There's just something so magical about the drone. For the music we love, and the sounds we love to hear, the drone seems to always be an element, whether it's black metal or dubstep or country, mix in a bit of drone, and it just does something magical to the mix. But you can't just pull the drone out, to display it bare, on its own, without knowing what you're doing. Like modern art, everyone thinks "Oh I could do that", but they can't in fact, it takes something or someone special to be able to wrangle a drone, to create dronemusic that unadorned can be lovely, harrowing, even riveting, and one of our favorite drone wranglers goes by the name Acre, and for several years now has been offering up some of the most compelling, and disarmingly simple drone music we've heard.
A casual listener might mistake the sounds of Acre for a swarm of insects, or the buzz of a faulty air conditioner, or the muted roar of a vacuum cleaner, and honestly the sound is really not that far removed for that, but to be fair, we've all found ourselves entranced by the sounds of everyday drone, helicopters passing overhead, the roar of an engine, the deep rumble of thunder, the static on the TV between channels, right? So strap on some headphones and let Acre take you into the heart of the drone.
Remember that ride at Disneyland, where you got strapped into a little car and went through the microscope which shrunk you down so you could explore atoms and molecules? Sometimes the music of Acre can be like that. With close listening, what on the surface seems static, comes alive, like a roaring river of sound. Dunk your head in, and you can hear the layers, and the overtones beating against each other, the buried melodies, the subtle nuances, that make drones like this seem almost alive.
Three long tracks, 15 minutes, 12 minutes and 22 minutes, each one a single drone, but each one also a journey through sound, into sound. It's strange that music this seemingly simple can be so enthralling, so hypnotic and entrancing, but it is, and once again Acre manages to create a minimal world of sound that is not as minimal as it seems.
WAY RECOMMENDED!
aQ reviews are usually written with a collective voice, but for this one, I'm (Andee) gonna have to step out into the first person, cuz I have been waiting for this record for 25 years! Since I was 14 years old.
I had just discovered heavy metal, and not HEAVY metal, we're talking Ratt and Motley Crue and Rough Cutt and King Kobra and L.A. Guns and Great White and Poison, that sort of heavy metal, and I was living in San Diego, and every time one of those bands played, there would be a local opener called Assassin, who RULED. Who as far as my 14 year old ears could tell, should have been just as popular as any of those other bands. And they were poised for that sort of success, the word was spreading, they did some small tours, they were maybe the next big thing, but as with lots of bands, before anything could happen, the band called it a day. And that was it.
I eventually moved on, my musical tastes matured and changed, but I never stopped liking eighties metal or hard rock or glam metal, and I never forgot Assassin. Over the years, and DECADES, I tried to track down their only single, and could never find it. I must have owned it back in the day, but somehow it had gone missing. And with the onset of the internet, I figured that would make it easier to find, but alas no luck. I eventually found a compilation that featured one of the tracks from the 7", and I played it to death, but I had sort of given up on ever tracking it down. So I was telling someone about Assassin, and just randomly Googled them, and WHAT? found an actual reissue, not just the single, but a whole unreleased record, as well as a live show!! I ordered one months before it came out, and waited patiently, and it showed up finally, and I threw it on, and FUCK!!! It sounded just as rad as it did when I was 14. So I figured what the hell, I oughta share this with my aQ pals, I mean, c'mon, a record I've literally been looking for for more than half my life!! TWENTY FIVE YEARS!!
Allan worried we wouldn't sell any, but I trust you, faithful aQ-ers, don't be ashamed of your eighties glam rock guilty pleasures (if they are in fact guilty), and dig this lost gem from an era short on lost gems. If you dig any of that kind of stuff, Motley Crue, Black And Blue, Armored Saint, Keel, Stryper, Seduce, Alcatrazz, Coney Hatch, Raven, hell, Assassin even opened for Slayer and Grim Reaper and Anthrax, then dig this. Heavy and hooky, listen to the two sound samples, those are the two songs from the single, and they are the best songs here, even after 25 years, I find myself listening to those two tracks over and over and over. The vocals are high and soaring, but really unique, the drummer kicks ass and the guitar player is a total shredder, and like the best bands of the time, Assassin were essentially a pop band, the songs rule, killer choruses, memorable verses, even the bridges and leads stick in your head. "Treason" might just be one of the best metal jams of the eighties, and "All Your Love" is a close close second. But give some of the other tracks a try, "Backstabber" is bad ass, "Nuance Le Dancer" is a weirdly structured metallic groover, "Tower" is an epic majestic dirge, and "No Way" is classic eighties metal. The live stuff shreds too, but that's just a bonus. I would have happily paid $15 for the single, so as far as I'm concerned those 2 tracks are worth the price of admission alone, everything else just sweetens the deal!
Lots of photos and liner notes, and anyone out there sitting on a treasure trove of rad eighties metal in need of a loving home, by all means, get in touch!!! We now return you to the third person...
A terrific sophomore release from The Awkward Stage has made its way down the West Coast to our eager ears. What is it in that Vancouver water that sprouts such dandy melodic sensibilities? On Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights, the dulcet drowsy voiced Shane Nelkin and company may initially come across as unassuming, and at times, yes, maybe slightly awkward, but in the most charmingly distinctly Canadian way. Then they wheel out their (also distinctly Canadian) guitar pop chops, and watch ears start pricking up and toes start tapping. Hot on their heels come a graceful tickling of the ivories and some buoyant bright horns (that gave us the nostalgic warm fuzzies for Zumpano), and well, away we goooo! The Awkward Stage casually nestle catchy hooks into both smooth and crunchy settings with delightful results. We're guessing they were raised on '60s pop and '70s soft rock (a la Raspberries, Sweet, Bread, Chicago, etc), and nurtured in the neighborhood of fellow Vancouverites The New Pornographers, the abovementioned Zumpano, and Immaculate Machine. Heck, Nelkin played with both A.C. Newman and Jason Zumpano's Sparrow for a spell. We also think this may tickle your fancy if you dig Hidden Cameras, Arcade Fire, Sloan and Interpol too. When this has been played in the store pop loving folks have asked, "Ooh, what's this?" and often take one home with them!
By this point people seem to have really strong feelings one way or another about Devendra Banhart, ourselves included. We've been big fans of him from his first ultra personal other worldly creations and then as he transitioned his approach into a more fleshed out sound, and we really do appreciate the twists and turns his music has taken over the years and his willingness to play with different sounds and approaches, even when not entirely successful. Perhaps especially then!
Because the thing about Banhart's music is that for every slight slip up or overly feel-good goofy song that might make it on a record (and there are a couple here) there are so many intense and heartfelt, emotional and flat out incredible songs that help balance his uniquely skewed musical vision.
Despite all the hype and hoopla that's surrounded Banhart over the years, the truth is he might just be one of the best songwriters of the last decade. What Will We Be? fits very nicely alongside his recent outings Cripple Crow and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Mountain, with some all out rocking and even glam moments ("16th Street & Valencia Roxy Music", "Rats") as well as a handful of tropical excursions, but it's the more slow and dreamy songs that really remind us why we love this guy so much. What Will We Be? is a record that requires multiple listens, as there are golden tracks throughout, which only really seep through after multiple plays. The cd comes with a beautiful booklet with the lyrics to each songs along with Banhart's wonderful drawings.
We were a bit surprised the first time we heard The Big Pink from the UK. We assumed the band was named after the famous record by The Band, so we were expecting something more rock or rootsy, but instead were treated to some awesome droned out druggy gothy smeary shoegazey electro pop. Weird enough to appeal to folks into all that strange shit, but catchy and hooky enough to end up on 4AD and be a super hyped next big thing.
And we're cool with that for sure. If there's gonna be a next big thing, it might as well be these guys. It's like a way poppier, more commercial version of some badass hybrid of Suicide, Depeche Mode, M83, My Bloody Valentine, Interpol, a little noisy, WAY poppy, a bit eighties, a lot nineties, a little new wave, there's some Pixies in there for sure.
The Big Pink are a duo, but have an extended band that weirdly enough includes a member of aQ prog faves Guapo, not that you'd mistake this stuff for prog, but it does hint that there might be something more going on than just another band looking toward the pop charts.
And all the backward looking pop these days, the coldwave revival, new wave seeping into everything, seems like a good time for these guys, not to say that if you love Cold Cave and Former Ghosts and Zola Jesus and the like that you'll dig this, but you just might, and if you like Interpol and M83 and dig lots of synths and drum machines and catchy choruses and washed out guitars and big beats and warm feedback, but on a bigger, stadium sort of scale, then check this out, it's pretty addictive stuff....
When we first discovered Black To Comm, they were described to us as sounding like Fennesz, Pimmon, and Earth jamming with Merzbow, which at the time wasn't all that far off. Since then, they seem to have dialed back on the Earth and Merzbow, leaving their sound much more shimmery and blissy and looped and electronic. Oval was another good comparison, with that same sort of underwater digital looped soft focus glitchscape vibe going on.
The band have also seemingly become more of a band, letting the organic instruments show through, processed sure, but allowed to ring out and resonate, which makes their move to the Type label all the more appropriate.
Their sound is still woozy and washed out and hazy and warbly, but on the opening track, everything is driven by a piano, it's notes reverbed and repetitive, a sort of chamber music set amidst a field of static and crackle, the delicate melodies, wreathed in constantly shifting clouds of electrical interference. The second track loops backwards guitars over a field of warm crackle, letting the loop define the haunting melody, the background buzz gradually intensifying, eventually building to a blinding, glimmering high end ur-drone, all the edges rounded so instead of a field of skree, it's pulsing wall of crystalline shimmer and buzz.
Like a warped music box, the record plays out like some half remembered dream, delicate little melodies drift through a haze of moaning distant guitars, murky post rock is pulled apart into some strange spidery lo-fi dirgescape, pizzicato strings and urgently strummed harps are wound into a tense cinematic swirl, long streaks of clanging reverberating metal are laid atop warm vacuum cleaner drones, surrounded by clouds of clatter and clang, deep brooding rumbles finally give way to crackle and pop flecked soft focus easy listening pop ambience.
Another gorgeous collection of mysterious musical manipulation, essential listening for any one into dronemusic, minimal ambience, abstract electronica or just strange and beautiful far out sounds...
