Originally released in 2006, the debut 7" from these lo-fi noise pop garage punk rockers is available again. And anyone into the current crop of noisemakers like Ty Segall, Waaves, Oh Sees, Crocodiles, and all that stuff, should not sleep on Tyvek, their full length we reviewed a while back is a killer, and these two songs destroy as well.
In fact, the A side, "Mary Ellen Claims" might be their best jam ever, all short sharp jagged guitar jangle, yelped vocals, total eighties punk rock vibe, we hear a more lo-fi scrappy Jam actually, cool catchy new wave melodies all over the place, frenetic drumming, and as catchy as all get out. This track will become so lodged in your head guaranteed. The flipside is more of a trifle, but still pretty cool, the vocals spouting absurdist lyrics about different makes and models of cars among other things, delivered in a very Mark E. Smith like drawl, but underpinned by fuzzy bass, and slashes of angular guitar. Rad stuff. And apparently originals of this go for crazy cash on eBay, so now's your chance...
Sub Rosa, in claiming to present this compilation within the context that "history needs constant re-evaluation because, like music, history cannot be read as a fixed entity" has unfortunately released an anthology that offers no new insights or previously unknown factors in the inception of noise and electronic musics. Rather, the artists featured are the often-name dropped art stars used within institutional texts for the Whitney Biennial or Documenta to legitimize sound art or some connection between institutional forces and underground activity. A good number of the artists - like Luigi Russolo, Pierre Schaefer, Sonic Youth, Xenakis, Pauline Oliveros, Edgard Varese, John Cage, Ryoji Ikeda, and Einsturzende Neubauten - are undoubtedly important; but is it really necessary to sing their praises yet again? While there's certainly something to be said for introducing new audiences to a lot of the amazing music on this compilation, Sub Rosa should call a spade a spade and fess up to curating a K-Tel compilation for the avant-garde.
At this point, sixties psych reissues are a dime a dozen. We have a whole section in the store, packed with good ones, and those are only a tiny fraction of what gets released. We've groused about it before, but just cuz it's old and rare, doesn't make it worth reissuing. Though sometimes, wow, is it ever!
The one thing we had never seen though, was a collection of sixties garage and psych from Iran. Then again, we had probably never wondered about the garage psych scene in Iran at all, but Raks Raks Raks has set us straight, and has us wishing we had.
As one might imagine, playing in a psychedelic rock band in the Middle East in the sixties was no cake walk, although according to the liner notes, it was maybe not as bad as we in the West might imagine, but amidst the various restrictions, political and personal, folks were of course still expressing themselves, and making music, and the results speak for themselves. Odds are, like us, you won't recognize a single band here, but it hardly matters, every track here is a winner, from Asian sounding grooves, to Ventures like surfy twang, to distinctly Middle Eastern sounding melodies, to fuzzy fifties-ish vocal doo wop, to twisted Monkees-like catchy pop, to Ethiopiques-ish jazzy funky grooves, to jangly psych folk, to fuzzy organ driven Joe Meek like grooviness, all infused with a distinctly Middle Eastern vibe, not just the language, the sound itself. Lo-fi, but so bursting with life and color and energy, classic sounds but imbued with elements and twists that make the tracks on Raks Raks Raks stand WAY out from the ordinary sixties psych reissue crowd BIG TIME! Expensive maybe, but so so worth it!
Massive booklet with extensive liner notes, as much about the history of the era and the politics of the region as the music and the artists.
Every city in every state, every country, has its own little musical scene, one that has grown and changed over the years, bands playing gigs, recording records, breaking up, moving on to other gigs, finally getting real jobs and settling down and having families, those records and gigs and bands forgotten. But think about all the places, all the cities, all the years and decades, and how many bands and records that we've never heard or heard of must be lurking out there. Records that were given to friends, consigned at the local store, or just stashed in the garage or basement. Rare record reissues are nothing new, and there's enough that they can't all possibly be good. In fact it's gotten to the point where if a record is old, and nobody heard it, it suddenly becomes a rarity worth unearthing. Which is not always the case. But with all those records out there, all those forgotten bands, some with only a song or two legacy, it's worth digging though all the rest, on the off chance of stumbling on to something amazing. And scenes have always fed off themselves, often where there was one good band, there was two, and where there was two, there was a whole bunch. Which brings us to Rocky Mountain Low. A killer collection of seventies rock and punk rock and power pop from Colorado, which is a place we're pretty familiar with, at least from the eighties onward, but we didn't know a single band here, and some of these groups are amazing. AND, for such a sprawling varied collection, there's very little chaff. In fact, this could very well have been a Numero Group reissue, super well researched, incredible song selection, a totally unknown lost scene, a bunch of amazing bands, and tons of killer tracks, maybe a bit more punk rock and lo-fi, but then, that's fine with us.
