Latest chunk of crunch from The North Sea, one of many musical projects perpetrated by Brad Rose, the man behind the mighty Digitalis label. Longtime readers of the list probably remember when The North Sea was more of a folk thing, Rose then a sort of modern day folk drone troubadour, creating lush twang flecked soundscapes, but somewhere in the recent past, The North Sea encountered a bit of a... well, sea change, and shifted direction dramatically, drifting toward a sound much more in keeping with the drone-doom-dirge tradition, where once was shimmer, now was rumble, where once was delicate, now was crushing, but, the cool thing about the new North Sea, is that the folky past has not been discarded, merely absorbed.
This latest jam is the perfect example, a massive corrosive sprawl of post industrial buzz and throb, layers of crumbling distortion and keening feedback, howling heaviness, blurred and smeared into thick tarpit swells, layered and shaded and lush, but for the most part intense and HEAVY. But throughout, Rose has laced his buzz with delicate steel string melodies, what sounds like a bouzouki, or even a sitar, is plucked gently, its notes reverbed and delayed, but left clean and clear and simple, the perfect counterpoint to the blackened squall that is constantly threatening to swallow it whole.
Probably too much for the New Weird America types, and the free folkies, but for the rest of you, into heavy guitar drone, and post industrial black ambience, this folk flecked beast will be much to your liking.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Each in deluxe printed metallic vellum sleeves, with a single panel hand marbled piece of art, and every one with a printed marbled metallic obi INSIDE the case held together with rivets!
These two tracks of hypnotizing dronemusik from the wandering sound artist Michael Northam originated from a night camping in the Finnish hinterlands, where he became fascinated with the sound of wind whipping through the trees. Field recordings have long been central to Northam's work dating back to his tactile compositions of corroded ambience and titanic drone arcing; and even the aspects of wind had featured heavily in work through the Aeolian harps he built in a bunker on a desolate Finnish island. Where those recordings were attempting to harness to power of wind as something of an intersection between technology and the landscape, these two beautiful recordings of brightly shimmering ambience are more of a poetic response to the dynamics of wind. So those whispings and scatterings of summertime arctic winds introduce the first side of this 10" and quickly subside amidst Northam's billowing drones from his Indonesian flute and an overblown Casio keyboard. The resulting waving tones flicker with the lingering glow of the sun arching toward the horizon at twilight, with golds, oranges, and reds radiating through each timbre. So striking are the colors that Northam gets through these tones, it can almost distract from his conceptual anchor. No matter, as he's creating one of his finest pieces in a long time. Nice!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Latest in the Tapeworm series of super limited cassette releases, the first two were from Philip Jeck (now sold out) and Jean Baudrillard (not really Baudrillard, but a reading of his work), but this one might be the most anticipated, which makes the fact that we were only able to get only 10 copies even that much more of a bummer.
So yeah, a tiny handful of you will get lucky and will snag one of these, a gorgeous sidelong dronescape from Stephen O'Malley (of SUNNO))), KTL, Gravetemple, Aethenor, Ginnungagap, Lotus Eaters, Khanate, Burning Witch, Thorr's Hammer among others), buzzing rumbling guitars, throbbing low end, delicate shimmer, haunting field recordings, music from an art installation, gorgeous stuff, without even noticing, we listened to it 4 or 5 times in a row, the tape flipping over and over, and we could have listened to it 5 more times!
Again apologies for the tiny number of copies, but often we don't have any control over stuff like that...
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, cool cover art by Savage Pencil.
Oh Yoko! After all these years and all you've gone through, you still manage to have such dynamic energy and such a magnetic spirit. Who else at 76 years of age could make a record that pretty much blows away all the stuff made by folks in the supposed 'prime' of their lives.
With Between My Head And The Sky, Ono has done just that, this is maybe one of the most rewarding, immediate and satisfying albums in her expansive back catalog. Sounding so totally modern yet so totally Yoko at the same time. With an awesome band behind her featuring Cornelius (!) and the amazing drummer from his band Yuko Araki, as well as cellist Erik Friedlander, saxophonist Daniel Carter, Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, Yoko's son Sean Lennon, and a few other great musical minds.
While they all help to create beautiful layers of sound and incredible grooves to each of these songs, it's Yoko's compositions and of course idiosyncratic delivery that pushes these songs into another realm. This is a record that perfectly blends Ono's more "out" and cosmic tendencies with her astute awareness of presence and nature and our surroundings, ranging from the charged and manic to the sweet and organic.
We know that folks tend to have quite strong opinions of Ono, with some of us at the store falling decidedly and staunchly on both sides of that divide, but a true testament to how great this record is, was when we were playing it in the store the other day, a customer asked what it was, when we told him he looked so surprised and told us he always assumed he didn't like her music, but that this was in fact a disc he would end up listening to over and over. For those of us here who are way way in the pro/in-love-with Yoko side of the equation, this is simply an amazing reconfirmation of why she is one of the most striking, sincere and creative forces of nature to live in our lifetime. Along with folks like Ornette Coleman and Asha Bhosle she is a constant reminder that growing old has nothing to do with losing spirit or soul, quite the opposite. So what will you be doing when you're 76??!!
Every crate digger worth their salt has come upon the Asian record dilemma. Records (often Chinese) that look so awesome and full of promise with their mysterious photography, strange graphics and humorous English misspellings, only to be underwhelmed by the most boring, pedestrian and oft-times sickly sweet music contained within. But what's a cratedigger to do when they are actually IN Asia and have to wade through stacks upon stacks of such records knowing they can only bring home a tiny batch? That's the dilemma the French-Vietnamese producer Onra found himself in on a trip to Vietnam where scouring through various flea markets, he picked up a stack of promising but highly worn records. Like the best of recent instrumental hip-hop records by J Dilla, Madlib (especially his Beat Konducta Indian series), and Oh No processed through the radio collage filters of Sublime Frequencies, Onra was able to mine pure gold from the scratchy sounds he collected abroad. Bits of operatic theater, odd sixties easy-listening covers, traditional flute and string ensembles, love songs and obscure soundtracks chopped into loops and grooves with all the rough crackle and sheen kept in tact. Soooo Awesome!!!!
We've written a lot about this band over the years (many years - they've been around for, like, 20!). Here's a quote: "Oxbow have always languished in relative obscurity here in the US when they really deserve to be ruling the whole damn world. Essential, intense, heavy, dark, weird, artful, aggressive, fucked genius with few peers."
We said that years ago about the previous reissue of Fuckfest (as an import double cd with their 2nd album King Of The Jews) and while they've gotten a bit less obscure - their unholy alliance with the Hydra Head empire has helped a lot in recent years, way better for them than their former label, SST - and Oxbow now have fans from among the legions of metalcore/postrock kids for sure, they still aren't yet the overlords of all that they should be. Maybe in the next life (now that would be a shock!). Those that have gotten into 'em though, in this life, are indeed the chosen ones.
Now Hydra Head has done all the new Oxbow fans a favor and reissued the band's magnificent 1989 debut Fuckfest on cd by itself for the first time, in a nice mini-lp-style sleeve, remastered. If you haven't heard Oxbow before, this is just the place to start, begin at the beginning. If you have heard Oxbow, but haven't heard Fuckfest, then you need to. All their albums are amazing, but this one is the one that first blew our minds way back when (well along with King Of The Jews, their other early effort that followed this in 1991, we first heard 'em both together on 2-on-1 cd Balls In the Great Meat Grinder Collection released by the long defunct Pathological label in the UK), and has the same effect today. Some insane shit here folks.
Fuckfest features all the trademark Oxbow elements... Sheer heaviness and suspenseful calm. Nearly indecipherable yet disturbingly expressive, anguished, almost hysterical vocals. Transgressive lyrics bawled by a man-baby-monster. Massive sheets of swampy slide guitar. Skittery bleeding hand solos. Led Zeppish cockrock riffage one moment, abstract angular post punk dissonance the next. Tinkling piano. Jazz infected drumming, country tinged atmosphere. What we'd now call postrock loud-soft dynamics. Music that's cathartic, cacophonous and complex. As well as impassioned and emotive. And exceedingly well crafted.
This album is maybe Oxbow at their most "metal" (and punk). After all, the original release was billed as "a six-song mega-muscled trip into total desperation". Certainly it's a tour de force of primal screaming stomping staggering, that's also surprisingly full of beaten-down beauty.
You could compare Oxbow then and now to the likes of the Jesus Lizard, the Melvins, the Bad Seeds, and there's elements of all of those here, but from the get-go Oxbow was OXBOW. Nothing else like 'em, and that's not even taking their infamous live performances into account.
