's tripped out space drone spell, drifting endlessly throughout their gloriously and deliriously hazy, woozy and wildly psychedelic world of sound.
Two new jams from this one man band, spearheading the current new wave of... umm, new wave. And we have to to say, lately, we're more and more convinced that if there is some sort of crown for dour new wave lo-fi noise pop king, it's gotta go to Mr. Blank Dogs, and this 7 inch only seals the deal. Strip away the fuzz and the hiss and the distortion and the crackle and you'd have some dangerously catchy pure pop. Fuck it, DON'T strip any of that stuff away and you STILL have some seriously perfect pop.
The A side has a hook most bands would kill for, rendered here in buzzy brittle synths, lilting guitar melodies, cool distorted effected vox, and all sorts of warble and warp, easily the catchiest Blank Dogs track yet.
The B side channels vintage Sebadoh style bedroom 4-track sad boy folk pop into something a little more poppy and new wave-y but still plenty murky and jangly and lo-fi, with sci-fi synths, rubbery bass and haunting multi tracked vocals, as well as another killer guitar part. Absolutely kick ass gloomy downer new wave doom pop that pretty much no other shitgazing bands have been able to touch...
New York doommongers Bloody Panda return with full length #2, this one courtesy of the always rad Profound Lore label. The band specializes in a style of glacial doom sounding like it was recorded in an enormous cathedral in the dead of night. Funereal keyboards and subsonic bass run alongside lumbering drums that put everything into a spiraling trance as the downtuned guitars puke out overwhelmingly negative sounding riffs. Then, there's the kicker, Bloody Panda's unassuming vocalist Yoshiko Ohara, whose beautiful and clear voice can just as easily switch from sweet croon to Yoko Ono howl to a throat ripping banshee scream to a guttural demon bark. Her super bleak lyrics focus on all the various aspects of mental instability that doom bands know and love, like a fever induced nightmare where Bloody Panda is the house band. Ohara's awesome and disturbing artwork perfectly mirrors the sounds within Summon, with lots of black space and faceless figures shrouded in slivers of hazy color. There are certainly some similarities to Neurosis' more, ahem, "tribal" moments, while the band's almost goth sensibility, not to mention the female vocals and organ, bring to mind Asva, but there is enough other stuff going on to make Bloody Panda stand out. This is only made clearer by the accompanying dvd, featuring a video for the 21 minute motherfucker of a song, "Miserere". Filmed by the band members themselves in various parts of Brooklyn in addition to shots taken in Indonesia, the dvd offers a stunning visual enhancement to Bloody Panda's sonic assault.
When we first saw this, we were excited that perhaps more lost recordings of UK folk singer Anne Briggs had been discovered, but this is actually the first vinyl release of Sing A Song For You, Briggs' final recording from 1973 that wasn't properly released until 1996 on The Fledg'ling label. Why this has a new title and new artwork is curious, but the record's liner notes give some insight to the singer's ambivalence about this recording and why she retired at such an early age. She was pregnant with her second child at the time and wasn't satisfied with the quality of her singing. Plus playing the bouzouki with its convex back against her pregnant belly was difficult! When the original photo session for the album cover didn't work out and she was asked to do it again while she was preparing for a move to Scotland, it pretty much sealed the final rejection of the project. She finally allowed it to be reissued in 1996 and now we have the 180 gram vinyl version with much better artwork than the cd! As much as we love Anne Briggs, we never paid much attention to that cd, thinking it was older recordings of more traditional material, never really knowing the back-story. But after listening to this, we were wrong to dismiss it! It's definitely a continuation of the much fuller sound from her last officially released record, The Time Has Come. Ten songs here, half she wrote, half traditional interpretations played mostly with Ragged Robin as the back-up band, the only time she has ever worked with a full band, and it really sounds amazing, like a true lost folk record should!
The legendary Roky Erickson and his 13th Floor Elevators are treasured by most psychedelic rock hounds, and deservedly so (recently the subject of a 10cd retrospective box set!). But the Elevators weren't the only sixties Texas psych band to release album on the Houston based International Artists label, of course, there was also the more avant garde Red Krayola... and THESE guys, best known for their hit "Hot Smoke And Sassafras", a song you must have heard at some point in your life, most likely without knowing it was by a band called Bubble Puppy. It starts off with an immediately catchy, chicka-chicka riff, one of THOSE killer riffs, funky and fuzzed, which leads into some primo '60s pop psych. Really it's the next best thing to James Gang's "Funk #49", or even some of Hendrix's classics a la "Purple Haze", in that long forgotten groovy acid rock style bands just don't do anymore. Great title too. "Hot Smoke And Sassafras" appeared on BP's lone 1969 album A Gathering Of Promises, now reissued in a limited edition, impressively thick deluxe "digibook" packaging complete with 8 bonus tracks!
Bubble Puppy are one of those sorta well-known yet still overlooked bands, who will forever be considered one hit wonders, but while "Hot Smoke..." is one REALLY good reason to get this album, they have other songs that are quite worthy too! Ferinstance, the title track is a great example of the other thing that BP do so well, a more mellowed out style of psych pop, another would be the Beatlesy "It's Safe To Say"... And then among the bonus tracks (some of which are merely mono singles versions of album cuts) you'll find "Thinkin' About Thinkin'", another energetic raver very much the "Hot Smoke..." style. Seems like they could have been a bigger band for sure, but International Artists wasn't able to take 'em there. Eventually these guys moved to LA and changed their name to Demian 'cause Bubble Puppy (an allusion to a childrens' game that figures in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World) sounded too bubblegum, which wasn't at all the intention - Bubble Puppy being a rock act whose very first gig was as support for The Who! Sadly, Demian never made it either, but at least these guys will forever be footnoted at least in the annals of rock n' roll thanks to "Hot Smoke...", though they deserve more than that based on the significant charms of this entire album.
We're a sucker for folks who make their own instruments, for musicians who customize machines and noisemakers, who use instruments in exactly the way they were never meant to be used, extra turntable arms on a record player, loudspeakers made from car radiators, all sorts of stuff used for percussion, guitars made from steel strings and tin cans, vacuum cleaners, dental tools, if it sounds good, we're all for it.
Amongst those instrument builders and sonic experimentalists, we're partial to those who gravitate toward the discarded, toward junk, old broken records, busted up guitars, malfunctioning electronics, tape players with dying batteries, one string guitars, NO string guitars, so we were pretty sure that this Nick Butcher guy would be right up our alley.
