Full length number two from Jonathan Lee, a member of big time aQ faves Souvenir's Young America, and the man behind Anduin, after two killer collaborations, one with Svarte Greiner (that track is included here!), the other with Jasper TX, which should definitely give you an idea of the sort of sound to expect from Anduin.
Dark and dreamy and dolorous, Anduin creates warm swirling rhythmic ambience, dark drones, and haunting soundscapes. Abandoned In Sleep includes many contributors either via sample contribution or live collaboration, Jasper TX again, Gareth Davis, Stephen Vitiello, Xela and a handful of others, but there's no doubt that Lee is the sonic alchemist here, taking sounds and samples, live performances, and pre-recorded works, and molding them into darkly gorgeous soundworks. Field recordings drift in and out of soft clouds of hushed shimmer, thick slabs of deep rumble are laid atop strange percussive pulses, warm whirring low end drifts beneath subtle horns, minimal rhythms skitter around slowly collapsing buzzscapes, long slow tones stretch out into disembodied harmonies, all bathed in a lush golden chordal wash, the harmonica makes an appearance, and helps turn a track into something distinctly Morricone-esque, huge subterranean drones are laced with the sound of footsteps, and creaking doors, distant machinery, and finally, horns moan and bleat in a field of delicate drones and muted rhythmic pulses.
The vinyl includes a cd, that features all the songs on the lp proper as well as three extra tracks, including the live collaboration with Svarte Greiner, all deep blackened shimmer, soft swells of feedback, dark rumbling pulsations, bleak and austere, laced with shards of high end melody, and softly grinding whirs.
Apparently, Abandoned In Sleep took the better part of a year to create, and listening to it now we can safely say it was well worth it!
Latest solo outing from one member of space-doom outronauts Bong, and like the Bong mothership, Basillica traffic in a murky, druggy, blackness, but where Bong is definitely rocking and have a sort of sitar-ed Hawkwind going, Basillica are way more free form and abstract, a sort of oozing lysergic black ambience, here a single track that sprawls like some thick slowly swirling cloud of rumbles and whirs, of muted melodies and cavernous chordal washes, at moments it sounds almost like a gamelan at 1rpm, a warped underwater warble, the melodies like strange shadow beasts struggling in vain to extricate themselves from the black sonic tarpit that is the core of Rotting Desert Queen And The Black Isolator Radar Strip.
And for a murky druggy bit of abstract ambience, there's definitely a lot going on here, wah guitars are effected until they barely resemble guitars at all, vibrating strings create ripples in the slowly pulsing sea of sound, occasionally shards of high end, or fragments of melodies break through, almost like a stray beam of sunlight, creating even more shadows, and causing the surrounding sounds to slowly swarm and swallow the sunlight whole.
Muddy and washed out, haunting and subterranean sounding, these sounds are also strangely soothing, as if you were floating in some underwater tributary, just below the surface, the water heated by the molten rock beneath, the black tide carrying you through all manner of caverns, the sound and light reflecting off the constantly undulating surface of the cavern walls, and then filtering through the swirling currents, becoming warped and warbly before finally settling in your fluid filled ears. Cool cool cool. Not to mention dark and heavy and druggily dreamy.
By now, if you're a regular reader of the aQ list, you no doubt know all about William Basinski, and the Disintegration Loops that introduced us to his music. And if you're anything like us, you were immediately smitten by his gorgeous slowly decaying dronescapes. The power of a simple loop, played over and over, in various states of decay, hearing the sounds literally crumble before your very ears, like getting a glimpse inside music, behind the notes, within the chords, observing the magnetic particles as they drop like flakes of soot after a fire, music transformed into inert object, and the glorious sound of that transition, from light to dark, life to death, sound to silence.
Basinski's music is rife with meaning, representational for sure, but can easily be appreciated from a purely sonic standpoint, the sounds, his loops, are blurred and indistinct and so lovely, washed out, hazy, sepia toned, they sound like they were snatched from another time, lifted from an audial scrapbook, the sounds curled up at the edges, lightly blackened, the images contained within smeared and unclear, beneath a patina of age, the chemicals reacting over time, changing the color, the texture, the emotion even, of each of those sounds.
Vivian & Ondine is a more recent work, but sounds like it could have come from the same treasure trove that produced the Disintegration Loops, dreamlike and otherworldly, hushed, intimate, and so beautiful.
Latest disc of blissed out soft focus dronemusic from this longtime aQ fave. After past collaborations with Lull (which is available again and featured elsewhere on this week's list) as well as Aidan Baker, Lunar Monograph is the first disc we've head from BC on his own, and it's definitely a divine bit of ethereal and ephemeral drift.
Field recordings are deftly woven into soft swirling shimmering tones, guitars are spidery and delicate, spinning crystalline webs of hushed melody, the opening track is a gorgeous bleary eared whisper, which segues smoothly into the second track, a sprawling 22 minute stretch of delicate piano, wreathed in swirling clouds of muted glitch and streaks of static and hiss, like listening to a solo piano performance, on a hilltop in the dead of night during a rainstorm.
The record does get intense briefly, on the surprisingly rocking psych dirge blowout of "Marsh Of Epidemics", with its keening chiming guitars, fuzzy blown out buzz and pounding drumbeat, the whole thing propulsive and intense, but also washed out and otherworldly sounding, but the record quickly shifts back into something much more tranquil and contemplative, another 20+ minute slow motion soundscape, this one much less distinct in terms of instrumentation, instead a swirling, looped, processed bit of layered dronemusic, lots of high tones laid upon what sounds like angelic voices way off in the distance, and a softly undulating low end, very choral and cinematic sounding, like a much more mellow Sunroof!, laced with hints of Arvo Part.
The record finally finishes with some gorgeous prismatic pop ambience, whirring and indistinct, a slight industrial undercurrent, but for the most part, pealing tones, and barely there melodies, drifting weightlessly through a field of minimal effects, and slow shifting whirs, as well as some mysterious field recordings, that make the end of the record feel like you've just come out of a trance, and found yourself back in the real world, which is not all that far off the mark. So nice.
The mission has been terminated, once again. Without giving any reasons, Maurizio Bianchi has given up producing music. Of course, this is not the first time that Bianchi had ceased operations, as he famously disappeared from sight around 1984 after a frenzy of releases beginning around 1978. Those albums, in particular Symphony For A Genocide and The Plain Truth, as well as William Bennett's antics on two early MB records released on Come Organisation, secured his status as a heavy weight of Industrial Culture alongside Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound, Ramleh, and Whitehouse; and the demonstrative cessation only served to buttress his mythology. But by the late '90s, Bianchi began recording once again, gradually returning to the frenzied pace he set during his earlier peak of activity. Unfortunately, the new work has not always been up to snuff, as he didn't seem to turn down any collaborative offer and didn't seem too interested in the finer points of editing his content. BUT, there have been some real gems amidst the chaff.
Hence, we announce Das Platinzeitalter. A quintessential Bianchi construction, this album meditates upon the minutiae of crumbling systems, returning to a common theme of Bianchi's classic period -- the cancerous body faced with a slow demise through ancillary pathogens. His sounds are blackened ambiences culled from stacked grey-smear loops and elongated ashen drones, some of which have been purported to originate from Jozef Van Wissem's lute recordings, although you'll be hard pressed to find anything lute-like in these shadowing sounds. Ominous. Grim. Foreboding. Oppressive. Neurotic. These are all apt descriptions to Bianchi's best work; and those all apply here, but with the strange twist that this ambience is somewhat contemplative, as if Bianchi's death-obsessed soundtrack is more of an enveloping invitation instead of a scream of horror.
This 2lp was originally released as a cd on Van Wissem's Incunabula a couple years back, and now appears on vinyl courtesy of Weird Forest in a modest edition of 500 copies.
People have been after this record for ages, we have to admit though we were a bit skeptical, not cuz we don't dig the Black Keys, but just cuz it seemed like a recipe for disaster, two white dudes, blues rockers to boot, as a back up band for a bunch of killer rappers. But hell, we're happy to admit when we were wrong, we have been convinced, this stuff is pretty bad ass, the Black Keys laying down super stripped down beats and grooves, which isn't all that different really than a DJ just sort of playing those same grooves maybe, but it's cool to hear a live band rocking behind these rappers, and wow, what a stellar bunch, the first track features Ol' Dirty Bastard ferchrissakes!! Teamed up with Ludacris to boot! Mos Def, Pharoahe Monch, RZA, Raekwon, Noe, Jim Jones, Q-Tip, as well as a soul singer named Nicole Wray.
The Wu-Tang tracks rule, RZA and Raekwon don't disappoint, ODB kills, pretty much everyone delivers some seriously killer flows, and the Black Keys are definitely up to the task, and actually, if you didn't know better, and just heard one of these jams on the radio, you'd probably never know...