To quote something else one of us (Allan, when he interviewed guitarist Niko in the first issue of his old 'zine) wrote about Oxbow long ago: "Oxbow is definitely a what-the-hell-is-this? kind of band... I can only describe their sound as kinda if you took, say, the Jesus Lizard, Neurosis, the Ruins, and Caroliner and got them all howling at the moon together". Again, that just means they're unique. And amazing. (And, to be sure, maybe not for everyone.) Fuckfest proves all that, though fans know already.
Thanks, Hydra Head. Presumably we can look forward to a similar reissue of King Of The Jews soon too? The same review above will go for it too, pretty much!
'Tis the season for blown out and supercharged lo-fi burners and we can't say we mind one bit. Band after band, this eruption of buzzy stumbly hook filled garage-y pop is pretty impossible not to love. Pens are a great addition to the current crop of noise-poppers like Wavves, Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, etc. Luckily they defiantly have their own take on that sound, as the record opens with what sounds like thumb piano before erupting into a full on garage pop anthem. Pens are a London trio who infuse wonderfully swirling psychedelic moments into their Shaggs like crash and burn approach to way-in-the-red and dizzyingly fucked up pop. There is something so spirited and punk rock about their sound and approach, imagine your favorite riot grrrrl band on Woodsist! Bikini Kill mixed with Wavves? You get the idea, a hectic, urgent and way damn pleasing musical ruckus!
This is really not new at all, and we had been holding out for the cd import version for ages, but then realized we still had never gotten it in, and thus had never listed this record at all, even though we've had a stack of the Southern Lord vinyl edition sitting here all this time, and it is pretty awesome, so we just decided to list it anyway, import compact disc be damned, so here it is, better late than never, the debut from Pentemple, which for those of you who have somehow missed out on this, is essentially a SUNNO))) record, as it features the core duo of Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, frequent SUNNO))) collaborators Oren Ambarchi and Attila Csihar, with the addition of the mysterious Sin Nanna of mighty one man black metal horde Striborg!
Needless to say, SUNNO))) fans will dig the shit out of this, two long 20+ minute tracks, each thick and slow and heavy and drone-y, the guitars not riffing so much as crawling like some black fog, and some seriously fucked up vox, feral mewling gives way to distant moaning, strange chanting tangled up with hellish shrieks and guttural growls, all draped over a constantly shifting blackened doomscape, it takes nearly seven minutes for the drums to kick in, but when they do, it changes the whole feel of the record, chaotic, abstract, very free, suddenly it sounds like free jazz SUNNO))), or SUNNO))) covering Coltrane or Ayler or something, whatever it is, it's really rad, a buzzing free form doom jazz that sprawls and oozes, splatter and hums, the two pieces are part of a bigger whole, by the second movement, it's all about the drums, now locked into a lurching stuttery rhythm, and the vocals, growing in intensity, the whole sound thickening and expanding, until the drums peter out, leaving 6 or 6 minutes of super thick, layered gristled and corrosive buzz, that manages to be super heavy but super hypnotic and dreamy at the same time before finishing off with a little melodic tangle at the end, still wreathed in hazy heaviness and a thick cloud of crumbling fuzz.
Killer packaging too, with the front cover image of the crowned goat hoof black on black and embossed so you can feel the grimness...
Here's some fucked-up, lo-fi collage music composed from 1968-1972 by two New Zealand artists, neither of which seem to have much in the way of a history before these recordings or even afterward. All we are left with is this head-scratching document loosely contextualized by an anonymously penned piece of academic writing that pretty much tells us this is fucked-up, lo-fi collage music amidst the five dollar wordplay. Appropriated snippets from the Apollo 11 lunar landing communications, and the Beatles' Help poster on the cover are the smallest of entry points to this album of murkily recorded potato mash of free-noise improvisation, varispeed tape manipulation, gritty vinyl abuse, and tonal smear. These primitive excursions in free-noise unhinged from various sources were contemporaries to the Canadian performance art / sound collage project Intersystems (albeit without any of the authoritarian vocal delivery from Intersystems' Blake Parker) and closer to home, looks forward to the advent many years later of New Zealand innerspace weirdos Sandoz Lab Technicians.
Record number 3 from this weirdo Canadian duo, sure it'll be a big hit with the kids into the current crop of lo-fi warble and fractured garage pop, but these guys take that sound in a much darker, and way creepier direction. Sort of new wave, kind of garage-y, even a little bit industrial, but also a whole lot fucked up and fractured, a bit of that Residents off kilter creep, all warped guitars and motorik beats, and some seriously demented vocals.
Every song is raw and blown out, but more murky and synthy than anything, the whole record wreathed in grit and hiss and filth, the vocals weirdly tangled and often doubled, the guitars melting into black puddles of hum and rumble, super fuzzy and jagged, but simultaneously muted and muddy, definitely more punk than most of those bands but filtered through the same sort of alternate universe FM radio vibe, a few of the tracks are even laced with some weird off kilter 8-bit video game sounds, which somehow manage to blend in perfectly with the rest of the sonic strangeness, stumbling drum machines, woozy ambience, twisted production, and yet, somehow, buried under all the buzz and crunch and lope and lumber, lurks some seriously catchy and irresistible lo-fi dream-doom-pop. Definitely a new favorite...
The reunion / reissue onslaught seems like it might never end. But when bands like Polvo decide to get back together, why would we ever want it to?
Easily one of our favorite math rock bands from the nineties, whose sound was truly unique, tangled Eastern sounding guitars, slippery riffs, complicated song structures, weary laid back vox, all wound tight into some of the catchiest, most unlikely indie rock songs ever.
We knew Polvo had gotten back together, and then we found out they were recording a brand new record, which could definitely have been a disappointment, but this is most definitely not a disappointment. Not at all. There are awesome reunion records for sure, but this isn't just an awesome *reunion* record, In Prism totally stands up to the rest of their catalog, Today's Active Lifestyles, Shapes, Exploded Drawing, only the pickiest of ears would be able to pick one of the In Prism songs out as not belonging, and only then it would probably be mostly because they didn't know it by heart like the rest of the catalog. Which is sort of the magic of Polvo, their music is so NOT typically catchy or poppy, it's obtuse, angular, off kilter, twisted, tangled, but somehow it IS both catchy and poppy. Those slithery woozy riffs get stuck in your head as hard as any radio hit pop song.
And yeah, In Prism carries on that tradition, another kick ass set of songs, hooky and heavy, warped and mathy, with a bit of a classic rock vibe going on, which we didn't really notice until someone pointed it out to us. But goddamn this stuff is awesome. Opener "Right The Relation" is perfect Polvo, with one of THOSE riffs, vocals and guitar lines getting all tangled up, and some incredible drumming. And then there's "Beggar's Bowl", the most classic Polvo track of all the jams here, with one of the best riffs ever, draped over shimmery high end guitar whir, super rad jagged start stop arrangements, hazy production, layered lush guitars, and a main hook that slays.
Anyone who loved Polvo back in the day, or who still loves Polvo (which we imagine must be everyone right?) will go nuts for In Prism, and folks into mathy, crunchy, indie post rock and have somehow never heard Polvo before, this might be an introduction to your new favorite band.
Daryl Groetsch - the one-man synth symphony better known as Pulse Emitter - has just answered one of the more commonly asked questions by passersby, but strangely one of the more difficult questions for us to answer: "Do you have any music for massage?"
That question gets addressed to us here at aQuarius more often than you might think; and the as far as music *we* would want as soundtracks to our massages (i.e. SUNNO))), Corrupted, Lustmord, Hazard, Thomas Koner, hell, even Merzbow might work for us!), well they just don't seem to cut it for most folks. So with this series of contemplative and un-cheesy ambient recordings, Pulse Emitter has that perfect record that we can recommend for that particular purpose; and it certainly works for us in terms of drifting to sleep music as well.
The continuation in the Meditative Music series brings us to the brightest of the three released so far. A slow, shimmering oscillation of an interwoven set of synths from Pulse Emitter's patch-bay modules gird the entire album which is dotted by a series of chiming bell-tones placed above. This is more of a record for summertime daydreaming than of the introspective meditations found on the previous two. Still a potent opiate through sound despite the warmly rounded tones of the album. Groetsch offers a brief description of this one: "placid waves for reflective times."
Oppressive Nature couldn't be a more apt title for this album from Portland's wizard of analogue synthesis Daryl Groestch (aka Pulse Emitter), or at least for the opening track of this album. Through and through, this is a far cry from the pastoral ambient sensibilities administered through his surprisingly great Meditative Music cd-r series. A grim curtain is cast from the onset, with squelching distortions, animalistic grunts, and wounded chirps propagated through electronic means. All of these blistered, cracked, and abused noises are strategically placed on a rumbling battlefield of crunched-low end rumblings, lending comparisons of today to Wolf Eyes and UW Owl and of yesterday to SPK and Factrix. Groestch lets off the distortion pedal for good chunks of Oppressive Nature, relying upon his filter-sweeping modulations and sinusoidal oscillations to craft isolating, deep space atmospheres. Weirdly majestic melodies counter the streams of noise generated throughout the untitled second track, eventually overtaking the noise amidst a series of tightly appregiated squiggles. The fourth cut hangs a sequence of revolving tones of phased dissonance upon a hyper minimal structure of tiny clicks and glitched pulses, which had they been generated digitally could easily fit within the Raster-Noton ethos. The album glides to a stop with windswept drones laced with distant clouds of feedback, white-noise, and one of Groetsch's melodic motifs.