With a name like Blasphemous Crucifixion, you should know what to expect - raw, buzzing black metal with a nice suicidal feel to it. This one man (presumably) hate machine cranks things out in a highly noisy, atonal way with a pretty pronounced punk influence. In fact, this sounds a bit like some of the Russian black metal we dig so much (early Old Wainds, Nav, Meti Bhuvah), which is indeed a very good thing. While the songs on Crude Burial, expanded with some demo tracks from earlier years, sound like they were recorded in an air raid shelter during an actual air raid AND in a blizzard, you can plainly hear all the instruments creeping their way out of the mix like they are gasping for air, so it never gets too noisy to where this will be mistaken for some experimental artsy black metal. There's nothing too ornate about Blasphemous Crucifixion, nor does there need to be. This is some harsh, negative stuff, super primitive and free of all the progressive bullshit than can ruin so much black metal these days, and with song titles like "Urine-Soaked Tombstone", "Disgusting", and "Self-Inflicted", you should know whether or not this is your bag. We say hell yeah. Coming to us from the always right on Rusty Axe imprint.
We're not entirely sure where we first heard about Body Hammer, we're not really sure if it's a band or a guy, what we do know, is that this is some seriously fierce and fucked up hypergrind / math metal / black drone weirdness. 18 songs, all but 6 less than a minute long, some of those as short as a matter of seconds, every one an awesome chunk of sonic mayhem. The 1:41 opener is all creep and creak, moan and drift, downtuned guitars and tinkling melodies, some sort of Wolf Eyes / Goblin hybrid, which leads right into 31 seconds of ultra technical, super distorted, gnarled and chaotic noise drenched metallic grind, that should hit the spot for Discordance Axis fans and anyone who digs all that drummachinegun grind. The 14 second follow up is a brief white hot squall of harmonized guitars and malfunctioning drum machines, which leads directly into another industrial drone drift.
The first 2/3 of the records pass in a blur, lurching from haunting droney ambience to chugging churning grinding metal madness and back again, stopping for brief forays into blacknoize, dreamy lo-fi ambient drift, as well as some under 20 second hypergrind workouts, all tweaked FX and lightspeed blast beats, high end feedback laced dronescapes, and rumbling guitardronebuzzandblur.
With 5 songs to go, Body Hammer lets the songs sprawl, and pushes the sound in even more fractured and fucked up directions, a super distorted in-the-red, lurching black doom trudge through a haze of glitched out distortion and howled vokills, thick crumbling post industrial dirgescapes, all reverbed clank and clatter, thud and pound and crunch, hypnotic static guitar drifts built from layered drones and laced with clean guitar twang, warped bass, and buried vox, until the final 7+ minute track, a harrowing blackened doomic dirge, groaning guitars, and distant vocals, which leaves 5 minutes of silence, before a minute or so of white noise hiss and intercepted voices from the ether.
Fucked up and fucking awesome. Packaged in a dvd case, with a printed insert, and while they last we have the super limited deluxe version that comes with a bunch of extra goodies and is wrapped in a sumo cloth and sealed with a sticker.
A while back we reviewed an amazing record by a band called Tides. What was equally amazing was the circuitous route it took to get to Aquarius. In a nutshell, it was sent to a certain publication who deemed it too punk to review, a friend at said publication grabbed it from the reject box thinking we'd like it. We did. And well you can read that review on the AQ site. And that record ended up being a huge hit around here. The thing is, that record wasn't alone on its perilous journey. No, another record was right there along side the Tides cd making its way to AQ. That record, was this record. The Body. But The Body had a bit farther to go, before making it to the list you have right here in your hands. First, many emails with the label, then much waiting. Then finally a box of cds arrived, but somehow they had all become unglued and ruined in the mail. More emails followed, and still more waiting. FInally we had pretty much just given up. Then just a few days ago, a couple of big bearded guys with tattoos were sort of lurking around the store. You guessed it, they were The Body. Phew. So was it worth it? Hell yeah it was. That is if you like massive, pummeling, downtuned slow motion sludge metal with little bits of ultra doom and lots of post rock in there. And you know we do.
So yeah, The Body. This will definitely hit the spot for all you folks into Conifer, Pelican, Isis, The Ocean, Mouth Of The Architect, Tides and all that metallic post rock doom stuff. The first track is a crusher, a plodding doom riff spread out over eight minutes, with freaky garbled vocal samples and the whole thing building in intensity and slowly becoming more and more blown out until it's a fuzzy slab of white noise doom drone. Woah. The rest of the record trudges alternately between slow motion chugging and poundiing, moody mathy rhythmic workouts, and some truly dense tangles of chaotic riff rhythm mashup. All strung together with some seriously harrowing shrieked black metal style vocals buried WAY down in the mix. The final track is a fifteen minute long, relentless midtempo pipe to the skull, with a main riff that is repeated over and over, almost looped sounding, completely mesmerizing, before it all breaks down into a spacious plodding doom coda. So awesome.
Packaged in hand glued cardstock digipaks. This came out a while ago and was limited to 1000 copies so we can't be entirely sure how long we'll have these.
We knew it was only a matter of time before San Francisco's Brilliant Colors broke out of the Bay and into the ears and hearts of listeners across the globe, and it makes such perfect sense that Slumberland is the proud label to get to release their debut full length.
After a couple amazing 7"s, we knew the time was ripe for Brilliant Colors to make a big splash with their energetic, raw and super charged garage pop, gloriously drenched in feedback and soaring amplification. They really are like a modern day version of Black Tambourine (the awesome short-lived early '90s band who just had their Complete Recordings reissued by Slumberland). Part pop, part garage, part punk, all coming together in such perfect alignment. BC belong near the top of the list of awesome bands who have emerged in the last few years very much influenced by the likes of The Vaselines, Shop Assistants, Talulah Gosh, Jesus & Mary Chain, Pastels, etc. Alongside folks like Grass Widow, Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and Pens, Brilliant Colors have injected a much needed blast of full throttle female energy into the post-punk scene and this debut full length picks up where their great singles left off, adding even more intensity and uncompromising tenacity to their delivery.
Crystal balls, dark mirrors, Ouija boards, seances, creepy knocking, music boxes that play themselves, creaking doors, and distorted kaleidoscopes are just a few of the fascinating hauntological associations mined in the latest collaborative effort by long time aQ faves, Broadcast, and new to us electronic outfit, The Focus Group, run by Ghost Box label head Julian House (who also designed all of Broadcast's record covers). We've been trying to carry the Ghost Box label stuff for years but haven't found a feasible distributor, and with this release, it has become quite clear what we've been missing out on.
Billed as a mini-album (23 tracks across 50 minutes), Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of The Radio Age is all at once a mesmerizing sound collage, a mind-warping concept album, a reimagined soundtrack to some chilling psychological cinema (we're thinking of films like Dead of Night, Secret Ceremony, The Ballad of Tam Lin, Persona, Angel, Angel Down We Go, or Simon, King of The Witches), as well as an homage to the obscure left-field psychedelic electronic music and sounds of the sixties and seventies that have influenced Broadcast over the years. Bands like White Noise, The Animated Egg, Basil Kirchin, United States of America, British Library Music and of course the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
So as you probably guessed from the description above, this is not a typical Broadcast release, but a experimental detour while we await for their next official full length. Fans of their full lengths may be less immediately satisfied by this, as it's not designed to be enjoyed as a pop record. It often requires either deep listening, or having it on while working on a solitary activity, such as painting or knitting, or better yet tarot card reading. While Trish Keenan's lush and dreamy singing is heard through out, there is only one typical Broadcast song, opener "The Be Colony", a woozy lullaby that hearkens back to the dreamy melodies from the HaHa Sound album, and even that is thrown in the delirious blender of The Focus Group, who took recordings made by Broadcast for this project and cut them up in a method to suggest automatic writing under a deep hypnosis. Disembodied voices, blowing wind, flashes of jazz drumming, eerie squeeches and electronic bloops, radio dials shifting, whining puppies, crows cawing, mysterious choirs and echo-y playground rhymes. Very ghostly, and sometimes beautifully creepy. It's the kind of strategy that may sound like it could get tedious after awhile, but the collage is so delicately and carefully constructed with just enough structured melodies that it wonderfully forms an intriguing narrative, of course aided by suggestive song titles like "Reception/ Group Therapy" , "Ritual/ Looking In", "Libra, The Mirror's Minor Self..." and "Drug Party". We think that people who are less inclined towards Broadcast's pop albums and into spectral sounds, occult music compilations, electric voice phenomenon, experimental electronic music or music on the Type or Miasmah labels should definitely give this a listen. We haven't been so spellbound by a record in quite a while. Fantastic!
This amazing and absolutely incomparable recording of Cedric Im Brooks finally gest reissued by Astralwerks via Honest Jons. Those of you who've picked up copies of the Trojan Nyabhinghi Box Set have already gotten a taste for Mr. Brooks. Born in Kingston in 1943 Cedric Brooks had been involved in Jamaica's music scene since the early sixties, playing both clarinet and saxophone for several groups and recording some successful instrumentals for Coxsone Dodd, along with working as a session musician at Studio 1. It was two subsequent events that really sharpened Brooks' musical aesthetic though: the first was a trip to the United States where Brooks almost had the opportunity to join Sun Ra's Arkestra (the birth of his daughter back home in Jamaica thwarted this). The other was his introduction to rasta percussionist Count Ossie. Ossie & Brooks teamed up, forming the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, to produce the holy grail of reggae/nyabhinghi recordings "Grounation". After parting ways with Ossie, Brooks formed his own orchestra "Light of Saba" in 1974 and recorded several albums worth of material with them. This compilation of 18 tracks here are absolutely amazing, a truly bizarre amalgam blending roots reggae, jazz, afro-funk, soul, calypso and even disco -- all glued together with pounding nyabhinghi drumming (not to mention bass, guitar, organ, horns and flute). Those beginning to feel squeamish about such shameless genre blending fear not: this is not some half-assed world-beat record cum marketing gimmick. This is perhaps one of the best "reggae" (though it doesn't completely fit the genre) reissues we've seen through these doors in a long time! This is heavy, rough hewn, beautiful and potent. This is one of those gems that, when we play it in the store, everyone either wants or wants to know just what the hell it is and when the hell it was recorded. Timeless and crucial. Highly recommended!
