Crow Autumn is the second record by A Broken Consort, aka Richard Skelton. He conjured up ABC as a project dedicated to his late wife who passed away in 2004, leaving a collection of sketches and photos, unfinished artwork, all of which inspired him to keep her memory alive, via posthumous collaborations, as well as various works of his own created in her memory. The last ABC record, Box Of Birch, was all blissed out drones and slow burning ragas, whereas Crow Autumn is more organic, more like an abstract assemblage of strings, a string quartet loosed from its traditional moorings perhaps. The sounds here are warm and lush, mediative and melancholic, the drone and raga elements are certainly still present, but the vibe is more acoustic, more raw and immediate and emotional, less processed and assembled.
Opening with a hushed, minimal stretch of warm washed out shimmer, the slow scrape of strings wrapped in reverb, the record quickly blossoms into a dense layered sprawl of metallic, shimmering strings, all overlapping, and slowly shifting, the overtones drifting in and out, the chords lush and intertwined, the notes occasionally spinning off into the ether, the pace is patient, and serene. At points there are distant melodies played on what sounds like a tiny piano, nearly obscured by a swirl of ethereal glimmering haze, but it seems the strings are the focal point of Crow Autumn, the tracks always seeming to gravitate toward a weightless expanse of suspended strings, plucked, scraped, bowed, the tones stretched out into warm billowy clouds, all very cinematic and dramatic, and strangely repetitive and looped sounding, so evocative of faded memory, of old photographs, of abandoned houses, of sunlight through old yellowed windows, of trees swaying in afternoon breezes, of long walks under grey skies, of sadness, loss, and longing. So beautiful, and heartfelt, and hypnotic.
Essential listening for fans of Leyland Kirby, the Caretaker, William Basinski, the Skelton solo record we reviewed a while back, the last A Broken Consort, and anyone into darkly meditative dream-drift-drone music...
The lo-fi, garagey, psychedelic "Zam Rock" scene that flourished in the southern African nation of Zambia during the mid '70s is now getting some long overdue exposure and appreciation over here, thanks to a bunch of recent reissues: Chrissy Zebby Tembo, Ngozi Family, Witch (highlighted last list) and now, also the lesser known but no less amazing Amanaz! Like Witch its reissue was facilitated by Egon of Stones Throw, who also wrote the liner notes, which make us realize how lucky we are to have these reissues, 'cause the original Zambian LPs are super rare and, Egon says, usually in about the same poor condition as an experienced frisbee. He also helps explain the genesis of the Zam Rock movement, suggesting that Zambia's Socialist government required a preponderance of "Zambian" content on the radio. Apparently the gov't also mandated a high fuzz content as well!
The Amanaz album, from 1975, certainly fulfills that quota, though at first listen we thought that maybe this one was mellower than some of the others like Witch, and parts if it are, in a stoned sorta way, and it's also somewhat more "African" sounding as befits its title, in its rhythms and vocal stylings, with some of the singing doing in the Bembe tongue, though most songs are in English. But still there's quite a supply of heavy fuzz here, with the likes of "History Of Man" being plenty brutal in that dep't. for sure!
And man is it beautiful, full of lovely, lovely grooves in a warm bath of lo-fi hiss and hum, maybe not as gritty as Witch and Ngozi but still gritty enough, and maybe even more memorably groov'd. There's fully a dozen songs here and it's hard to pick highlights, we dig 'em all, somehow so fuzzy yet so gentle, well, not always gentle, like how the otherwise laidback "Nsunka Lwendo" includes a phenomenally LOUD and PIERCING guitar solo, that wanders back and forth from left channel to the right channel, looking for a way to crack into your skull. Meanwhile the sizzling, syncopated "Green Apple" throbs with what almost sounds like a buried Geezer Butler bass line, and the exuberant "Making The Scene" features a part that we swear appears on a Witchcraft album, or close to anyway! Wow. More proof Zam Rock RULES. Recommended!
Sometimes it's easy to take the musicians who live in our city for granted. We see them around all the time, lots of them shop in the store, so the mystique and mystery that you usually have with bands from far away doesn't really exist. So when we found out that our pal Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, Thuja, Blithe Sons) and Joseph Alper (Skygreen Leopards, Whysp) had begun a new off-kilter pop project we were thinking, "cool we're sure it's going to be good", but holy fuck, once we actually put it on we realized it was GREAT! And if we didn't know the folks involved it's the kind of listening experience that would have sent us right to the Internet to Google all the names of the players involved, to figure out who the hell these guys were, and even more importantly, what year this weird pop record was actually from!!