Metal Blade brings us the blazing attack of Boston's Ravage, and boy do they sound like they belong on Metal Blade - circa 1987 maybe. Total '80s style metal a la Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, extra-energetic and self-consciously classic.
They've apparently been around for a while (formed in 1995) but this is only their second studio album. Otherwise their discography, according to the Metal Archives site on the internet, consists entirely of limited edition live albums (5 of them!! Including, apparently, a mostly instrumental one called Yes, We Have No Lead Singer, 'cause he got lost on the way to the show!) plus a few eps and demo tapes and whatnot. So it's cool that Metal Blade picked 'em up, odd too because Metal Blade has already released plenty of albums by bands that sound a lot like this in the '90s (Wardog anyone?) and they never did that well outside of Germany anyway. Maybe they thought it was time to try again.
We can recommend this, at any rate, it's a good one if you're in the mood for some surefire headbanging action. And, it's got a Repka painting of a giant radioactive spider laying waste to a city on the cover. More importantly, perhaps, this also boasts the vocals of one Al Ravage, who possesses a great shrieky voice, sorta Dickinsonian. Perfect for this heavy and speedy metal, loaded with catchy riffage, some of it recalling Euro power metallers like Gamma Ray and Iron Fire for sure, but also the NWOBHM and American acts like Metal Church and Metallica back in the day. And we're definitely reminded of Judas Priest's maybe-most-metal offering, Painkiller. Possibly 'cause Ravage cover "The Nightcrawler" from that album here. And their own song "The Shredder" could easily have been on Painkiller too. No bad thing, that..
Eccentric Bay Area band Rube Waddell have gone back and remastered their albums so now a whole new bunch of folks can dig these guys' fun and oddball approach to music making! The beloved local trio make great use of the usual rock instruments, but also include more oddball sound making devices such as sousa horn, jaw harp, mahogany and koa wood ukuleles, accordion, glass harmonica, marimba, autoharp, and much more. Rube Waddell's sound is a little bit acousticky punk, a little bit Tom Waitsian drunken carousing, a touch of twangy silliness, and a pinch of gravely blues rowdiness. An SF institution!
Oh, how we miss the "cassingle". Those two or three songs and perhaps a dance remix that would play on both sides of a cassette over and over again, burning those couple of songs immediately into our heads. And with its cheap cardstock sleeve instead of a case, for the time, before we got so super concerned about the environment, it was so happily disposable.
That's not to say this new 4 song cassette release by aQ faves, Silver Pines is similarly throwaway, but their choice of packaging (a black cardstock sleeve with unique collage elements) and the brevity of its length, just takes us back to those (not really) good ol' days. Made for their recent tour, this is a more lo-fi and blown out take on their majestic shoegazey Americana than we saw on the Forces cd-r (oh, and btw vinyl of that is coming soon!). In fact side one starter, "You Came To My Door", starts off very in the red, with the vocals and drifting guitar soundscapes near clipping out, but the sound issues are pretty much corrected by the second track "(I Believe In) Magic Dreams", a more spacious and slow-burning instrumental. Yet it's the second side that holds the real gold. Both songs, "Glass Church" and "Baby Universe" are stunningly beautiful and druggy ballads that are more strung out and psychedelic than anything we've ever heard from Hope Sandoval or Mazzy Star, the Pines most recognizable sonic touchstones. These two songs alone are worth the price of admission, but act fast, because only 100 were made and we only got a handful. So freakin' lovely!
Yeah, we know this came out a coupla months ago, but we think it makes a perfect late summer into autumn kind of listen. Y'know, one that's best listened to amid the soft rustle of freshly falling leaves and the cooler evening breezes. The Skygreen Leopards' latest album Gorgeous Johnny is filled with a baker's dozen willowy psych-tinged folk pop numbers. Their pretty, slightly woozy melodies drift in and out of the shadows, making for an ever so comfortingly drowsy listen. Adding a bit more sweetness to the hazy warm concoction is the presence of The Papercuts' Jason Quever on bass, drums and piano. The band continues to follow surefootedly in the distinctly west coast countrified pop Americana tradition of The Byrds, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Grateful Dead. Definitely recommended if you dig contemporaries like Devendra Banhart, Fleet Foxes and Vetiver too.
Don't know too much about these guys (this guy?) other than the fact that they create the sort of hazy mechanical looped soundscape we can't seem to get enough of. Imagine the music of Philip Jeck, Wolf Eyes, Tim Hecker, Starving Weirdos and This Heat but all stripped down and reassembled into some abstract collage of post industrial loops, gritty lo-fi dronemusic and abstract motorik krautrock abstraction.
Hard to say what exactly these guys are using as sound sources, there is some sort of metallic percussion, super processed vocals, tons of FX, layer upon layer of fuzzy grit, grimy blurs and deeprumbles, there's a drumkit in there too, lurking below the woozy fug above, but occasionally exploding in a little burst of sizzling cymbals. There's a definite grim gothic vibe too, when the noise occasionally peels back, it reveals a moody meandering sort of doom drift, cold wave, gloom pop, all tribal and haunting and hypnotic. With warm warbly organ, weird swirling production, before the record explodes again in a sprawl of clank and clatter and crunch.
The record shifts and transforms constantly, but often finds a gorgeous washed out hypnotic sound and settles in, sticking with it for long stretches, lulling the listener into an altered state, and then yanking them out and hurling them into an avalanche of crumbling distortion and fractured truncated beats, streaks of feedback and heaving swells of muted distortion.
Even at its noisiest, Born Into It manages to be weirdly pretty and super mesmerizing, but more often than not, the noise is tamped down by thick swaths of thick whirring dreamdronedrift, and wrapped around abstract skeletal rhythms.
Super cool stuff.
If you're a loyal aQ follower, you already know how much we love to discover new and awesome music from all over this dusty planet. And you probably already know that what makes us even more excited is being able to share it with all of our fellow music nerds! With that in mind, we absolutely could not wait to share with you our newest obsession and latest discovery, Vancouver's best-kept dream drone secret, Solars!
This brand new tape from the heavy hitting drone-gaze duo completely hits the spot, super unique and magical stuff here. Imagine the slow creep of distant bells growing louder and louder until you're bundled in a blanket of rich, metallic swell, then massive layers of thick guitar wash expand over you into monolithic chords that shimmer and morph in the blinding sunlight. Like taking the crushingly heavy, melodic smear of MBV's loveless, and combining it with the melodic richness and orchestral detail of Stars of the Lid, and there you have Solars' Shadow/ Cave, their debut cassette on Pop Drones Records. Somber melodies wrapped in cocoons of fuzz and buzzing heaviness, echoing electric guitar lulling you deeper and deeper into the night's hazy mist, completely blissed out and amazing!! Though the duo have also released a 7" in the past, this is their most recent release and a fine representation of what these sonic magi can conjure up. With a tape debut as killer as this, we seriously cannot wait to hear what else these Canadian conjurers cook up in the future. Super duper limited to an edition of 30, we only have a few, so you better be quick if you want one, they will be gone in no time!!
It's a strange musical time lately, with pretty much every cool band we loved in the eighties and nineties reforming, many of them recording brand new albums, lots of them performing classic albums in their entirety, and while we're usually not all that psyched on the reunion thing, we have to say, we were pretty thrilled to get to see Slint, and some of us are going to see the Get Up Kids next week, and who could possibly complain about seeing the Butthole Surfers or Killdozer or Jesus Lizard? Sure, they were better back in the day, the energy is different, back then they were young and hungry and had something to prove, now they're moms and dads with jobs and many are probably doing it for the money, considering they're probably gonna make more reuniting for a few months now than they ever did in years of recording and touring.
Plus there's a whole new generation of music fanatics, who missed out on arguably some of the best music ever, many of whom love bands who wouldn't even exist if it weren't for all those bands that came before.
One reunion that folks have been clamoring for since mere moments after breaking up, is for emo legends Sunny Day Real Estate, and while it only took a decade, it looks like the band will in fact finally reunite, and tour, and yeah, we'll probably all be there, freaking out when they play the hits, and speaking of the hits, maybe more exciting than the reunion, is the deluxe reissue of SDRE's first two albums, Diary, and LP2, both absolute classics, redefining the template for modern day indie rock / emo, and like Slint, SDRE were most definitely a band that launched a million other bands. Odds are most folks have these discs already, but if for some reason you don't holy shit are you in for a treat. Heavy, mathy, emotional, catchy, totally rocking, and just absolutely incredible.