Built To Spill manage to pack more memorable guitar licks and irresistible melodies into a single song than most bands manage in their whole career. There Is No Enemy, the latest from these long time aQ faves, is overflowing with that amazing and instantly recognizable Built To Spill sound: twangy, swirly, expansive and super rocking. Doug Marstch's voice is the perfect foil for his amazing indie rock guitar heroics, as it drifts, soars, howls and emotes. BTS are really a band who have not made a single bad record, they are in it for the long haul and they bring a presence to each of their records that manages to make each new outing unique and special. It's kind of awesome that they have never let their music be used in films (as far as we know), as it seems like it would be kind of like cheating for a filmmaker since Built To Spill's songs have such a filmic quality all on their their own. They tap into the human experience in such an honest and nuanced way, always blurring the lines of emotions and perspectives. their songs are never just happy, or sad, or angry, but instead, are a combination of all those things, sounds and songs rife with memories, disappointments, dreams, regrets and hope. It's crazy to think how so many of us have really grown up with Doug Marstch, discovering him in pre-BTS juggernaut Treepeople, and enjoying the genesis of Built To Spill together, when some of us were just teenagers, and later continuing to listen and get so much from the music of BTS all these years later. Martsch really is like the Neil Young of our generation, there is always a phrase, an epic guitar moment, a moving sentiment, a moment of true emotional intensity that sinks deep into your subconscious, in pretty much every Built To Spill song.
There Is No Enemy only gets better, more complex and impactful as the album goes on. Some of the best songs are towards the end of the album, unlike so many other bands who cram their one or two great songs right in the front, and pack the rest with filler, Built To Spill continue to make a career out of crafting one great song after another. We've found ourselves listening to this from beginning to end on headphones as we go through our daily lives, moving from one destination to another, because as always Built To Spill really is the perfect soundtrack to our lives. And once again they've made a totally great record!
Been meaning to list this for a while... Sadly this is the swan song for this fine Vancouver band who decided to call it quits earlier this year. Yeah, we've always given them a good natured hard time over the years about their band name. Quite simply, we felt it seriously undermined their songcraft which was so much more than the goofy moniker expressed. Turn a blind eye to the name, and you'll find that you can't knock their music. With each album they've gotten increasingly dark, lush, smoldery and composed. The dramatic somberness of the Americana stylings (or should that be Canadiana?) is quite a contrast to their earlier hybrid of new wave synth pop and rootsy folk, but Cartography still finds the band striking chords and balances between seeming opposites. The rustic and the elegant. The intimate and the expansive. The stormy and the utterly serene. The subtly applied electronic instrumentation are much more integrated into their rich earthy tapestry. A vocoded vocal here, a softly blooping synth countermelody there. Fans of the deep velvety voiced solemn twang bands such as Lambchop, Handsome Family, Red House Painters and on the other side of the pond Tindersticks or Pulp even, take note! A beautiful brooding farewell! Recommended!
The field of psychedelic hypnno-drone rock in San Francisco keeps getting wider, and more amazing. Along with Wooden Shjips, Sleepy Sun and The Lumerians comes the slow growth space rock of Carlton Melton. We raved about their first self-released cd-r, Live at Point Arena, CA recorded in a genuine geodesic dome, and we're psyched that they have returned with a vinyl only follow-up! While the first cd-r had a more rough around the edges shambling momentum to it (after all, the band had pretty much formed just to record in the dome!), Pass It On has a more penetrating and focused feel. Recording in the dome once again, the songs have the slow motion but still very heavy vibrations of White Hills, Moon Duo, Hawkwind and Pink Floyd. In fact, the album begins with a heavy cover version of Pink Floyd's "When You're In" from Obscured By Clouds, which builds with intensity setting up the stoned pillowy cushion freefall of follow-up track "Found Children". "Off The Grid" takes a more divergent path through the woods with freaked out tribal rhythms and strange loping pulsations and alien guitar swells. Side two begins with a reworking of a track from the Point Arena cd-r called "Fucking Funky Shit" now renamed "Digging In" that utilizes its bass and drum rhythmic foundation as a means for the guitars and organ to arc off into the stratosphere before descending into the final track "Sequoia", which burrows deep into the earth with a smouldering drone that leaves us, for the lack of a better analogy, cosmically wasted. On redwood colored vinyl. Recommended!
When Nick Cave started playing piano full time on the Bad Seeds' records, a lot of people wondered at the softer direction Mr. Cave was headed. Though he has redeemed himself in the eyes of his more rocking fans with the Grinderman band (and with his increased skill at the keys), there is an eerie beauty to the almost entirely instrumental piano-and-violin tracks on White Lunar. This 2cd set contains music from numerous films, including The Proposition, The Road, and two rare documentaries scored by Mr. Cave and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, violinist for the Bad Seeds and The Dirty Three. The melodies from these haunting tracks will stay with you, and even people who aren't fans of Nick Cave will appreciate them.
The arrival of a new Andrew Chalk album is always a cause for celebration, doubly so when it's one of his scarce productions on vinyl. Mr. Chalk has long stood as one of our favorite drone composers over the years, beginning with his early contributions to the more placid Organum recordings, through his exemplary collaborative work in Mirror and Ora, and onto his near perfect catalogue of solo recording self-released through his Faraway Press. Through the more recent recordings Goldfall and Time Of Hayfield, the timbre of Chalk's work has brightened a bit, even as that brightening occurs between the spectrum of shadowy grey to sodden blue. Like Goldfall, The Cable House is an album sourced from piano; but where the notes on that earlier album loosely trailed amidst a gossamer web of bleary dronings, The Cable House has a considerably more purposeful set of melodic structures, pushing Chalk's work much closer into the realm of Satie's Furniture Music than ever before. Nonetheless, Chalk is masterful at extracting soft ringings of echo, restrained attack, and muted reverberations from his piano. It would be hard to imagine even someone like Eno or Basinski being able to craft something more elegant, more shimmering, more beautiful.
The artwork features hand printed woodblock prints, rendering each piece just slightly different from one another. As a result of the laborious printing process, Chalk has only made 300 copies.
It seems like the Bureau B label is bravely (and thankfully) treading all the murky Cluster corners that the Water label sadly deemed non-essential.
Curiosum from 1981 definitely is a curiosity being the last Cluster record before the duo took a 10 year hiatus, and if you're looking for classic Cluster, this isn't necessarily where you would want to start. The sound is more minimal, cold and less exploratory than their previous effort, Grosses Wasser. You might even call it difficult, not that it's noisy, grating or indulgent, but it tends not to over-elaborate the compositions with dynamic structures instead reducing the compositions into essential forms. Taking a less is more approach, seemingly inspired by the then current sound of post-punk and no wave, Cluster use plodding and lurching rhythmic motifs in shorter compositions with more subtle, purposely meandering, and oft-kilter melodic nuances: whirring sounds like a toy low on batteries, discombobulated waltzes, Radiophonic Workshop-like tape manipulations and loping loops. The last song "Ufer" (also one of the longest) plays up on Eno's Discreet Music, as an exercise in listening through near-silence. It almost seems like Curiosum was a missing link recording between Cluster II and Zuckerzeit as it sort of bridges those two sensibilities of formless composition and melodic structure with just enough form and just enough melody, but not too much that one would engage with it in mindless pleasure. Instead it dares you to feel it in the present but at a removed distance.
The return of metalcore gods Coalesce was one of the coolest and most unexpected musical surprises in recent memory, and the band's mighty Ox record from earlier this year kicked our asses just like we were hoping it would. The 7 songs on this little bro ep pretty much bring things to their brutal as fuck yet melodic, catchy, and just plain rocking conclusion in a way that only this band could deliver. Never ones to keep it plain and simple, the boys from Kansas City, MO (I know, right?) spice things up with moments of thoughtful experimentation and beautiful acoustic ditties that exhibit the same sort of dark twang as current day Earth. It always helps when the musicians effortlessly ascend to the next level of musical ability and comprehension, and yeah, Coalesce are up for the task. The hardcore songs here are like the unholy lovechild of the Jesus Lizard and Converge, or maybe more appropriately, like, uh, Coalesce. They're pioneers for sure, and it's nice to have them back making pretty much everything else of this ilk irrelevant.
Synthesized Philly gloom pop merchants Cold Cave continue their winning streak here, offering a nice companion piece to the recent (as in, like, "this list" recent) Matador reissue of the unanimously agreed upon Love Comes Close. Curiously, Death Comes Close actually kicks off with the song "Love Comes Close", a cool New Order-esque track, which as we mentioned in our review of the album, is "a DEAD RINGER for the melody in the infamous mirror dance scene in Silence Of The Lambs." Next up is "Double Lives In Single Beds", where CC mainman Wes Eisold waxes gothically over a catchy little synth groove with spacey sustained chords and a simple programmed drum beat. The B-side begins with the upbeat "Theme From Tomorrowland", probably our favorite song here. The title is apt, with its futuristic synth pulses and throbs, with Eisold backed up by catchy girl vocals for a nice ethereal effect. "Now That I'm In The Future" rides with a cool fuzzy synth groove. We were gonna say it's "dramatic", but, uh, that's sort of Cold Cave's thing. Either way, it's awesome, and even without soundclips, we probably don't need to do too much convincing as everyone is going crazy for these guys, with good reason.
Cold Cave have really been making the rounds as of late, but unless you were one of the lucky few to obtain some of their super limited vinyl only platters or their recent Cremations collection (which is still available), you may have been left out in the... cold. HAHA! But anyway, Love Comes Close is the first official Cold Cave record, though it does include the three songs (re-recorded?) off the band's disgustingly limited Etsel and Ruby 12" which we had for about 5 minutes, as well as the song "The Trees Grew Emotions And Died" from the ep of the same name, all of them winners. We are happy to report that this baby more than ably lives up to all the hype. It's not that the sound of Cold Cave is revolutionary or progressive... nay, in far less skilled hands, this could easily be filed under the "derivative shit" category, but Cold Cave's remarkable melodic sense and keen understanding of songcraft are so expertly handled that their tunes come off more like lost synth pop classics. It's actually a bit unbelievable just how darkly catchy these songs are, and how they will just pop into your head at random moments like they've been there for ages. Cold Cave's music is the perfect combination of everything that is great about '80s synth based music with none of the dated cheesiness, or maybe more appropriately, just the right amount of dated cheesiness. OMD styled melodies and uber dramatic vocals from the school of Ian Curtis meld with throbbing rhythms, awesome life denying lyrics, and a pronounced gothic element, but goth as interpreted by hardcore kids. All of these combined are enough to make Cold Cave stand out from the rest of the pack. Plus, you know it's gotta be good when various folks may *want* to dislike something but can't muster the hate in their hearts simply because it's so great.