The Ravers are crunchy and jangly and sound like they're from Minneapolis, Radio Pete might be our favorite, effortlessly creating some gloriously rough edged reverb drenched garage pop, the sort of thing all those new groups are desperately emulating, sounds like Ariel Pink or the Oh Sees or Ty Segall if they were from the early seventies, the Front are snarly almost metallic sounding punk rock, Defex kick out the muddy murky bass heavy jams, all squiggly angular leads, wild drumming and killer pop hooks, the Cells are total Romantics style new wave power pop, the Profalactics are all yelpy Riot Grrl sounding lo-fi punk rock three chord lo-fi crunch, the Instant are woozy low fidelity punk pop psych, a lot of this reminds us of Guided By Voices too, that sort of British sound filtered through a US punk rock aesthetic, and it goes on and on. So many kick ass bands, so many amazing tracks, a double lp AND a cd, with a massive full color magazine sized booklet, jam packed with extensive liner notes on EVERY band here, cool stuff for sure, and an awesome glimpse of yet another lost and forgotten scene...
Proto metal fiends, come get your fix! This new collection of "20 Heavy Nuggets From The Golden Age Of Hard Psych" is definitely in the tradition of other cool comps like White Lace And Strange, Downer Rock Genocide, The Electric Asylum, A Visit To The Spaceship Factory, Psychedelic Minds, etc. Just check out the lineup, names we know (and love) include the likes of Highway Robbery, Bang, Sir Lord Baltimore, Granicus, Power Of Zeus, Haystacks Balboa, Yesterday's Children, Tin House, SRC, and The Litter. Heavy hitters, all of 'em. Now you might already have some of these cuts, if you really are a hard psych / proto metal fiend, but you surely don't have 'em all. And even though we were familiar with a bunch of these bands, there's plenty more here we'd never had the pleasure of hearing before, and these obscurities fit right in with such illustrious company. Most of these tracks are taken from LPs, not singles, usually the band's one and only album, many of which have never been properly reissued or even if they have been, aren't in print anymore anyway.
So what we've got here is a deep survey of vintage late '60s, early '70s North American hard rock action, (proto) metallic, garagey, and psychedelic, chock full of crunching riffs, wild wailing guitars, and rough n' tough vocals. It's all pretty darn heavy for the era, if not quite to the extreme reached across the pond by heavy metal progenitors Black Sabbath (though Bang comes quite close - and hey look there's a song titled "Wrought Iron Man" by a band called Steeplechase). This comp includes the the most fuzzed out and stompin' version of frat rock chestnut "Gimme Some Lovin'" you've ever heard (by Euclid, from their album Heavy Machinery). Of course, fuzz is in copious supply all across this disc, erupting perhaps most savagely on the classic "Kingdom Come" by Sir Lord Baltimore, a majestic six and a half minute epic mixing tripped out lyrics with bursts of ultra distorted guitar. Being one of the tracks, like a few others here, that'd we'd have chosen ourselves for an all time ultimate proto metal mix.
FYI, the other bands on this disc we haven't mentioned yet are: Liquid Smoke, The Finchley Boys, Damnation Of Adam Blessing, Dragonfly, Jamul, Third Power, Head Over Heels, and Landslide. Among all 20, it's hard to pick faves, some are heavier, some are weirder/proggier, some are blusier, some are groovier, some are more melodic, you'll have to decide for yourself. But this is definitely a pretty badass acid rock comp! And thankfully the cd booklet includes informative commentary on each band/track.
Pretty killer 4 way match up on this super limited 7": Kurt Vile, Jack Rose, Meg Baird and US Girls. But what do all 4 of these acts have in common? They all call Philadelphia home. Released to commemorate a show the folks at Kraak set up earlier this year in Philly, each of these 4 bands offers up a brief little blast of the glorious sounds they make. Blast might be too strong a word to describe the tracks here, as evidenced by garage noise popper Kurt Vile who starts things off on a surprisingly sweet and folky note with his "I Wanted Everything", all minor key guitar and sweetly crooned vox, plenty of reverb, a dark woozy almost traditional sounding ballad, which leads perfectly into Rose's "Mr. Rose Visits Washington D.C.", yet another gorgeous tangle of buzzing steel string modern Appalachia, replete with the usual bleary blur of frenetic melody and warm languid raga like buzz.
On the flipside, Meg Baird (of Espers) offers up a sweetly melancholy folky drift, a cover of a track by obscure sixties Christian folkies Felt, delicate crystalline guitar, her voice ethereal and angelic, the whole thing very dreamy and timeless, but definitely looking back to the classic era of seventies British female folk. And finally US Girls finish things off with the only real 'blast' here, a glorious noisy lo-fi looped chunk of warm swirling garage pop, repetitive and buzzy and totally mesmerizing but WAY too short. Left us dying for more for sure...
Comes in a simple printed black and white cover, adorned with a crazy high school binder drawing of wolves and buildings and melty hands and floating heads and fat people and ghosts and teeth and all kinds of super detailed weirdness. And this is most likely crazy limited, these things most always are.