When the last proper Bonnie Prince Billy album, Beware, came out, Drag City released a very limited 10" version that contained a set of bonus songs not on the album. That 10" also came with a download of the whole Beware album and featured the exact same cover artwork as the album itself only in 10" form. And Drag City for some weird reason pretended that there was no vinyl in the sleeve, which made no sense. Confusing, kind of. But gone in a flash they were. Recently, though, one of our distributors discovered a very small stash of these, so Bonnie Prince Billy fans you have one final chance to snag these four songs that will not be released on cd or in digital format, and are not available anywhere but here. As prolific as Mr. Oldham is, he still has yet to put out a bad record and these four songs are really as strong as anything that was on Beware. So like we said it's probably a very small window, but if you missed it the first time around you can try to snag one now! And if you need to be reminded of what we had to say about Beware when we reviewed the record proper:
Seems like everywhere you look these days you're bombarded with praise and press for Will Oldham. From The New York Times to Wire Magazine it's been hard to escape images of ol' Bonnie Prince Billy, but truth be told, he is one fine songwriter who deserves much of the praise and accolades coming his way. While not all of his recent outings have totally blown us away, we're very much digging the rich and sometimes dark country sounds on Beware. The instrumentation is a bit more nuanced and compelling than on his previous effort Lie Down In The Light. It kind of made perfect sense that a customer who was in the store the first time we played this asked what Lee Hazlewood record this was, and were surprised and happy to find out that it was actually Will Oldham. With appearances on the big screen, a recent artist in residency in the Marin Headlands over the Golden Gate Bridge from here, and this new set of songs, Oldham has been one busy bee and we think well worthy of all that adoration and praise.
Not sure why we never reviewed anything by these pot fueled purveyors of crusty sludge, could be that all of their records predated the list, but we have shown much love to post Buzzov-en stoner sludge combo Weedeater, the thing is, everything we love about Weedeater, existed in Buzzov-en, even more. Heavier, sludgier, stonier, crustier, filthier, these five songs were recorded right before the band disbanded in the mid nineties, and the band are on fire, lurching, churning, downtuned heaviness, KILLER riffs, caveman drum pound, vocals buried WAY down in the mix, from pounding dirge, the thrashing chaotic crunch, the band just sound relentless and fucking ultra intense here, could be that it was close to the end, could be the fact that the whole band was falling apart to problems with drugs, whatever it is, this stuff sounds fierce and violent and raw and on the edge. The sound is weirdly murky and muddy, blown out, but not super hot sounding, more blurred and buzzy, but it suits the mood big time.
There are of course goofy samples before most of the songs, which seems par for the stoner sludge course, and there's the totally demented drugged out 16 minute "Nod" which does in fact sound like the whole band nodding off mid song, captured on tape, a stumbling, abstract soundscape of guitar buzz, and weird voices, swirling effects, deconstructed riffage, total psychedelic sonic headfuck, which rules, but it's the other 4 songs that put most of Buzzov-en's contemporaries, past and present, to shame. These tracks may have been recorded 15 years ago, but they still sound incredible, and anyone into the current crop of drug metal heavies, who somehow missed out on these guys back in the day, well, now is the time to make things right. The liner notes mention a possible new Buzzov-en record in 2010 as well, we can only hope...
You think folks would get tired of all the lo-fi trippy home-brewed psychedelic pop that seems to show no sign of letting up, but with bands like Campfires creating 7"s like this, can't see that happening anytime soon. This one man band from Chicago, takes the fuzzy Beach Boys psych bliss of the Elephant Six label and crams it through the cracked aesthetic of the current crop of lysergic pop deconstructionists, resulting in three short sharp jams that manage to be lush and ebullient, but also fuzzy and filthy and raw, rich with hooks and killer riffs, a sound warm and blown out, "She Was Down" could be the lo-fi pop jam of the year, with its ultra distorted drums, buried lilting vocals, crunchy main riff, and a hook that will stay lodged in your head for ages. "Stormy Late Fall" sounds like Big Star and Redd Kross recorded onto a Dictaphone, woozy, warped, and so catchy, with some seriously unforgettable melodies, and some bad ass guitar wrangling.
The closer is a little more stripped down, brittle and crunchy, but continues on in the same vein, with sweetly melancholic melodies wrapped around shambling drums and warbly guitar jangle.
Barely more than 5 minutes, but in this case it's definitely quality over quantity, can't wait for the 'full length', even if it ends up being less than 20 minutes long...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, every one hand numbered, includes a code so you can download the mp3 versions for your iPod...
Solo debut from Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, and there's no doubt this man knows his away around infectious melodies and he can most definitely kick out pop songs that can get stuck in your head FOREVER. While the last couple Strokes albums have been a bit hit and miss, there is no denying how great their debut was and despite all the hype that surrounded them it's a record that still stands on its own. We were excited to hear what Casablancas would do on HIS own, especially when we heard it was going to be more of an '80s pop, synthesizer driven affair. And man the good songs on here are sooooo great and catchy! But just like recent Strokes outings there are a few tracks that just fall a bit flat. "11th Dimension" is for sure one of the best and catchiest pop songs of '09, in fact it would have sounded right at home on the latest album from Phoenix. But yeah there are a couple bummer tracks, not full on clunkers but just songs that don't have the same brightness and color which keep this from being a start to finish thriller. But worth it for the several killers....
Finally Available on Vinyl!
What we said when the cd came out: Here it is! The much anticipated follow-up to Neko Case's fabulous debut album of 1997 The Virginian. Have no fear, this ain't no faux-country a la Shania Twain or Dixie Chicks, No! Ms Case has some unbelievable true blue old-school country pipes and spirit (that have drawn many comparisons to kd lang and Loretta Lynn). Indeed, hers is a voice that can lift your heart and let it soar or wrap it in velvet aches... or pick you up by the seat of your pants and give it a swift kick. This time around she's got a band with a solid line-up backing her up; one with whom she's toured and written most of the songs on this album. Plus her usual lengthy list of guest players, among them Brian Connelly (formerly of Shadowy Men From A Shadowy Planet, a truly awesome guitarist in his own right but perhaps most noted for writing the theme to 'Kids In The Hall'), Carl Newman (guitarist/vocalist of Zumpano, Superconductor, and The New Pornographers) and her labelmates The Sadies and Kelly Hogan. Whereas on her first record half of the songs were loving cover versions of many of her old favorites and inspirations, this album is wonderfully all her own.
Circle are getting to be like a Finnish hypnorock version of the Grateful Dead, a comparison which would no doubt thrill Circle mainman Jussi Lehtisalo, who is very upfront about his obsession with the Dead. In so much as between albums, Circle, like the Dead, crank out killer live record after killer liver record, often with some of the same songs, always including a few live staples, familiar enough to hit the spot, but different enough that a Circle fan could be forgiven for needing them ALL!
This vinyl-only latest from these fantastic Finns, is indeed yet another live set, and not only features a super striking crystal skull cover, but also finds the band bolstered by some extra axe power in the form of members of fellow NWOFHM combo Pharaoh Overlord. Recorded last year, in Finland, Soundcheck, as the label puts it, "offers the most contemporary document possible of a Circle soundcheck / concert experience". Indeed!
The Aside offers two new tracks, beginning with the brief "Kukkakaalia Kapteenit!", a wispy swirl of shimmery synths, laid back tribal drumming and some dramatic, emotional crooning, very cinematic sounding, almost like it could be some lost 4AD single, dreamy and ethereal, giving way to the way more rocking and intense "Tuhatsata", which takes up most of the side, a slow burning, blackened bit of Finnish krautrock, super epic, with dueling vocals, crooning versus grunted and growled, fusiony keys, still more tribal drumming, spidery guitars, the track pulsing and pounding, building to multiple crescendos, frenzied freakouts that always lip right back into more looped mesmer.
The flipside features two instantly recognizable live set staples, first up, "Virsi", dramatically progtastic, with that super soaring epic intro, all dynamic shifts and huge bursts of instrumental crunch, with vocals howling and wailing almost operatically, before lurching into some rad atonal krauty, fusiony, jazzy, hypno groove skitter. The second track, another Circle classic, and live staple, "Nopeuskuningas", explodes right out of the gate, with its chugging almost surfy, ZZ Top-ish boogie riff, locked in groove, the whole thing stretched out over the remainder of the side, the band solid, and hypnotic, and intense, and rocking and tight as fuck. Their showstopper for sure, and it clearly did the job at this show as well.
Heavy vinyl, super swank skull jacket, and most definitely LIMITED.
This 2005 Circle album, out of print for a bit, is now newly reissued on cd, this time its jewel case wrapped in a spiffy slipcase, featuring some cool new artwork (and a "no posers" symbol)!
NWOFHM. That's what it says on the inside of the cd booklet, in big bold letters. NWOFHM? WTF? If you don't get the joke, explaining it won't help, but here goes: New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal. Our Finnish friends Circle are apparently referencing the famed NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) that took the rock world by storm circa 1979, giving us Saxon, Angel Witch, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Venom, Samson, and many many many more. What's that got to do with the Can and Neu! pulsed space/prog/post-rock normally practiced by Circle?? Well Circle fans know that these guys have indeed established their very own trademark "circular" sound (repetitive, rhythmic, looping, hypnotic rock) that, whirlpool-like, pulls in all sorts of influences, from the aforementioned Krautrock forefathers to jazz and dub and lo-fi drone improv and, yes, metal. When you get a new Circle album, you kinda both know what to expect *and* never know what to expect. Well we'll tell you about Circle's latest studio effort, Tulikoria. In part, it's Circle donning the leather and spikes (metaphorically, perhaps, though they threatened to do so for real live on stage at their show in San Francisco that was happening the night we originally posted this review). Circle's love of metal, specifically the true, traditional heavy metal of the '80s, has borne fruit before, on several of the songs from their amazing Sunrise album released in 2002. So, the heavy metal component present on Tulikoira is precedented in the Circle discog. But, like Sunrise, this isn't just Circle "doing metal". It's a lot of other things besides! Nobody will confuse it for an "actual" metal album. But heavy metal is definitely, proudly an element here, amongst others. And graphically, too, it's an inspiration, as you'll see from Circle's new fangled, tough-looking symmetrical logo, which even incorporates a lightning bolt!