Art Museums use primitive 4-track recording techniques with equally rudimentary drum machines which serve as the perfect tools for their totally endearing, catchy yet understated songs that sounds so innocent and carefree and definitely harken back to the classic C86 days.... For sure looking to The Television Personalities and such as HUGE influences, but borrowing and paying homage to their pop forebears in such an incredibly fresh and vibrant way. These are the kind of songs that just keep growing on you and getting further and further under your skin on repeated listens. Like the best Chris Knox songs or if The Shins went way lo-fi and covered early Guided By Voices. Or Belle and Sebastian getting their XTC on, in like a lone lazy afternoon. Art Museums have created that rare recording, a pop album that is smart and rewarding yet also just so damn fun to listen to. An absolute must have!
The return of East Coast USBM duo Ash Pool featuring Dominick Fernow of Prurient, which is what usually has people expecting something WAY noisier, along the lines of WOLD or Nekrasov or something, a sort of white noise infused with elements of blackness and buzz, but in fact the sound of Ash Pool is way more "poppy" than you might expect, aligning itself with the raw black energy of groups like Akitsa. Ash Pool definitely used to traffic in ultra raw, primitive BM, but on For Which He Plies The Lash, things seem to have taken a turn, with a more polished sound and some distinctly more accomplished songwriting, that includes some awesomely off kilter riffing, and lots of what the fuck weirdness.
Take the opening track "Holocaust Temple", which begins with a killer start/stop lurch, before exploding into full on manic buzz frenzy, but then there's some crooned clean vocals, that remind us of Borknagar, a weird juxtaposition for sure, but it works, it's just totally changes the vibe, as the music and the harsh vox are relentless and almost looped sounding, pounding away. The song shifts gears, and veers into a seriously poppy stretch, with some awesome guitar playing, and crazy catchy melodies, sounding a bit like In Flames gone black metal, and then suddenly, the song grinds to a halt, and they kick out this crazy folky / polka riff, and the songs becomes almost jaunty, the vocals even more maniacal, the bass bloopy and woozy, the whole song a sort of black waltz, before lurching into the home stretch with a blast of venomous black fury. Holy shit, so awesome, and so fucking weird.
And the rest of the record follows suit. "A Sacrifice Consumed By Fire" begins with a hysterical shriek before slipping into a warped doomy lumber, that eventually becomes more and more jagged, and furiously blastingly obtuse. "Big Bang Black Metal" is downright black 'n' roll, with a super rocking groove, and monstrous grunted vox, as well as a tripped out bridge, all Eastern sounding, with a weird temp change and spidery melody.
The whole record is one awesome musical mindfuck, equal parts troo grim heaviness, warped poppiness, sludge doom driven chug, and out there what the fuck, but all deftly woven into one seriously cohesive chunk of fucked up blackness.
And as if to just seal the deal, the record closes with quite the confusional two-fer, the downtuned shriek laden seasick creep of "Moon Rose Over Sobibor", slipping from doomic lumber, to stuttery chug and back again, before finishing off with the oddly titled "On The Rings Of Saturn Adam And Eve Conceive Cain" which is mostly a filthy slab of midtempo grimness, oh except for that one part where the song cuts out suddenly, leaving a weird, swirly sci-fi organ driven pound, which then underpins the next stretch of soaring majestic riffage, before the band finally leap back into the fray, finishing off with a stretch of frantic frenzied freaked out heaviness.
Fucking awesome stuff. And definitely not where we expected Ash Pool to head next, but these guys just keep getting better and better, and we're pretty sure For Which He Plies The Lash is probably gonna be a contender for black metal record of the year...
Last list we reviewed a dvd from a 'group' called Author & Punisher, a one man industrial doom band, whose sole member, Tristan Shone, designed and fabricated an incredible array of massive sound generators: a 300 pound spinning metal disc, a huge hydraulic handled chain driven (and seriously physical) drum machine, a motorized handled bass generator, a headgear with a multi mic'd mask, to transform vocals into different sounds and rhythms... We were mesmerized by the footage, the sound was amazing, heavy and crushing, totally intense, but watching this guy, physically create and trigger the sounds, is what sealed the deal, an brutal and exhausting 'performance', a sweat soaked, instrumental work out, way more interesting than the legion of boring floorcore laptoppers and effects jockeys. That said, most of us tend to not re-watch videos, whereas records we'll spin over and over again. So we figured it would definitely be worthwhile to track down a proper record from A&P, and here it is.
The title says it all, Drone Machines, not to mention the front cover image of A&P maestro Shone, hunched over the huge spinning metal disc. So if you picked up the dvd, you know what sort of crushing sonic punishment you're in for, and if you missed out on that dvd completely somehow, then this is your chance to get introduced to A&P's churning, chugging, pummeling low end industrial doom crush.