More and more quiet goes the solo album for Mika Vainio, the Finnish electronic wizard who has brought us such feats of techo-minimalist intensity as the Kesto 4cd boxset set in Pan Sonic and the Metri album recorded as an O with slash through it. But under his own name, Vainio's recordings shrink from existence in the wake of gasping, nocturnal bouts of silence. That said, comparisons to the very-special-nothing-music of Bernhard Gunter (whatever happened to that guy?) or Richard Chartier don't really apply to Vainio's work. There's much more in common here with the 2009 release Vectors from Robert Hampson (also released through Touch), as a revamped interpretation of INA-GRM concrete / electronic compositions from the '60s and '70s. Vainio's palette of sound rotates between chorales of electrical static, snarls of sawtooth buzzings, and cold sinewave generation with a few field recordings thrown in for good measure; and Vainio composes these elements by way of the razor-cut more often than not. Thus, Aineen Musta Puhelin is a fragmentary collage, at times marked by sharpened, Tesla-coil bursts of engorged electricity only to snap to a blackened frame of silence or at least prolonged inactivity.
Yet another bit of gorgeous drifting pop ambience from the Echospace camp, this time from the unknown to us Brock Van Wey, which is strange in part because he's from right here in SF, and apparently he's been making this divine dreaminess for a while now.
Well, no use in lamenting what we may have missed, better to just leap straight in to these white clouds, and live in the moment. And Van Wey's moment is indeed divine, a series of sprawling gauzy ethereal moments in fact, all soft tones, and softly tumbling melodies. We hear Brian Eno all over this for sure, as well as Gas and Roedelius and Reich, needless to say if those names mean anything to you, odds are this could well become your new favorite late night chill out music.
A hushed ambient pop drift, equal parts new age shimmer, and muted electronic thrum, here and there the sound gets super fuzzy and washed out and suddenly we're reminded of the Field, or perhaps a beatless M83, that same sort of sun dappled soft focus looped mesmer, often the sound seems to be constructed from voices, layered and effected, a hauntingly organic and lovely assemblage of tones and textures, alternately rendered in minimal drift, and maximal shimmer. So gorgeous. Gorgeous enough that Echospace mainman Stephen Hitchell was so smitten that he added a whole extra disc of his own reinterpretation / remix of the album, and if Hitchell's version, while dramatically different, is just as good. The fuzzed out bliss is muted and blurred and backgrounded, allowing rhythms and minimal textures to drive these versions, the sound very much Chain Reaction, a glitchy skeletal dub, wreathed in soft smears of the original's dreamy buzz, a super modern dubbed out click and glitch and thump and pulse, that drifts from warm gristled buzz, to lounge-y almost exotica, to full on dark space dub, and finally to warm, hissy, glitchy, skittery, washed out dreamdrone ambience. Both discs on their own would be essential listening, but together, this couldn't be more recommended.
It all began with two unidentified mp3's sent via email, no message, no anything, just to HUGE files. We were wondering if there was something wrong with our email, and then POW. Two songs, identified only by title, but nothing about what they were, the name of the band, where they came from. Our first impulse was to just trash em, but we thought what the heck? And holy shit were we immediately floored. Exactly the sort of buzzing warped blackness we love around these parts, lo-fi, tripped out, druggy, heavy, space-y, we had to figure out who the heck this band was and how to get MORE!!
After a few emails back and forth, we discovered this filthy black chaos was the work of a one man band from the Northwest called Voltaic Omen, a little more digging revealed than not only did that one man have the most bad ass corpse paint, but his corpsepainted visage was an integral part of one of the VO logos, one of the best black metal logos ever by the way. VO was only too happy to send us more, the result being several weeks of mp3's and downloads and demos and cassettes and 3"cd-r's and often a new track every few days as they were hatched. It's almost like we won the fucked up demented lo-fi black metal lottery! But now it's time to share our good fortune with you. Not only will there hopefully be a compilation coming soon on Andee's own tUMULt label, but we have a brand new proper cd-r demo, called Supreme Satanic Substorm, and crammed with the swirling, stumbling, off kilter, fucked up and freaky black metal weirdness that had us so smitten in the first place.