He only uses broken and found things to make sounds, not even instruments necessarily, old busted up keyboards, crappy tape players, old guitars missing strings, and coolest of all, cassette tapes that have been taken apart, cut up, looped, reassembled and played again on said crappy tape players. He also does a sort of primitive real time multitracking, playing one tape and recording it on another, making a loop, then re-records those to make another loop and so on, and so on, using the various loops, room sound, broken instruments and whatever else, to create gorgeous haunting mysterious soundscapes.
These 4 tracks were recorded live, in a big room, you can tell from the echo, the footsteps, the bits of shuffling, every little creak or scrape, magnified and wreathed in natural reverb, but even knowing what we know about the process, just listening, it's hard to imagine how he makes these sounds. Dark minimal gorgeous drone-y drifts, hushed and melodic, like Basinski or something, looped, but subtly so, the tones overlapping into subtle harmonies, the sound of the room and much of a presence as the music itself, gauzy and hazy and so so divine. The second track begins similarly, but almost sounds like some sort of modern microdub, Pole or something, the loop stuttering and allowing small bits of empty space in sort of like anti-beats, a softly propulsive ultra minimal minor key krautdrone, like the hushed shadowy, whispery side of a group like Expo 70, except made with busted tapes and broken tape recorders!
The third track is the first with guitar, a couple strums a few plucks, it seems like maybe he was recording them, cuz fragments of those first guitar scrabbles return in fuzzy, fractured loop form, and again are assembled into a warm woozy series of soft swells, that are eventually overwhelmed by another soft loop, this one swirly and softly psychedelic, finishing off with a brief bit of, yep, warm, weary, dreamy, softly looped washed out drone-y ambient bliss. So so so so so nice.
The debut recording by these legendary Texan drug punks, finally available again on vinyl! Brown Reason To live was the Surfers' first record, a seven song ep, originally released in 1983, and reissued later bundled onto a cd with their live PCPP ep, but as good as that live stuff was/is, these tracks all on their own constitute one of THEE legendary punk rock records EVER. And we say punk rock knowing full well that the Buttholes' version of punk rock had almost nothing in common with what the rest of the world at the time considered punk.
These songs are damaged and disturbing, wild and chaotic, extended stumbling lysergic blowouts, as likely to erupt into a strange woozy sea shanty or a bit of twangy gallop as a blown out blast of pounding punk, moreso really. And while the sound here is not as overtly whatthefuck as the records that would come right after, it's weird enough that you could tell something freaky was going on, and you can hear the seeds that would blossom into that the Surfers eventually became. The Buttholes merged the punk sounds that surrounded them, with their own twisted take on DIY music making, not to mention lots and lots and lots and lots of drugs. All of these songs are timeless, total classics, but "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave" is practically a punk rock anthem, or no less than the genre's swan song. Depending on how you look at it, maybe both. For the band anyway, the track was every bit a standard as "Free Bird" was for Skynyrd. Listening to this again now, it seems insane that a band like this - who at one time seemed destined to a life of cult obscurity - achieved such enormous mainstream success. It's all urine under the bridge now though, we try to ignore the last few releases and focus on the years when the Butthole Surfers were untouchable ('83-'88?), and this is where it all started, a ferocious fucked up chunk of drug addled genius called Brown Reason To Live.
Rockadrome's Vintage division comes through with the proto metal goods yet again, this time reissuing the 1975 debut album from Minnesota hard rockers Cain (put out on compact disc once before by Rockadrome's previous incarnation Monster Records, but long out of print). First off, you know this is gonna be heavy when you see that cover, graphically and grossly depicting an actual pound (or more) of actual flesh overflowing from a tin can marked Cain. "8 Prime Cuts" it says on the can. And there are, 8 prime cuts of good ol' '70s American riff rock. (Plus four more bonus tracks from '78 on this cd reish.) It's along the lines of Grand Funk, Starz, Bad Company, Ted Nugent, Moxy, with some hints of Angel and Blue Oyster Cult...
Frontman Jiggs Lee's barechested vocals lead the charge with barroom bravado, as Cain kick out their jams, consisting of hard hitting party time grooves definitely made to be blasted LOUD out of muscle cars in the Midwest. Full of funky rhythms and dramatic crescendos, Cain's music is basically swaggering cock rock, with nods to both glam and the proggier fare from the likes of Led Zep and Queen (there's even flute in the intro to the second track, "Katy"). Speaking of Queen, you gotta love a band that has a song called "Queen Of The Night" and then another one, two tracks later, entitled "South Side Queen".
If you liked the recent Rockadrome reissue of Poobah, you'll want to check this out too. And for even more proto metal awesomeness that's shown up here this week, see also our review of the Up All Night various artists collection!
"Lace Heart" was originally self-released as a cd-r in 2005 in an edition of 300 copies and quickly disappeared from circulation. Nevertheless, it was one of the recordings in Christina Carter's extensive catalogue that immediately stood out to her fans and became a benchmark for albums that followed. These spectral avant-folk numbers managed a teary-eyed, nocturnal atmosphere through Spartan arrangements for just guitar and voice. Her guitar quietly meanders along simple strumming that may only alternate between just a few chords throughout each of the tracks, peppered with occasional overdubs of distant, shimmering swells of reverberation; and the album drifts in and out of dreamstates through the hypnotic repetitions of her slowly chiming guitar. Her earthen voice occasionally rises out of her arrangements as a beautiful counterpoint, but more often than not her monophonic cooing nestles into the warmth of the guitar as a perfect complement to those elliptical plucks and strums.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, beautiful printed sleeves, the lps pressed on thick swirled red vinyl, the D side featuring an etching similar to the front cover artwork!
This is not new, but we only just discovered this head spinning slab of totally demented fifties style (recorded in the sixties) rockabilly genius (or madness!) thanks to our pal Brian Turner at WFMU. And holy crap are we kicking ourselves for missing this. You'd never know from the cover, featuring Carter in a zebra striped jacket mugging with his guitar behind big colored letters, what freakiness lurks inside. And freaky it is. Not all of it. There are of course some straight up old school garage rockabilly jams, but some of the songs are soooooo far out, Carter was a bit like a rockabilly Joe Meek, always after new sounds, on the hunt for new equipment, anything to realize the twisted sounds in his head. He also reminds us of Michael Yonkers!