Diary, originally released back in 1994, is another one of those records that is so front loaded, you could be forgiven for owning this record and nor making it to the end. Even now, we have to fight the urge to play the first few tracks over and over and over. But fight on, cuz the second half is just as kick ass.
"Seven" and "In Circles" are probably SDRE's best known songs and for good reason, two of THEE most perfect indie rock jams ever. The guitars lines are tangled melodic, the riffs crunchy, the drums complex and pounding, the arrangements complex, with plenty of starts and stops, little bursts of manic chug, streaks of chiming shimmer, the vocals so anguished and passionate, high and reedy, but still a little rough and ragged, keening and on the verge of breaking, slipping from whisper to howl and back again, really, if you've never heard these guys, just listen to the sound samples, and if you're not immediately smitten / obsessed, then heck, we're not sure what else to do for you.
"In Circles" is the prettier half of the opening one-two punch, with that immediately recognizable looped guitar intro, before slipping into some shimmery stripped down almost slowcore, but with a fantastically soaring, epic, majestic, hands in the air, heartbreak chorus, which ranks up there as one of those all time goosebumps, hair on the back of your neck, tearjerker, air guitar, indie rock musical moments, and a testament to its power is that it has that affect EVERY time, and still does 15 years later.
So after listening to those two songs 20 or 30 times, force yourself to continue on, you won't be disappointed. "Song About An Angel" is another slow brooding drift, that has one of the coolest stop start staccato bridges ever, as catchy as any other song's chorus. "47" had it been pushed forward a little in the playing order, might have been part of that irresistible replay opening salvo, with an incredible main melody, and verses that somehow manage to be even catchier than the catchy chorus. And don't let all this poppiness and catchiness ward off you heavy music folks, all that pop is tangled up and intertwined with some serious heaviness, plenty of heft and crunch, some incredible guitar playing, wild mathy, almost metallic drumming, and again, all wound up into highly unconventional song structures.
We could go on and on and on, the rest of the record is just as awesome, there are a handful of brooding slow burners, but even those are peppered with some seriously emo blowouts, not a bad one in the bunch, it's not hard to see why we all freaked out about this band when this record first appeared, and none of its power or emotion or energy has been blunted by the passing of time. Not in the least.
The reissue features two bonus tracks, from the awesome and long gone Thief, Steal Me A Peach 7", which predated Diary by about a year, and if anything is even heavier and more dense, the perfect sort of bonus track, melding seamlessly with the album proper (and one thing we notice listening to the 7"s tracks is how much SDRE sometimes sounded like a WAY heavier, way more rocking Decemberists!). New fancy gatefold digipak packaging, with that iconic Fisher Price Little People parody artwork, featuring those conical people shaped toys, set in depressing environments, like in a kitchen with the toast burning, amidst a not so happy family, a couple sleeping far apart in their bed, in surgery, at the scene of a car accident, etc. Also includes all new liner notes and interviews with the various band members.
One complaint about the cd packaging though, the digipak comes in a slipcover, which is always cool, but the slipcover has the record title, band name, and some random text about bonus tracks and the producer, stuff that should obviously have been on a sticker but is printed over that super cool artwork, and unfortunately, you can't toss the slipcover, cuz it's the ONLY place where the track listing is printed, thankfully, the lp version does not make the same mistake...
It's a strange musical time lately, with pretty much every cool band we loved in the eighties and nineties reforming, many of them recording brand new albums, lots of them performing classic albums in their entirety, and while we're usually not all that psyched on the reunion thing, we have to say, we were pretty thrilled to get to see Slint, and some of us are going to see the Get Up Kids next week, and who could possibly complain about seeing the Butthole Surfers or Killdozer or Jesus Lizard? Sure, they were better back in the day, the energy is different, back then they were young and hungry and had something to prove, now they're moms and dads with jobs and many are probably doing it for the money, considering they're probably gonna make more reuniting for a few months now than they ever did in years of recording and touring.
Plus there's a whole new generation of music fanatics, who missed out on arguably some of the best music ever, many of whom love bands who wouldn't even exist if it weren't for all those bands that came before.
One reunion that folks have been clamoring for since mere moments after breaking up, is for emo legends Sunny Day Real Estate, and while it only took a decade, it looks like the band will in fact finally reunite, and tour, and yeah, we'll probably all be there, freaking out when they play the hits, and speaking of the hits, maybe more exciting than the reunion, is the deluxe reissue of SDRE's first two albums, Diary, and LP2, both absolute classics, redefining the template for modern day indie rock / emo, and like Slint, SDRE were most definitely a band that launched a million other bands. Odds are most folks have these discs already, but if for some reason you don't holy shit are you in for a treat. Heavy, mathy, emotional, catchy, totally rocking, and just absolutely incredible.
Sunny Day Real Estate's second record, self titled, often referred to as 'the pink album' due to its simple all pink cover, as well as being known now as LP2, was released in 1995, mere months before the band broke up (for the first time), and it's easy to hear in the music, the sound is much less immediately catchy than Diary, a bit darker, a grower for sure, all the sonic elements are still present, the same spidery chiming guitars, dense complex arrangements, soaring chug heavy choruses, Jeremy Enigk's plaintive emotional wail, and hooks, they're there all right, but they sink in slowly, over repeated listens. Over the years, LP2 has become just as powerful as Diary, in some ways even more so, with its overall sound more wrought with tension and emotion, the songs more minor key and somehow more sad sounding. And thus even, maybe a bit more emo.
There are some 'hits' here too. "Theo B" is frantic, with a cool lurching tempo, weirdly angular guitars, and some seriously intense vocals. "Red Elephant", is a slow burning post rocker, with a soaring chorus, rife with chiming guitars and dense drum pound, but with a weary, worn vibe, like much of the record, a strange undercurrent of impending doom. Definitely darker than Diary, but instead of that being a weakness, it's most definitely the record's strength. "Waffle" might be our favorite track here, a meandering low end slither, all woozy bass and Slint-y guitars, a sing songy tempo, a gorgeous main melody, and some truly beautiful voice-about-to-crack vocals. Then there's "8", which sounds like it could have been plucked right off of Diary, and like the single bonus tracks on Diary, reminds us again how much SDRE sometimes sound like a super heavy emo Decemberists. The strange thing about LP2, is that it's really back heavy, with some of the best SDRE songs EVER, tucked way near the end of the record, which makes sense in a way if you consider LP2 to be a sort of continuation of Diary...
The thing is, as long as we've had these records, they seemed more like 2 halves of the same record, a sprawling concept record, one side lighter, one darker, perfectly complimenting each other, both on their own practically perfect, but combined, pretty much one of the greatest song suites in second wave emo for sure, but maybe even in indie rock history all together.
After this record, frontman Jeremy Enigk would discover Jesus and go on to record some awesome solo records, 1/2 the band would go on to play in the Foo Fighters, and the band would get back together 4 or 5 years later, and record two more SDRE records, both pretty great, but nothing really compared to the magic of this one, and Diary.
LP2 features two bonus tracks, each single B-sides, and both again, pretty kick ass, and both surprisingly dark and heavy and EPIC.
All new deluxe packaging, gatefold digipak, printed inner sleeve, and a massive booklet with all new liner notes, and an interview with the band members.
You thought rap and metal sounded good together? (Or not?)
Well, how about thrash metal and PIRATES?? A match made in Heaven. Or hell! Or on the high seas! Kinda silly, but fun for sure... the thrash metal is furious and tight and heavy, the vocals aren't especially 'pirate-y', but the lyrics certainly are. And there are some awesome between song interludes, featuring clips from movies and samples and various other bits of pirate dialogue and drama...
After parting ways with her band The Concretes a few years ago, Victoria Bergsman has since shown the world that she not only possesses one of the most lovely voices around, but also has a musical mind that is as tasteful as it is creative. Her first album as Taken By Trees was nothing short of pure bittersweet pop perfection, and this sophomore effort follows suit with some really tasty twists. The main twist being that she headed to Pakistan to record most of the album with local musicians there which adds such a unique texture to her richly crafted songs. Tablas, flutes, violin, tumha, dholak, etc. all come together with such a free flowing ease and Bergsman's singular touch and vision shines through the entire record.
Most folks who embark on similar projects often forget about subtly, and awkwardly inject another region's sounds into their songs with no regard for how the various elements will flow. But Taken By Trees creates that fusion effortlessly, never letting the new sounds overpower the old, a delicate balance achieved so gracefully.