Purely sonically, these sounds could have been played by a band, or created on a computer, but just realizing that it's one guy, and his army of sound generators, definitely adds something to the listening experience. Plus there's also plenty of weird sonic manipulation that could NOT be played by a band, thick bass tones slow down like someone pressing their finger down on a record while it's playing, that would be that massive disc, the booming percussion, involves a slamming of the huge chain driven hydraulic handle, hearing this, picturing that, makes it sound that much heavier, but screw it, taken on music alone, the sound of Drone Machines is classic post industrial metal crunch, but twisted and a little warped, a more robotic and machine-like Godflesh maybe, the tone and timbre definitely owes much to Broadrick's industrial beast. But then the record will offer up some weird buzzing almost synthy sounding bass, and weird high end tangles, strange haunting melodies swirling around, a totally tripped out psychedelic swirl, and we're in some far out sonic sci-fi universe, before it gives way to another stretch of lurching lumbering Teutonic pound. The vocals, when there are vocals, are gruff and howled, again harkening back to Broadrick, and add some serious menace to the already sonically menacing proceedings.
The best parts for us are the parts where the sound sources become obvious, or at least where you can tell something weird and special is going on, the swooping low end, constantly changing pitch, the various sounds becoming clipped or cut off, the grinding rumbling low end speeding up then slowing down, it makes the whole experience that much more warped and tripped out and psychedelic. The music becomes more than a chunk of industrial metal, it becomes a heaving metallic monster MADE from industrial metal, the various gears and servos emitting strange buzzes and whirrs, its thunderous footsteps the booming beat, the speaker rattling low end it's guttural growl, and the howling vox, the man that commands this beast, and instructs it to do his bidding, a futuristic steampunk, post industrial robotic doom metal dirge, that we just can't get enough of!
Autodigest might be best known around these parts for their confusing, and amusing, and to many wholly irritating record A Compressed History of Everything Ever Recorded, Vol. 2: Ubiquitous Eternal Live, which was essentially an entire record of applause, the cheering and clapping and whooping and hollering, from before and after various performances, all woven into an hour long 'piece'. In some weird way, the concept did actually become something almost listenable, a sort of strangely textured and dynamic bit of weirdo dronemusic. So we were pretty excited to hear this latest in Autodigest's Compressed History series, this one purporting to contain "Every Bootleg Ever Recorded"! The liner notes on the tape elaborates: "The Music on this cassette spans over 40 years and was originally recorded on analogue and digital equipment. We have attempted to distance ourselves as much as possible from the sound of the original recordings. Autodigest Volume 4 is an attempt to reveal all limitations of the source tapes."
And so what we initially imagined as some insane plunderphonic cacophony of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Seger and the Doobie Brothers and Hall & Oates reveals itself as something more akin to their applause record, or even more appropriately, Reynols' Blank Tapes record. As Autodigest have collected what sounds like the leaders, and the almost blank spaces between songs, the left over tape at the end of recordings, and woven them into a swirling abstract wash of hiss and whir, laced with little fragments of actual music, buried voices, muffled melodies, layered barely there rhythms, everything seems to be way off in the distance, and while there does seem to be full on rocking going on here and there, it's rendered nearly unrecognizable, buried beneath a haze of crackle and buzz, layer after layer after layer of tape hiss.
The 'music' in this Compressed History definitely benefits from headphones. In the store or on the stereo, these sounds might tend to bleed and dissipate, blend into the sounds of daily life, but with headphones, it's a total minimal psychedelic abstract spectral sound headtrip, until the very end of side one, when the murky sonic clouds clear and a voice calls out from the stage "Awwww, for fuck's sake, stop letting off fireworks and shouting and screaming, I'm trying to sing a song..."
The flip side begins with a flurry of shouting, and caterwauling from the stage, which begins crystal clear but quickly dissolves into another hissy buzzy swirl of abstraction and absence, a gorgeously textured sprawl consisting of the sounds that lurk between the sounds, not just tape hiss this time, recordings of muted muffled rocking, recorded from what sounds like the dressing room beneath the stage, the B-side much more dense and dark and noisy, like some fucked up field recording (which it pretty much is), but still shot through with random voices, shards of music, bits of sirens, distant shouts, and all the other mostly non musical detritus of a surreptitiously captured live recording. Quite cool, if not entirely musical enough for most folks, but most aQuarians into far out found sounds will definitely dig this.
For some reason this one is limited to ONLY 100 COPIES!!! So grab one while you can...