Take for example the cover of Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock" which opens up this collection, a totally twisted off kilter take on the original, with way more aggressive vocals, some weird high end tones over almost the whole thing, and a completely over the top insanely psychedelic guitar freakout (made by grinding the neck of the guitar against a mic stand) right in the middle, which was meant to sound like an actual jailhouse riot going on. As if that weren't enough, besides the usual rock instruments, Carter gathered up various friends and family members to contribute ukulele, accordion, and clarinet, played by a neighbor's 12 year old daughter!! But that's only the tip of the iceberg, the second track is a super rocking garage jam that sounds like early MC5, but then the third "I Got A Girl" is all buzzy garage stomp, with super raw vocals, and a weird looped female "ahhh" that repeats non stop throughout the entire song. Weird? Oh yeah, and it only gets weirder. "Rebel Woman" is a super heavy organ driven Screamin' Jay Hawkins style workout, and then there's the killer cover of "Fever", a classic jam for sure, but made a little bit more creepy with Carter's occasional croak, and his yelped vox throughout, as well as a droney looped sounding main guitar part. "Run Rabbit Run" is a lurching weirdo bit of gloomy garage pop, with growled vox, an amazing main guitar riff, that sounds almost metal at times, some awesome tribal drumming, and a weirdly innocent sounding female chorus.
But "Midnight Sun" might just be our favorite, after a spoken intro, the main guitar riff seems to slow down, the guitar creating a woozy dizzying seasick loop, the vocals dramatically crooned, some warm warbly organ, and a hook to die for, we've been listening to this track EVERY DAY. But heck, we end up playing this whole disc over and over and over. A perfect mix of outsider experimentation, classic rockabilly garage rock jamming, sixties psychedelia, and that Joe Meek like kitchen sink inventiveness, plus, it's SUPER rocking, suprisingly heavy, killer stuff for sure.
Lots of liner notes and tons of pix too. WAY RECOMMENDED.
Hooray for our dear pal Owen Ashworth! Over the years his instrument palette has expanded a good deal beyond the keyboard named in his moniker. As well, his music production has flourished out of the bedroom and into a much broader arena; and his songwriting delves deeper into darker subject matter than the beloved lighthearted musings and unrequited crushes of years past. And yet, his music still embodies a beautiful intimate earnestness, sweet tart romantic yearnings and a biting sense of humor. Though he's still the gallant knight of indie pop, his fifth full length is definitely far less twee and far more composed than his early recordings. It might seem that this is more of a 'serious' CFTPA, but then again there has always been a subtle undercurrent of gravity to his music. On Vs. Children, he incorporates organ, Mellotron and piano, which makes for a nicely rounded, enveloping listen. That said, although the music might get you in a cozy mood, his lyrics will keep you on your toes. He continues to prove what a really really good storyteller he is! Ever endearing and engaging!
These guys must destroy live. Check out the picture on the sleeve, wild frenzied sweaty kids mid-mosh, a bloodied microphone, and then of course there's the music, a fucking skull crushing unholy post punk noise rock racket that manages to take all the stuff we loved about Sub Pop and AmRep and nineties noise rock and amp it all up two thousands style. A little bit of screamo, a bit of post hardcore, but really, these guys could have come straight out of 1995, cuz they just don't make shit like this anymore. Only, they do. Catalyst does, and it sounds as good as it ever did.
Heavy as fuck, catchy as fuck, wild tribal drumming, buzz drenched super distorted riffage, howled vocals, soaring choruses, plenty of mathy breakdowns, a little bit off groove, hooks galore, warped woozy guitar harmonies all tangled and melodic reminding us big time of Drive Like Jehu, and heck, they even have a song called "Lars Ulrich's 1986 Funeral (It Should Have Been You)".
We raved about their previous record Marianas Trench, which we still have a few copies of, but this one is even better, heavier, catchier... We often lament the lack of actual BANDS, y'know, bands that write songs, there's so much dronemusic, and experimental ambience, and free folk improv, and blackend buzz, and we do love all that, but sometimes nothing hits the spot like an actual rock band, pounding away on actual instruments, sweating, bleeding, leaping off the stage, rolling around on the floor, and spitting out actual songs. Of course it helps when the band is this bad ass and the songs rule this hard, so if you've been hankering for some seriously heavy post punk noise rock in your life, and who amongst us HASN'T? Well, then these guys should definitely hit the spot.
At first glance, it might be difficult to know what this record it all about. The sleeve is just a photo of trees and leaves, a dense overgrown forest. Pull out the cd, that too is cryptic, just some random letters on the disc, the sleeve, an old crinkled photo from some seventies porn mag of a topless cowgirl with a gun in her mouth. There's an insert, with a bunch of strange shapes, the word CAVE right at the top. But we know what it is. We've been waiting for this disc for ages. The debut recording from, wait for it� CAVE! Who just so happen to be the spacerock krautrock dronerock riff heavy jam band side project of one Warhammer 48K, who were already spacey and krauty and droney to begin with, so needless to say this is some seriously kick ass, aQ freakout worthy shit.
For the attention span impaired, howabout some Hawkwind, Can, Circle, Lightning Bolt, Pharaoh Overlord? Sounds good huh? Well, it's easy to hear bits and pieces of all of those bands in the sound of Cave, a dual drummer-ed riff heavy psych rock, that takes single riffs and hammers at them, pounding and pummeling, repetitive and mesmerizing, a sort of kraut flecked hypnorock, but with all sorts of strange twists and turns, bizarre arrangements, baffling breakdowns, but woven into longform jams that should have anyone into the above mentioned bands frothing at the mouth.
The opening track is a gorgeous little tangle of minor key melodies, looped and repeated, over a tense distant drone, thick swaths of keyboard whir over soft tangles of acoustic guitar and space-y backwards guitar swoops, but then the opening riff of the second track kicks in, and it's all fuzzy and feral, the greatest riff Pharoah Overlord never wrote, and they just hang on it, way longer than any normal band would, FOREVER, before the drums kick in, and they're off, a relentless and hooky groove, with brief blasts of super dynamic chaos, before slipping right back into it. Keyboards lay still more hypnotic melodies over the top, vocals, when there are any, are shouted way down in the mix, or are wordless falsetto la-la-la's, adding more texture and sonic complexity than anything. The dual drummers mix it up spitting out occasional tribal squalls, sometimes thick swirls of staticky fuzz wash over the proceedings, but their propulsive fortitude never falters. The first two tracks would almost be enough. Nearly 12 minutes of heavy freaked out space jam nirvana. You can practically feel the walls heaving and the sweat dripping through the speakers. You'll probably need a lie down afterwards. But there's no time, cuz hell, there's 6 more tracks to dig through. The sound is punk rock, lo-fi, but lush and epic, damaged and delirious, like garage rockers raised on Magma and Faust, there's plenty of Neu! in there, Stereolab too then, but it's way heavier than that, the guitars crunchy and thick, occasionally opening up into wailing psychrock blowouts, the drums getting more and more distorted and frenzied. Imagine an amphetamine fueled Circle or Can, but via the basement, the sound a sweat soaked drug drenched mostly instrumental kraut groove
Mathy, murky, like the fucked up younger brother of Yes, a Neanderthal krautrock, laced with awesome grinding space rock riffage, blown out squalls of ur-psych, flurries of percussive splatter, chanting cult vocals, bits of what the fuck vocoder (!), but for all the weirdness, the core sound of Cave is THE RIFF. Whether it's a warbly synth, or a superdistorted guitar, or tra-la-la vocals, they all align themselves with that riff, the mission, to entrance, to ensorcel, a heaving, pulsing, throbbing mass, the sound magnetic and irresistible. Endless jams that aren't really, but feel like they should be. Like they are anyway. Transcending the laws of time and space, dragging us kicking and screaming, bouncing and bobbing, into some blissed out basement at the end of the universe, where we subsist of nothing but riffs, drums and FX. We never want to leave.