The album kicks off with "Cebe And Me", with super minimal percussion and murky, distorted female vocals that weave around a repetitive synth buzz. This sets things up perfectly for the next track, "Love Comes Close," with CC mainman Wes Eisold's deadpan vocals and music that manages to be both upbeat and melancholy as hell. The real kicker with this one, however, is the fact that it is a DEAD RINGER for the melody in the infamous mirror dance scene in Silence Of The Lambs. So now all you dudes can fashion a mangina and prance naked in front of your mirror within the comfort of your own home, just like Buffalo Bill. "Life Magazine" utilizes a blown out buzzy keyboard to hold the foundation while more down to earth programming and amazing female vocals courtesy of one time Xiu Xiu collaborator Caralee McElroy help to make this maybe our favorite track on the album. A reedy little synth melody sits atop everything else, and the dreaminess of it all sends things way off into the clouds... Goddamn, it's so good.
Naming a song "Heaven Was Full" definitely sets the bar pretty high, you're pretty much obligated to make it awesome, and that's just what Cold Cave did with this one. Subsonic oscillations swirl below what sounds like wispy winds made by a synthesizer, accompanied by Eisold's low croon and some of the catchiest and most beautiful melodies on the album. The slow movement of this piece really strikes an emotional chord, it's a real downer, but it's so irresistible it hurts. "The Tree Grew Emotions And Died" features some cool clanky drum machines with staccato boy/girl vocals and an ever present layer of super blown out guitars (we think), with a nice, slightly bouncy keyboard melody carrying the song forward. Album closer "I.C.D.K." is a quirky yet slightly ominous dance number that will certainly keep many an ass shaking all night long, and when it's all over, you first instinct will be to put Love Comes Close on for another round.
Undoubtedly Cold Cave will have trouble escaping comparisons to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, and even the Magnetic Fields at times, and not without good reason. But the band's greatest strength is its ability to go beyond their influences and deliver music that is too amazing and well written to be ignored. If you don't dig it, it doesn't mean people will respect your supposed impeccable taste and appreciation for groundbreaking music... it means you're missing out.
Funk - It's a tricky thing. In the wrong hands it can be some of our least favorite music in the world (think cheesy bass slapping bro's in dorky outfits, you know that scene) but the few who really possess TRUE FUNK can move us like no others.
Of course there is the old school pantheon of funk pioneers like Parliament-Funkadelic, The JB's, The Gap Band, The B.T. Express, Cameo, Betty Davis, Rick James, Zapp, Con Funk Shun, and Prince, but when it comes to modern day funk it's really rare to get the real deal. Folks either be faking the funk so hard it hurts, or they rely so heavily on being retro copy cats that they don't really bring any new flavor to the funk legacy they so want to be a part of. Which brings us to Dam-Funk, who has most definitely got the true funk special spirit running through his veins. We had heard his amazing mixes over the last couple years and knew the guy had talent but it wasn't until this proper full length of his own songs that we totally realized just how damn special and full of the real funk this man is.
While of course taking inspiration from many of the above mentioned funk pioneers, Dam-Funk is no mere retro act, as he knows that one of the major defining forces of true funk is how it should always be injected with a sense of very modern/future minded vision that's always a bit left of center. While folks like Outkast, Sa-Ra, and Gnarls Barkley have gotten close to entering that realm, Dam-Funk really lives, breathes and exudes the true funk aesthetic. He's able to bring in his futuristic electronic stylings informed by everyone from Kraftwerk to Cybotron/Model 500 and inject such natural soul into his beats and grooves.
Everything about this record kills, all the elements come together so perfectly, the production, the vocals, the actual songwriting, it's all there and it all just oozes real funk! There's also a second all instrumental disc, which helps keep Dam-Funk's amazing party of a record going on and on and on and we STILL really can't get enough. No joke, every single time we've played this in the store someone has bought a copy, and even if you're a bit funk-shy we think you should give this a chance! Funk jam of the year contender for sure!
Latest issue of the premiere American glossy metal mag features metalcore masters Converge on the cover. Inside, all kinds of other AQ approved bands: Skeletonwitch, Saviours, Shrinebuilder, The Gates Of Slumber, Liturgy, Portal, 3 Inches Of Blood, Gnaw Their Tongues, Gorgoroth, and plenty more! There's a High On Fire "studio report", the usual amusing John Darnielle and J. Bennett columns, the usual cavalcade of reviews (including one of new metal-themed video game Brutal Legend that says it's got "the greatest metal soundtrack ever" for which we at Aquarius can take a little credit, having helped out with it), and, best of all, a "Hall Of Fame" feature on Trouble's debut album! Now that's a good issue!
Part Les Rallizes Denudes, part Maher Shalal Hash Baz, this Japanese super group do a sort of droney, jangley garage psych pop, that over the course of Old Punks slips from woozy indie rock to brooding looped psych rock, playful power pop, to reverby almost ballads to Velvets-y minimal lope. The band is super laid back, the songs are weary and ragged and drawly and shambling, the guitars loose and detuned sounding, the drums spare and simple, the vocals, which might make or break DG for most folks, are sort of flat and tuneless, mumbled and moaned, sometimes crooned, but usually buried in the mix, just another layer of whirling sonic warmth.
Occasionally, things do get weird, some crunchy surf guitars, some strange jumbled group vocals, all tangled and chaotic, and of course bursts of psychedelic solo guitar squall, but for the most part Old Punks traffics in simple stripped down psychedelic rock, laced with bits of folk and pop, and of course shadows of both Maher and Les Rallizes.
Comes with a download card so you can grab yourself a digital copy of the record too!
The 2008 opus Imperial Distortion took a lot of people by surprise, as that album signaled an abrupt shift in Kevin Drumm's aesthetic trajectory. For many years, Drumm had been embracing a full tilt noise agenda on such self-evident albums as Sheer Hellish Miasma; but with Imperial Distortion, he steered into the cold waters of an impeccable, glacial doom-ambient sound. That album was much more in line with the disgorged ambience, bleak isolationism, and perfected minimalism of Eliane Radigue, Thomas Koner, and Andrew Chalk. Imperial Horizon is the suitable follow-up to that earlier album, and it clearly shows that Drumm's success on Distortion was no fluke.
While coming from the same train of thought, Imperial Horizon isn't a mere redux of Imperial Distortion. Drumm opens the album with a brighter, silvery set of sinewaves, looped feedback, or maybe just a refined set of synth patches. Gradually, the layers of sound separate to allow for a subtle two note melody to push out of the background. Deeper subterranean tones eventually overtake those silvery tones at the beginning, with another complementary pairing of harmonic notes an octave or so lower than before. This compositional rotation of drone, revelation of melody, and collapse into drone continues over very long stretches, several times throughout the duration of the piece. In the brighter tones on Imperial Horizon, this album sparkles and shines like the glistens of frost and ice from a wintery sun, as opposed to the nuclear fall-out deposits from Imperial Distortion's far bleaker aspirations. Nevertheless, Imperial Horizon is a stunning piece of dronescaping.
For those of you out there who embrace Drumm's screaming noise recordings too, don't despair. He's still working quite diligently in this vein as well. Check out the electro-terminus cacophony of his recent album Impish Tyrant!
The sound constructs of John Duncan almost exist as a residue of his own personal research into esoteric realms of knowledge, existential bouts of continuous questioning, and transgressive acts against himself and society at large. Here was a man who claimed to have sex with a corpse as a performance piece entitled Blind Date, whereby he planted his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. That event presumably took place nearly 30 years ago, when Duncan was emerging as an artist in Los Angeles alongside Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley. Blind Date has become a piece of infamy that blossomed beyond his already highly transgressive context, but he's always been an artist who is very deft at framing particular works through the process and through the context of said piece. The Nazca Transmissions is one such piece.
A few years back, Duncan received an email from a German archaeologist working at the site of the Nazca Lines in Peru. These are the massive drawings carved into an arid plateau some 2000 years ago by the ancient Nazca people. Some of these figures are representation, some are not, and some get as large of 200 yards in size, all posing the question: who was supposed to be seeing these figures, and to what end? Now, this archaeologist claimed to have been able to record sounds from those line drawings; and he presented the raw material to Duncan, having been familiar with his transmutational pieces of digital data and shortwave. Duncan was suitably perplexed and intrigued by the sounds that were presented to him, proceeding to work on a series of compositions through that material. Unfortunately, this archaeologist ceased all communications, leading Duncan to wonder if it was all a big hoax.
Eerie ringings pocked with scrabbled textures almost like clipped VLF recordings open the album set against a gaping chasm of quietness. While Duncan's penchant for abrasive noise and jarring juxtaposition is well documented, you won't find that here. By the end of the side, the textures take on an unsettled rhythm that almost resembles human speech garbled through the process. Very compelling, very unsettled. The second side begins with an interlocking series of modulated and muffled Shepherd Tones, these are the audio equivalent of a barber's pole with the tones giving the appearance of being in constant ascension or descension. It's a common artifact found throughout the shortwave bands, harkening back to one of his preferred sound sources; and Duncan puts them to excellent use amidst a sea of low end rumblings. Soon after, pierced tones push to the foreground as those low end rumblings mutate into grotesquely deformed growlings only to fade against a hushed coda of grey noise. This is limited to less than 300 copies, and it remains to be seen if we'll be able to get more than the handful we have now. Recommended no matter how you look at it.
Not sure if this is part 4, or just the first in a new multi part epic, hardly matters, what does matter is, this is another glorious expansive collection of meditative psychedelic abstract dronefolk ambience. Every High Mountain Tempel disc we're reviewed thus far has gotten played to death here, and this one doesn't appear to be any different. Well, at least in that respect. In one distinct way it is very different, HMT are not going it alone this time. They've assembled a pretty impressive collection of sonic alchemists and musical conjurers to help with this ritual, Isis Aquarian from the Source Family, Charles Curtis from La Monte Young's Just Alap Raga Ensemble, and two crews from the UK we've never heard of, Earthling Society and Astarism, but even with all those cooks in the kitchen, HMT and friends have managed to weave another dark minimal masterpiece, all hushed barely there guitar shimmer, drifting whispered vocals, delicate crystalline melodies, dense swirls of piano, warm swells of tape hiss, mysterious voices and field recordings, whirring organ, bowed steel strings... so lovely.
If the liner notes are to be believed, two of the tracks feature Earthling Society on their own, and those tracks do sound different, much less free and sprawling, a bit more structured, like seventies UK acid folk, swirling and melodic and quite lovely. The final two tracks find the two groups in full on collaborative mode, and the gears shift to something much more space rocky and Hawkwindy, all blissed out and heart-of-the-sun, until the final track which is a strummy, delicate, moody chill out closer, a sort of dour doom folk drift, that makes a perfect ending.