There's four tracks here, starting with "Rautakaarme", an atmospheric seven-minute cut featuring monkish chant, eerie drone, and energetic bursts of rock action. Second track "Tulilintu" is *entirely* active and energetic, really bringing in the headbanging, fist-pumping metal, complete with guitar leads and soaring screams in the manner of Rob Halford. Seriously. The lyrics are in Finnish (presumably) so we don't know how tongue-in-cheek-or-not they are. Track three, "Berserk", is kinda weird, another atmospheric exercise with some lines in English like "I'm a scorpion" and "I'm a crocodile" spoken over rather spooky, bass-heavy grooves. A lot of tension in this one. Could almost be a noirish film soundtrack from the '70s, but with additional "circular" electric guitar riffing. Then the final track "Puutiikeri" arrives, pretty much taking over the album since it's an epic 24 minute affair, beginning and ending with authentic heavy metal riffing, but journeying far and wide in-between. Creaky improv splatter, lush keyboards, gently whispering vocals, spacey electronic effects, chugging, pulsating rhythms (of course!), and even some quasi-techno beats (!) are stirred into this weird mix. Ranging in mood from calm tranquility to flat out rockin', this is a real trip, as is all of Tulikoira. If you've been following Circle's output in recent years, and rolling with all their eccentricities, from Sunrise to Guillotine to Forest to Empire, you'll be happy to add Tulikoria to your collection too!
Not sure why we never listed the previous two Clipse records as they were definitely some of the best, most addictive and hard hitting hip-hop records to come out in the last decade. Combining the instantly gratifying production of modern day mainstream hip-hop while retaining an urgency and strength in vocal delivery that reminded us a lot of Rakim had his records been produced by The Neptunes. So we were way excited for 'Til The Casket Drops and while it's not terrible it just doesn't pack the same knockout punch that the previous records did. Somehow it feels a little more typical and mainstream, although there are for sure some totally fun and standout moments.
We love Philip Cohran, and while he doesn't get the same level of attention and widespread adoration as folks like Pharaoh Sanders, Rashan Roland Kirk, or Alice Coltrane, there is no doubt his music belongs in that special elite class of spiritual jazz geniuses, as his records are filled with such deep vibrations and such endless creativity.
In the past we have gushed over the reissues of his albums On The Beach and The Malcolm X Memorial, two records that truly transcend stiff and narrow definitions of genre, as we've seen many jazz-shy folks get swept away by those amazing sounds!
The Spanish Suite was never released before, so this is the first time most folks have gotten to hear it, a long form piece composed and created in the late '60s by Cohran and his collective of amazing Chicago musicians, many of whom have super impressive musical resumes, from Sun Ra to the great early incarnation of Earth Wind & Fire. The Spanish Suite demonstrates an effortless infusion of Latin elements into deep African grooves of forward thinking jazz, executed with total perfection. A little like Miles Davis' masterpiece Sketches Of Spain stretched out and taken to some outer dimension. Patience is a virtue with this piece as it starts out nice and somewhat traditional sounding for the first little while until it morphs into some contemplative and expansive spiritual jazz exploration, the sort of thing that Cohran has definitely mastered. Highly recommended!
Another fine issue of this great metal read. On the cover, Megadeth, Slayer, and Testament! What is this, 1990?? Apparently these veteran thrashers are on tour together, again, Clash Of The Titans 2010 aka American Carnage! Cool.
Then there's also stuff on Enslaved (with their album Frost being inducted into the Decibel Hall Of Fame), Shining, Between The Buried And Me, Thou, Immolation, and much more, including the usual funny columns and reviews and the rest.
Deep Jew was one of those good bands with a horrible name; and had they been born a decade earlier, these LA noiseniks would have counted amongst the numerous crustpunks touring alongside Man Is The Bastard or maybe even Corrupted throughout the '90s. Yet, as it stands, Deep Jew released a couple of things including a split single for Not Not Fun and this LP (of which we managed to dig up a few copies!) before calling it quits in 2008. But no matter how you look at it, Deep Jew's slow-motion, dirge-punk, power-violence is a force not to be taken lightly. Even if they do have a questionable name.
Five cuts of post-MITB brutalist sludge and murkscaping distortion grace the A side of Ugliest Man / Dog Blood with howling vocals, caveman bashing drum kit abuse, low-slung bass buried way way down deep, and thick guitar / amplifier pedal noise which might have something in the way of Swans-like riff if all of that distortion hadn't crumbled everything into filthy noise. The flip is a monstrous side-long car-crash captured at quarter-speed with chugging, stumbling dirgecore rhythms that lurch amidst a lock-stepped bass throb all of which tugs and / or pushes against relentlessly overblown amplifier punishment and blister-popped feedback. Silkscreened covers and limited to something like 400 copies.
Not to be confused with Earth, WIND and Fire! Female fronted Dutch prog-psych circa 1970 here folks, and it's a cult classic. This was originally issued, and likewise reissued, several times with different cover art. The various covers we've seen all look nice, but this design, the spooky psychedelic postery tree roots one, is our favorite, so we're glad the Esoteric label elected to go with it for this nice, remastered reish. Cover aside, though, what we care about is the music, and this self-titled album, the band's debut, is a favorite, probably their best in our book. They got a lot proggier later on (nothing wrong with that!), more symphonic, but this album had a pop buzz to it that can't be denied, the songs here mostly on the shorter side. The groovy "Love Quiver" is the longest at a respectably proggy 7:35, but the others are in the 3-4 minute range of radio-friendly singles, which ALL these songs are catchy enough to have been. It's Earth and Fire's most (stonery) "rock" record too, with enough heavy fuzz riffing, acid guitar soloing, and dramatic majesty to interest some of you proto-metal types. The first track is called "Wild And Exciting" and that describes this record, exciting especially for fans of the Jefferson Airplane, Curved Air, Savage Rose, Shocking Blue... and we'd suggest that those into current bands Blood Ceremony and The Devil's Blood ought to check this out too! But, ignoring the female vocals aspect of this for a sec, we'd also liken 'em a bit to Captain Beyond (when they really get to riffin') and Iron Butterfly (there's some organ)... also, though, the Mamas And The Papas (the female vocals again, and classic '60s-ness) ... It's just one great song after another, moody -and- rockin', and that applies to the two bonus tracks here too, singles B-sides "Hazy Paradise" and "Mechanical Lover", the former of which you may recall was covered by Japanese psychsters Ghost on their Hypnotic Underworld album a few years back! Can we offer more of a recommendation than that?!
A vinyl reissue of one of the best Einsturzende Neubauten recordings! Halber Mensch ('half man' in German) originally came out in 1985, at the height of the apex of punk self-immolation, pure German expressionism, and industrial theatricality. The infernal vocal chorale of the title track is about as intense as a vocal piece could ever be, without resorting to pure guttural howling. Here is it a searing repetition of an atonal plainsong, buttressed by the always unique snarl of frontman Blixa Bargeld. The repurposed metals from junkyards and constructions site which have become synonymous with Neubauten immediately appear afterwards on their anthemic single "Yu-Gung (Fuetter Mein Ego)," whose insistent rhythm works almost Gamelan-like as the principal melody to this amazing tune. It should also be pointed out that Pussy Galore, who were already heavily indebted to EN, covered this on their Sugar Shit Sharp ep! later As a grand climax to the album, Neubauten again returns to hellish imagery through the symphony of bowed metals on "Der Tod Ist Ein Dandy," where these cacophonic scrapes amass into a dramatic arc of acoustic noise that easily parallels those same constructions that David Jackman built through Organum. This is one of those seminal records that should always be in print, and one of those records that you should already have. But if not, you shouldn't pass this up!
A brilliant reissue from the seminal German industrial ensemble Einsturzende Neubauten. This album represented the first full realization of the Neubauten project, with F.M. Einheit and Marc Chung (both hailing from the underappreciated post-punk ensemble Abwarts) joining the trio of Blixa Bargeld, Alexander Hacke, and N.U. Unruh. The O.T. from the title of this record references Oswald Tschirtner, a resident of psychiatric hospital for artists, where the patient created these compulsive drawings out of the unkempt visions in his head. Such is the way the Neubauten seeks to employ sound on this record: cracked, naive, and dangerous. Found objects, stolen radio transmissions, repurposed machinery, and lots of metal bashing appear in this album, inspired as much by musique concrete juxtaposition as by punk fury. The desolate drone-centric piece "Armenia" and the propulsive "Vandium I-Ching" represent two of the extremes found on this ever-impressive album.