Killer packaging, it's an lp AND a cd, same music on both, fold over full color sleeve, full color one sided cd sleeve (all described above) and a full color thick cardstock insert. And of course, limited, only 500 copies!
The return of Cave In. Or maybe more accurately, ANOTHER return of Cave In. We might be some of the only folks who never stopped loving this band. From their crushing metallic early years, to their epic pop prog Radiohead style flirtation with major label years, to their return to indie label / heaviness, to Cave In front man Stephen Brodsky's curious but totally compelling jangly psych pop solo records, and now this, another return that sounds a lot like the under appreciated Perfect Pitch Black record from a while back, the band melding their two disparate sides, the poppy polished side, and the chugging metal side. And fuck if it doesn't still sound great. In fact, it's the sort of thing that could, or maybe SHOULD find it's way on to commercial radio. As the climate is way more accepting of metal, and heaviness in general, and Cave In have a sort of Muse only more metal thing going on, with the right push, as we've said before, these guys cold be huge.
"Cayman Tongue" opens up with some soaring guitars, big stadium drums, and Brodsky's soaring croon, and some serious chug. We're definitely hearing some Muse, but with that distinct Cave In vibe and way with melodies, before it gets seriously crunchy and the gruff vocals come out, and things get mathy and gloriously chaotic, and then for MINUTES, the band get all spaced out and doomy, letting their guitars feedback and buzz, interrupting the tangled guitar gnarl every few seconds with a big metallic crush, before a seriously grinding intense Coalesce-style outro.
"Retina Sees Rewind" has a killer main riff, all tangled Maiden-y squiggles and crunchy chug, wild psychedelic leads, and a chorus that sounds a bit like Torche meets Rush meets Queens Of The Stone Age. "The Redtrail" is all frantic punk rock with shrieked vox and tangled guitars, Greg Ginn-ish riffage and a total old school punk rock breakdown right in the middle. And "Air Escapes" finishes things off with another perfect blend of mathy metallic heaviness and quirky psych pop, Brodsky's nimble vocals draped over angular guitars and tribal drumming, that gets more and more Voivod-ish as the track progresses which is never a bad thing.
We still love these guys, hard to understand why everyone doesn't. One of the few bands as adept at pummeling metal as they are at crafting epic arena pop, and the fact that they can somehow do both at once, only makes them that much more special.
Incredible packaging as with most Hydra Head stuff, gorgeous metallic printing on the jacket and on the inside sleeve, pressed on ultra thick vinyl, and most likely very very limited.
If you live in the bay area and don't know who George Chen is, we can safely say you've been locked in a windowless room for the past decade, surviving only on bread crust and lint. For those of you who fall under the above condition and have not had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Chen, he is a huge organizer of all kinds of all ages events and get togethers in the bay area, and has been on the road with all kinds of people from Grey Daturas to Common Eider King Eider. He also makes some seriously awesome music under the name Chen Santa Maria, usually of the noise freak-out persuasion. And this collaboration between Chen Santa Maria and Luuse is no exception, almost an hour of live sonic exploration from these dudes, relentless and all the while totally immersive and huge. Recommended!
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A long lost Circle album??! Sort of. One of Circle's best albums?! Definitely. The deal with Taantumus is that it came out on the Finnish label Bad Vugum back in 2001, falling betwixt Prospekt and Sunrise (approximately, it's hard to keep track) in the ever-expanding Circle discography. At the time, there was talk of Taantumus getting a domestic release in the US, so we never imported any copies from overseas. Well, that domestic release never ever happened, but thankfully, years and years later, this amazing "lost" (to most folks outside of Finland, anyway) Circle album has been reissued by the band's own Ektro label, now crowned with the 9:21 bonus track "Veitsi"!
Now, you should already be aware we LOVE this hypnotic Finnish space/prog/psych/metal/kraut band. If we could marry them, we would! So of course we're excited by any release of theirs. However, this one is definitely extra-deserving of Record Of The Week honors, as it's really one of their best efforts (though we'd be hard pressed to agree upon a definitive Circle top ten, let's not get sidetracked).
One listen should convince. To one track, even. The first track, "Kultaa", that's IT. Right there. Damn. Hit Circle song, in the universe where Circle could have hit songs, which is our universe, as far as we're concerned. Boom boom on the floor tom, the guitars hitting the same chord over and over again. Repetition, repetition, repetition. But utterly energizing and maddeningly catchy. And then, the vocals - Meronian monks whooping it up.
Track two, "Kekkone", tick tock drums and electronic flutter, with melodic guitar lines tiptoeing across the stereo field... utterly exquisite! Track three, "Valtaisa Hahmo", another monster motorik HIT. With whistling FLUTE, well maybe it's a recorder, and droning synths. Track four... well heck we're not gonna go through 'em all. What's the point, you already know you want this, right?? So get it and listen for yourself, at home, cranked up LOUD. (Not that this is loud music, per se, some of it sure is, but lots of it is subtle, stuff that if listened to at volume will simply allow one to more easily bask in its glory). That way you can find out about the kick ass harmonica jam of track 9, "Morn", all on your own. (Shades of Itavayla there.)
Rest assured, Taantumus is stocked with plenty of Circle's trademark mantric riffs, throbbing bass, precision timekeeping, cosmic shimmer, and curious noise. OK, we'll mention a few more of the many treats to be found on this 66 minute disc... Track 5, "Suopea", brings in extra distortion and heaviness, contrasted with a haunting vocal choir that floats over, of course, a tight percolating rhythm. Track 7, "Lyhytaallosta", is a slab of bass heavy angular postpunk, Circle style, with chiming no-wavey guitars and deepvoiced Viking vox - plus weird glitch and gurgle. Into the more "metal" side of Circle? Try track 10, "Siivet", a killer "speedkraut" cut foreshadowing their later Panic disc, albeit with piano. And Mika's operatic vocals, something first unleashed on the preceding Prospekt disc. Heavier still is "Pelqton", which sounds like Circle doing abstract Isis... but, again, with piano. Oh, and yeah the bonus track is awesome too. Droning density that skitters into deep grooves with some near spoken singing. Actually, elsewhere on the album there's mysterious vocal bits in the background that somehow sound like they could be a song from The Mighty Boosh, if you are familiar with that British TV comedy you'll be scratching your head too.