Another often overlooked ambitious album in the amazing career of producer/arranger/musical mastermind David Axelrod. Unlike the orchestrated and conceptual records he made earlier in his career, this 1975 album is all about the totally deep and funky jazz. Very much an album of its time, this is some over the top fusion jazz-funk action that definitely has its moments but can get very very wanky. That said, there are plenty of moments that you could imagine J Dilla sampling, or snippets that would fit so perfectly on the Beastie Boys record Pauls Boutique. Kind of like a 70's cop show meets porno soundtrack vibe. If you don't have any David Axelrod in your music collection (which you should remedy post haste!) this isn't necessarily the place to start. Try, Songs Of Innocence or the great collection The Edge: David Axelrod At Capitol Records 1966-1970, as those really capture the true genius and innovation of Axelrod. But for those who want to dig deeper into his sound or just have a sweet soft spot for this era in all its funky weirdness then we say why not go seriously deep?
Yet another incredible collection of far out sights and sounds from the folks at Bad Acid. Everything from sludge to doom to psych to stoner rock to noise to weird jazz to fractured electronics to post rock and pretty much every stop in between. Rumor is that Bad Acid might be shifting to a monthly release schedule, which is certainly fine with us, but considering how much stuff is jammed into each Tab, we have no idea how these guys will be able to pull it off. But here's hoping, cuz not only is every issue loaded with tons of mp3s and videos and live performances from bands we already love, but also included are tons of bands we'd never even heard of before, many of which end up being be big time favorites.
This time around, the audio compilation includes tracks from Gnod, Harvey Milk, Oxbow, Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, Moss, 5ive, Berkowitz Lake & Dahmer, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Zu, Btong, Skull Defekts, Burmese, Cadaver Eyes, Pendo, L'Otracina, Enablers, Outrageous Cherry, Millions, Kenji Siratori, A Fashionable Disease, and that's just the bands we know, there are FORTY FIVE other bands!!! The dvd features Bay Area stoner stalwarts Acid King, as well as a whole mess of mostly new to us bands, offering up promo videos, live sets as well as animation and other visual weirdness. There's also a label sampler included on the disc, and then there's still the printed magazine! A thick dvd sized booklet, overflowing with interviews and articles and features and reviews, with most of the bands featured on the dvd as well all the notes for the artists included on the dvd (both the audio and video portion). Easily one of the most amazing resources for tripped out weird underground and independent music, and for discovering new bands, or even for actually finally hearing bands you'd always wondered about, it's a big ol' earful, and an eyeful, so best to set aside some serious listening / reading time, and just dive in. After all, since they might be bumping up their schedule, you might only have the next 30 days to make it through all this Bad Acid before you have Tab 9 to contend with...
One of our favorite records from this Philly drone / drug / psych ensemble, available again on lp, this time with a bonus track, and a cd version bundled with the lp...
Bufo Alvarius, originally released in 1995, was Bardo Pond's first, and some (us for example) might argue, still their best, completely tripped out, hazy sonic sedatives administered in the form of blown out space psych bliss, the guitars not so much riffing as expelling thick undulating sheets of warped fuzz, the drums, loose and propulsive, driving the songs, but not rigidily, the flute fluttering throughout, like melodic flecks floating in a swirling sonic sea of bongwater, the band do occasionally come together, and briefly sound like a super loose spaced out slowed down Stooges, but even then they stumble and meander, lurch and lumber, staggering druggily through clouds of spectrascopic sonic splutter, eventually exploding into full on effects drenched meltdown, managing to sound heavy and dense and trippy, but still totally dreamy and mesmerizing.
A few tracks get all jangly, and the band sound like Pavement covering Spacemen 3, while extremely high, the female vocals are doused in reverb and echo and delay, and they drift ghostlike through woozy whirling fields of tangled psychedelic guitar freakout, the whole band seemingly on the verge of total collapse, this record a document of a group teetering gloriously on the edge. When the band rock, they rock hard, and sound a bit like Loop, albeit a whole lot more loose, that same sort of psychedelic hypno-drug-rock, but in the hands of Bardo Pond, those moments never last, instead, what could be a driving super heavy rocker, tends again, to crumble, and collapse, into a stumbling druggy psych dirge of swirling sweet crooned female vox, pounding off kilter drumming, a tangled knot of corruscated guitar buzz, everything wrapped in a thick cloak of grimy, gritty fuzzed out whirr. It really doesn't get heavier, or trippier or more psychedelic than this. Take the nearly half hour track "Amen", a single track, but essentially an entire bonus record, a fantastically OUT ambient sprawl of impressionistic psychguitar, bleary free noise, and druggy dreamlike ambience, the sort of blown out abstraction most current bands couldn't pull off if their lives depended on it.
This recent reissue tacks on a bonus track, the groovy woozy jangly "Fixed", that begins all strummy and soft focus, before the drums kick in hard, the vocals serene and sweet, backed up by a wall of churning psychedelia, softy strummed clean guitar, and of course haunting spectral flute. So good.