Super nice packaging, silkscreened oversized 4 panel sleeve, white on black, with the cd-r affixed to the inside. And of course, SUPER LIMITED!
We've been smitten with El Perro Del Mar ever since her enchanting debut a few years ago, and with each release it feels like we fall in love all over again. Last year's outing, From The Valley To The Stars, was one of the most underrated releases of the year in our opinion, with its completely elegant and bittersweet pop crafted and delivered with such subtle and satisfying results.
The latest from this dazzling Swedish chanteuse finds her in absolute top form with swirling pop melodies, haunting and sultry vocal delivery and songs that are so immaculately crafted yet still flow with such perfect ease. With every EPDM (not to be confused with EPMD!) record, she manages to create a sound that is very much her own while mixing it up enough so that every record really has its own identity. On Love Is Not Pop we are hearing the first hints of a Kate Bush influence on her songs as some of the tracks here, especially "L Is For Love" sound like they could be the perfect B-side to a track on Hounds Of Love. With a few of us here in aQ land way beyond obsessed with the sounds of Kate Bush it's been making us love El Perro Del Mar all the more! She continues to make records that are beautiful and darkly melodic and moody yet don't pander to the lowest common denominator. It would be all to easy for EPDM to keep her songs so simple and straight forward to cash in on the coffee house crowd, but there is a deeper integrity and range of emotions conveyed in El Perro Del Mar's songs which is what makes her one of our favorite songstresses of today. Highly recommended!
Prince of Truth, the follow-up to 2008's Hello, Voyager, walks a beautiful, cacophonous path. Carla Bozulich, the force behind Evangelista, is definitely one of a kind, or at least one of a very, very select few. She has assembled a group of excellent musicians that weave equal doses of melody and chaos around loose structures of songs without having them dissolve into utter randomness or pretentious noodling. Dominic Cramp on keys knows when to really take it up a notch and when to compliment others by adding just that little extra something; Tara Barnes, Carla's longtime low-end collaborator, is a rock on which to cling in choppy waters; Nels Cline on guitar needs no introduction; and the incomparable Ches Smith (of Xiu Xiu / Good for Cows / John Zorn) on drums... these are just a few of the amazing musicians on Prince of Truth.
The record opens with "The Slayer": two and a half minutes of noise introduce the listener to what is to come before Carla's vocals and a few cymbal washes add solidity to the mix. Cellos and what sounds like tape loops start off the second track, "Tremble Dragonfly," before they fade into a slow dirge held together by Carla's voice, some sleigh bells and strings. "Dragonfly" sounds like a really, really drugged out B-side off Tom Waits' Black Rider. What could be better?
Though the chaos is prepared to perfection, when the album gets a bit stripped down you can really tell that Evangelista is a rare gem indeed. "I Lay There in Front of Me Covered in Ice" is possibly the most melodic song on the record. Multiple vocal tracks ride high over an electric organ and minimal percussion, combining into something that makes us want to cry everytime we listen to it.
Carla Bozulich has been a staple of the underground music scene for a long time, and we have loved everything from the Geraldine Fibbers to Ethyl Meatplow to her latest incarnation as Evangelista. If you haven't discovered her genius yet, Prince of Truth is a perfect introduction.
We've been wanting to correct a glaring omission from our site for some time now. Well, its not so much an omission as it's an overdue update on a very old review; one that was made when our reviews served only as shelf-talkers in the store instead of entryways into the vast online catalog of our website. And now with an affordable reissue with a bonus disc of rare BBC radio sessions and alternate versions, the time is right to reappraise this mighty, weird, and awesome jewel of classic krautrock greatness that is Faust IV.
Essential as any krautrock album we can name, including Can's Tago Mago or Future Days, Amon Duul II's Yeti, or Neu! 1, Cluster, Kraftwerk etc. It's also the record that coined the term "krautrock" which is the title of the nearly 12 minute opening track, a thick pulsating rumble of motorik groove that out-Neu's Neu!. But things definitely get stranger after that with bizarre forays into reggae, pretty ballads, prog, pop and free jazz. Yet for all the weirdness, this is the record to get if you've never heard Faust before as it's their most accessible and structured. Not nearly as kaleidoscopic and avant as, So Far or Faust Tapes, and even with the genre-hopping, the songs all seem to belong together. "The Sad Skinhead" has got to be the most left-field excursion into reggae we've heard, complete with marimba passages and echoing vocals, while "Jennifer" has to be about the prettiest song ever made. Each song linked together by odd passages of detuned piano, far away screams and noisy stews of synth warbles and feedback stabs. "Giggly Smile" obviously influenced Battles recent debut Mirrors, as strange effected vocals accompany groovy prog excursions that abruptly shift tempos into one of our favorite rocking moments ever put to tape before suddenly ending, launching into the sublime folk groove of "Lauft... Heisst Das Es Lauft Oder Es Kommt Bald... Lauft". And it just keeps getting better and better.
The bonus disc features many alternate versions of the songs including a much longer version of "Just A Second (Starts Like That!)", plus rare BBC radio sessions of two songs "The Lurcher" and "Do So" and one previously unreleased piece, called appropriately "Piano Piece".
This is definitely one of those records, where we wish we could just invoke some physical force to reach out and grab you through the computer by the shoulders and just scream "Buy this already!!!!!!"
Incredible reissue of this totally cracked, acid fried slab of downer synth pop outsider genius. Originally released in the early eighties, Tom Fazzini was carving out a sound that must have freaked people the fuck out back then. Even by today's standards, this stuff is out there: minimal, lo-fi, dark and druggy, psychedelic and a little bit new wave. Keyboards warble and wheeze, drum machines skitter and thump, and Fazzini's vocals, howl and croon and mewl, occasionally grunting, squealing, growling, dripping with reverb, often a volatile angry counterpoint to the warm new wave-y drift of the music underneath.
Much of Neck To Neck gets all industrial and doomy, lots of space, the synth and mechanical drums meting out a spare, abstract pound, that would almost sound right at home on a Wolf Eyes record, or even some unreleased Suicide jam. The record slips into some truly creepy dark ambience, the vocals occasionally erupt into squalls of howling-in-tongues, FX overload madness, but for the most part, Neck to Neck is dark and mysterious, a bit damaged and lysergic.
The B-side especially spends much of its time creeping and crawling, lots of buzzing low end synth, the vocals paranoid and frantic, bloopy basslines, lots of hushed shimmer, and abstract drift, that is until the record explodes into a twisted sing songy jingle, bouncy and bizarre, with what sounds like kazoos, sixties housewife background vocals, almost growly scary singing, over a monotonous rhythm, everything evolving into what sounds like a fucked up Neanderthal birthday party gone wrong, before slipping back into that incessant jazz jingle looped weirdness, only to finish the record with some gorgeous, stripped down elegiac minor key guitarscapery, depressive and downer-y, laced with slow motion circus calliope melodies and warm swells of chordal whirr.
Schizophrenic, otherworldly, damaged, demented and so goddamn great. Sounds like Ariel Pink's creepy drugged out older brother. If Fazzini was a twenty something making music today, with a bunch of limited cd-r releases under his belt, he would be the toast of the current lo-fi / warped pop / cold wave underground, as it is, all those whippersnappers mining the past best bow down, considering that the stuff they're doing now, already existed 25 years ago, and was way weirder!
Former Ghosts is a primitive darkwave trio featuring two folks we know quite well, the teen goth chanteuse Zola Jesus and Xiu Xiu's emotionally wracked Jamie Stewart; but it's the third party who's responsible for penning all of the songs for Former Ghosts. That would be one Freddy Ruppert, who also records as brilliantly named solo project This Song Is A Mess But So Am I. Even though Zola and Jamie are the supporting cast in Former Ghosts, their unique theatricality is welcomed in Ruppert's dark cabaret of cheap synths wheezing out downer melodies. The Joy Division / early New Order axis is the most obvious influence on Ruppert's songwriting, alternating between peppy minor-chord tunes and maudlin electro-dirges; yet the production veers much closer to the John Maus ethos for warped home recordings. In fact, the track "Mother" could be straight out of New Order's Power, Corruption, and Lies, minus the lack of a Martin Hannett production in favor something much more jagged around the edges. Zola Jesus mostly keeps her vocals as backing chorales of sustained trills and ululations, but on a couple of tracks she steps forward to belt out those songs with operatic prowess. As affected and gloomy as Ruppert's monotone can be, the Zola Jesus tracks are probably the standouts on the album. Certainly one to place alongside Cold Cave, Blank Dogs, and of course Xiu Xiu and Zola Jesus. Great stuff.
So, here we have it, one of the more scandalous black metal releases to hit the rounds as of late, at least to those with the time to focus on such pressing matters. Quantos Possunt Ad Satanitatem Trahunt is the first Gorgoroth release following the power struggle for, um, ownership of the Gorgoroth franchise and name. The Norwegian courts, certainly in league with Satan, agreed with guitarist/founder Infernus, while his ex-bandmates Gaahl and King Ov Hell were legally forced to peddle their craft in the decidedly less cool sounding God Seed (which, apparently is now kaput following Gaahl's decision to drop out of the black metal scene). Remember when Norwegian black metal bands were actually on trial for cool shit? But whatever, all joking aside, Gorgoroth in 2009 is certainly worthy of the name and reputation they have been building for so long. Yeah, it sounds like Gorgoroth. And why wouldn't it? Infernus is the guy who pretty much established the band's identity with his songwriting and intense riffery, and the man replacing Gaahl is actually the one who was replaced BY Gaahl... wait, what? It marks the return of the mighty Pest on vocals, and we certainly aren't complaining. The album shreds relentlessly, the production is nice and not too over the top, and the band pretty much slays like you would expect them to. Maybe the lack of surprises is just because it's easy to take a band like this for granted after so many face melting releases. But that said, this definitely stands out as a grim black highlight in Gorgoroth's stellar catalog as well as the introduction of yet another evil chapter in Gorgoroth lore. Maybe not quite as evil as Gaahl kidnapping that guy and ripping his balls off with a fork and making him bleed into a cup... but pretty damn evil, nonetheless.
More archival weirdness from legendary one man black metal horde Graveland. Necromanteion gathers up the first two demos from way back in 1992, and for those of you who remember the Drunemeton release, another collection of Graveland oldies, the sounds on Necromanteion might not be surprising, but for the rest of you, who haven't yet sampled the damaged weirdness that is early Graveland, you're in for a bit of a shock.