So, wow. This is the sort of album that leaves us puzzled - why isn't Circle the biggest band in the world? (Maybe they really HAVE hypnotized us.) But really, aside from being really WEIRD, and not widely released, you'd have thought that an album like this would have made Circle megasuperduper stars. I mean really, what do they gotta do, besides being one of the best bands ever? You think that'd be enough. You'd think Taantumus would be enough. Well whatever, in our universe it is.
We've always held a special place in our darkened hearts for Finnish black metal weirdos Circle Of Ouroborus. The duo churns out a very strange brand of metal that would appear to share just as much, or maybe even more, with melancholy gloom merchants like Joy Division (who they have covered) and Dead Can Dance, as it does with black metal. They definitely share some of the influences of groups like Lifelover and Amesoeurs - you know, a gothy 4AD shimmer, cleanly arpeggiated guitar melodies, and vocals that don't rely exclusively on shrieks or growls - but to compare Circle Of Ouroborus to those bands, or anyone else really, is to neglect just how unique these guys are. For one, an ever present murkiness permeates all COO recordings, giving their songs a weird dreamy quality that seems to exist completely out of any time or place. The vocals, which have garnered understandable comparisons to the off kilter approach of Mark E. Smith, are hardly what you would expect from a "black metal" band, but there is obviously an acute awareness of the bleak realities of life that is TOTALLY black metal. Maybe more than anything, Circle Of Ouroborus have completely sidestepped any expectations of what a black metal band is supposed to be, and redefined it for their own purposes. In doing so, they have carved out a unique place in the metal underground and never failed to blow our minds with their bizarre sound. Now, after the completion of their Shores/Streams/Islands trilogy of records (we're still trying to track down Islands for y'all!), COO have progressed way beyond the awesome but at times amateur practice space sonics of some of their earlier work and delivered Tree Of Knowledge, not only their most accomplished and well thought out work to date, but certainly one of the best and most interesting metal releases we have heard this year.
The album begins with "A Root Casket", and it pretty much sounds like a more beefed up (and better) version of the COO we originally lost our shit over. The band sounds full and spacious, but still raw and lo-fi, like a ninth generation cassette dub of a lost Factory Records band. A catchy keyboard melody carries the song majestically, while murky guitars spin a sustained droniness that works perfectly with the vocals. At the same time, it manages to give a glimpse into their weird folky side. The seasick queasiness of the band's past releases endures, it just seems like they've better grasped how to work with their limited recording technology. "Demon In Iron" is a slightly atonal piece that makes perfect use of the band's cyclical guitar riffs and shimmery keyboards. It's so melodic and sad, but just BEAUTIFUL and even a bit punky, and you'd be forgiven if you mistook this one for some gloomy as hell indie band from the early '90s. "Show Me The Way To The Wishing Wall" is a midtempo downer with more cool circular guitar and steady, midtempo drumming. The singer's croon goes perfectly with the hazed out nature of the songs, and the natural overdrive on the otherwise clean guitars definitely help to make COO sound unlike most metal bands. Of course, around the 4 minute mark a Xasthurian black metal croak reminds you that, yes, this is some evil shit and not just another shoegazey black metal band. "Dead Eyes, Dead Soul" (how's that for further Joy Division comparisons?) follows another beautifully sad melody with phased out guitars and a discordant chorus that offers a cool transition to the tunefulness of the rest of the song. Instrumental number "Summer Graves" features sustained synth strings and an exotic touch with guitars that, at moments, *almost* brought to mind Polvo... Weird, but not quite as weird as the addition of a trumpet on the closing song, "Through My Fingers". Slow picked guitars and a chorus that manages to throw in some metal as fuck pinch harmonics with the contemplative dreaminess are accompanied by the sustained trumpet melodies that seem almost hopeful. Of course, the lyrics prove otherwise...
Like all COO releases, Tree Of Knowledge features totally amazing artwork, with 8 unique icons (each corresponding to a different song, it would seem) wrapped in the roots of a broken tree. It's rare that a band is able to achieve such a unique and perfectly realized vision, especially within a genre known for its dogmatically orthodox bullshit. But Circle Of Ouroborus are hardly just another band, and with Tree Of Knowledge, they have made that abundantly clear.
Clark put out one of the best and sadly overlooked electronic albums of last year, Turning Dragon. A high adrenaline rush of colorful spazzed out electronic perfection. Totems Flare finds Clark adding vocals to the mix on a few tracks (with varied results) and while we're not as much in love with this album as we were with his previous outings, Totems Flare still has plenty of crunchy, glitchy, color that pops out of our speakers and here and there REALLY hits the spot. In many ways Totems Flare has a sound reminiscent of Go Plastic era Squarepusher and it certainly is the most vintage Warp sounding record to come out on that label in a long time. And actually, the more we play this, the more we find ourselves getting into it. Check it out...
Cold Cave have really been making the rounds as of late, but unless you were one of the lucky few to obtain some of their super limited vinyl only platters or their recent Cremations collection (which is still available), you may have been left out in the... cold. HAHA! But anyway, Love Comes Close is the first official Cold Cave record, though it does include the three songs (re-recorded?) off the band's disgustingly limited Etsel and Ruby 12" which we had for about 5 minutes, as well as the song "The Trees Grew Emotions And Died" from the ep of the same name, all of them winners. We are happy to report that this baby more than ably lives up to all the hype. It's not that the sound of Cold Cave is revolutionary or progressive... nay, in far less skilled hands, this could easily be filed under the "derivative shit" category, but Cold Cave's remarkable melodic sense and keen understanding of songcraft are so expertly handled that their tunes come off more like lost synth pop classics. It's actually a bit unbelievable just how darkly catchy these songs are, and how they will just pop into your head at random moments like they've been there for ages. Cold Cave's music is the perfect combination of everything that is great about '80s synth based music with none of the dated cheesiness, or maybe more appropriately, just the right amount of dated cheesiness. OMD styled melodies and uber dramatic vocals from the school of Ian Curtis meld with throbbing rhythms, awesome life denying lyrics, and a pronounced gothic element, but goth as interpreted by hardcore kids. All of these combined are enough to make Cold Cave stand out from the rest of the pack. Plus, you know it's gotta be good when various folks may *want* to dislike something but can't muster the hate in their hearts simply because it's so great.