With the amazing voice she posses it would be so easy for Bergsman to just make very straight ahead coffee house ready songs, but instead she injects as much thought and passion into the texture of her songs as she does her beautiful vocal delivery. Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) also lends his voice to a few tracks, which makes the awesome cover of Animal Collective's "My Girls" (here transformed into "My Boys") even more endearing. Conjuring images of greats like Astrud Gilberto, Taken By Trees really is a true modern day chanteuse.
Tamaru is a Japanese minimalist, who's not terribly well known outside of Japan, as this is only his second cd in well over a decade of making music. Both on this record and in performance, he uses little more than his bass guitar, a volume pedal, and a delay pedal; and with this process, he restricts himself to an open tuning, using only those four notes as the basis for his harmonic and subharmonic overtones. His thrumbing drones are the results from a decade of refining his craft, discovering which tones he can master, and seamlessly layering sound on top of itself. The eight tracks on Figure are all essentially variations on this same theme for lugubrious undulations of sound that organically ripple, echo, and hypnotize as if they were the cyclical patterns from waves moving across a relatively calm body of water. The first couple of tracks are pretty heavy constructs of tonal interplay within thundering drones stretched upon elongated bowings from his bass guitar, somewhat not all that dissimilar to the longform works by Jonathan Coleclough or Yoshi Wada. On "Stream," Tamaru allows for more of a traditional means of playing the bass, as rounded clouds of tone billow forth like some of the amorphous material from Rothko. "Juju" is a wavering mirage for overlapping drones and slippery swells of bass timbre; and "Room" is downright playful exercise in delay driven phase patterns. Any number of these pieces could be rendered successfully as sustained duration compositions, but Tamaru's economy of scale renders everything as a precious, tightly encapsulated gem of low end frequencies. Nicely done!
Latest issue of UK heavy music powerhouse Terrorizer. On the cover, Taiwanese black metallers Chthonic (a particularly awesome and creepy cover shot btw!), inside there's Behmoth, Bolt Thrower, Ulver, Neurosis, Death Angel, Glorior Belli, Burnt By The Sun, as well as part one of Terrorizer's Sludge Special, featuring a rad oral histroy of sludge and of course a brief history of Eyehategod. There's also a cool feature on Until The Light Takes Us, the new black metal doc made by Aaron from noise pop band Iran.
And as always, a ton of features on new and upcoming bands, loads of reviews, records, cds, reissues, shows, books movies, and this issue comes with a double cd, one of the discs featuring exclusively unsigned bands!
Must be a cold day in Hell. The long rumored, NEW Trouble album is finally here. Been a long time coming. In fact, it seemed like Judgement Day might get here first, that this would never happen, but it has. Chances are, those looking to pick up this expensive import are probably only gonna be fans already, so there's not much need for us to explain just how legendary these Chicago doom metallers are. Let's just say that along with Pentagram, Saint Vitus and Candlemass, in the eighties these guys were the bearers of the Black Sabbath torch...with hints of more psychedelic '60s stuff like Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and the Beatles surfacing in their music as well. Rick Rubin tried to break 'em big back in 1990 but it wasn't to be, though their eponymous Def American debut remains a (sadly out of print) classic. Various breakups, lineups, fuckups, and troubles befell, the band last releasing a studio album in 1995, Plastic Green Head, which easily could have been their swansong, their final epitaph. But twelve long years later they have reconvened (more or less) with the most crucial factor being that original vocalist Eric Wagner is at the mic. When we last heard him, on Dave Grohl's Probot project, it seemed criminal that Trouble wasn't happening at the time and that their future was, as ever, in doubt. Now, at last, at least, they're back (even if this release was damn hard for us to get) and at this point is just nice to hear Wagner crooning in his sincere soaring gargle over some heavy riffs once again!! Like Dio and his rainbows and wishing wells, Eric Wagner has still got Heaven on his mind. Other familiar Trouble tropes, musical and lyrical, abound, from swinging Sabbathy riffage to mellow stoner psych balladry about reaching "the end of my daze". Better than Plastic Green Head? As good as Manic Frustration? Up there with Run To The Light? Er, well, each fan must judge. One thing that's most definitely rad about this record is that they chose to do a cover of "Ride The Sky" by krautrock proto-metallers Lucifer's Friend!
Ahhhh, Unrest. There was a time when Unrest were IT. They could do no wrong. Mark Robinson (Unrest / Teenbeat Records mainman) was king of the indie scene. And listening to this record there is no doubt in our minds as to why. While the records before Imperial were sloppy and chaotic (in a good way!) and sort of punk rock, they were also dark and dreamy and sweetly melancholy, all hinting at some doleful sensitive underside, lurking like a shy boy, beneath Unrest's spikey exterior. So along comes Imperial (originally released in 1992), and it was sort of like that shy boy finally got up the guts to talk to that girl he had been longing for all year, and while she still ignored him, something about reaching that point made him realize he didn't need loud noisy punk rock, or smashing chaos, he could just be himself, and the sound of being himself, finally unveiled on Imperial, managed to suddenly illuminate the pop treasure map Unrest had been following since day one. All that sweet sweet pop was now the focal point, the foundation, no longer hiding bashfully behind the crash and clang. Gone were the willful snottiness, the distorted guitars, the ramshcakle drumming and in their place, a languid, lustrous jangle pop shimmer, bathed in reverb, and laced with dreamy soulful crooning, lilting guitar melodies, and sweet sweet hooks, with the ultimate mixtape lyrics. "I Do Believe You Are Blushing". I mean, c'mon!! How sweetly romantic is that?! I for one must fess up to at least several tracks on Imperial making their way on to many a mix tape.
And while a few tracks do 'rock' ("Suki" has to be one of the best rocking pop songs EVER!), it's in that sort of liquidly propulsive Neu! meets Beat Happening sort of way, a droney jangle with repetitive guitars and shuffling rhythms, mesmerizing but a little bouncy too. However, on Imperial, it's all about the blissed out shimmer pop, lazy electric guitars, and distant throbbing bass floating delicately atop a slowly unfurling popscape, simple and absolutely beautiful, with Mark Robinson's gorgeous hearfelt croon as well as the occasional delicate angelic female vocal. So so so so beautiful!
This re-issue also tacks on 8 bonus tracks that while not included on the original, definitely sound like they could have just been placed anywhere throughout the record proper and would have seemed right at home. A massive 13 minute reworking of the title track, stretched out into a druggy, dreamy ambient janglescape, swoonsome and sweet, slowly shifting from a tripped out acapella blur to endless instrumental bliss-out. A trip hoppy version of "Isabel" that sounds just as good as the original, a couple ambient experiments that add more mystery to Imperial's moodiness, the dirgey , pretty slowcore crawl "Wednesday And Proud" and a few others. Inexplicably, they left off the infamous Unrest classic "Yes She Is My Skinhead Girl" which was only on a 7" and was once included as a bonus track on the import version of this. But that's hardly a complaint when faced with such a stunning slice of pop perfection. Listen to the sound samples and you will understand just what we mean.
MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT!! MISSIS... oh wait. Scratch that. A Orillas Del Magdalena might LOOK like a Mississippi record, and may SOUND like a Mississippi record, but is in fact a new archival release on Domino Sound, the beginning of a new series? We don't know, but we sure hope so. Needless to say, all you Mississippi Records fanatics, might want to grab one of these, sure maybe it doesn't yet have the fetishistic cache that Mississippi has attained, but it is a fantastic collection of lost sounds.
Unlike the gospel / blues focus of Mississippi, A Orillas Del Magdalena is a collection of Cumbia music, a mix of African and Spanish sounds from Columbia, that is festive and celebratory, raucous and emotional. The songs here are culled from the archives of recordist Antonio Fuentes, who began recording the music of Columbia in the early 30s and went on to start Columbia's first record label. The tracks here span the several decades between the fifties and the seventies, and are so fantastic, the sound incorporates lots of horns and accordions, call and response vocalizing, wild percussion, fluttery flutes, playful melodies, it's a little bit calypso, a little bit mariachi, all infused with a distinctly African vibe, fans of the Ethiopiques series and all the Sublime Frequencies releases will definitely dig this and yeah, this easily could have found it's way to Mississippi, which means, as if you couldn't have sussed it out already, WAY recommended!
Those crazies at Past & Present are gonna have to add a whole new wing to their Electric Asylum, we're up to volume 3! More late '60s, early '70s "Rare British Acid Freakrock" from 20 obscure acts, these are they: Renegade, Primitive Man, Sensations, Puzzle, Barracuda, Grumbleweeds, Boneshaker, Barron Knights, Dynasty, M.A.S.K., Shakane, Wheels, Spode, 1984, Greg Robbins, Things Fall Apart, Roger Ruskin Spear, Don Crown, Zebedee, and Amazon Trust. Never heard of most of 'em before, probably won't hear of 'em again, but we're enjoying the one-off treats (some fun bubblegum, some grooving glam, some trippy prog pop) found here, now. And we'll be humming along with some of these for a while. One we did know was Primitive Man, whose outrageous "Animal Love" appeared on another cool comp, Neurotic Reactions, a few years back.