The sound while still plenty grim and black and buzzy, is also very industrial, mechanical, looped sounding, in fact if anything, old Graveland sound more like Godflesh or Pitchshifter than any other black metal band. The drums are programmed, and super simple, pounding and repetitive, the guitars super blown out, crumbling with distortion, and the drums and guitar are locked into lurching lumbering looped sounding dirge, the sound of some ancient black machine churning out a filthy industrial blackness, and then there are the vocals, a growling gurgle so low it's almost inaudible, the sort of monstrous grunt that would be more at home on a gore grind record than a black metal record, but that just adds to the weirdness, and makes this some of our favorite Graveland EVER.
There's some awesome primitive and demented sounding keyboard interludes, the notes clipped and dropping out, off kilter and so twisted. There's some creepy black ambience as well, and at least one song sort of blasts, more like a gallop, but the strange hollow sounding programmed drums and sea shanty grunts turn it into something completely twisted.
The second demo is even cooler, the roughest recording, totally in the red, blown out, so distorted it's almost impossible to tell what's going on, but the tolling bells, and growling vocals, the clean guitars, and long droned out ambience, are all transformed into some sort of inadvertent avant outsider black dronemusic, laced with plenty of motorik beats, fractured melodies, and some seriously fucked up noise drenched atmosphere.
Incredible! As much as we love more recent Graveland, we find ourselves always returning to these earlier recordings, they're just so fucked up and demented, and so unlike any other (sort of) black metal you've ever heard...
When you read our Saviours review below, you'll probably get the idea that we thought that it was the best metal of the trad '80s influenced (denim, leather, fists in the air) variety on this week's list. Well, it might be... but then again this record might be too (i.e. they're both pretty rad). Since we don't do our reviews in alphabetical order, though, Saviours happened to get written first, and into that review went many of the superlatives and expletives that we'd also apply to Harbinger.
Harbinger are deliberately '80s NWOBHM styled metal, but kick everything (especially everything ridiculous) up a notch, delivering the goods with all the hyperactive energy of school children hopped up on sugary breakfast cereals. It's all very intentionally over the top, but they mean it sincerely. We know they do, 'cause we heard about them in the first place from some friends of ours who are also in a metal band (Slough Feg), who always rave about how much fun it is to play in East Lansing, Michigan, 'cause that's where these Harbinger dudes dwell... they've got a total party house, drink tons of beer, only listen to vinyl (ironic then that this is cd-only as yet!), and watch movies only on VHS tape, not dvd. They probably don't have cel phones or use the Internet if they can help it. But these are kids, not actual '80s burn outs, just 20-something kids doing their best to live an imaginary '80s metal lifestyle. And, in addition, making old school heavy metal music to match!
What we really like about Harbinger is that as retro as they are, they're also completely willing to "own" the music themselves and do surprising stuff so that they really don't sound like a generic clone of any actual '80s band. Instead, like we said, they seem a bit more crazed than that. Invariably their songs, after relatively sedate intro, suddenly surge forward faster, as if you'd flipped the switch from 33 to 45 rpm. Their guitars are super distorted, this record a real rickety ruckus of a racket. Blazing along, these songs are crammed with unexpected cool parts, lots of shedding solos and burbling bass licks, blasts of drum clatter and plenty of high pitched waaaaaooooooooooohhh screams on the edge of insane. The vocalist also sings with a raspier nasal yowl that can convey melodic catchiness quite well, straight off the Sunset Strip... spin, ferinstance, "Die For Metal - Live For Death" more than once and see if you're not singing along. The disc is also littered with amusing samples - including some taken from our favorite metal mockumentary, no not Spinal Tap, we're talking about Bad Newz!
So maybe Harbinger aren't the most serious band ever, but they're having a blast, and it really do kick ass. It's hard not to get caught up in the spirit of things. Which allows us to appreciate the terrible cover art, a painting of a scary-looking warrior woman, quite buxom in her spiked breastplate, brandishing a morningstar in one hand and, in the other, what looks like an oatmeal or chocolate chip cookie but is upon closer examination actually dirt-globe of some sort, on or inside of which tiny silhouettes of other medieval fantasy fighters do battle. Weird, but maybe not as weird as the inner tray photo of a fist (with studded leather wristband, wearing a fingerless Harbinger brand weightlifting glove) thrusting upwards from beneath a pile of pocket change... pennies, nickles, dimes, and quarters! That's their idea of bling, apparently. And somehow it goes along with everything else here that makes 'em seem more real and raw and fresh (idiosyncratically so) than some other bands we also like, who are doing the "New Wave Of Old School Heavy Metal" thing too.
A few weeks back, we highlighted Acid Witch. Now, Hellwitch! What (or which, or witch) will they think of next? Although, Hellwitch aren't really new. This is a reissue of an obscure Florida death metal album from 1990, done up deluxe with hella-witch bonus tracks. Wait, wait, make that a TOTALLY BATSHIT INSANE Florida death metal album, i.e. the sort of thing that we think AQ customers who aren't necessarily big death metal fans but who DO like really weird fucked up music would dig. Sound intriguing? Heck, they had us at "syzgial miscreancy" whatever that might mean. We had to look it up. (In astronomy, "syzygy" is when the sun, moon, and earth are aligned in a straight line, apparently... now make that villainous, somehow.)
So we gave Hellwitch a listen, and it turned out to be some freakin' gonzo stuff. Experimental death/thrash music, we guess, super chaotic and complex. The vocals are more thrash/HC punk sounding that cookie monster DM, often electronically treated especially on the bonus demo tracks. Or at least, we hope they're electronically treated... otherwise how on earth to explain the truly disturbing shrieks in the track "Mordirvial Dissemination" that sound like Judson Fountain singing black metal??! Electronic effects about elsewhere as well, there's tons of flange on the guitar solos ferinstance. The music itself is spastic and technical, songs crammed with angular non-repeating riffs, soloing that sounds like swarms of insects, aggro-octopoidal drumming, and plenty of WTF? extras, like the when in the midst of a particularly brutal passage Hellwitch will switch into an acoustic folky jig. Makes the likes of Melt-Banana not seem so strange.
Recorded, like all good Florida death metal, by Scott Burns at the infamous Morrisound studios, this is an unearthing of an immediately forgotten gem that anyone into the cult avant-edges of weirdass tech-death-grind should check out, fans of the likes of Obliveon, Kataklysm, Nocturnus, Atheist, Gorguts, Pestilence, Exit-13...
According to this reissue's detailed liner notes, written by lead guitarist/vocalist and founding member Pat Ranieri, the band started off, in the context of smoking lots of pot and listening to old '70s prog rock and then-current '80s crossover thrashpunk, with a mission to be as original as possible, to quote: "Each riff was to sound like no other. Each lyric/title was to be completely fresh and never before read." Well, he goes on to admit that the band didn't always succeed at these quixotic goals, specifically and humorously citing the obvious, their name, as not quite living up to the concept: "With originality as key, we chose the most generic name possible to define something never heard before." Whoops! But heck, they tried, how they tried, and the results we think are pretty special, and we're damn glad this got reissued 'cause somehow we missed out on 'em back in 1990...
The cd booklet, in addition to Ranieri's notes, includes full lyrics, photos, lots of full-color graphics (demo tape covers, and old show fliers - they played with Morbid Angel and Die Kruezen, among others), and even a Hellwitch comic strip. Also it sports the album's original, kinda goofy cover painting that makes a bit more sense when you know what syzygy means.
This remastered cd reissue includes not only the band's sole album but also a dozen crucial bonus tracks, taken from demo and rehearsal tapes recorded between 1984 and 1989. It doesn't get any more syzygial than this, miscreants!!
Some of us came to punk in a seriously roundabout way. Seems like most folks we talk to, got into punk rock, then moved toward heavier stuff and got into metal. But we went straight to metal, then gradually discovered punk rock, so we ended up learning about bands like Fear and Black Flag and Die Kreuzen and the Dead Kennedys well after we had been into Slayer and Venom and Motley Crew or whatever. One effect that had on our taste in punk, was that we liked the stuff that was heavier, and more metallic, Cro Mags, Die Kreuzen, Black Flag, and we got super into West Virginia's Th' Inbred, partially for that reason, sure they were punky and fast, and had a vocalist who sometimes sounded like Jello Biafra and sometimes sounded like Lee Ving from Fear, and their lyrics were snarky and political and funny, but musically they had lot more going on than a lot of punk rock bands, super complex guitar playing, very Greg Ginn influenced, bordering on jazzy now and then, but often gnarled and twisted, and the band were pretty noisy too, easily mistaken for some punky AmRep band, but then able to bust out a super complex almost proggy start stop punk jazz groove, and then explode in a frenzy of pounding pure punk energy, plus they had a wicked sense of humor, as evidenced not only by their lyrics, but their album covers as well (the Jerry Lee and Myra Kissin' Cousins cover for example).
Listening to this again, it's hard to believe these guys were even as popular as they were, this is some weird shit, every few tracks the band would throw the crowd a bone, with something full on punk, but they definitely spent most of their time trying everything but!
Killer reissue, both albums, the first ep, as well as some bonus tracks, all stuff circa '85-'88, a HUGE booklet jam packed with new liner notes, track listings, tons of photos, and some awesome (and awesomely funny) illustrations.
At this point, it's pretty much a given: Justin K. Broadrick can do no wrong. The man is a living legend, from his days in Napalm Death to Head Of David to Godflesh to Jesu to Final, he has always been pushing the boundaries of heavy music to beautiful extremes. And speaking of "beautiful," nothing from Broadrick's catalog quite takes the cake like the mighty Jesu. This project has always been loaded to the brim with maximum dreaminess, but goddamn if Opiate Sun doesn't one up what has already been perfected. And it's STILL heavy! Every one of these four songs pretty much exhibits the most gorgeous, melodic, and melancholy sounds you could ever pull out of your mind if you were Justin Broadrick. They're so damn beautiful it hurts, but in the best way imaginable. You just want these songs to go on forever so you can tune out the rest of the world and celebrate how good it feels to be sad. And with titles like "Losing Streak" and "Deflated", you can safely count on sadness to the Nth power, so when you're done wiping away those majestic tears, you'll probably just want to add this one to your cart.