The album kicks off with "Cebe And Me", with super minimal percussion and murky, distorted female vocals that weave around a repetitive synth buzz. This sets things up perfectly for the next track, "Love Comes Close," with CC mainman Wes Eisold's deadpan vocals and music that manages to be both upbeat and melancholy as hell. The real kicker with this one, however, is the fact that it is a DEAD RINGER for the melody in the infamous mirror dance scene in Silence Of The Lambs. So now all you dudes can fashion a mangina and prance naked in front of your mirror within the comfort of your own home, just like Buffalo Bill. "Life Magazine" utilizes a blown out buzzy keyboard to hold the foundation while more down to earth programming and amazing female vocals courtesy of one time Xiu Xiu collaborator Caralee McElroy help to make this maybe our favorite track on the album. A reedy little synth melody sits atop everything else, and the dreaminess of it all sends things way off into the clouds... Goddamn, it's so good.
Naming a song "Heaven Was Full" definitely sets the bar pretty high, you're pretty much obligated to make it awesome, and that's just what Cold Cave did with this one. Subsonic oscillations swirl below what sounds like wispy winds made by a synthesizer, accompanied by Eisold's low croon and some of the catchiest and most beautiful melodies on the album. The slow movement of this piece really strikes an emotional chord, it's a real downer, but it's so irresistible it hurts. "The Tree Grew Emotions And Died" features some cool clanky drum machines with staccato boy/girl vocals and an ever present layer of super blown out guitars (we think), with a nice, slightly bouncy keyboard melody carrying the song forward. Album closer "I.C.D.K." is a quirky yet slightly ominous dance number that will certainly keep many an ass shaking all night long, and when it's all over, you first instinct will be to put Love Comes Close on for another round.
Undoubtedly Cold Cave will have trouble escaping comparisons to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, and even the Magnetic Fields at times, and not without good reason. But the band's greatest strength is its ability to go beyond their influences and deliver music that is too amazing and well written to be ignored. If you don't dig it, it doesn't mean people will respect your supposed impeccable taste and appreciation for groundbreaking music... it means you're missing out.
One of several new releases on the always kick ass Digitalis label, this one from a one man band called Concern, that one man being Gordon Ashworth, little brother of Owen Ashworth of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, as well as a member of the late great Peyote Calamity, a weird heavy outfit, who sadly never released a proper record, but neither of those bands necessarily hint at the sounds to be found here. Utilizing a vast collection of instruments and noise making devices, zither, lap harp, mbira, banjo, piano, clarinet, trombone, accordion, acoustic guitar and alto horn, Ashworth blurs all those various instruments into long streaks of hazy drone-y dreaminess. Three tracks, all long, all gorgeously lush and textured, strangely melodic and propulsive for a sound that tends toward a more static drift.
Opener "Truth And Distance" bristles with energy, a glowing warm shimmer, the edges growing ever sharper as the songs sprawls outward, from a hushed whisper to a mighty heart of the sun ur-drone, the sound raw and organic, the core a deep unwavering drone, but the sound is like a stream, carrying all manner of glitch and hum, stray bits of disembodied guitar, melodic fragments, eventually transforming into a strange abstract Appalachia, a soft swirling tangle of upper register buzz and and skittery processed tones, definitely some of the most divine drones we've heard.
The first track is well over half the total length of the record, but the second two tracks, while shorter, are just as beautiful and epic. "Young Birth" builds from hushed whir to almost symphonic sounding majesty, a warped otherworldly new age, all tranquil and blissed out, the various tones overlapping and intertwining before fading out in a soft flurry of crackle and hum. While the final track, "Heartsink", begins all raw and fuzzy and almost heavy with a Tim Hecker sort of vibe, only to shift gears, and allow the sound of the various instruments to become distinct and identifiable. Which in no way means the sound is any less dreamlike, soft shimmers of heavily reverbed piano drift weightlessly in an expanse of soft muted melodies, the overtones creating distant drone-y swells, the result a lovely abstract sort of classical chamber dronemusic, so so so nice.
Essential listening for the drone inclined, and any one into Tim Hecker, Aidan Baker, Fennesz, Belong and the like might just have a new favorite record.
We would have to be forgiven for missing out on The Cultural Decay from a couple years back. After all, there are eighty-gazillion lost and recently rediscovered post-punk, minimal-wave, and art-rock obscurities from all around the world; but this short-lived Belgian post-punk group from the early 80s is something special and fortunately, Sacred Bones did take notice and should be commended for finally making this available.
From 1980 to 1982, The Cultural Decay only played a handful of gigs, all in Belgium; and they released two singles, one of which was produced by the Revolting Cocks founder Luc Van Acker. From the onset, it's pretty clear that Joy Division was the favorite band of The Cultural Decay, as the guitar and bass interplay of jagged rhythmic guitar chops coupled with loping low-end bass melodies mirrors that of Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. To be fair, this Belgian band did not have Ian Curtis as a front-man; and they relied more on a snarled monotone delivery similar to those found in the Buzzcocks and Crisis. For those who know fellow Belgian post-punkers Siglo XX, the sound of The Cultural Decay will be very familiar and arguably better! The songs are all darkly tinged post-punk tunes clouded by a dour atmosphere that the band urgently pushes against. Given that this collection features the two studio produced singles and a bunch of 4-track demos, the production quality is a bit uneven; but hey, that's DIY for you! It certainly doesn't detract from the songs themselves, which just get a little rough around the edges.
FYI, The Cultural Decay ran a small label themselves, and were the the original home of that incredible AA single that we reviewed not that long ago. Recommended, for sure!
PS: The cd (not here yet, unfortunately) features FIVE extra tracks not on the lp!
It's always a challenge to delve into the polyglot mythologies of David Tibet, as the visions in his lyrics reference a host of esoteric subjects: the gnostic Christian texts of the early 2nd Century, Thelemic citations from Aleister Crowley, snippets of Coptic, and plenty of Tibet's feverish dislocations of images delivered in stream of consciousness. The central protagonist here is Aleph, a character with a slippery persona, one that may be acting before God set the universe in order, one that may be acting as a dopplerganger to Adam, one that may be the murderous precursor of Cain, one that may spell out an alternate origin of Lucifer, or one that is unique to Current 93. To avid Current 93 fans, these mysteries and contradictions are commonplace; but the biggest shift for Current 93 is in the musical arrangements. Gone are the fairy-dusted madrigals for just piano, 12-string guitar, and violin. Tibet has now grasped onto a blistering, occasionally sprawling psychedelia centered upon heavy, proto-metal riffs. Amon Duul's Yeti, the psychedelic moments of Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, and certainly early Alice Cooper all factor into Current 93's arrangements. Given the '70s laden heaviness of this album, it's a little hard to believe that Al Cisneros (Om, Sleep) who had previously collaborated with Tibet isn't present. Instead, Tibet has brought on board Alex Neilson, Andrew WK, Keith Wood, Matt Sweeney, Rickey Lee Jones, James Blackshaw, porn-star Sasha Gray, and a host of others. Once again, Steven Stapleton is at the helm of the production with Andrew Liles adding his deft hand in the mix as well. Alex Neilson's presence on drums is of particular note, as his heavy-handed fills and lumbering gate does away with the taut precision which gave some Current 93 albums an anal retentive quality. Neilson in conjunction with the army of guitarists churning through these heavy, psychedelic riffs makes this album as good as it is.