SSS starts out appropriately enough with Carl Sagan from Cosmos, his voice drenched in reverb, before the record stumbles into motion, a lugubrious tarpit blast, under some oozing riffage and bizarre echoey vocals, which suddenly switch gears into what sounds like some lo-fi noise pop jam gone black metal. And it only gets weirder from there, lumbering doomic blurred buzzscapes wrap around woozy minor key guitars, heaving strangled vokills drift over programmed beats, the vibe shifting from washed out Burzumy dirge, to total psychedelic outer space blackened skree, the third track "Blood Bound" is all growled vocals, over tinny high end swirls of guitar, and splattery blast beats, a sound less metal, and more sort of washed out grim bliss, then the low end kicks in and the track seems to ooze and sprawl and slip into even more chaos. Elsewhere, tracks drift into weird muted skitter, or are laced with dizzyingly out of tune synths, funhouse melodies, even some weirdly poppy jangle, but it always seems to collapse inward, into a swirling black cloud of gloriously outsider whatthefuck. This is not the sort of stuff for folks looking for super tight blazing black metal, or even Burzumic depressive blackness, no, Voltaic Omen is for the freaks, the folks who like their black metal as demented as it is black, who want their black metal records to sound like they were left on the dashboard of the car in a heatwave, the grooves all melting into one another, the result a warped, woozy, warbly weird as fuck ambient black space blow out. And even when it seems like he's going for classic black metal, a frenzied riff, flurries of double kick drum, soaring epic melodies, it only lasts for a few seconds, before it gets pulled apart, wrapped in a vocal that sounds like a dying foghorn, or sent tumbling through some spaced out stretch of demonic vox and whirring amp buzz, or pelted with off kilter D-beat drumming, or splintered into thick swirls of intense (but still twisted) black ambience, often slipping into abstract, almost funereal doom or even indescribable bursts of total blackspacepsychdrone freakout.
As the above review demonstrates, this stuff is super hard to describe. But think Abruptum, Lugubrum, Vondur, Striborg, Necrofrost, that's the sort of damaged delirium Voltaic Omen explores. So now all of you loyal aQ weirdo black metal obsessives can add Voltaic Omen to your fucked up freaked out damaged and demented outsider lo-fi space drone black metal pantheon!
Second release from this Skullflower side project, fronted by (of course) SF mainman Matthew Bower, who in Voltigeurs teams up with SF cellist Samantha Davies for a bit of Skullflowery blow out. Their M.O. seems to remain the same as on the self titled disc on Turgid Animal, a head splitting rib cracking wall of crumbling super distorted noise, but a noise shot through with more texture and melody than one might expect. As with most music like this, a glancing listen, or hearing it as background sound, will do nothing for you, a white noise vacuum cleaner Merzbowian blowout. But crank the volume a bit, strap on some headphones, and you will gradually become able to parse these caustic sounds.
Not sure if it's the presence of cello, or if Davies brings out Bower's softer side, but the sounds within the sounds here are surprisingly melodic, little tangles and squiggles, fragments and shards, but it's not just the inner sounds, the constantly coruscating frenzy of blown out guitar buzz, is warm and textural, layered and dense, a rich sound that seems to be constantly shifting and changing hues, timbre and tone, slipping from warm whir, to grating skree, to crumbling crunch, to in-the-red frenzy, but at every step along the way, the sound is much more than just NOISE, it most definitely IS 'noisy', and when we go on about Bower's softer side, it is of course, all relative, Bower's softer side is still about a hundred times harsher and heavier than the next guy's, but since we are not really big fans of harsh noise at all, it definitely takes a special touch for us to enjoy something this noisy, and Bower and Davies most assuredly have it.
From the most recent Skullflowers to this (and the previous) Voltigeurs disc, the duo have figured out how to harness noise, hot to sculpt and create with noise, the sort of noise than in lesser hands would be uncontrollable, and would overwhelm, here becomes sound, which in turn becomes music, a heavy, harsh, hellish, blown out music, no doubt, but from these two we would expect nothing less.
Essential for Skullflower obsessives obviously, and a pretty perfect second movement in the ongoing Voltigeurs sonic saga...
First and only offical release from the mighty VON, a legendary black metal band from right here in the Bay Area. Never heard of 'em? Not surprising. Not only did they never release an actual album, but they were spurned by the scene at the time for playing sloppy fucked up, super simple and repetitive metal, unlike the technical thrash that was popular at the time. Von took their sound from
Hellhammer, Bathory and Venom, playing very simple trance-like riffs, over and over, with barked, super-affected gutteral vocals, and very little melody. Simple and raw and way more Satanic than most bands of the time. This droning grimness would become the blueprint for modern primitve black metal, but at the time, Von were pretty much it. Certainly around these parts. This disc collects everything, the Satanic Blood demo, the Satanic Angel demo, and a live show at the Stone in San Francisco from 1991. Wow.
This one is difficult to categorize. Rigid electronic music in the guise of open-ended free jazz? 20th century minimalism with subtle ethnographic influences? Concrete stoner music for the Salvia Divinorum set? Ok, the last one may have been a stretch, but this record has been really hard to wrap our brains around. This super group of sorts, all from the new wave of minimalist techno, includes not only Moritz Von Oswald (Basic Channel, Rhythm And Sound) of course, but also Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay) and Max Loderbauer (Sun Electric), veering a bit from the predicted norm. That this was released on The Honest Jon's label adds another level of unexpected curiosity as this is an electronic record but not quite the "heroin house" you would expect from the Chain Reaction label, nor the classical recompositions Von Oswald made with Carl Craig earlier this year. What you get is a flexible weaving of machine calibrated electronic treatments (drones, synth sequences and hazy shifting textures) with an array of clattering handmade rhythm instruments (metal clangs, wooden clops, and watery blops) interlocking in organic ways designed for improvisation and live performance. It's definitely warmer and more inviting than most of the Basic Channel stuff, while still keeping the sound and performances reigned in. Yet we're not sure if this is a first foray into a more exploratory open-ended direction or just a curious one-off. Overall though, we go away with a beautiful and interesting sounding recording that's definitely worth checking out!