Way recommended, easily one of our all time favorite modern psych records, and to all those folks into the new breed of psychedelic space rock: White Hills, the Heads, Gnod, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged... You NEED this!
NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE! With TWO bonus tracks, not on the lp...
First long player from Bare Wires, a band best known around these parts for being the OTHER band of the guy from Snake Flower 2, whose recent full length knocked us on our asses with its wild hybrid of distorted garage rock and drone-y druggy FX drenched space rock. Bare Wires are a whole different beast, less heavy, less spacey, but way more poppy, and garage-y, and thankfully equally as catchy. Where SF2 reminded us of a garage rock Hawkwind or Monster Magnet, Bare Wires are all classic garage and power pop, but with just enough of that modern warp-age to keep it interesting.
Record opener "Artificial Clouds" pretty much sets the tone, and in the process, sets itself up as another contender for jam of the year, total tripped out effects wrapped around some seriously rocking lo-fi twisted garage noise pop, with some incredible guitar parts and a main hook to die for. A record full of tracks like this should have Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys and the rest of that crowd sweating it big time. And that's exactly what this is, hooky, jangly, melodic, frenetic, catchy as fuck, a little spacey and druggy for sure, but way more heavy on the classic power pop and sixties garage jangle, which is just fine by us!
Another blast of killer garage-y power pop from Oakland's Bare Wires, whose lp Artificial Clouds we raved about a while back (which was reissued on TAPE, and is reviewed elsewhere on this list) and which just so happens to be the work of the same guy behind Snake Flower 2, who were responsible for one of our favorite records of the last few years...
Anyway, these two short sharp bursts of jangle and twang are total sunshine-y old school power pop, sounding like they were transported straight from the early eighties, heck the late seventies, these two jams could just as easily have come off one of those Yellow Pills comps, Dwight Twilley Band, The Only Ones, the Nerves, The Flamin' Groovies, the Diodes, gone is much of the garagey grit and grime, although the sound is still rough around the edges, but both tracks here sound totally classic and vintage. Bouncy and hooky, jangly and catchy, killer guitar melodies, dreamy vocals, the B side is even poppier, with a distinctly sixties pop vibe, super stripped down, still jangly, revved up a bit it could be a lost Ramones Bside, but strip it even further down and it's some classic jukebox jam. So awesome. Surprised Bare Wires (and Snake Flower 2 for that matter), haven't yet been pegged as the next big thing. We can't imagine that time is very far off though...
Latest slab of sprawling outsider minimal ambient sludge doom drone from this (now) duo, fronted by none other than Campbell Kneale, he of Birchville Cat Motel and Our Love Will Destroy The World, but as most of you probably already know, BBA is a whole 'nother beast. A snarling, slow motion, glacial, tarpit, black crawling beast, a sparse, yet still dense assemblage of massive riffing, the riffs themselves doused in crumbling distortion and left to just decay before our ears, only to have another crunching chord wash over us, not so much riffs as long arrangements of massive notes and chords, a forward momentum of nearly nil, these guys create some serious ultra doom, that rivals groups like Moss for sheer sonic weight.
The Witch Must Be Killed is a two sided two parter, the first side begins with a long stretch of near silence, hushed ambient drift, before the band really kick in with a Neurosis-at-16rpm dirge, and calling it a dirge is being generous, it's so slow, it's almost like a soundscape assembled from bits of riff, and occasional crashing drum pound, but the result is intoxicating, gorgeously hazy and blown out and weirdly epic, especially with the addition of a whole other layer of sound, what could be distant waiting vox, or another high end guitar, or some sort of noisemaker, but what that extra layer does is add some serious pathos, tension, what would otherwise be a metallic creep, becomes something totally emotional and intense, like a metal Godspeed crossed with an even more minimal Corrupted, but WAY spaced out, cosmic and otherworldly, more in line with something like Jesu or Nadja, but way heavier, and WAY more metal.