Debut release from this East Coast duo, who weave a dense swirl of softly rhythmic ambience, druggy dronemusic and abstract psychedelic space drift, utilizing a strange assemblage of instruments. Along with guitars, vocals and pedals, they also utilize a Gameboy, the result is not that far removed from the sounds of folks like Expo 70, Gnod, Sounding The Deep, Pulse Emitter and the like, but these guys describe their sound as "triumphant post-noise and stretched out bummer-wave", which translates to washed out expanses of skittery programmed rhythms, warm shimmery guitars, muted loops and subtle glitchery, everything raw and lo-fi but still lush and expansive, there are vocals, but they tend to be blurred into soft swirls of layered hum and whir, the sound is dreamlike and mediative, but not mellow, instead it's minimally propulsive and blissed out, sometimes slipping into full on Autechre-like skitter, but even then, the rhythms are set amidst dense layers of drone, disembodied melodies, hushed ethereal ambience, or tripped out soft noise. Cool, mysterious and definitely psychedelic, this is the perfect headphone drift soundtrack, or sounds for a rainy day lost wander, or music to help you achieve the next level, to leave your body and attain enlightenment, or to just put on and chill out.
SUPER LIMITED RUN, 53 tapes and 47 cd-r's, we only got the cd-r's, and each one comes bundled with a bad ass lazer etched black triangular talisman, that according to the band, will "bring you infinite power", and that Andee has been wearing since we first got these in!! (proof is here: http://twitpic.com/ya15g, http://twitpic.com/ya1cu)
Another gloriously spaced out missive from one of our favorite purveyors of space-kraut-drone, Expo 70, aka Justin Wright, with occasional help from a small cadre of fellow sonic explorers. This one disappeared in no time, sold out in a flash, limited to 100 copies maybe. The label agreed to whip up another batch just for us, but once these are gone, you're out of luck, so grab one while you can, cuz it's another good'un. Then again, we've yet to experience a bad one from Wright.
Three tracks, three movements, each an extended part of Expo's Galaxy Of Mysticism, the parts named Altar Of Mystic Rites, Entrance To The Outer Circle, and Central Sphere Of The Mystical Galaxy, which should give you an idea of what sort of druggy, spacey, heart of the sun shit we're talking about here. Spiralling strands of guitar reach out into the warm whirling blackness, looped effects pulse and throb, the sound crystalline and delicate, but subtly ominous as well, hypnotic, mesmerizing, and dreamily psychedelic.
The second movement amps up the energy a little, a thick wash of whirring organ is the foundation, for high end squiggles and spidery melodies, the sound growing thicker and thicker, the underlying drone getting more and more dense, finally giving way to the closing movement, a swirling cloud of chordal swells, and layered shimmer, all held together by the simple pound of a drum machine, the track quickly growing more freaked out and psychedelic, lysergic leads stretching out amidst streaks of glitched out and swooping space FX, the guitars finally loosed and offering up heaving walls of crumbling doomic distortion. Heavy and spacey and divine.
Seriously transcendent spaced out kraut psych... and INSANELY LIMITED, these are the last copies ever, cool hand screened splatter sleeves with pasted on logo, and mini printed insert.
We somehow missed out on the Feelies back in the day, but after years and years of hearing them namechecked we were pretty psyched to finally hear them, and we ended up liking them way more than we imagined. Heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground, and in turn, heavily influencing R.E.M., the feeling infused their post punk / indie rock / new wave, with as the title of their debut suggested, crazy rhythms, the drums tribal and super busy, while the guitars wove lush shimmery layered soundscapes behind the bands frantic, frenetic punkish pop. We actually hear a lot of Television in their sound as well, especially in the guitars.
Crazy Rhythms was the Feelies debut and would remain their defining record, opener "The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness" seems to capture the jittery vibe of the band both in sound and in title, with the extra percussion (all four members played percussion), the lush tangly guitars, the subtle hooks, the whole record follows suit, with the vocals often spoken/sung, a la Velvet Underground or Jonathan Richman, and the closing song and title track seals the deal, all rubbery bass, skittery drums, loads of space, wrapped around almost twangy jangle and strum, the sound practically surfy, before the big anthemic outro. So good. Kicking ourselves for missing out, but heck, better late than never!
We somehow missed out on the Feelies back in the day, but after years and years of hearing them namechecked we were pretty psyched to finally hear them, and we ended up liking them way more than we imagined. Heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground, and in turn, heavily influencing R.E.M., the feeling infused their post punk / indie rock / new wave, with as the title of their debut suggested, crazy rhythms, the drums tribal and super busy, while the guitars wove lush shimmery layered soundscapes behind the bands frantic, frenetic punkish pop. We actually hear a lot of Television in their sound as well, especially in the guitars.
Good Earth was the followup to the perhaps-impossible-to-top Crazy Rhythms, and the band made it no easier on themselves by altering their sound quite a bit, exploring more abstract sound structures, ditching the typical verse chorus verse arrangements, mellowing out a bit, slowing down, the only remnants of their more frantic sound being "The Last Roundup", with its flurry of fast picked notes and tumble of drum rolls to match, and the propulsive "Two Rooms", but for the most part the rest of the record is way dreamier, laid back, strummier and at times almost Grateful Dead sounding, but within these new song structures the band continued to explore and do amazing, and definitely un-pop things, strange guitar parts, lots of textural layered ambience, harmonies, all in all a pretty nice balance to the more intense debut. And while they did go on to make two more records, the first two remained the ones most folks considered their finest moments. And we'd have to agree.
Been meaning to stock and review the delightful debut album from this Swedish duo (who've recently expanded to a sextet) for quite some time! We've been snugly enveloped in its whimsical beauty ever since it was recommended to us by a kind aQ mailorder customer a number of months ago. Finally it's here! Fredrik is indeed the name of one of these fellows. You'll hear his lulling voice, guitar, piano and horns. Lindefelt is the other, and he entwines a glistening array of strings and shuffling, twinkling electronics. There are also some uncredited angelic female backing vocals that are the absolute whipped cream and cherry topping on this glorious musical confection. Together, they've made one of Cup's favorite albums of 2009... yeah, even though it was released in late 2008! Hey, you discover things when you discover them, right? From note one, you'll be swept off your feet! Filled with an air of wide-eyed innocence, hazy atmospheres, and daydreamy reflective moods, it's the perfect album for taking your little row boat out on the sun dappled lake for the day, setting it adrift, and leaving the oars at rest. A balance of songs and scapes, each track is its own mesmerizing folk-tinged journey. The title of the seventh number "Angora Sleepwalking" really captures the essence of this album. You may find Na Na Ni to be in some ways akin to the dream pop of Kings Of Convenience or The Notwist, but a bit more electronic than the former and somewhat more airy and pastoral than the latter. Or perhaps they're the long lost music box and wind-up toy festooned brethren of the Elephant Six collective, but with a bit more European flair and a bit less psychedelics? To boot, folks who dig Arcade Fire's lush emotiveness or Weakerthans' earnest sensitivities may also find Fredrik's vocals particularly appealing. That said, hopefully those references don't lead you astray because they definitely weave their own beautifully crafted enchanted magic... and it all sounds mighty good to us. Oh yes, very recommended!
At this point, the idea of "improvised guitar and electronics" (what it says here) elicits a bit of a ho-hum reaction from us. Heard it before, we think. Do we need more of that noise? But, in the case of French guitarist Guillaume Gargaud, it's still pretty worthwhile of an idea. We hadn't heard him previously (despite his having a recent recording on AQ fave label Utech, somehow we missed that one!). But we're glad we checked out his new disc, released on the same label that previously brought us the cosmic New Age electronics of J.D. Emmanuel (via archival release Solid Dawn: Electronic Works 1979-1982).
Portions of this are certainly dreamily deep space sounding enough to fit in with that. The nine tracks here in fact range from truly intense, dramatic drone, like the ominous opening cut "Seve Brute" (which reminds us of Darsombra or an "isolationist" Expo 70) to purely acoustic, post-Takoma wanderings more akin to James Blackshaw or Steffen Basho-Junghans ("Aedeiinae"). Though there's heavy moments, many of the tracks are ultimately gentle, vaguely glitchy, sometimes soothingly rhythmic, mostly drifting... all quite nice. Turns out there's still lots of good & not TOO abstract results possible with ye olde improvised guitar and electronics, why did we doubt it?
We won't go into too much detail with this as it's limited to a mere 100 copies and odds are will be sold out or nearly so by the time you're reading this.
Golden Retriever is the duo of Matt Carlson, from Bonus, who we've raved about in the past, along with multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Sielaff, the two use synthesizer and bass clarinet to evoke images of some dystopian future, or the streets of some dying city, the synths buzz and rumble, whir and thrum, the clarinet soars and sings lyrically, subtly intertwined with the synth buzz, the two occasionally falling together perfectly, creating a thick swath of ominous sound. The clarinet flutter and flits, occasionally slipping into some abstract jazziness, other times offering counterpoint for the synths' low end melodic buzz, or unfurling long long Niblockian tones, which is when GR sound the best, when the synth and clarinet are locked into longform stretches of near static sound, tense and intense, minimal and mysterious.