Well, "Columbodia, Missouri's" own Warhammer posse showed up not too long ago here at aQ enroute to all corners of the country and they stopped in long enough to rock the asses of the San Francisco scene in a wickedly intimate "bus show" (AQ pal and former A Minor Forest-er has a huge mobile venue, IN A BUS, with a stage, a solar powered generator and an engine that runs on vegetable oil!) and to hand us off a a big pile of their new self-released second cd entitled An Ethereal Oracle.
By the looks and sounds of it, the title holds true to the old adage "what you see is what you get". That is if you can figure out what an ethereal oracle is -musically- speaking.
While the mind-melting debut Uber Om was more of a big loud thud upside your melon, An Ethereal Oracle is more like some forbidden fruit. That something or someone, you've been warned about, you know it's dangerous, potentially deadly, but you just can't resist. It's the temptation of the darkside, the dangerous, you know you're in for it, you know you're done for, you just can't ever be sure when. Or how!
The record starts off with a long scary radio broadcast track, you know, like one of those Emergency Broadcast System things warning you about "the big storm approaching", and just when you start feeling REALLY nervous, you start to get dizzy, everything becomes blurry, your head is spinning, your ears are ringing, you feel flush, you start to sweat, goosebumps, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end, you try to resist, fight it off, but it's too much, you are completely under its spell.
You let the jagged guitar lines, birds chirping in the distance, strange what-the-fuck acoustic folk fuckery, drugged out laid-back droned-out blissful warmness and full on red-line space jam experimental shredding pummelry drag you into the darkness. Before you know it, you're bruised and bloody, naked and tied up with broken guitar strings, ears ringing and bleeding, you have strange WH48K images burned into your flesh, laying atop a pile of bloodstained broken drumsticks, surrounded by a Stonehenge like circle of towering totem like amps, in front of which stand the mysterious members of Warhammer, smiling wickedly as they prepare to do it all over again.
And that's only the first half of the cd!
Limited to 500 intricately illustrated/hand printed/hand assembled copies, and we only have about 30 left of the ones we got.
So act fast...
It's the Brazil Issue! With Gilberto Gil on the cover. Also Joyce, Ceu, Tim Maia, Jards Macale, Arthur Verocai, Airto Moreira and tons more. All the deep interviews and awesome vintage color photography you expect from this fine magazine of funk, soul, hiphop, etc.
Another killer brooding angular guitar-ed dour-ish hook filled modern new wave record from Scotland, this time from the awesomely monickered We Were Promised Jetpacks, whose sound will no doubt by now be familiar to fans of outfits like Maximo Park, Frightened Rabbit, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol and the like, and while WWPJ don't necessarily revolutionize -that- sound, they do know their way around a pop song, managing to wind taut chiming guitars, muscle-y drumming, buzzy synths, and yowled emotional vocals into slow burning epics, rife with crunchy guitars, epic post rock swells, some bursts of almost metallic heft, and plenty of low slung bass heavy grooves. The first song alone was enough, we were sold within seconds, a woozy muted dark riff, looped beneath a weary croon, building and building for nearly half the song, the guitars growing ever more insistent, tinkling chimes joining the nearly percussionless jam, before the track finally explodes into a massive Mogwai-ish blowout.
And so it goes. Crunchy guitars, anthemic choruses, a gloomy Joy Divisiony rhythm section, hooks like crazy, some songs hushed and intimate, but others wrapped in huge gauzy streaks of Godspeed / Mogwai / Sigur Ros epic post rock haze (and one of the songs even has a Conet Project sample!). Heavy and hooky, dark and jangly and a new favorite for sure.
If you were sad to hear the end of Iowa City's Raccoo-oo-oon, have no fear, for Shawn Reed and Ryan Garbes have returned to the trance-punk altar with a new band, Wet Hair. With two synths, a drum kit, and some hazy distorted vocals the duo offer up Dream, their debut lp, a kraut punk offering of free synth meanderings and cosmic filth, all thrown together in some dusty garage. Pretty cool sunny day avant-punk improv for the deep dreamers, already out of print from Not Not Fun, we managed to get our grubby hands on a few, so act quick if you want one.
'Nother issue of this essential new music monthly. On the cover, the Beat Konducta, Madlib! Also, Japan's Nisennenmondai, Chrystal Belle Scrodd aka Diana Rogerson, Andrea Parkins, Rolf Julius, the music scene in Belize, a primer on "British Visionary Jazz", an Invisible Jukebox session with Sleazy from Coil/Throbbing Gristle, and a feature on what they're calling "Hynagogic Pop": the dreamy noise music of Skaters, Pocahaunted, Emeralds... plus all the other usual Wire mag columns, reviews, and whatnot.