It seems Kranky has taken a break from their steady output of psychedelic pop to make room some cosmic minimalists. Which we're excited about considering how much we dug Gregg Kowalsky's Tape Chants (which we reviewed a few lists ago). This time Kranky delivers Mr. Davis's second effort on the Chicago based label, titled Mutually Arising. The aptly named disc is as minimal as it gets, two long form tracks, one 28 minutes and the other 20 minutes, of mind liquefying, analog synth hypnosis. Mr. Davis, who has been known to work with a variety of instruments and experiment with folk stylings in the past, has restrained himself to a Korg Mono/Poly synth, a Crumar Stratus synth, various effects pedals and a computer. Though a fairly amorphous figure in the experimental music community, having collaborated with the likes of Keith Fullerton Whitman and Sebastien Roux, it seems Davis has locked into some cosmic wavelength. Mutually Arising begins with a faint distant ring and builds into a tidal wave of shimmering bliss, offering up soaring, slow shifting chords and long form tones to create two beaming compositions of fluttering overtones and radiant textures. Having studied music at Chicago's De Paul university, it's no wonder Mr. Davis has taken a rather academic approach to Mutually Rising, a slight reach from his more organic compositions usually involving gongs, guitars or exotic reed instruments. What makes Mutually Arising so killer is the slow creeping subtly of small details that slowly evolve in and out of the analog hum, it's a gradual process like clouds shifting shape, distant buzz and hum, radiating overtones, the movement is there but incremental and delicate. A true gem of modern minimalist composition, a must have for drone heads and long time Kranky fans alike, highly recommended!
Along with Terrorizer, this magazine is our monthly metal must-read. This issue has Nergal of Polish black/death metallers Behemoth on the cover, a cool photo of him looking like a surly member of the Blue Man Group who overdosed on Rogaine. Also, there's interviews with / features involving the likes of Anvil, The Gates Of Slumber, Voivod, Church Of Misery, Yob, Dysrhythmia, Gorod, Suffocation, and more. Including an interview with "pirate metal" band Swashbuckle conducted by Waldo the Parrot from Hatebeak! And if that's not enough humor for you, there's the usual John Darnielle column at the back of the magazine too, among other chuckles throughout.
Everything Johnny Jewel touches these days turns to sultry dancefloor gold. Whether it's Glass Candy, the Chromatics, or a handful of other groups on Italians Do It Better that have felt Jewel's magic touch, he has really been largely responsible for making IDIB a label to trust when it comes to sizzling, late night spaced out disco!
What sets Desire a little apart from other acts on Italians Do It Better is that it's much more of a full band effort, with an affection for analog synthesizers as well as strings, percussion, piano, and it's got an overall delivery that is much more warm and rich than some of the other similar sounding outfits on the label. Desire still have that icy-detached aesthetic that can be found in the sounds of Chromatics, but there is something a bit more personal sounding in the songs here. While most records in this genre tend to be filled with super immediate hooks that sometimes lose their staying power on repeated listens, this record is a serious grower. In fact on first listen we thought maybe this was going to be a bit of a let down, but we're so happy we gave it a few more spins, cuz we were eventually totally sucked into the moody, sultry stylings that Desire conjure up. Between this and the Nite Jewel record we gushed about recently, our late night coming down soundtrack is sounding better then ever. Feel the slow burn!
Almost 50 years after its release and still as raw, pleasing, and perfect sounding as ever. In lots of ways it seems as though Bo Diddley never really got his due. Besides being an electric guitar pioneer and rock n' roll forefather, Diddley knew something about soul, bare-bone execution, and smiling-with-purpose delivery that made his best records able to stand the test of time. You can't listen to Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger without your foot constantly bouncing up and down. You can't listen to his rendition of "Sixteen Tons" without your eyebrows raising in pleasant curiosity. You can't listen to him do the crawdaddy without wanting to join right along. Bo Diddley knew about that totally pure and raw space where you can feel music hit you in the greatest and most physical way. One of those timeless records that belongs in any music lovers collection. Whether your stereo is usually filled with the sounds of Japanese noise or no wave intensity or singer songwriter statements; this is a record that you can turn to and get refreshed by all the time. Diddley is an amazing example of someone who had the gift of making music that could ooze into our bodies and under our skin and next thing you know your whole body is moving your face is grinning and it feels so damn good. Thank you Mr. Diddley!
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.
It seems like many of the figurative walls that used to keep musical scenes and and record collections segregated are finally crumbling to the ground. In recent years indie rockers have embraced pop and the dance floor while lots of pop, hip-hop and R&B artists have latched on to the always evolving world of electronica. Discovery are kind of like the perfect poster boys for this evolution.
While best known for their more indie rock minded bands (one of those bands being quite the buzz band from a couple years ago) these two soundmakers have taken the opportunity to fully embrace their love of un-ironic pure dance pop delight. Much like the way Hot Chip brought the sound of Prince to a more indie sensibility, Discovery have crafted totally irresistible modern pop gems that kind of sound like the newest Phoenix record mixed with Kanye West. There is something so bright, colorful and refreshing about the sounds on LP. A bit more bouncy and playful then the Junior Boys while still using a bit of the same sonic template that they and Hot Chip helped create a few years back. The beats and electronics on LP are executed so flawlessly, if tweaked just a bit more they would sound right at home on a skweee record, but even so, this record is all about full on shiny pop perfection. Imagine the sound in the mall as we all roller-skated down the escalators after hours, in some teen movie with an Orange Julius in our hands, the food court behind us and a Forever 21 on the horizon. So yummy!
Another missive of gloriously murky tropical lo-fi garage surf pop from Ducktails, aka Matt Mondanile, this cd collecting tons of older out of print material from cassettes: the '1992' demo, recorded in 2007, a split tape from a little later on and the way out of print Ducktails II.