Another worth the price of admission highlight has to be "Little Girl" by a band called 1984, a remarkably jaunty number, upbeat and energetic and so very catchy, the bright and bouncy qualities of which contrast with the lyrics, the singer smugly telling off some girl who wronged him. And somehow also this song is replete with heavy psych guitar. They don't make 'em like that anymore. Likewise with the rest of the stuff on the disc, really! On the other hand, there's the super gruff voice used on the maniacal "Drop Out" by one Roger Ruskin Spear, that was probably a novelty back in the era it was recorded, though unwittingly a precursor to the likes of Killdozer!
The pseudo-occultic, proto-proto-metal percentage is down somewhat compared to the previous 2 volumes, but this still rocks, and the delightful kitsch quotient hasn't changed at all. Fuzzy, goofy, good times.
Like the other Electric Asylums, the cd booklet contains info on each track, as much as the compiler (who calls himself "Psychomania", so you know where his head's at) could dig up anyway, which actually often enough is more than you thought you'd ever want to know. Nicely done, with plenty of colorful original sleeve/label graphics illustrating the thick booklet.
We've said it before and we'll say it again. It never ceases to amaze us how there can be such an endless supply of killer '60s garage-psych songs to fill up compilation after compilation. Sure, once in a while there's some overlap, but really, it's incredible how many obscure bands managed to release a completely charming 7" single or two and then vanished - but their music lives on, thanks to comps like this one! The appropriately named High All The Time features a whole bunch of turned-on, drugged-out sounds circa 1966-69, all of it fuzzy and freaky and sometimes beautifully melodic.
14 tracks, 11 bands, mostly from the US of A, though two bands are Dutch and one Swedish (The Shakers, doing "Who Will Buy (These Wonderful Evils)", a classic acid-guitar drenched track we know from another comp that took that for its title. But that Shakers song is the only thing here we'd heard before.
Opening the proceedings, Mammoth takes a Kinks "You Really Got Me" type riff and fuzzes it up big time, hinting at Blue Cheer style heaviness. Then, getting even freakier, The Hobbit tosses some musique concrete sound FX into their exotic "Author's Message". Next up, Dragonfly's "Celestial Dream" is indeed pretty dreamy, coming from a band who wore wild dragonfly-wing facepaint.... so, we won't describe all the tracks, but suffice to say they're all quite groovy, and varied, and definitely high all the time, yeah! No bummers here. Bad trips, yes, well, there's The Darelyck's track "Bad Trip", a propulsive sorta-rockabilly garage beat number with the vocalist mainly chanting "It was a bad trip, it was a bad trip" over and over, way cool... From start to finish, this is comp is our idea of a good trip. And the finish is a strong one, tracks 13 and 14 being both sides of The Beautiful Daze's "City Jungle Parts 1 & 2", with Part 2 being a particularly dense, droning, throbbing piece of work.
This compact disc edition (the comp itself is a reissue, apparently originally released on LP back in the late '70s or '80s we'd guess) includes in its booklet what meager information they were able to dig up about each band, with discographical information and sometimes graphics from the original 45's.
Latest collection of forward thinking electronica from UK DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, this latest expands her focus from mostly grime and dubstep, to techno and hip hop and all sorts of variations and microgenres in between.
The compilation begins with a track by Mark Pritchard, who we had never heard of before, but his track "?" is a gorgeous bit of minimal dronemusic, that begins super spare and only begins to blossom near the end, with the drone splintering into woozy minor key melodies, creating a sort of bittersweet ambient drift, which leads right into a jam from Hudson Mohawke (Best band name ever? Quite possibly!), a lurching stuttery glitchy electronic freak out, all splatters of 8-bit beep and bloop, weird female grunts, and a killer hip hop beat underneath, warped and so good. Mike Slott is up next with a warbly slow jam, another flurry of blips and weird truncated vocals, pretty and sunshiney, but still plenty weird, which butts up against Brackles, some tripped out synth heavy techno, and so it goes, all over the map for sure, although there is some sort of sonic thread connecting all of the jams here.
We're still partial to the dubstep, and Hobbs has gathered up some killers, Mono/Poly dishes up some strangled stutter step, heavy on the glitch and crunch, plenty of bass warble, but here the treble is cranked, so that warble is more like a little blast of static. Architeq kicks up some serious warble, with a rad loping beat, and some thick thick bass, Tranqill kills it with some dubbed out hip hop, lots of Western twang, buzzy sitar, creepy flurries of
processed old school computer sounds, and Untold is super spare, and skeletal, lots of space, the beats spare and skittery, with a distinctly Eastern flair. Those jams are scattered throughout, amidst hazy almost pop ambience, glittery house-y grooves, fuzzy indie electronic pop and the killer closer, maybe our favorite track from the Legion Of Two record we made Record Of The Week a while back, some seriously grim and heavy live drummer post industrial dub step heaviness.
For a limited time, the compact disc version of Wild Angles is on sale! $2 off regular list price (which normally would be $14.98) for the next two weeks. Dig it!
Upstairs is the cd-r imprint for nostalgic electrons and warped lo-fi esoterica run by Daniel Lapotin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never), and what's a better way to kick-start things than with a comp of the accomplices, malcontents, and hangers-on? There's a handful of artists we're familiar with (Julian Lynch, Pulse Emitter, Africa Germany, Caboladies, and of course Oneohtrix who's covering a Grouper song which sounds as weird and fucking awesome as you could imagine!) but a ton we've not got a clue about. For example, take Autre Ne Veut's '80s pop simulacrum filtered through disposable recording techniques; or the anti-aesthetics, bleepity techno of cheap synthesizers from No Fun Acid; or the suitably kosmiche zone tripping from Stellar Om Source; or the wild and woolly oscillations from Nackt Insecten. Pulse Emitter's jagged electronica maps out lunar rhythms for those smooth surfaces of synthetic melodies he's mastered in recent years. Julian Lynch wistfully taps out softened melodies sort of like an idiot savant rendition of Erik Satie with some squiggly ring modulation tossed in for good measure. Gatekeeper brings the compilation to a conclusion with murky recapitulation of early Chris & Cosey smears of shadowy electronica. There's plenty more between all of these points of interest, making for a pretty great album. It's a shame that there's only 75 copies, and Upstairs has already sold out of all of their copies...
Another super limited lp installment in Sublime Frequencies' ever expanding collection of fantastic and mysterious world musics. It's unclear, why a few releases have been vinyl only, and if the shelf-life of the last Sublime Frequencies lp was any indication, these won't last long at all.
So what is Shadow Music Of Thailand? Well, it's Thai pop heavily influenced by UK instrumental rockers The Shadows of course. More specifically it's a strain of sixties Thai guitar pop heavily influenced by Western music, rock, garage and especially surf. The guitar being the most obvious influence.
So here we have a collection of some of the most notable purveyors of "Shadow Music": The Son Of P.M., P.M. Pocket Music, P.M 7 / Jupiter and Johnny Guitar. You may have noticed the recurring P.M., well that stands for Payong Mukda, one of the most prolific composers and performers of the time and the music genius behind all of those P.M. groups.
On first listen, the Shadow Music here doesn't sound all that different than much of the Thai Pop we've heard before on other collections, and no doubt there is some overlap. But keep listening, and all sorts of strange and unique little sonic flourishes reveal themselves. Really, where else can you hear gamelan percussion with super fuzzed out ? And The Mysterions style organ and wailing surf guitar? From groovy garage rock to shimmery surf, lots of organ, and plenty of gamelan, vibraphone, xylophone, gorgeous vocals, strange harmonies, mysterious melodies, but it's those guitars, it buzzes and howls, chugs and twangs, woven into all of the songs here, creating this strange hybrid, Thai Pop, Bollywood, surf rock, blues rock, latin, soul, all woven into a wild groovy psychedelic fuzzy funky garage folkpop that will totally hit the spot for fans of exotic grooves and wild and wonderful sounds.
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF ONLY 1500 COPIES. 180 gram vinyl, super thick, gatefold sleeve, full color with tons of original Thai artwork and extensive liner notes.
Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find a review of another Sublime Frequencies release, the Shadow Music Of Thailand, where we discuss how hard it is to pick a favorite release, cuz they're all so goddamn good.