A couple years after he started the Dead Kennedys, Jello Biafra recorded a project called the Witch Trials, with a distinctly proto-industrial bent, primitive drum machines and of course Biafra's spoken vocal front and center, as political, satirical, and theatrical as ever. Recorded in a friend's apartment in London, the record found Biafra taking aim at the Los Angeles police years before NWA and Ice-T would, and in so many ways we're reminded how Biafra's fiercely political voice and ability to inhabit characters in his songs was really a precursor to much of the voices that would emerge in hip-hop in years to follow.
Witch Trials also demonstrates that while many others who were identified in the punk movement subscribed to narrow views of what punk could sound and look like, Biafra never had time for that. Instead he found many outlets to express his dystopian rage. The first two tracks of this ep are almost like full on performance art pieces with Biafra's immediately recognizable vocals speaking/singing over primitive drum machines and crumbling instrumentation that at times even echoed the sound of Public Image Ltd. The strength of the record really shines through on the last two songs which are the most musical of the bunch, especially the record's closer "Meat Beat", which we would guess was the song that inspired Meat Beat Manifesto, and is truly a classic fucked up almost dancefloor ready song that would sound right at home on records by synth outsiders of today like John Maus. Fans of Biafra and fucked up industrial sounding soundtracks to Orwellian nightmares must have this!
We've been dying for this one, the latest from German post rock avant metallers Woburn House, whose last Paradigms release Message To Ourselves Outside The Dreaming Machine totally blew us away, with its weird mix of black buzz, post rock drift, metallic prog and noisy discordant math rock. And while on first listen, it seems not too much has changed, as we get further into the record (heck, further into the first song!), it seems that Woburn House have indeed begun exploring a new sonic direction...
It only takes a few minutes for this record to establish it's utter dominance, beginning with a drifty lilting spidery guitar melody, soft and jangly and minor key, before slipping into a lurching downtuned chug, all stop start crunch, before slipping back into the opening drift, this time accompanied by some skittery rhythms, and so it goes until finally the vocals come in, a warm ethereal crooned harmony, with a distinctly shoegaze-y vibe, way down in the mix, allowing the song to grow more jagged, and get a bit Voivod-y, before finally stretching out into a gorgeous looped sounding sun dappled post metal drift, all soaring chiming guitars, and those warm vocals, the track finally winding down in a swirling swell of epic sun dappled psychedelia. Wow. Okay, so yeah, things have changed quite a bit, in as much as WH have managed to expand their sound even further, and taken their metallic sound in a distinctly less overtly metallic direction.
The more we listen, the more it becomes evident that this record is much more mellow and poppy, than it's more metallic predecessor, the core sound falling somewhere between the twisted blackened metallic pop of Lifelover and the grandiose doom pop of Katatonia, the result is awesome, emotional, intense, epic, with the songs often building to huge chaotic climaxes, but just as often loping along dreamily, and metalheads fear not, while it is poppier, there is still plenty of crushing heaviness, gnarled riffage, and lurching chug to balance the blissy mathy pop and haunting shimmery drift that makes up much of the rest of the record.
"Globus" is some dark dreamy spacedrone, with its tribal drumming, dense fuzz bass, effects drenched guitars, all locked into a looped motorik groove that wouldn't be that out of place on a Expo 70 or White Hills record. "Transmitter" brings the metal back, but definitely drifts into some serious Katatonia territory, with some woozy drifty almost-prog, occasionally giving way to huge swells of metallic heft, and more of those warm crooned vocals, the entire song wreathed in a gauzy washed out sheen.
And finally, there's the 23 minute closing track "Transformer", which opens with the most black metal bit on the whole records, a buzzing blast, peppered with warbly minor key melodies, and warm swirling drones, but at its core, this is pounding and thrashing and heavy, until before you know it, the band have shifted gears once again, unfurling a glimmery driftscape of crystalline guitar and warm blackened ambience, when the track does kick back in, it's in a whole new form, a cool, lumbering post rock tangle of metallic buzz and complex start stop arrangements, there's even a long stretch of that sort of blown out Jesu-style metalgaze, before everything drops off, and all that's left is a field recording of birds, and cars, the side of the highway presumably, people talking, all manner of ambient sound, eventually the song does drift back in, and finishes with a few minutes of woozy laid back slow core pop drift, hazy and weary and like much of the rest of the record, dreamy and melodic.
Folks looking for lots of buzzing blackness or crushing chugging metallic pummel, might not find enough of that here, but for folks who love their metal infused with all manner of pop, and dig stuff like Amesoeurs, Katatonia, Lifelover, Alcest, and that sort of stuff, will definitely dig this a LOT.