Even more warped and warbly than the Not Not Fun full length, these tracks drift and float through a hazy sonic dreamworld, slipping from looped cassette tape psychedelic calypso, to moody, sludgey bedroom balladry, to fuzzy proto garage rock, to dizzying super distorted sonic collages, to far out glistening new wave sparkle, to disembodied otherworldly Appalachia, to lonely sun dappled country twang, to lush lo-fi drum machine driven power pop, to dark brooding minimal indie jangle, to cinematic, almost Morricone sounding soundscapery, to super distorted GBV sounding fractured fragmented ADD pop, to hushed spaced out new age shimmer, all held together by that weird warped production, which wreathes everything in a washed out muted glow, like someone turned down the treble, or cut up the tweeters in your speakers with an exacto knife, the result is muddy and blurry and smeary and so gorgeous.
And be sure to stick around for the 12+ minute closing track, merely an excerpt of a much longer track, but it could be our favorite, an extended slow burning space drone, layered and textured, super distorted and effected, growing more so as it unfurls, eventually the sound begins to blow out, the notes begin to crumble, revealing a warm glowing center, surrounded by slowly decaying buzz and crunch!
When Andee and Allan were in Austin last spring for SXSW, they stumbled into a record store (the very cool End Of An Ear) only to be unexpectedly pummelled by two scruffy dudes set up in the corner, guitar and drums, kicking up a head splitting ear shredding low end racket, that was so powerful it almost made record shopping impossible, but then who wants to record shop when you can immerse yourself in an avalanche of sound so thick and viscous that it was almost a physical presence in the room? The guy with the axe seemed familiar too, and it wasn't until afterwards that we realized it was Gentry Densley of Iceburn fame, and we had just witnessed a live performance by his new duo project, Eagle Twin!
So, here we have the full length, and it's just as dark, and heavy and sprawling as it was live, not nearly as terrifying or ear drum destroying but records rarely are. What it is, though, is HEAVY AS FUCK, downtuned and massive, if we didn't know Densley was guitar player we would have almost assumed this was another one of those rhythm section only bands (a la Om).
Not sure if we're hearing too much Iceburn in Eagle Twin, it's definitely twisted and proggy, with lurching abstract arrangements, so in that it's similar, but this is more of the new slow n' low school, a la SUNNO))), Earth, Corrupted, Moss, Bunkur, etc.
The album begins by confusing the hell out of you. Opener "In The Beginning Was The Scream" sounds like some strange doom/free jazz hybrid, or maybe like a metal version of the Stooges song "LA Blues". You might notice that the vocals flow with a similar eccentricity to someone like Attila Csihar, but more than likely, you'll be blown away by what you soon realize is Tuvan throat singing and tons of gong-laden percussion. This is some weird and intense stuff for sure, and there is a peculiar aggressiveness to the instrumentation that many doom bands unintentionally eschew by trying to be slower than everyone else. Eagle Twin understand the power of built up tension and negative space, while never neglecting to utilize a heavy groove when necessary. The subsonic distortion and raspy spoken vocals on songs like "Storytelling Of Ravens" stir up plenty of blackened negative vibes for sure, but elsewhere, like on "Crow Hymns", Eagle Twin actually rock out pretty hard with boatloads of fuzzed out harmonic distortion and some awesome tom-heavy drumming. Densley's raspy voice, which at times carries a bit of a country drawl, works perfectly on "Carry On, King Of Carrion", which blends the sounds of both early and modern day Earth with doomed out Southern rock riffage.
The vocals sort of sound like dude in Scissorfight (if anyone gives a shit), or even like Wino, the songs are surprisingly catchy at times, Southern rock sounding even here and there, but then there's also all kinds of weird exotic shit and definitely some themes that show an Eastern influence, and some incredible riffing, as Densley is a fucking shredder, and even in downtuned minimal mode, he SLAYS. This is definitely about the heaviest record you may here all year, and totally puts to shame pretty much every other heavy duo we can think of, except maybe early godheadSilo...
What a total gem! An amazing unearthed, ultra obscure album from way back in 1986. Hailing from Rochester, NY, Eleven Pond crafted super infectious dark pop with wonderful synth moments and song writing that has really held up over the years. Some of the production, and much of the overall sound reminds us a bit of Seventeen Seconds era Cure, where basslines lead the tracks and the guitars and synths add such a nice mood and texture. We're also reminded a lot of another obscure mid '80s band, For Against, who had the same ability to take Factory/4AD elements and influences and meld them so nicely with classic eighties American college rock, they kind of sounded like this amazing hybrid of Joy Division and R.E.M.
With new romantic vocals that totally tap into vintage Depeche Mode and New Order territory, we also hear echoes of other lesser known yet great bands of this era like Soul Merchants and Jet Black Factory. With so many new bands lately referencing that era and looking to similarly vintage sounds for inspiration, it's so refreshing to hear an actual relic from that period, too bad it sadly somehow slipped through the cracks, but now we can finally enjoy this set of songs, so worthy of much wider appreciation.
Limited to a pressing of 500, each copy has been silk screened and contains two Eleven Pond postcards as well as a sticker from Dark Entries, the label who mark this as their first release and who we have a pretty good feeling we're going to be hearing a lot more from in the future. Grab one while you can, as this is highly recommended!
So in the latest issue of the Wire, David Keenan was on to something with his cultural study of what he's calling 'hypnogogic pop' to define connections between the likes of Emeralds, The Skaters, Ariel Pink, Zola Jesus, Pocahaunted, and others. He argues that these bands draw from a fictional reading of the late '70s and early '80s, that extracts an aura of that time period without a direct revisionism of any particular style. It would be a stretch to qualify Emaciator as 'pop' but certainly on this brilliant cassette self-released on Monorail Trespassing, Emaciator does fit within the hypnogogic definition of a half-awake / half-dreaming and half-remembering / half-forgetting sensibility. The psychic birthing place for this album would have been sometime in the late '70s and would stand as Jon Borges fictional historicism of what braintuning cassettes should have sounded like instead of insipid new age wishy-washy-ness. Sure, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Harmonia had generated a like-minded ambience through mellotron and guitar; and minimalists like Roland Kayn, Yoshi Wada, and LaMonte Young deconstructed composition into an unrepentant drone; but the psychedelia of the former rarely melded with the rigor of the latter. And here is where Emaciator fills in the historical gap, producing these two linear shots of deep cosmic dronemusik. The first side gradually builds out of analogue synthesis with swelling pulses of low end frequencies bristling against a meandering melody which hovers like a mirage in the distance. The second side is even more meditative, with a steady arc of sound which emerges like an arctic sunrise in wintertime, peeking over the blackened horizon only to sink back as a sunset. Emaciator's work seems to be smoothing out more and more, leaving an increasing gap between this work and the noise alter-ego Pedestrian Deposit. Both are great projects and should be checked out! Appease is a limited edition 22 minute cassette in an edition of 125 copies. These will not last.