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
1994's Down was the band's final record for Touch And Go before jumping ship to Capitol a year later. Despite its status as most peoples' least favorite of their Touch And Go albums (which certain aQ staffers will disagree with on every level), the band stills tears shit up relentlessly and mercilessly. Opener "Fly On The Wall" retains a lumbering, pounding groove with Denison's appropriately insect-like guitar buzzing all over the place as Yow tells the tale of his spiraling insanity caused by the titular character. Throw in a chorus that is the noise rock equivalent of a massive heart attack, and you know the Jesus Lizard mean business. The manic rocker "Queen For A Day" storms out like an evil, bluesy tornado, with Dennison shredding out some amazing noisy guitar solos over the ominous throb of Sims and McNeilly. All the while, a manic Yow screams out his hilariously frightening, creepy as fuck lyrics that manage to reference Dante's Inferno. Woah. The melodically charged "Destroy Before Reading" makes use of awesome sustained, droney chords and a steady rhythmic flow, and is sort of like journeying through a surreal dream in the darkest corners of Yow's crazed brain, as he spits out choice lyrics like "Mingus and Parker fuck for breakfast / cause jazz is a slut again." Right. Fucking. On. Melancholy instrumental "Low Rider" (enhanced by some maniacal Yow screams at all the appropriate moments) creaks and sways with bits of chorus inflected guitar and bass, serving as a perfect interlude to separate the album's two halves. "Horse" pummels at a steady rhythm with a cool underwater organ moving hazily under the band's nihilistic dirges, while the spacious, slow moving "Elegy" is surprisingly melodic and - gasp! - kinda "beautiful", even as Yow verbally defiles your rotting corpse with the barely composed delivery of a serial killer.
So yeah, wherever Down may rate in the canon of the Jesus Lizard to some folks, we're all for it on every conceivable level. This reissue also also includes the amazing single versions (all made available on Inch, but whatever) of the songs "White Hole", "Glamorous", and "Deaf As A Bat", as well as "Panic In Cicero" from the Clerks soundtrack. Hopefully others will give this album the listen it deserves, because there really is everything that's great about this band on full display, if you ask us. GET THIS NOW!!!
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
It's pretty much impossible to pick a favorite Jesus Lizard record, they all rule, ALL of them, even the major label releases, this was a band who were pretty much untouchable. But if we really did have to choose, it would probably have to be Goat. Head is an amazing disc, as is the debut lp Pure, but Goat is where the band finally locked into the sound that would become their trademark, a sound so instantly recognizable, that all you needed to hear was one instrument, and you knew, the crack of the drum, and angular slash of guitar, a weird distorted yowl, it didn't matter, and hell, if you heard em together, well, that was it.
Goat finds the band coming together and almost impossibly transforming into a seriously streamlined rock band, who were as tight as fuck, but simultaneously fucked up and loose and dangerous and chaotic. Due in no small part, as mentioned above, to their very dangerous frontman David Yow. But on Goat is where the power of JL's rhythm section finally became undeniable. The rhythms lurching and lumbering, the drumming insanely of kilter, but managing to still swing, the guitars distorted and crunchy, jagged and sharp, and the songs, how can music this mean and distorted and freaky be so goddamn catchy?
It's really about "Mouthbreather", the big Jesus Lizard hit if there ever was one. From the opening riff, it's the sort of song that would send a crowd into a frenzy, the drum part is beguilingly complicated, and the main hook, the stops and starts, it's relentless and overwhelming but so catchy and of course there's Yow's refrain of "Don't get me wrong, I like him just fine, but he's a mouthbreather". "Then Comes Dudley" is some unholy union of Big Black and Slint, with its low slung bass, big simple motorik drumming, and reedy main guitar melody, not to mention the awesome lurching start/stop bridge. And c'mon, "Seasick"? Has a song ever sounded so much like its title? A woozy, mathy, seasick stumble. And on and on, every track here is a "hit" in some alternate universe where people worship bands like the Jesus Lizard and not shit like the Jonas Brothers. And even to this day, Goat sounds as heavy and harrowing and genius as it did almost 20 years ago. And still better and more musically relevant than about 90 percent of the stuff coming out today. Not to sound like cranky old men on the porch with a shotgun yelling for kids to get off our lawn and for bands to try and write a decent song, but they really just don't make 'em like this anymore.
There are some bonus tracks, singles, live tracks, all new liner notes and let's not forget the amazing projector naked lady cover art!
NOW ON VINYL!!!
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
Head was Jesus Lizard's debut full length, and while perhaps out heart will always belong to Goat, Head is nipping at its heels as THEE definitive Jesus Lizard record, The band had only recently switched from drum machine to love drummer, but the effect was immediate, what was once a throbbing mechanical post industrial noise rock juggernaut, was now something else entirely. Goat seemed to be where everything clicked, but Head was basically almost there, heavy and dense and mathy and now listening to this again, it's easy to see why we all freaked out about this band. The songs are gnarled and grotesque, but at the same time melodic and impossibly catchy, dark and ominous and seriously creepy, but also totally rocking and HEAVY. These guys moved the noise rock bar so high, few that followed could even come close. There's plenty of Slint going on too, hard to say who influenced who, but Albini managed the boards for both. Listen to the sound samples, heck, just buy all four of these reissues, you won't be sorry. And if somehow you've made it this far without ever hearing these guys, you are in for just about the biggest musical epiphany of your life.
The reissue tacks on some bonus tracks, available on the vinyl as MP3 downloads, a killer Chrome cover, and two live tracks, as well as all new liner notes.
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
Liar is the band's third record, originally released in 1992. The album begins in classic Jesus Lizard form with the sonic beatdown of "Boilermaker". Exactly as we love them, the band sounds out for blood and just plain mean, despite Yow claiming "I'm calm now", as "calm" is probably the last descriptor that would enter your mind when hearing this song. Up next is "Gladiator", with the monolithic pounding of the rhythm section and bursts of slashing, percussively charged guitar work. It feels like everything in the song is the result of counterintuitive upstroked chords combined with Yow's truly insane screaming and an ending that puts most metal bands to shame in terms of sheer brutality. "Puss" rides wildly with tight as fuck, atonal guitar chords and underlying distorted backing vocals as the bass winds frantically over McNeilly's merciless pounding. In the middle is an awesome, simple Dennison guitar solo before everyone locks back into the evil groove. "Rope" sounds a bit like a manic, Jesus Lizard styled hoedown with its super fast, tight as hell playing, and instrumentation that is both mean sounding and kind of... wacky? Maybe. It's a good 'un no matter how you try to describe it. A demented country influence is also on display with "Zachariah," a slow moving piece that brings to mind all kinds of demented evil that must be looming in David Yow's mind. Closing number "Dancing Naked Ladies" brings Liar to its fever inducing conclusion, with Yow grunting and screeching over the serpentine melodies and rumbling low end.
Like all the Jesus Lizard reissues, Liar comes packed with some tasty bonus cuts (all previously available on Inch, but whatever), including their cover of the Dicks' "Wheelchair Epidemic", a single version of "Dancing Naked Ladies", and demos for "Gladiator" and "Boilermaker". GET THIS NOW!!!
What might you expect from a band made up of two parts Khanate, and one part Isis / Grey Machine / House Of Low Culture? Probably nothing as pretty and haunting as this. That's right, we said pretty. We were definitely expecting some crushing slo-mo heaviness, figured if that much of Khanate was involved it would have to be screechy and torturous.
And while Jodis is doomy, it's also moody, and atmospheric, slow and spare, spacious and strangely lovely. Occasionally the guitars rev up and get way louder, and it sounds like the band might explode into some sort of bellowing dirge, but instead, they sprawl into an ominous creep, the guitars shimmery, the notes spaced way out, as much about the decay and overtones as the initial note or the overall melody. The vocals are weary and washed out, reverbed and down in the mix. If anything this reminds us of some classic slowcore, maybe Codeine or Seam, albeit a little more abstract, a little less indie rock, but the same sort of moody drift, the same kind of minimal melody, emotional and dark and haunting and dreamlike.
Surprisingly, the drums are super restrained, in fact, the first few tracks sound almost drumless, minus a few cymbal shimmers, some flares and accents here and there. On "Secret House" the drums are active, flurries of fills all over the kit, but not for bombast, again for texture, almost like playing chords on the drums, there are some harsh vox on "Secret House", and they almost sound out of place, disrupting the strange slow tranquility. But once we move on to the next track, we're back to that gauzy melodic drift, the drums again super skeletal, the guitar drifting in the ether, the vocals choral, almost monk-like, super meditative and ethereal.
And the rest of the record plays out in a similar fashion, long drawn out slow burning epics writ small, the three exploring the space around the notes, finishing off with the gorgeous 9 minute "Slivers", the guitar unfurling a fuzzy blurry drone, the drums more active, a bit tribal, but still muted, and the vocals a falsetto off in the distance, the track, heaving and pulsing and shimmering, before slipping into a more abstract drone and then blinking out.
Some seriously gorgeous stuff, a surprise new favorite for sure, getting lots of play late at night, lights turned low, consciousness at rest, on the cusp of some other plane...
Originally discovered by one of our pals at Root Strata, you can just imagine the emails:
"You guys gotta check out this band King Kong Ding Dong!"
"Um... really?"
"Seriously, they're so amazing, KING KONG DING DONG!"
"Ummm, okay..."
Originally we thought maybe it was all a ploy, and it was them messing with us, maybe they had recorded a bunch of stuff themselves and were trying to dupe us into heaping praises on what was essentially a joke, but we took their advice, sought out KKDD, and gave it a listen, and HOLY SHIT. All it took was about a minute of "Evil", and we were hooked. We made a sample, it's down below, we'll wait... listen, and read on...
After some woozy guitar and amp buzz and cord crackle, the band lock into a mesmerizing minimal groove, a loping melody, disembodied voices, swirls of effected buzz, simple tribal percussion, and then BAM, the main riff comes in, all languid and stoned sounding, super spaced out, just two notes, a weird sort of indie folk doom, crooned and hummed vocal harmonies underscore the warm warped riff and the stumbling drums wrapped around it. It's almost like some weird hybrid of Silvester Anfang, True Widow, Animal Collective and No Neck Blues Band or something. Raw and lo-fi, loose and shambling, but so darkly heavy and groovy and hypnotic. We listened to that track about 100 times, before we even moved on to the rest of the record, which was just chock full of sonic surprises. Nothing else on the record is quite like "Evil", the rest of the record flits all over the place from super abstract soundscapes to tuneful indie jangle, to vocal driven bliss out anti pop, to warm warped drone, but they are all somehow woven together into one organic, and constantly transforming whole.
Opener "Jample", winds a strange looped crunchy riff over a simple pounding beat, and some reverby "whooo"s, female vocals belt out an equally reverbed counterpoint, the whole thing building to a super tripped out effects heavy dream pop freakout.