Repetitive, hypnotic, mesmerizing, nearly endless, a sprawling primordial metallic ooze, that envelops and consumes, sucking the listener into a black vortex of minimal metallic sound, the song itself developing slowly, nearly imperceptibly, for it is an actual sound, not just a hodge podge of sounds, a song that fills up nearly two sides, until about halfway through side two, when the band slip into their own sort of Filsofem, a blurred wash of buzz and rumble, of swirling hiss, of smeared effects and black ambience, laced with a haunting melody, played over and over, way off in the distance, partially obscured by the murk, while beneath it strange voices surface and swirl, the guitars smolder and burn, totally gorgeous and weirdly dreamy and otherworldy, as the record dissolves into an extended outro as bleary eared and buzzy as the best Birchville jam, just rendered via big amps and loud blackened guitars. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Sure, spelling errors and grammatical mishaps may (and most likely do) pop up all the time on the aQ website; but we can be certain that we have correctly transcribed the name of Wayne Grim's art-prog project Blakcpullet Grimoire. Admittedly, this is one of the first projects that's come our way from Mr. Grim even though he's been very active in the Bay Area avant-garde scoring films, building installations, performing in countless guises, and appearing in this production or that. There are a ton of musical ideas splattered throughout Eating Whole Villages, beginning with a heavy, chugging guitar set against the old-school noise a dial-up modem generates, giving the album a Melvins / Mike Patton vibe from the get go. This is followed by a hissing track of noise and static aerations, muddling a delay saturated lecture from Buckminster Fuller captured on cassette. Then, you'll find electronic yawnings of bassbin rattling frequencies, bleeping glitches, and floorscraped noises barely coalescing upon their sparse structure countered by snippets from Kurt Schwitters' seminal sound poem Ursonate. These perpetual detours from track to track continue through the album, which really opens up after the rather claustrophobic beginning into some lovely stripped down acoustic guitar plucking and continues through an expanded passage of stereo-phased amplifier distortion ruptured with controlled attacks on a drum kit. Frippertronic styled guitar drones cascade out of the speakers later on as if they were from No Pussyfooting. Contemplative and enveloping, it's hard to imagine this as the same record, the end so far removed from the opening corroded heavy sounds. Confounding yes, but certainly rewarding!
Imagine a blackened, funereal dooooooom band like Skepticism or Nortt morphed into the jazz idiom (after having kissed a frog, or some fairytale scenario like that), playing their slow, sad music in a smoky Berlin jazz club. The sound is jazz (electric piano, organ, vibes, sax, double bass, trap kit...) but the feeling is doom. That's our usual shorthand for describing the unique music made by longtime AQ fave, Germany's Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. Here at last is their eagerly anticipated 5th album, Dolores (not named after the San Francisco street near us, presumably). If you're fans like we are, you know what to expect, it's just as ponderously "heavy" as a "jazz" band can be. No, not loud, not harsh, not noisy. The opposite of all that. Rather, whisper-quiet, glacially slow, and spacious, with sparse snare hits keeping time like a wound-down clock ticking off the eternity between 2 minutes to midnight and the witching hour itself. Doomsday so slowly arrives on a velvety bed of somnolent deep bass notes, and the cool slinky tones of vintage Fender Rhodes. Cymbals shiver in a dark haze of ambient drones near to silence. Several of the songs are infused with the warmth of tenor or baritone sax breathes gorgeous expiring breaths. It's all so sad and woeful and achingly beautiful, Bohren nodding off, their fragile melodies trickling like tears, and by the end you may find you have shed a few too.
This newest Bohren differs mainly from their previous Ipecac outing Geisterfaust by being composed of somewhat shorter, sweeter tracks, ten in all, in about an hour. But it is, again, an-ever-more-perfected example of why Bohren is one of our all time favorite bands, especially at twilight and late at night...
Just as we expected, and certainly hoped, the fact that the Phoenix label reissued the freaky '70s Japanese psych artifact by Karuna Khyal (their album Alomoni 1985, highlighted here a few lists ago) meant that Brast Burn and their lone album Debon from 1975 was sure to follow. And now here it its, another rare record originally released on the extremely underground Voice label, the work of a mysterious avant-psych entity that may or may not have shared more of less the same membership as Karuna Khyal. Very similar to that band's record, this one also consists of two sprawling side-long tracks, that seem designed to demonstrate that Japanese hippies can could play primal "krautrock" too. Both tracks situate fairly mellow grooves amidst droning, heavily effected weirdness, with vocal chanting, ceremonial hand percussion, acid rock guitar spew, raw flute soloing, tape manipulated field recordings, rumbling drums, buzzing electronics, Twilight Zone melodies, and other good stuff making significant appearances in the freeform stew... it's very "Eastern", quite insane, and totally enjoyable.
If you liked the Karuna Khyal, you'll like this too. Also any fan of Acid Mothers Temple, Ghost, or other modern day Japanese psych would be remiss not check this out, we'd be surprised if it wasn't to be found in Kawabata Makoto and Masaki Batoh's record collections. Furthermore, without even checking, we're pretty sure this is the sort of thing that must be on the famous Nurse With Wound "list"... ok, we looked, it's there! Of course. And speaking of lists, it's #26 on Julian Cope's Japrocksampler Top 50, by the way (the Karuna Khyal was #19).
In the usual "wallet" style Phoenix cd packaging, limited to 1000 numbered copies.