Gorgeous packaging, elaborately folded vellum sleeve, with the full color disc visible from within, and a small printed insert. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
First proper solo record from this core member of SF post rockers Tarentel, as well as the mastermind behind another post rock combo we dig, the even dreamier The Drift.
Fountain is simply fantastic, a subtle and varied affair, that dips into various sounds and moods, with acoustic and electric guitars as the main instrumentation, although the guitars are augmented by melodica, keyboard, bow, voice, and of course, rain.
The sounds here are delicate and crystalline, lush and warm, dreamy and sun dappled, deftly fingerpicked abstract Appalachia, gives way to melancholic folk, chamber music drifts into thick layered dronemusic, hushed one second, exuberant and joyful the next, a gorgeous, ever shifting songsuite, that definitely harkens back to classic seventies folk music, but is infused with the more abstract home brewed abstract bedroom dronemusic of today, as well as nods to the post rock that informs so much of the music Grody plays.
Totally blissful and dreamy, from the hushed opener, simply strummed guitars, and slow shifting overtones, to the spare finger picked beauty of "Well Wisher", that gradually blossoms into a sunshiney bit of glimmery instrumental dream pop, to the pop ambient haze of "Covered Mirrors", to the sprawling "Eve", a gorgeous folk flecked steel string work out, interrupted part way by a gorgeous cloud of lush shimmering whir, to the dark, muted, blurred guitarscape that makes up the record's closer "Finding Time", notes suspended in space, tones drawn out into extended humming soft focus drones, little melodic fragments chiming in the distance, all moving glacially through a sepia toned haze. So so lovely.
We are SO PSYCHED that this has finally been reissued. Back in the eighties there was an amazing punk/noise rock scene happening in Australia, Lubricated Goat, King Snake Roost, the Kryptonics and of course Grong Grong, and it seems like the Memorandum label has been started up with the sole purpose of rescuing those classic sounds from obscurity. There is a double disc Lubricated Goat reissue coming soon, which will most likely be a Record Of The Week, the catchy Kryptonics record is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, we've emailed the label asking them to please please please reissue the King Snake Roost records, which brings us to Grong Grong, Australia's answer to Killdozer, or maybe Flipper. Originally released on Alternative Tentacles, the record is fleshed out here with a ton of bonus tracks, live tracks, and even a dvd with amazing archival footage of the band! But you say, why should we care?
Grong Grong was born on a whim, named for a small Australian town, that one of the members just happened to be passing through, when he got home, he decided he had to start a band, and it had to be called Grong Grong. And apparently the simple approach of asking folks "Do you want to be in a band called Grong Grong?" was enough, and soon, Grong Grong were playing shows and making records. Or at least a record, and what a record, filthy, grimey, noisy, raw, primitive, pounding, chaotic, punk as fuck, a little post punk, a little new wave, crunchy angular guitars, throbbing low slung bass, wild drumming, and big bellowed vocals drenched in reverb, the band locking into a single riff, and working it and pounding away, the guitar spiraling off into weird little tangles while the bass and drums stayed locked into their groove, and the vocals swooped all over the place, the delay sending the grunts and growls careening from speaker to speaker. Not sure how these guys ended up on AT (well, Jello was a big fan), seems like they might have been just as at home on AmRep, where most of the other bands from this scene ended up.
Hardly matters, this is some awesome classic Aussie weirdo noise punk, and it sounds as good as it ever did, and listening to this now, it's shocking how many young bands are aping these guys big time, whether they realized it or not. Swampy, bluesy, woozy, psychedelic, lurching, lumbering, sloppy and loose, but so goddamn good, and those vocals, totally pushing all those same Killdozer buttons, but these guys were way more minimal, all about mood and texture and vibe, not parts, not verses and choruses, they sort of just launched into a song and kept going until it ground to a halt, or the band collapsed into a heap only to stumble into the next track, which is evidenced by the bonus DVD which features tons of old recordings, even their very first show, and even back then they were a serious force to be reckoned with. Seems like we already have a contender for reissue of the year and it's only January, only possibility of it getting knocked out of the running, is if those Lubricated Goat or King Snake Roost reissues materialize, and more than likely all three will rank in the top ten, but for now, this is THEE shit.
With a name like Hallowed Butchery, we had a good idea of what was in store. Then we saw the cover art, not necessarily metal looking if you weren't expecting such, and the touching dedication of Funeral Rites For The Living to HB overlord Ryan Fairfield's wife and daughter. That seemed to soften up our expectations. Then we actually listened to Hallowed Butchery. And, um, yeah, this is some filthy as fuck, abject, miserable, doom-laden metal, blackened for sure but not "black metal" per se, and however you want to define it, just plain VILE! The sounds are so insanely heavy that it's like things are going to be pulled into a black hole where they will remain swirling about in perpetual negativity. The vocals are a harsh, guttural gurgle, scary and forceful but buried in the mix as another layer of sound, sometimes sounding a bit like a guy getting ready to puke up his innards. At the same time, there are many moments on here that are just plain beautiful, especially when Fairfield strums out some dolorous tunes on his acoustic guitar. The sadness on display is no doubt genuine, and the lyrics follow a path of hopelessness and despair. Reading them alongside the aforementioned dedication, as well as the heartfelt thank you list, makes it clear that Fairfield is someone with a realistic view on the woes of this world, which is always a cool thing in a scene where everyone is trying to put on some phony air of being "evil". Fuck that. This stuff also has a pronounced industrial vibe, offering a sonic beatdown that will surely appeal to fans of groups like Gnaw Their Tongues, Human Quena Orchestra, and Nekrasov. The super dense, crushing doomscapes conjure up some post-industrial meltdown, and the electronic ambience gives things a very disconcerting feeling, sometimes sounding a bit like some of Current 93's more recent work actually. Then, after getting your ass handed to you on a platter, Fairfield brings things down a notch with a GORGEOUS cover of Neil Young's "After The Gold Rush," so SO awesome, not to mention pretty much completely unexpected. Things are pretty straightforward, at least until it becomes the first doom metal Neil Young cover that we know of. Suppose we shouldn't be surprised at this point, but one man projects like this always get us; how could one dude be responsible for such a thick slab of concentrated negativity? Dunno, but this is definitely hitting the spot.
This just might be the prettiest depressive black metal record you'll ever hear. Featuring Morbid from Happy Days on drums, this trio unfurls gorgeously melancholy soft focus landscapes of crystalline guitar chime, warm washed out distortion, simple skeletal drumming, everything super melodic and dreamy, the sound gauzy and blurred, the vocals the only thing that really make this truly black metal, without them, How Will You Live Your Life Today? would sound more like some shoegazey indie pop record, all shimmery and minor key, minimal and utterly poppy, loping, meandering, jangly softly buzzing doom pop, but the vocals, hysterically shrieking one second, growling raspily the next, definitely add some pathos to the prettiness, which is definitely the point. The band sing about love, and heartbreak, misery and abandonment, loneliness and breakups, and the music perfectly captures that feeling, the sort of hopefulness lurking behind every heartbreak, the sadness inherent in giving your heart away, thus the music is pretty and sweet and poppy, while the vocals are tortured and anguished. It's a strange combination, but after a few listens, it's hard to imagine the music without the vocals, the sweet without the sour, the light without the dark.
Should definitely appeal to folks who dig stuff like Lifelover, Toil, Hypothermia, and others who dare to infuse their black metal with jangle and hooks and heart.
Hailing from Bristol, England, the ultra-powerful power trio known so appropriately as The Heads are here to freak you out again. We've been waiting for, like, three years for a new full-length album from these guys, who are just about our favorite heavy-psych-stoner-garage-rawk band currently existing in this blessed world. Under The Stress Of A Headlong Dive is finally here and we are NOT disappointed. Totally chuffed is more like it.
This, their seventh album, contains 19 new tracks, some of them weird under-a-minute droning FX interludes, others fuzz-fueled manic marathons lasting upwards of a quarter hour. Oh god the fuzz! This is some heavy, heavily distorted wailing swirling insanity indeed. Comets On Fire can't even compare. You have to go to Japan, maybe, and stick your head right next to the amps of a band like High Rise or Mainliner to approximate The Heads' in-the-red, pedals-to-the-metal, flyin' high, inner eye stare down acid energy sound. But we also have to imagine that they think of themselves as a pop band of sorts. The Fall would be one reference (the vocals do remind us of Mark E. Smith). And the Stooges were a pop band too, let's remember, and along with Hawkwind must be one of The Heads biggest sources of inspiration. But The Heads ain't a retro act, this is future/now rock action we're glad to be around to witness (on disc, that is, never seen 'em live but would love to!!).
Punkishly menacing and kind of metallic (with bongos, though!), or spacey and mantric, this never lets up and never gets dull. Over the course of this 72 minute platter they always seem to have a new trick up their sleeves, or a new pedal to step on... all heads should agree that The Heads have outdone themselves with this one!!