Backwards guitars, lead out of that track into a gorgeous hazy acousticguitarscape, ethereal vocals definitely drifting into Animal Collective territory, but way more scrappy and lo-fi, shimmery sheets of indie jangle give way to blown out distorted drums and looped detuned melodies. Dreamy buzzy pop music gets twisted up into a strange Beach Boys dirge, all choral and chaotic, shot through with spidery high end melodies, which slips sweetly into a spare field of twinkle and twang, wrapped around distant drums and sweetly crooned falsetto vox. Then we're back to "Evil" again, which, heck, deserves yet another listen...
The final four offer up more off kilter outsider dream pop stumble, high crystalline vocals drifting over distorted drum splatter and looped guitar shimmer, soft swirls of effects drift beneath almost operatic sounding harmonies, a sort of twangy slowcore, but slowly crumbling into something much more atmospheric and abstract. After a brief fanfare, what sounds like a soft cacophony of horns, comes a strange harmonica loop, which erupts into some gorgeous, hazy, near perfect minimal space psych drone dream pop.
Shouldn't take long for the rest of the world to catch on. And wouldn't be surprised if these guys started getting hyped by Pitchfork or Matador or any other number of 'tastemakers', and heck, they deserve it, this stuff is mysterious and magical, and the fact that they're called King Kong Ding Dong, somehow only makes it that much better....
One of our favorite features in Mojo magazine is this small section where they ask musicians a series of questions about records they love for certain moments/days, and one of the questions they always ask is what's your perfect Sunday morning record, and when we think about that question Kings Of Convenience is always one of the first bands that comes to mind.
No one makes more fragile and delicate sounds that are so perfect for the slow and quiet start of a lazy sun dappled morning. It's easy to forget, but Kings Of Convenience were crafting their mellow, Nick Drake tinged style of folk/pop before that sound would make such a huge resurgence, spawning bands and folks like Iron & Wine, Jose Gonzalez, Taken By Trees, Jens Lekman, El Perro Del Mar, Vetiver, Camera Obscura, etc.
It's been five years since this great Norwegian duo gave us the fantastic Riot On An Empty Street, though they have been keeping busy with a multitude of side and solo projects, including Erlend Oye's band The Whitest Boy Alive, which is also pretty great btw!
Declaration Of Dependence finds the duo as perfectly bittersweet as ever, both of their voices melding together with such ease, and the sparse and pastoral instrumentation keeps the breeze flowing with just the right hints of memory, sadness and introspection. Unlike many who have come after, nothing here feels forced or heavy handed, to the contrary, their songs really do feel like the slight rush of air blowing on a crisp autumn day, and this is becoming our perfect fall sweater soundtrack. So good!
The third and final volume of this sprawling 6lp (two lps in each volume) drone haze ambient masterpiece from the man behind the Caretaker, and V/VM! All three 2lps have been compiled onto a triple cd, this week's Record Of The Week, but for vinyl folks, who have the first two, grab part three while you can...
For a couple of years now, Leyland James Kirby has been releasing a highly acclaimed catalog of maudlin ambient recordings culled from melodic phrases looped and blurred from old 78s. The bulk of these recordings (typically released under the Caretaker moniker) didn't seem to leave England or at least they didn't arrive in California. Now that the distribution has improved, we've finally been able to hear what the fuss has been all about. This album belongs to a trilogy called Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was that Kirby has made now that he finds himself living under the grey skies of Berlin having relocated from grey skied Manchester; lo and behold, he's still making cold, rainy grey music for cold, rainy days. And yeah, he's pretty damn good at it.
As a piece of vinyl, When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die eschews titles and doesn't even give us any information what so ever on the artwork, a paint-smeared canvas. It works as an endless loop of flipping the two records, forgetting which track you've drifted in and out of, and wondering where to start next. These pieces of blurred ambience, obfuscated field recordings, and sad piano melodies hint at the furniture music of Erik Satie, the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti, and the emotional resonance of William Basinski. Limited to 450 copies, these will not last.
It had to be an aQ Record Of The Week. Nearly four hours of warbly and washed out ambient beauty spread out over 3 cds (and 6 lps!), from the man behind the looped and warped ambient jazz minimalism of The Caretaker and the electronic fuckery of V/VM. We've been listing/reviewing the vinyl versions as they were released, part one: When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die, part two: When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart, and part three: Memories Live Longer Than Dreams (elsewhere on this week's list). We would have made the vinyl ROTW too, but we thought it was a lot to ask, 6 lps, nearly $80, so we held off, for THIS. A gorgeous compact collection of all 6 lps on 3 discs, in super minimal sleeves, gathered in an equally minimal and mysterious slipcover, printed to look like an old wooden crate. The art and the sound are all inexorably linked. The music of Kirby is mournful and mysterious, melancholy and otherworldly, everything shot through with a certain degree of sadness. Check the song titles: "When We Parted, My Heart Wanted To Die", "The Beauty Of The Impending Tragedy Of My Existence", "And As I Sat Beside You I Felt The Great Sadness That Day", "Tonight Is The Last Night Of The World", and the sounds those words represent, impart the same sense of heartbreak and loneliness, the music feels grey, like looking through a rain speckled dust coated window, at an old abandoned lot, the metal rusted, broken swingsets, collapsing barns, dead grass, mud and old pieces of wood, artifacts of a happier time, all reflecting the blackened sky above. But somehow, this isn't miserable music, it manages to be warm, and thick, and rich, and deceptively simple, lots of layers constantly shifting. It's definitely dronemusic, but not minimal or static, these sounds are alive, record crackle, buried voices, old record, warped instrumentation, sounds are looped and stretched and inverted, tied into knots and then pulled slowly and delicately apart. Fans of Philip Jeck, and Tim Hecker, and William Basinski, this is another gorgeously decayed artifact to add to your collection, evoking many of the same emotions as those like minded soundscapers, yet, the music of Leyland Kirby manages to sound unlike any of them.
This is the perfect soundtrack for introspection, for long nights, candlelight, grey days, windswept storm drenched hillsides, for drifting off, for huddling up with another and sharing warmth, dark, delicate and so beautiful. An incredible, sprawling collection of blurred ambience, obfuscated field recordings, and sad piano melodies hint at the furniture music of Erik Satie, the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti, and the emotional resonance of Basinski's Disintegration Loops.
While technically the vinyl wasn't Record Of The Week, it essentially has been, for a couple months now, just delivered in installments, each one a mysterious missive from some otherworld, those who have been keeping up, no doubt understand, and are surely already utterly and inexorably tangled up in Kirby's magical and mournful world of sound, but for the rest of you, who have yet to delve, to climb through, to step beyond, to lose yourself completely. Now is the time, and the message is clear, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was...
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There is something so damn special about family bands. You know... the Jackson 5, The Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, ESG, people who share roots that really allow them to communicate with each other on another level. These three young siblings (we think they still might be in their teens!) out of North London, Kitty, Daisy and Lewis, have that special something together and with it, they tap into the vintage sound of Sun records, classic rockabilly, that awesome intersection of country music and rock n roll. They nail the sound and aesthetic so perfectly.
The recording is totally analog and its warmth and rugged quality shines through so strongly. These are kids who grew up in a totally amazing musical environment, with a father who is one of the top engineers at the London mastering studio The Exchange and a mother that played drums for The Raincoats!! So it makes perfect sense that these kids have so much respect for the history of music and that they would make something with all the right ingredients and their own unique energy. This really is in so many ways to vintage rock n' roll what folks like Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and Nicole Willis & The Soul Investigators are to classic vintage soul. They capture the absolute sound and mindset of that special moment in time, yet bring a spunk and enthusiasm that is truly their own. Think if Holly Golightly and a more revved up Jolie Holland joined forces and tackled covers from the Sun Records catalog, AWESOME!
It's about time. Dusseldorf's most famous export, the Godfathers of electronic pop music, Kraftwerk, finally see their classic albums remastered and reissued for the 21st century (although, unfortunately, not yet their EARLIEST classics, the ones with the traffic cone covers). Given the group's notoriety for demanding nothing but absolute perfection, you can safely bet that these sound AMAZING after years of tireless mixing and mastering in Kling-Klang studios. That's probably the main selling point here, as Kraftwerk was never really a "bonus material" kind of band, and there is none of that here; if it was released, it pretty much meant it was labored upon until being deemed suitable for public exposure. These reissues have also got some pretty fancy expanded artwork, with simple but bold slip covers housing the actual cds. Of course, if you don't already have these albums in some form or another, you should probably do yourself a favor and purchase every single one of them immediately.
Arguably, Kraftwerk's best recording, Trans-Europe Express from 1977 marries the Kosmiche minimalism of the Ralf and Florian record with the technological sublime sound of Autobahn while at the same time foreshadowing the robotic dance pop of The Man-Machine and Computer World. We also see for the first time, the image of the band as a uniform commodity dealing with post-modern themes of surface, reflection, repetition and reproduction that would thoroughly dominate their later output.
Metgumbnerbone is not a reference that pops up all that much, nor is it one that would mean much to anyone who isn't a complete dork about British esoteric experimental musics. But that's where we'll start for this review because that's the reference that one such dork had to make here at Aquarius (it was Jim if you must know). Metgumbnerbone was a shadowy collection of dour Brits (including Richard Rupenus of The New Blockaders) who took up residence in an abandoned factory somewhere in Newcastle and constructed a bleak ritualist music out of the refuse found within. Scraping metal and atonal horns crafted out of plumbing material abound in the Metgumbnerbone vocabulary. Such is the case for Lethe as well, the found-space project of Japanese improviser Kuwayama Kiyoharu. However, as Metgumbernone's post-electrical scrabblings were the result of a collective effort, Lethe's spatializations emerge from an orchestra of one. It seems impossible that he did not overdub many of these sounds, but the production so fully embraces the cavernous space of his choosing that Lethe's pieces sound as if they were constructed in a single take.
For Catastrophe Point #5, Lethe used an abandoned grain warehouse located on the outskirts of Nagoya, Japan. Much more than an ambivalent shuffling or wandering scattering of clunky sounds, Lethe amasses sympathetic scrapings from pieces of metal, large and small, as they are dragged, bowed, and beaten throughout the space. Long form drones emerge throughout the performance as if he's triggering a resonant frequency of the space, echoing against itself. It's true that many of these sounds resemble those found on the impossible to find Metgumberbone records, but other references would be Organum's Vacant Lights album, Z'ev's finer moments, the recent John Grzinich constructions, and even Yoshi Wada's bellowing recordings of his Earth Horns. Excellent!