And such is the case with this one too, a sequel of sorts to 2007's Thai Pop Spectacular 1960s-1980s, this one titled Siamese Soul, but the first one was pretty soulful as well, so we'll presume that it was just chosen as a catchy title, because this does play out like a continuation of the first part which is in no way a bad thing, in fact, we'd been hankering for more ever since that first volume.
As the loner notes discuss, Cambodian pop has gotten so much attention lately, that it seems almost criminal that Thai pop wasn't getting the same attention, which becomes even more apparent listening to Siamese Soul (as well as the first volume). In the review of the first volume we described Thai Pop as "an awesomely confusional mix of Molam, Bollywood, Ethiopian groove, funk, soul, American pop and surf rock, all tangled up into amazing shapes, and peppered with killer hooks, amazing vocalists, bizarre production techniques, but most of all amazing amazing songs." Which of course still absolutely applies. Heavy Western funk to Ethiopian sounding grooves, tripped out organ drenched fuzz rock, with creepy sexy female vox to Shadows / Ventures style surf rock, a bunch of the songs like many of the tracks on the two Molam: Thai Country Groove Sublime Frequencies comps, totally remind us of whatever Thai song the Butthole Surfers appropriated for their song "Kuntz", that distinctly Thai vocal melody is so unmistakable and unforgettable. The whole record is just so wild and fun and varied and out there, slipping easily from classic sounding pop, to mysterious folk music, to stomping funk, to twangy soundtrack sounds to smokey bar ballads, to slithery soul, to far out almost Bollywood sounding exotica, all with a distinctly Thai flavor. Funky, groovy, soulful, so so good. Check out the sound samples. Sometimes we feel words can't quite do sounds like these justice. And the more we listen to this, the more THIS one is becoming one of our favorites, and heck, we could very well have made this another Record Of The Week too!
We reviewed the Dean Carter disc a few lists back, a killer collection of super twisted rockabilly and garage rock, ultra distorted, tons of weird effects, super rocking and far out, especially for the time. We sold a ton, and still can't seem to stop listening to it. In the liner notes, they kept mentioning a comp called The Midnite Sound Of The Milky Way, a collection of singles from the label that Dean Carter called home, and we figured if it was even half as weird as the Carter disc, we had to have it, and guess what, it totally is.
This one is not new either, a few years old in fact, but somehow we missed out both on the Carter, and the Milky Way, so we figured maybe some of you did too. More twisted garage rock, weirdo rockabilly, some proto-doom (really!) and some stuff that we're not exactly sure how to describe. One name keeps popping up all over this disc, with NINE tracks, and that's Kookie Cook, who just so happened to be a member of Dean Carter's band, and judging from these tracks, had much to do with that twisted sound. "Workin' Man" is a total classic, with a killer main riff, a bunch of whistling, some weirdly delivered sung spoken vocals, lots of "HEY!"s, some awesome drumming, and a screaming lead that lasts all of two seconds. Woah. "Don't Lie" is a slithery twisted swampy bit of blues, with frenzied howled vox, and some strange female back ups. "Revenge" is a total reverbed surf jam, with some more super strange vocals, frenzied and maniacal, all over some shimmery twang, and some seriously pounding drums. "Misery" and "I Feel Alright" are classic fifties sounding rockabilly blues jams, with bad ass guitar wrangling, all super distorted and tangled. "Ooby Dooby" is another fifties style groover, with lots of nonsense lyrics, and some really weird female back up vox, and finally, "Drums" begins with Cook shouting "Drums! Baby!" and then two minutes of wild drum freakout and occasional shouts. So good. We hope this guy has a lost album somewhere. Cook also contributes two tracks with his band the Satalites, one of which sounds a little like the Benny Hill theme mixed with surf rock, while the other is a weird slow jam, all wild manic laughing, and weird horns and 'whoop!'s in the background. And that's just Cook's tracks (which are more than enough reason to buy this), there's also the mysterious 12th Knight, whose "Death Row" is total fuzz drenched proto-doom, like Sabbath played on shitty little amps, so grim and weirdly heavy, and there's a bunch of other groups, The Cobras, Dave Marten, Four A While, George Jacks, Jack Johnson, The Grapes Of Wrath and Willie & The Travelaires, all of them cool, although not as weird or far out as Cook or as heavy and haunting as 12th Knight. Such a killer comp. Anyone who dug the Dean Carter, or just loves lost outsider gems from the sixties, this is definitely well worth checking out!
Another incredible installment in Numero Group's Wayfaring Strangers series, Lonesome Heroes is the male singer-songwriter counterpart to the series' first installment, Ladies of The Canyon. But instead of one artist serving as the thematic touchstone (Joni Mitchell and John Fahey were the key influences of the first two installments), there are several influences present, but the artists are unified by a moody tone of loneliness and introspection. You can hear traces of Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Tim Hardin and Tom Rapp in this collection of private press wonder (one artist, Kieran White, the only singer from the UK and a member of Steamhammer, actually sounds a lot like Sam Beam from Iron and Wine!), but the songs that span the late sixties to the early eighties are neither love songs or protest songs. Nor do they connect in any real way to a folk music scene or its traditions. These 17 artists, mostly from America, were rambling individuals who more often than not wrote music for recording more than for performing, penning quiet songs about time spent and lost, regrets and joys, and nature as the mystical reminder of this ever present balance of life. The home studio has a big presence in the recordings casting a warm tape aura around the songs and making subtle studio effects (reverb, multi-tracking, panning) add interesting details to the compositions. It's not all just an acoustic guitar and a voice (though some of it is), but aural flourishes of flutes, pianos, and female backing vocals can also be heard throughout. Perfect for Sunday Morning listening! As usual, Numero Group do a great job with the packaging with an added booklet featuring photos of the original private press lps and mini-bios of all the artists here. Astonishing!
SHIT YEAH. Kurt Vile returns with this 3 song teaser to his upcoming full length on indie rock powerhouse Matador, and if the scores of KV records we've been digging these last few months weren't confirmation enough, this 7" proves it: Kurt Vile is no fucking fluke, but the real deal. An honest, heartfelt songwriter and a damn fine guitarist who will no doubt be setting the world on fire with his catchy, melodic tunes and cool slow drawl vocals. "He's Alright" is a cool acoustic number, sort of Neil Young-ish with a nice upbeat acoustic guitar and some spacey electrics. It's simple and straightforward, but the production is lush and 100% bullshit free. The B-side kicks off with the brief "Farfisas In Falltime," utilizing the legendary titular organ to create a droney, buzzing looplike interlude before finishing up with "Take Your Time," another acoustic number showing off Kurt's fingerpicking proficiency and delightfully mushmouthed vocals.
This little record comes pressed on handsome marbled blue vinyl, and has us jonesin' for the day - not too far off now - that Kurt unleashes Childish Prodigy upon the world. We can't wait!
Much has transpired in the last year or two since the Vivian Girls first hit the scene with their exciting and refreshing brand of girl group meets blown out garage rock stomp. Their original drummer jumped ship and left to join Crystal Stilts, and loads of new bands emerged with their own like-minded approach to amped up raw and melodic garage pop (Wavves, Brilliant Colors, Dum Dum Girls, Cause Co-Motion, Pens, etc...), and all the while the Vivian Girls have been touring pretty much non stop with a schedule so rigorous they would often find themselves playing multiple shows in one day.
We were quite anxious to hear how this much anticipated sophomore outing would fare, and it totally kills! Picking right up where the last one left off but played with even more confidence and unrelenting passion. Under the raucous surface of their songs, you can totally tell the Vivian Girls understand the importance of melody and hooks, and they totally sound like a band on K Records that ditched those cuddly sweaters and threw on ripped up t-shirts to get down to some seriously rocking business! Moments of Spector-like wall of sound glory collide with full throttle shredding garage pop, which these Girls masterfully and effortlessly pull off big time!
This month's issue features Broadcast (on the cover) discussing their witchy new release, also spacey techno technician Dopplereffekt, "hypnagogic popster" Sun Araw, Romanian avant-composer Iancu Dumitrescu, the Master Musicians of Joujouka, and more, including Lou Reed given the Invisible Jukebox blindfold listening test by Alan Licht. Also, the Primer this issue is about kosmische krautrock music a la Ash Ra Tempel, Siloah, and Yatha Sidra amongst others. And Christian Marclay discusses the cover art of Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream & Other Delights. Plus all the usual reviews, columns, new bits, charts (where you'll find an Aquarius 15!), and more.
Oh, and this issue also features a free cover mounted cd sampler, The Wire Tapper 22, featuring Shits And Giggles, Zenlo, Pink Mountain, Climax Golden Twins, and 16 others.
Woah, didn't expect to get another round of these super limited (300 copies to be specific) cassette anthologies from Saskatchewan's favorite (only?) black metal noise terrorists, the mighty WOLD. Imperator serves as a good introduction to the truly insane sounds of WOLD, combining tracks from each of their three awesome full lengths, and more importantly, impossibly rare tracks from various cd-rs and cassettes released in tiny batches that less than 100 people would have ever gotten their hands on.