Debut full length from this East Coast one man black metal band, and from note one, A Spell For The Death Of Man reveals itself as something not even remotely typical, a distinctly different, and surprisingly melodic take on the old blast and buzz. The opening minute or two of the nine minute "Solitude" is just guitar, all soaring mournful and minor key, playing out a distinctly post rock riff, unfurling lazily, wreathed in reverb, majestic and epic, sorrowful and distinctly indie, gradually growing slower and slower, before stick clicks bring on the blackness, a furious tangle of squiggly buzzsaw riffage and blasting beats, buried blackened shrieks. Somehow, even though on the surface the song seems to have switched gears completely, elements of the intro remain, within and beneath the roiling heaviness, lending the music a distinctly 'indie rock' vibe, especially when the track shifts again, and suddenly it sounds a a little like Superchunk or Seam, only supercharged and blackened and Satanized. Not to say this is super poppy and jangly, but it is, sort of. Once you hear it, it's tough to ignore, but then why the heck would you want to? Folks with a super limited musical scope, say, ONLY metal, probably won't hear it as much, especially if they're open to more melodic stuff like Alcest or Amesoeurs, but for those who maybe didn't grow up listening to only metal, as we're guessing is the case with Woe mainman (and only man) Xos. Just wait until the breakdown near the end, when that opening riff is wrapped around some muffled chugging, and some dense tribal drumming, suddenly it's equal parts Husker Du, Bastro and black metal.
The rest of the record is a bit more traditionally black, but even then, with galloping rhythms and dizzying black riffage, the songs still manage to sound strangely melodic, and in some super abstract sense, kind of poppy. But again, all of this pop and jangle and post rock, is totally tangled up with some seriously dense thrashing and super heavy, blasting black metal. It's that unlikely mix that makes Woe sound so different, and makes this record so awesome, deftly balancing the grim and the kvlt with the moody and hooky and melodic. The record closes with an even less black metal number than the opener, strange angular midtempo minor key guitars, plodding drums, very postrock / mathrock, the vocals still in black metal shriek mode, but draped over a lilting almost dirgey slowcore groove, definitely pretty, and a bit woozy and mysterious, but still heavy, and just the slightest bit black.
Fans of more melodic blackness will definitely dig, while dabblers and newbies might have just found the perfect black metal gateway drug.
This week's entry into the NWOOSHM (New Wave Of Old School Heavy Metal, we've dubbed it) comes from Sweden's Wolf. This traditional metal band (in the tradition of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Mercyful Fate, specifically) are almost not even the new wave anymore, as this is their fifth album! Hard to believe it, we remember like it was yesterday when we first heard their 1999 debut and were like, wow, this band sounds so much like it's 1983, and these dudes probably were toddlers back then! Well now here we are 10 years later and Wolf are still cranking out the true metal like it's, well, no later than 1989.
Ravenous is a good title for this disc, 'cause they sound hungry again, regaining the spark that seemed somehow lacking on their last effort The Black Wind. Singer/guitarist Niklas "Viper" Stalvind's distinctive high pitched vocals scream out lyrics inspired (but not THAT inspired, if you know what we mean) by horror and history, backed by chunky riffs, shredding leads, and galloping rhythms. Nothing incredibly original, but quite metallically solid, indeed, exceedingly ass kicking. Which is pretty much all you can ask from a band called Wolf who write songs with titles like "Whiskey Psycho Hellions", eh?
"Love At First Bite" is another song here, and we're pretty sure it's not about the '70s Dracula comedy starring George Hamilton, but it would be cool if it was. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the current lineup of Wolf all have nicknames, the others besides "Viper" are: "Raptor", "Axeman" (no prizes if you guess what instrument he plays), and "Tornado". We can see -maybe- calling somebody Viper on a regular basis, but do you really think their buddies say, "Yo, Tornado, let's grab a beer?" Or, "Dude, did you see that chick Axeman was hanging out with?" No, we don't think so...
Don't think we're making FUN of Wolf though, we think it's all part of their plan. Likewise with the fact that the Wolf logo on the Ravenous cd itself is, for some reason, pink!
The ultimate in deep Memphis soul, O.V. Wright possessed a voice as smooth as it was strong. Memphis Unlimited featured a legendary band backing him up, including the likes of Leroy, Charles and Teenie Hodges, Howard Grimes, James Mitchell, as well as The Memphis Strings, and immaculate production by the legendary Willie Mitchell. Originally released in 1973, Memphis Unlimited is a truly immaculate deep hitting soul album that slow burns and hits every mark from start to finish. While he never reached the same kind of mainstream fame, his records and voice really do remind us of the great Al Green. No doubt, Cat Power has listened to this record MANY times as she recruited many of the same players to join her all star back up band to record The Greatest. This has become a permanent Sunday afternoon record for us with its perfect mix of Southern breeze and deep soul stirring conviction.
Dancehall's Mavado on the cover. Inside, Girl Talk, Labtekwon, Meanderthals, Tanya Morgan, and producer Xrabit talking 'bout Paul's Boutique. Plus lots more, reviews, columns, stuff about music, tech, video games, places to buy stuff in various urban centers... also comes with a free download card for an mp3 mix by Drop The Lime.