Hailing from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Catholicon spent roughly 15 years cranking out their own blend of blackened brutality before calling it quits last year. The band definitely existed within the realm of black metal, but that's only part of the equation. Not surprisingly, given their origins, you get a nice healthy dose of misanthropic hardcore sludge, Southern style, as well as some early Earache styled death and grind. And there's more, like plenty of spaced out synths and a dark electronic influence at times, none of which gets in the way of Catholicon's blasphemous metallic fury. So basically, there is nothing NOT to like here.
Of Ages Past serves as a nice summary for this prolific band, and the bonus audio dvd collects all the band's demos as well as some live recordings, unreleased tracks, and rehearsal tapes. The musicianship is spot on, everyone slays, but thankfully no one ever tries to grandstand. Instead, the band sounds like a dangerous metal machine intent on total destruction. At times, they're super burly and doomy sounding with vocals ranging from death metal barks to black metal shrieking. Everything is downtuned and sludgy sounding but often performed in the manner of early Carcass or Bolt Thrower, or maybe even Discharge if they gave it all up to Satan, but with a definite American vibe. The winding riffs are lumbering and hypnotic, and there are even some surprises, like in "Land Beyond The Stars", where an almost Middle Eastern sounding synth melody gives you an idea of what Omar Souleyman might sound like if he had been influenced by Burzum. Haha, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but you get the point: the band wasn't afraid to go at it by their own rules. Obviously, this is a good thing. Throughout it all, Catholicon just fucking rocks and will keep you headbanging into the next morning for sure. Highly recommended.
Whenever we hear some pounding death metal, or blasting thrash metal, sometimes even some grim black metal, the one thing that occasionally wears on us is the non-singing vocals, whether they be gurgling cookie monster vocals, or hysterical hellish shrieks, or demonic grunts, we sometimes can't help but wonder how much cooler the band would sound with an ACTUAL singer.
So the other night we heard this blasting thrashing heaviness, which sounded pretty damn good, somewhere right between classic Maiden styled power metal, and something much more thrashy and aggressive and extreme, and then the vocals came in and we were knocked out, totally soaring classic clean metal vocals, actual singing, like Maiden or Judas Priest, which is a particularly apt comparison as the vocalist in question turned out to be none other than Tim 'Ripper' Owens, who did once front Priest, but is now fronting the awesomely titled Charred Walls Of The Damned, definitely his best gig in ages.
But there's more weirdness to the story of CWOTD... Drummer Richard Christy, who has played in a million bands, including Iced Earth, Incantation, Death, Control Denied, and the pitbull fronted death metal band Caninus(!), had pretty much given up music for comedy, and eventually ended up on the Howard Stern show, where he's become infamous for some seriously fucked up and funny prank calls. Not sure why he decided to start playing again, but he gathered a pretty stellar lineup, with Ripper Owens, bassist Steve Di Giorgio (Sadus, Death, Iced Earth, Testament, Autopsy) and guitarist Jason Suecof (Capharnaum, Evince, and umm, Crotch Duster), and the record these guys have come up with rules. That is if you're into classic metal, Dio, Maiden, Priest, imagine that sort of band, but supercharged, a little heavier, a little faster, with more insane technical shredding, but still super catchy, with epic riffing, blasting drums, that classic eighties metal sound, but updated, although only a little. We're particularly reminded of more modern power metallers like Blind Guardian, or especially Lost Horizon.
Charred Walls Of The Damned is quickly turning into a new favorite, we've never really lost our love for this stuff, and hopefully you haven't either, check out the sound samples, should only take a few seconds for you to figure out if this is for you. Majestic, dramatic, hooky, and super heavy. And thus, absolutely recommended.
Includes a bonus dvd featuring a documentary about the making of the record (which we haven't had a chance to watch yet)...
It would take way more space than we have for this review to list off all the great bands who have been influenced by The Clean over the years. For the sake of brevity we'll just mention off a handful: Yo La Tengo, The Chills, Jay Reatard, R.E.M, Eat Skull, Times New Viking, Woods, Pavement, Sebadoh, the list goes on and on! Since the early '80s this New Zealand band has been crafting totally infectious left of center pop that really helped usher in the sound of "college radio" as we know it.
It's been quite a long while since we last heard from The Clean, yet with Mister Pop there is something so natural and free flowing that it feels like they were never gone. Focusing more on their hazy psychedelic dream pop side, the songs on Mister Pop unfold so easily, yet with a sonic depth that makes you keep going back to them over and over. While it would be so easy for The Clean to just rest on their laurels and dial in a standard reunion album, they instead remind us of why they are the legends they are, and what great songsmiths they were and still are, with an unparalleled ability to not only create hooks and melody but mood and feeling.