It's hard to actually describe a band like WOLD. Sure, it's black. You could call it "metal", but these boys whip up some of the noisiest, most out of control sounds ever committed to tape, seeming to owe more of a significant debt to industrial noise merchants like Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle than any black metal band we could think of. Whatever you want to call it, WOLD's brand of chaos is truly unique. Sheets of uncontrollable white noise, an industrial strength throb, and the unbelievable witch-like shrieks of Fortress Crookedjaw (best black metal name ever, methinks) all merge into a hellacious brew of unrestrained evil, with amazing lyrics (none of which are printed here, so good luck) and perhaps most surprisingly, melodies that are both beautiful and catchy. Of course, said melodies are buried under multiple layers of windy tape hiss, crumbling distortion, and overblown electronics, and what you get out of a WOLD track depends on how well you are prepared to listen, preferably under a pair of headphones at maximum volume. It's like taking a wild ride through a barren wilderness of ice and fog, both disorienting and exhilarating, and noisy as fuck.
Released as a professionally printed, smoky black cartridge on the very cool cassette label Rotting Chapel, this is probably the only chance you will ever have to get this little bastard from us. We got about 10 (yes, TEN) copies, so act fast!
We know this came out a while back, not sure why we haven't gotten around to reviewing it till now, but rest assured it is killer! Another sun soaked, acid bathed dose of strummy pop from East Coasters Woods. This 7" hits hard with two driving tracks of their usual lo-fi clanking around, up-beat catchy lyrics, vocals sung in the usual high pitched, seven-year-old-trying-to-imitate-Neil-Young kind of voice, driving rhythm guitar plods on and on like the Stooges gone punk, soaring fuzz leads driving each song into rock and roll oblivion, all wrapped up in a neat little package just waiting to be thrown on your turntable before the last days of summer slip away. We know there's a lot of folks rolling with the whole old-as-new aesthetic, and we have to say Woods really stands out as being one of the most charming of these new lo-fi garage groups. That said, this 7" is a must have and should not be missed!! Recommended!
Easily the BEST album whose tracks contain of a lot of seeming nonsense baby babble and backwards tape manipulations (that was originally improvised for Italian radio) we've ever heard. Even if you already think you'd like babbling vocals and tape FX, this is even better than you think. Why? well it helps that it was done by Robert Wyatt, who is a bit of a genius, you know. Of course, if you're a Wyatt fan, you already know you want this 'cause it's basically an UNRELEASED ROBERT WYATT ALBUM FROM 1981.
Now, the title is Radio Experiment as it definitely was an experiment, a successful one, fortunately. Wyatt was invited to come to Rome and spend a week at this radio station's studio, recording his spontaneous creative process during that time frame, whatever might transpire.
The radio people picked the right artist to participate in this project, as Wyatt fully embraced the concept, working in a "blank frenzy", willing to let the end results remain secondary to documenting the work in progress of music making, though as it turned out, the finished music is pretty cool. And strange.
There's seven completed compositions presented on this disc, along with a final 10 minute track that was assembled and edited by the radio program's staff from recordings made surreptitiously during Wyatt's initial "rehearsals" in the studio. He's a one-man band here, playing piano and keys and drums and Jew's harp and other "objects". And singing, overdubbing his voice, which is all over the place, from playfully chopped up burble to weird whisper to high pitched whine to mumbled chatter to, well, actual singing that's quite fragile and pretty. There's plenty of wordless ba ba ba la la la, and other more coherent parts where you can understand the lyrics, in some cases read from political/historical texts. Multitracked and layered, all these pieces have a dreamy, hazy, hallucinatory aspect, somewhat abstract but pleasant, moody and melodic too. Being to a degree improvised, some jazz seeps in from Wyatt's Soft Machine days, and one track in fact is an interpretation, of sorts, of Charlie Parker's "Billie's Bounce".
Overall, a week well spent! Wyatt fans of course should enjoy this, and it also sounds to us like something perhaps This Heat related, and there's lots of current underground, cd-r scene activity featuring fractured pop and rhythmic lo-fi psychedelia and the textural use of the human voice that unknowingly harks back to these archival recordings from 28 years ago, long hidden away but thankfully now issued on cd and vinyl. The way this combines both beautiful pop-iness with really weird methods and sounds seems like something fans of, say, Panda Bear would be totally into. Very recommended!
Latest from this bad ass SF based electronic music magazine, on the cover, the Modular Recordings label from Australia, inside: grime lord Durrty Goods, dubstepper Untold, LA jazzhead Ras G, Toronto post punkers DD/MM/YYYY, a feature on labels XLR*R loves, including Werk Discs, Truckback, Modern Love, Type, Bersa Discos, Dirty, Mothership, Wireblock, True Panther Sounds, I Am Sound, In The Red, Discerror, DIYNamic and Interdependent Media. Also inside: Black Moth Super Rainbow, a weird fashion shoot with Belgian musicians and the usual ton of reviews. ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
They never ever disappoint, in fact more often than not, they totally blow us away. And with Popular Songs, Yo La Tengo remind us once again why they are one of the best bands of the last quarter century. From start to finish this is an album with so many different sounds, styles, moods and motifs, yet it's all so deliciously Yo La Tengo! Like their best albums, the first time you hear this record you know it's going to be an album that you'll listen to for the rest of your life. And in this day and age of disposable culture it's so incredibly refreshing to have YLT, whose music has such a timeless element, and sounds so personal and passionate, and will undoubtedly stand the test of time. YLT never aspired to be the hippest or trendiest or coolest band around. Simply stated, slow and steady wins the race! They've definitely won, and continue to win, and in turn so have we. They've made their indelible mark by just being themselves, and when it comes to pure substance it just doesn't get more richly rewarding than YLT.
Popular Songs is like an album that represent the best friend we all wish we could have. Someone you can turn to when it's time to get deep or vent some bittersweet sadness, someone you can also have fun sleepover parties with and let loose and experience total joy together. These are a set of songs that really do hit at almost the entire spectrum of emotion, and the pacing/sequencing of the album just couldn't be more perfect. Whether being melted away by one of Georgia Hubley's beautifully aching drift-away numbers or being swept up in a Motown like fury or rocked by a straight ahead burner, there is such immaculate skill in the crafting of each song.
The album features wonderfully lush string arrangements provided by Richard Evans, the legendary soul pioneer who contributed so much to the amazing '60s Chicago/Cadet soul scene, who many of you might know and love for his work on the great Afro-Harping album by Dorothy Ashby. So awesome, and yet after taking so many wonderful twist and turns, it is the ending of the album that really leaves us so stunned and in awe.
The last two tracks are very long and mostly instrumental. "The Fireside" is eleven minutes of total shoegaze bliss, that puts most actual 'shoegaze' bands to shame, letting the listener get lost in a slow glowing haze. And then the album's closer "And The Glitter Is Gone", an almost sixteen minute sonic smolder brimming with a droning and triumphant psychedelic spirit that we could listen to forever.
One of those rare records that is all 'favorite songs', every listen, a new song gets stuck in your head and fills your heart, only to be supplanted by another the next time, and on it goes, favorite after favorite after favorite. We think it's fair to say this is a total masterpiece from one of our favorite groups!
Over the years, Yo La Tengo have proven to be masters at creating such evocative atmosphere and feeling and emotion in their songs. So it was only a matter of time that wise film directors would seek them out to create scores for their films.
Between the years 2005 and 2006 four different films employed the (maybe not so) surprising soundtrack prowess of YLT, their film music, not all that removed from their band music, creating lingering bittersweet sounds both classy and sophisticated, lush and intimate.
For the score to Old Joy they were joined by Smokey Hormel on guitar to create the perfect hazy sounds for meandering roadtrip and a bit of Northwest exploration. For Junebug they employed a string and horn ensemble adding fluttery floral ambience. For Game 6 the band went at it alone creating the most dynamic and eclectic set of the bunch showing once again what amazing range YLT posses. The disc concludes with their contributions to the John Cameron Mitchell film Shortbus, adding some nice, light and charming sonic snippets to that sexually provocative/honest film.
Aside from being perfect for film music, we also always appreciated just how painterly the instrumental side of Yo La Tengo managed to be, conjuring so many moods and images with such a nice wide palette of delicately employed sounds. We want to give this to all our artist friends as we think it would be the perfect record to have playing in the studio when folks go to create art of their own. This collection came out last year but we only just got in enough of them to list, so grab one as fast as you can, 'cause if we run out we're not sure how quickly we will get them back in stock, since they were sent to us directly by the band (who says rockstars don't go to the post office!?) on the same day they left to go on a big tour!