Another archival release from the now defunct and greatly missed floorcore noise duo Yellow Swans. We have not been able to keep this in stock, we sold out twice before we had a chance to review it, and now we have 5 copies, maybe the last 5 copies, as this was limited to 500 copies and is already sold out and out of print at the label. So act fast and be lucky if you want one of these.
This Mort Aux Vaches session from 2007 finds the 'Swans at their heaviest and noisiest. On first listen, it's a wild psychedelic squall, heaving walls of crumbling distortion and blown out buzz, Skullflower, Total, that sort of thing, but closer listening reveals all sorts of prettiness beneath, lilting melodies, haunting refrains, keening feedback, unlikely harmonies, in fact, the more you listen, the more the 'noise' seems to peel back, letting the strange melodic beauty underneath shine through. Which was sort of the magic of the Yellow Swans, creating massive roiling swirls of chaotic beauty, sculpting otherwise harsh and hellish sonics into impossibly beautiful soundscapes, weaving buzz and rumble and drone and whir and howl and grind and crunch into dense shimmering clouds of otherworldly sound.
INCREDIBLE PACKAGING, maybe the most over the top Mort Aux Vaches yet, the usual fold over sleeve held shut by a little metal fastener, but affixed to the front a three dimensional sort-of-sculpture, depicting a little girl and a yellow swan, an image from some old storybook but rendered in three dimensions like it was pried off the front of some old building. Super cool.
And again, we only have FIVE copies. Be prepared to be disappointed... Sorry.
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Prepare yourself, this could get kind of META. So Joe Pernice, looooongtime aQ fave (Scud Mountain Boys, Pernice Brothers, Big Tobacco, Chappaquiddick Skyline, etc.) will be publishing his first novel this year. In that novel, the narrator is in a band called The Young Accuser, THIS band. After the FICTIONAL narrator, leaves this, his FICTIONAL BAND, they record a FICTIONAL song and send it to the NON-FICTIONAL Sub Pop label. And like they say on the Sub Pop website: "This is the non-fiction version of that fictional single". Phew.
So basically, Joe Pernice and some pals cooked up this 3 song 7", ostensibly a record by the band from his novel, and heck, it's really awesome, BUT, not like anything you might expect from Mr. Pernice. The Young Accuser sound straight out of the eighties, a fuzzy power pop college rock, that reminds us of the Replacements, the Mice, and Guided By Voices BIG TIME. Super lo-fi production, distorted vocals (which are often a dead ringer for Bob Pollard), blown out bass, wild drumming way down in the mix, and some bad ass HOOKS, total rad eighties classic power pop indie rock. The B side is a bit more snarly, and even more lo-fi, culminating in the brief slip of a final song, the only track here that really sounds Pernice-y, with strummed clean electrinc guitar, Pernice's high plaintive croon, a gorgeous lo-fi ballad not that dissimilar to those Replacements tracks that were always tucked amidst the more rocking jams, "Answering Machine", "Skyway" and the like.
Cool stuff, with a totally bad ass vintage Sub Pop singles club sleeve. ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
Folk-psych masterpiece out of Teheran, Iran circa 1976. With incredibly rich instrumentation and orchestration as a backdrop, Pari Zangeneh's voice soars with such soft strength. We're reminded a lot of some of the amazing psych gems from Turkey that we've dug so much like Mogollar and Selda but with less funk in the mix and much more lush folk running through the sound. In fact, Zangeneh sounds quite a bit like a Persian version of Vashti Bunyan at times, albeit with a bit more bravado and color in her delivery. She is still performing all these years later, and while this record is now over three decades old it still sounds so timeless and compelling. We imagine modern day psych-folksters like White Magic, Espers, and Dungen would find tons of inspiration in these mystical and delightful sounds, we sure do!
Sacred Bones is turning into the go-to-label for rad vinyl (and cd!) from both up and coming bands s well as a bunch of way deserved obscure reissues. In the last year they've put out stuff by Blank Dogs, Gary War, Cultural Decay, 13th Chime, and a whole bunch more. We first heard Zola Jesus on a split with Burial Hex but with this full length we've been fully engrossed with her much needed female take on warped bedroom psychedelia. You can't just sight one easy reference for the sound of Zola Jesus and that's a good thing. From the dark and brooding elements of Siouxsie & The Banshees, the haunting spirit of Lydia Lunch, hints of the mystical world of a way lo-fi Kate Bush, layers of haze and echo that would be at home on records by folks like Valet and Pocahaunted. She offers up a much needed scuzzier, moodier, more dense version of what slicker folks like Bat For Lashes and Cocorosie have gotten quite famous for recently. The Spoils is a record filled with dark psychedelic explorations that are able to manifest that aura into really compelling songs that we find ourselves coming back to again and again. ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