Wow, when we reviewed those two J.P. Massiera Psychoses compilations, a couple of years back, we somehow assumed that this eccentric French producer recorded so prolifically under so many monikers that many of the groups (especially the space disco ones) were probably just single releases and not complete full length albums. Well, the Mucho Gusto label has proven us wrong once again, by reissuing the full length albums of both Venus Gang and Herman's Rocket, two of the zaniest freakout space disco-funk outfits that Massiera ever created. Commissioned in 1977 and 1978 by an Italian producer to jump on the European Space Disco craze, Massiera teamed up with his half-brother, Bernard Torelli and the singers Mickey and Joyce to create these two amazing groups. Amazing also in the sense that while he used what is basically a cookie-cutter disco template (he blatantly borrows lots from American funk and disco - but really who didn't? And at least he borrows well!), he managed to create such a crazy, unique sound with lots of Moogs, strange vocal effects and lots of spacey noises and sounds. Considered too crazy at the time for marketable appeal (check out the great covers!), both records have gained a cult following over the years and sound so good right now especially with all the modern throwbacks of Italo-disco trying to sound like this, these two groups are by far way freakier and so worth your time. We're curious if all of Massiera's disco incarnations released full length albums, and if we'll be soon gifted with reissues of The Human Egg, Sex Convention and The Starlights too. Here's hoping!
Both albums were only reissued on vinyl, not on cd, but do come with mp3 download cards!
Another out of left field record that just knocked our blocks off. Not sure what we were expecting, something super noisy and fucked up actually, but what we got was some totally irresistible sloppy chaotic garage power pop, that actually sort of ends up sounding a bit like noise rock guys unleashing their inner power pop demons. Before we go any further though, listen to the first sound sample, "Two Steps", we'll wait...
Man that song destroys, some of you have probably already added this to your cart, heck, that's what we would have done, there's no resisting that one, easily THE pop jam of the year, we've literally listened to that song about 50 times in the last week, so much that it wasn't until a couple days ago that we finally listened to that whole record, which thankfully revealed a whole 'nother bunch of killer pop chaos, not to mention some even more chaotic off kilter noisiness.
Let's talk about that song first, it's definitely the best song on the record, and we would gladly pay $14 for a one sided single with JUST that song, it's pretty much the most perfect pop song we've heard in forever, with wild almost cracking vocals, some incredible riffing, including a weird slippery almost slide part that gives us chills every time, sloppy drumming, and a killer tempo shift part way through that's just fucking perfect. And the hook, that song has been stuck in our head non stop since the first time we heard it.
But after you get it out of your system and listen to it 20 or 20 or 50 times, the rest of the record will reveal itself as a pretty much non stop kick ass punky power pop gem, like some eighties pop record transported through time. but on the way it got all tangled up in the slipstream with some random noise and garage rock records and emerged like, well, THIS.
"Other Side Of The Street" is a short sharp ultra distorted pop jam, with a punky frame but laced with all sorts of amazing hooky guitar melodies, "Route 18" (after the 3 minutes of near silence that is "Live Outside") is total bubblegum FM radio pop, but all twisted up and tweaked, and just like the other tracks, it's the extra guitar that turns it into something super special, adding some super rad melodic filigree. It's hard to not hear some Guided By Voices and other purveyors of lo-fi pop, but this isn't traditionally lo-fi, it doesn't sound muddy and 4-tracky and much as it just sound ramshackle and haphazard, and if there are hints of those other lo-fi rockers, these guys definitely make it their own, plus there's the weird extra noisy parts which manage to fit perfectly, not disrupting the flow at all, rather highlighting the subtle noisiness in the poppiest tracks, while hiding some serious poppery within the various layers of crunch and howl, the angular no-wave opener "Nest Of Vipers", with its sampled broken glass, fucked-with tape speed, mumbled vocals, super blown out drumming, and dreamy hushed detuned piano backward outro, "A Different Touch" is super in-the-red, the drums so distorted they sound like bursts of radio static, the guitars practically melting, but the whole thing wrapped around some killer hooks, with amazing guitar melodies, an impossibly noise drenched murk-pop blow out, and that's basically the magic of Home Blitz, the practically perfect pop is infused with noise and on the verge of total implosion, while the fucked up noise jams are infused with pop, threatening to shed the noise completely and explode into another burst of wild eyed power pop. If these guys went in a real studio and spent a fortune, it's almost possible to imagine them getting huge, but smooth out the rough edges and it just wouldn't be the same band.
Absolutely killer noisepop, and yet another record to add to our year end faves list...
Your first impulse might be to assume that the title of JOMF's new record, Ballads Of The Revolution, was not meant to be taken literally, but in some weird way, these six tracks are indeed balladic, albeit in a distinctly Jackie-O style, opening with a traditional, and following that with a Lucky Dragons cover, before getting to the originals, but right out of the gate, the sound is drifty and dreamy, slide guitars slippery over warm reverbed twang, deep crooned vocals, brushed drums, all hazy and rainy afternoon sounding. The Lucky Dragons cover is all skittery percussion and muted bleated horns, as well as the soft honeyed vocals of Honey Owens aka Valet, now seemingly a full time Motherfucker. The song gets gradually more and more dense and clattery, eventually morphing into something distinctly noisy and chaotic and not at all ballad-like.
The four originals also veer away from ballad territory, but not entirely, the vocals in the first original are quite prominent, soaring in a cloud of soft reverb, over an almost krautlike groove, wrapped in a Spacemen 3 like haze, the following track, is all mumbled vox over spacey FX, and drum machine skitter, total druggy trip out drift, before another spacekraut jam that finds the band getting a little Hawkwindy, the vocals again heavily effected, drifting through space, while the band lock into a serious psychrock fuzz guitar groove, before finally finishing off with another sort-of-ballad, Appalachian guitar, simple lilting vocals, lovely female background vox, fuzzy minimal leads, very much like some lost seventies acid folk jam, gorgeous stuff.
We've been loving us some hell-fire Gospel tunes lately, thanks especially to Tompkins Square's Fire in My Bones triple cd threat and of course the granddaddy of all Gospel collections, Dust to Digital's Goodbye Babylon box set. So we're extra excited about this release coming from Parlortone, the vinyl arm of Dust to Digital. While this is not a Gospel Music recording per se, the figure at this center of this recording, The Rev. Johnny L. "Hurricane" Jones was a popular Gospel singer in the sixties and seventies, but he was even more well-known for his sermons, and since 1960 has recorded many of them on reel-to-reel and cassette tape. He still preaches in Atlanta to this day at the age of 73! So this record is a collection of some of his best sermons including the 13 minute title track, Jesus Christ from A-Z which he preaches in alphabetical verse. But what makes these sermons stand out is the sounds of the choir and his congregation responding with Amens, whooops, shouts, and Hallelujahs. Even if you are not religiously inclined, just the field recording quality of the sounds makes it amazingly worthwhile.
Awesome new group from the Bay Area who channel international psych of years past to create some totally engaging and undeniably fun sounds. We're lucky to have so many amazing bands and musicians in San Francisco and we're even luckier that many of them are customers of ours. So it's always cool to see what lots of our favorite music makers in town are listening to and checking out when they swing by the store. And not that we've been spying but every time Max Balaoin (one of the master minds of Khi Darag) has come into the store over the last couple years it was hard not to notice how fast he'd make a beeline to the '70s Turkish Psychedelia section, as well as always seemingly after left of center sounds from across the globe circa late '60s and '70s.
With a band that features folks from groups like Rube Wadell, Rupa & The April Fishes, Charming Hostess, Lord Loves A Working Man and even the SF Mime Troupe, these extremely talented musicians have taken those international psych sounds from years past and brought in their own elements of surf rock, klezmer, and soundtracks to create music that is pretty impossible not to move to.
Much like Dengue Fever they use their influences from the past with total respect and love and it comes out in the sounds that they create. They also have a bit of a suspenseful undertone to their aesthetic which makes us think this is exactly the kind of band Mike Patton or John Zorn would want playing at their wedding with a dancefloor of weirdos having the time of their life. So fun!
There are three types of folks who will want one of these. Fans of the Brainbombs, which makes sense, considering the fact that Krig I Hudik includes two of Brainbombs amongst their ranks. Or fans of classic Finnish punk, as in anyone who bought that rad Finnish Punk boxset we listed a while back, or anyone super into bands like Totalitar (who coincidentally also count some Brainbombs as members), and of course, the folks who are both. Which we would guess is a lot of you.
Krig I Hudak jam 10 tracks onto this 7", a head caving, ear splitting barrage of snarling, crusty, pounding, thrashing, late seventies / early eighties style Finnish punk rock, blown out and heavy, practice space drums buried in a haze of crunchy riffs and bellowed vocals (even some strange chant-like backup vox now and again), super hooky and anthemic, raw and intense and totally kick ass, from midtempo grind, to frenzied chaotic thrashing, the majority of these tracks are in fact covers of super obscure punk rock bands from back in the day, who hail from the same hometown as Krig I Hudik, although two are originals, but you might not ever know it.
Folks looking for purely misanthropic dirgey sludge, a la the Brainbombs, might be a bit disappointed, but for the rest of you, in the market for some bad ass blasting punk rock, and filthy furious Finnish crush, this shit is unbeatable.
Super swank sleeves, printed inserts with lyrics, LIMITED TO 500 copies, seemingly already out of print at the label!
We're flipping out a little over this new Memorandum label, a reissue label dedicated to an era of Australian underground rock that we've been obsessed with for years, Lubricated Goat, King Snake Roost, Grong Grong (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), the Hard-Ons, the Triffids, Radio Birdman, the list goes on.
We had never actually heard the Kryptonics before, but did know that members of the Kryptonics went on to play in Radio Birdman, the Hard-Ons, and most exciting for us, Lubricated Goat! But the sound of the Kryptonics was not nearly as noisy or punk, they were more a sort of garage pop combo, who listening to this now definitely remind us of the Hoodoo Gurus, or the Lime Spiders, albeit a bit more raw and rough around the edges. But holy crap could these guys write songs, a bunch of the tracks here are incredible and sound like could have been / should have been hits, in fact the whole first disc is pretty much super catchy, super rocking, kick ass punk pop through and through, so much so that a bunch of these sound like we MUST have heard them before. The second disc is mostly live and odds and ends, but live these guys definitely kicked ass, and there's an awesome cover of The Only Ones' "Another Girl, Another Planet"!
Comes with a massive booklet, tons of liner notes, photos, flyers, etc. Anyone into garage rock of ANY stripe will definitely dig this stuff if they're not familiar with these guys already, and for anyone into the new breed of garage rockers, and noise poppers, check out the Kryptonics, even if it's just to realize that the NEW sound is not nearly so new after all...
MeteorCity have been KILLING lately, so many amazing releases, Freedom Hawk, Village Of Dead Roads, Egypt, Ararat, Flood, WhiteBuzz (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list) and now these guys, the weirdly named Leeches Of Lore, who just might be the weirdest Southern style stoner rock band EVER. And in fact, they're only barely stoner rock, hey're definitely heavy, and definitely rock. More metal in fact, but their sound is all over the place, especially Southern / classic rock. The record opens with a thrashing pounding metallic jam with full on old school Metallica style riffing, super high Ozzy-ish vocals, seriously fierce. As is the next track, although it gets a little bit stonery, with some bad ass stop start riffing, like a hyped up super charged Deep Purple or Thin Lizzy or something, but then all of sudden the band busts out with a stange acoustic interlude, all steel string guitar, and soulful twang flecked croon, only to slowly mutate into some sort of Southern rock, evntually building back to the original riffing that started the song.
And that seems to be where the band are coming from, they have a distinctly Western sounding almost country thing going on, and then a full on super heavy classic stoner rock side, and they're not at all shy abut flitting back and forth, or cramming the two sounds together. "Cenozoic Death Waltz" is almost entirely an old timey country waltz, but then the metal guitars come in, and it turns into something else, a sort of classic hard rock, and then those high vocals come in, and the band is full on heavy metal parking lot, crusing down the highway, drinking beer, heavy metal RAWK.
The mellower twangier parts can sound like Lynrd Skynrd, the Eagles, the Outlaws, but the band always end up transforming that sound into something way heavier and more metallic.
The title track is like their "Freebird" or "Green Grass And High Tides Forever", with its slow country build, chugging riffs giving way to a seriously dense bit of psychedelic heaviness, a little mathy, and a lot proggy, so good.
The whole record is basically a bad ass Southern rock, stoner metal hybrid, with plenty of little oddball bits mixed in, like the last two songs, the croony almost acapella "Western Skies" and the minute plus closer "Why, Toe-Bot?", a short sharp blast of metallic madness that sounds quite a bit like Nitro, and yeah, THAT Nitro.
Another killer from MeteorCity...
Legend were an awesome, if obscure NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, pronounced n'wobim) band that never got a major label deal (in the liner notes, mention is made of the band watching helplessly as mediocre London bands got signed while bands like themselves from other parts of Britain are ignored -- well, maybe they should have moved to London!! ever think of that, guys?). But, their lack of success really was a bit unfair, as a listen to this double cd, containing their entire output -- two LPs, a 4 song ep, and a demo, spanning the years '81 through '83 -- shows them to be a damn fine heavy metal act indeed! Heavy, catchy stuff with much frantic axe action and folky, somewhat Ozzy-ish vox. That, plus doomy, politically themed lyrics, various songwriting eccentricities (occasional acoustic guitars, folk melodies, lengthy instrumental riff-outs, some prog-pop moves on their second LP), and a charmingly lo-fi production make 'em come across kinda like Angel Witch meets Manilla Road. In other words, pretty cool and very cult. Twenty years on, they've lived up to their name! And interestingly, in this day and age of black metal 'evilness', it's interesting to remember that metal is not necessarily PRO-war and violence (even if it's *about* war and violence). Indeed, along with bands like Megadeth, Nuclear Assault and Anthrax, Legend spoke out against the dangerous arms race and superpower militarism of the Cold War era. Now with today's worries about WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), Legend demonstrate continued relevance. Heck, they even do a catchy little number entitled "Anthrax Attack".
Third and final release from this depressive black doom duo, and it's a fitting epitaph to a short but brilliant streak. Three super limited cd-r's, less than 200 all told, each one overflowing with blackened misery and gorgeous harrowing sonic blackness, the first, titled A Million Dead Beneath The Ice, gave way to the second, titled Life Is Meaningless & Goes On Forever, which brings us to Worse Than Anyone Would Have Expected, which should give you a decent impression of the overall vibe and tone of Light's distinctly UN-light sound.
Three looooooong tracks, thick caustic layers of buzzing low end drone, sparsely strummed acoustic guitar, shrieked vocals way down in the mix, funereal, glacial, miserable, not even plodding as there seems to be no drums, or if they are there, they're practically inaudible. The melodies are lilting and melancholic, there's some piano, the rumbling buzzing backdrop seems to coalesce into some sort of melody, the whole thing lurching in slow motion, grim, and dense, and miserably and mournfully lovely. Totally hypnotic .
The second track offers up more of the same, another lovely black expanse of pointillist piano, harrowing screams, and slow swells of black buzz, before finally segueing into the epic closing track, a formula similar to the first two, but somehow even slower, more abject, more ambient, so slow and spaced out and minimal, that it nearly ceases being metal or doom and is transformed into some sort of black ambient slowcore, a haunting doomic creep, that to these ears is as pretty as it is grim and harsh.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES. Gorgeous packaging, black on black, black disc, elaborately folded sleeve with a black on black printed obi, super fancy, and most likely gone before you know it...
Now available on vinyl!
We have been hearing about Little Dragon for quite a while now as lots of folks around here had seen them live and been blown away and kept urging us to check out their stuff and to see what an amazing presence their Swedish-Japanese singer has. Unfortunately, most of LD's releases where hard-to-track-down imports up 'til now, but luckily with the release of this newest album Machine Dreams we get to hear why all our friends were so excited about Little Dragon.
Machine Dreams is completely refreshing, bright and colorful electro-pop that eschews all the detached and cold cliches that so many in the scene rely on, opting instead for elements of soul, house, downtempo, and an overall warmth and sincerity of sound that really makes LD stick out.
Imagine a more uptempo and cheery Fever Ray, or if Lali Puna stopped navel gazing and reached their hands and hearts to the sky, or if Matthew Herbert got to produce a record for Gwen Guthrie! We hear wonderful hints of LD's influences too, everything from Massive Attack to Pizzicato Five, yet they manage to really shine with their own identity, displaying a really great range, from uptempo catchy dancefloor moments to more drowsy, sultry bittwersweet slow burners. We are feeling this so much!
Lopez Island is one of the many islands that dapple the Puget Sound of Washington state, located about 150 miles NW of Seattle. It seems an isolated environment that probably attracts a good deal of outdoorsy types in the summertime; yet for the field recordist / composer Francisco Lopez, he explored the island's soundscape during the winter of 1999-2000 when sleet, snow, wind, and rain perpetually fell upon the island. Lopez has always been a consumate phonographer, with his typical strategies being acousmatic in nature, whereby he would extract and filter particular sounds from his recordings and build monolithic slabs of grey sounds elegantly shifting from near silences to tumultous crescendos. La Selva (and to a lesser extent Addy En Elpais De Las Frutas Y Los Chunches) remain the most highly regarded compositions through this strategy, with sounds becoming blurred into a miasma of turbulance, confusion, and intrigue. Here on Lopez Island, our man Lopez begins his composition with an extended passage of raw recordings, in particular there's the damp tactility of sleet sploshing amidst wet leaves and twigs. If anything, Lopez has set the stage for a very cold environment, followed by a brisk whistling of wind that Lopez slowly transforms into a thoroughly synthetic climax of sparkling drones and haunted siren songs that resemble the isolationism of BJ Nilsen, Stilluppsteypa, and the Hafler Trio much more than before. Since the release of his Live In San Francisco recording, we haven't been too keen on Francisco's output; but Lopez Island marks the inevitable return to excellence for Mr. Lopez.
"Industrial Music for Industrial People," well that was a tagline that Monte Cazzazza used to 'brand' Throbbing Gristle's Industrial Records, who intended the slogan to be an expression of going beyond the 'agricultural music' which came before. Some 30 years later, and the meaning of Industrial Music has gone through numerous permutations, some of which are quite reprehensible. Yet, that transition from the 'agricultural' into the 'industrial' ethos could be apt for this body of work from the self-proclaimed purveyor of 'absolute' music, Francisco Lopez. It's all machines, all the time for this 2cd set of recordings; and he's clearly building upon the techniques he had used during his seminal recordings of natural sounds such as La Selva or Wind. Yes, yes, yes, Lopez *has* used mechanical sounds throughout his body of work, so the Industrial Records metaphor might not be an exact fit. But it's close enough.
"Klokken" is the first piece on Machines, built out of recordings collected from large collections of clocks from the Netherlands. His piece is a bright collage that overlays the precise motors and machinations found within each of those machines. As these flywheels spin and gears click, the regularity of these repetitions is surprisingly uneven, perhaps as a metaphoric explanation as why time can be a relative construct with the machines pushing time forwards and backwards ever so slightly. Whether intentional or not, this piece has a considerable aesthetic similarity to Ligeti's Poeme
Symphonique, composed strictly through metronomes. It ends with 6 minutes of silence, just because that's the way Lopez is. "Fahstuhle" is more of a typical Lopez construction with the sources culled from various elevators in Germany, as the elliptical hisses and tension-based drones from the elevator cables emerge as the fundamental sound construction that Lopez punctuates with various resonant clangs and motorized ruptures. The source material to "Labs" should be somewhat self-evident, with resonant frequencies captured from large-scale institutional devices of unknown origin and pressurized aerations. Compositionally, this is again a signature Lopez piece, focussed upon the gradual acceleration and occultation of his sounds, with grandiose bursts of sustained energy. "Fabrikas" finds Lopez indulging in the fineries of chocolate and beer factories, all the while taking time to make some field recordings. At first, it seems like a reprise of the mechanical whirlings of the clock piece, but as he builds the layers with greater density, this piece grows into a huge mass of rasping buzz and accreted white noise. Excellent!
After so many years at the turn of the millennium of high caliber records, Lopez has been floundering recently. Machines is a welcome exception finding Lopez once again at the height of his game.
We only got a handful of these, and it was limited to only 100 or so copies anyway, so we won't get into too much detail. Most folks just need to see the name Lull and they'll be sold. Lull, aka Mick Harris, collaborates here with Beta Cloud, who a while back teamed up with Aidan Baker for a killer disc of dark buzzing dronemusic. But on Circadian Rhythm Disturbance, Harris and Beta Cloud team up for one 20 minute track of extreme dark ambience, loose barely there rhythms drift in and out occasionally, but this is all about the atmospheric low end, and it is LOW, a deep subterranean rumble that seems to swallow up all light, like the sound of some massive behemoth drifting slowly through the blackened deep, or some mysterious black shape drifting across the midnight sky, huge groaning drones and massive swells of rib cage rattling bass, smeared and blurred into a tidal sort of barely-rhythm, that subtly pulses and throbs, sucking the listener under, filling you ears with gorgeous soft black sound.�
SUPER LIMITED. Most likely already out of print at the label.
More pioneering electronic music unearthed by Japan's EM Records (previous releases include discs by Barton Smith, David Rosenboom, and Noah Creshevsky). This time, it's Barton and Priscilla McLean. A husband and wife team, but no Sonny and Cher here!! This duo performed live as the "McLean Mix", and were responsible for a bunch of sought-after Folkways LPs in their time, including 1979's "Electro-Symphonic Landscapes" (all the tracks from which are found here). The cover of this cd is an adaptation of the cover of that LP, the artwork actually being the graphical score for Barton's "Song Of The Nahuatl" (it's interesting to note that while the McLeans worked together, they didn't collaborate compositionally it seems -- half the tracks here are by the Mr. and half by the Mrs.). The McLeans got their start together in electronic composition in academia, at the University of Indiana, South Bend, 'round about 1973, when the Music Department there brought in a huge EMS Synthi-100 synthesizer and Synthi-256 sequencer. Hours of tape-splicing creativity would ensue! That mega-synthesizer was later repossessed (!) so the McLeans turned to musique concrete techniques (bouncing steak knives on violin strings, metal bars on piano strings, that sort of thing) to source their sounds, combined with the output of what electronic equipment they were able to access. Much of this disc, tracks dating back to 1975, feature this sort of laborious processing of sound. And the results are fantastic! Reminds us a bit of the classic Forbidden Planet soundtrack by Louis and Bebe Barron, another husband and wife team who preceded the McLeans in the annals of electronic music... In addition to the vintage '70s stuff here, there's a couple tracks of some newer material from the digital age... which holds up quite well, actually! Keening drones, mysterious pulses, psychedelic bleepage -- yep, way better than Sonny n' Cher!
EM has graciously provided both English and Japanese liner notes, so the 22 page cd booklet makes good reading for anyone curious about the McLeans' musical methodology, as well as providing cool graphics and intriguing photos to ponder.
Attention Masayuki Takayanagi fans! Actually, attention all '70s Japanese free jazz fans!! Heck, attention everybody!!! (Well, everybody who likes crazy creative freeform improv skronkiness.)
Doubtmusic brings us this compact disc reissue of a 1976 album by Japanese improvising cellist/bassist Keiki Midorikawa playing with several heavy friends, nicely packaged of course, in a miniature LP style sleeve. Actually, it's more than a reissue, as this double cd edition has been expanded twofold to include previously unissued music. The original LP documented Midorikawa's duo with legendary guitarist Takayanagi on one side, and his duo with pianist Masahiko Sato on the other side, about 20 minutes each. But at the same concert, Midorikawa had also performed a duo with percussionist Mashaiko Togashi, the 40 minute recording of which appears here for the first time, as disc one of what's now a two disc set, which is why it's now considered "Complete". Additionally, it's been remastered, and includes both the liner notes from the original vinyl release as well as new liners penned by Taku Sugimoto. Perhaps they explain why all the titles are given in what appears to be German, we don't know though, we haven't read 'em yet.
Since we came to this primarily as Takayanagi fans, naturally we jumped right to disc two to hear his contribution to this set. The Midorikawa/Takayanagi duo, entitled "An die Prinzessin die aus dem Maulbeerbaum geboren wurde", is crammed with plinking and plonking, scrabble and scrape, silences and even some (vocal) screams, the busy fingers of both men rustling up some (mostly quiet) noise. It's the Derek Bailey-ish side of Takayanagi on display here. Following it on the same disc, Midorikawa's duo with Sato, "Der Todeskampf am Maderospatch" is rather more dramatic, sounding melodically lovely (jazzy) in parts, but also building to loud, rumbling crescendos. Quite satisfying for our free jazz cravings.
But actually, turning to disc one, we soon discovered that Midorikawa's lengthy duo with Togashi, "Dichorragia nesimachus", is probably our favorite piece here. It's both wonderfully moody, Midorikawa caressing his strings in "classical" mode, melodically droning away amidst beautiful bells and gentle shimmer, which gives way on the percussive side of the equation to more martial drum beats, a physical pounding that then elicits a sawing, shuddering response from Midorikawa's cello, both players coming together for rapidfire percussive skitter-scatter... of course, it's a long piece, and that only describes a portion of it. Nice to have it rescued from the vault!
Moebius's first solo album from 1983 is also one of our favorites of the post-Cluster universe. We first heard this when it was recently reissued on cd via the Japanese import label Captain Trip (along with Zero Set and Rastakraut Pasta), but it was much too expensive to list. Thankfully, the Bureau B label has come to the rescue and we're able to share this gem with you.
Moebius has always been the more elusive and ornery of the Cluster duo. By 1983, Roedelius already had 5 solo albums under his belt, but Moebius always seemed to prefer working with groups or one-off projects, where he could entertain his curious sonic predilections against the grain of other performers. Surprisingly for his first actual solo release, he turns in an intriguing and engaging pop record. Not "Pop" in the commercial sense, but Tonspuren is surprisingly big on melodic but idiosyncratic precise miniatures with songs sounding like they were made by tiny but giddy machines.
Yet unlike Roedelius, Moebius allows no willful excursion or baroque tangent to intervene with the concise construction of his compositions, keeping them reduced to as essential compositions as possible, though much warmer and more fluid than, say, the compositions on Cluster's Curiosum (reviewed elsewhere on this list). Tellingly, this was made at the height of German New Wave, and one wonders how much of that may have played an influence. If you liked Cluster's Zuckerzeit, then check this out! Highly recommended!
Part two of Mojo's celebration of the 30th anniversary of Pink Floyd's The Wall, with an interview about the movie version with director Sir Alan Parker and animator Gerald Scarfe, and (glued to the cover in a jewel case) a second disc of re-recordings, track-by-track, of The Wall by a bunch of cool folks including Diagonal, Peter Broderick, Crippled Black Phoenix, The Soundcarriers, and others.
Also this ish: A 15 page section about Mojo's Top 50 albums etc. of 2009 (#1 album = Animal Collective), cover star Dave Grohl, Tom Petty, Sting, SUNNO))), Brian May, news, reviews, charts, and plenty more. Always lots to read in any issue of Mojo!