This is hardly a new record, but one we had for some reason or another never listed, and now we got it for a nice low price. Coughs (not to be confused with the doom band Cough) were part of Chicago's fertile underground noise rock scene from a few years back, and even though they have long since broken up, it's clear that today's crop of atonal noise mongers could still learn a thing or two. The band whips up a mighty hell of a racket, and people in Chicago still speak of them in somewhat mythical tones. Somehow they were able to merge numerous stylistic influences into something else altogether. Among other things, you will probably react immediately to the crazed female vocals stuck within a downtuned sea of no wave sludge... or something. Craziest of all is how musical it all is, in a scary as fuck, I'm losing my mind kind of way. The opening number, appropriately named "Quagmire", sets the stage for Secret Passage with intense, tom heavy drumming, a buzzing guitar riff, some skronky saxophone and awesome female screaming. "Happy Harvest" lurches forward with some strange riffing that seamlessly shifts from both extremes of the fretboard while super distorted bass rumbles nonstop. There's so much tension in the sound, like the band is just ready to take off into some crazy void, but the rhythm section keeps everything, maybe "grounded" isn't the right word, but at least right in your face where you can't ignore it. The insectoid guitars and the cloud of doominess on songs like "Bunny Slope" conjure up all kinds of disturbing imagery, while the forceful rhythms just can't be denied. It's cool how the songs go to all kinds of unexpected places, clearly the result of a band who had spent plenty of time bashing out improv noise into something that no one else could touch, like on "Intentional Community", which makes use of negative space for a truly disconcerting vibe. This is definitely not metal, but when listening, one can't ignore that Coughs were responsible for a truly unique and brutal attack that many metal bands would kill for. Tough luck for them, though. You either got it or you don't, and anyone who missed this the first time around should do themselves a favor and check it out. Highly recommended.
Bad ass 4 way split featuring some of the current crop of lo-fi garage poppers, all contributing some of the best songs we've heard from any of them.
Up first is the Crocodiles, who start things off with some lo-fi garagey dream pop filtered through some Jesus And Mary Chain fuzz and some classic eighties MTV pop, and the result is so awesome. Like the Fuzztones meets ABC meets Blank Dogs? All druggy and hazy and washed out, with rad buzzy new wave bass synths, swirly keyboards, with an amazing chorus, cleaned up this could have easily been a huge eighties hit, with one of those totally bizarre videos, with random characters playing out insanely convoluted dramas, but as it is, it's more raw and gritty, and blown out, and thus, might be one of our favorite new jams.
The Dum Dum Girls offer up more of what we love and expect from these gals, stripped down and raw, but still super poppy, a little bit K Records, a little new wave, shimmery, shuffle-y, with a looped main riff, a sort of grimey Stooges-y feel but all wrapped up with angelic vocals and some serious pop hooks. Great stuff.
The Pens track is definitely the best thing we've heard from them, a super fuzzy and distorted main riff, pretty vocals, but buried in the murk and mire, some sort of riff heavy girl pop that destroys, the swirling hooks buried under the churning chug, tangled sing songy guitar melodies draped over the top, underpinned by a muted pounding rhythm, super hypnotic and heavy and so goddamn good, the SOUND, is just so irresistible, reminds us of some rad nineties 7" of bedroom brewed lo-fi indie rock, we've literally been listening to this track over and over and over.
We had never heard of Graffiti Island, but they sound right at home with these other three bands, a more kinetic, rough and raw Beat Happening maybe? Mostly cuz of the deep sung / spoken vox, but all over some reverby guitar, one of those sixties tambourine beats and plenty of crunch and buzz and lo-fi haze. So good.
Reissued once more (like many ESP-Disks, constantly going out of and then thankfully back into print), and we are glad to have it back in our racks for sure, since this album is an all-time AQ fave and it's been gone too long. This time around, it's in a digpack with the original black & white version of the cover art, and it's been given its original title of Cave Rock instead of Orgasm. But a freaked out masterpiece by any other name...
Here's the review we first wrote about this when a previous reissued entered our collective Aquarius consciousness some years ago:
Yet another gem we somehow managed to miss, thankfully newly reissued to give us a second chance. (Well, not all of us missed it. Allan had the previously reissued version at one point, and got rid of it somehow. He just wasn't ready for it back then. Now he owns it again!) And a few of our customers have responded with the customary "Oh that record! I love that record. I've had that record for years." So for those of you, like us, managed to somehow miss it, we present to you Cromagnon.
An anomaly, even on the always far out ESP label, Cromagnon was the result of two top 40 songwriters (accustomed to producing bubblegum pop) who seemed to have completely lost their minds. I mean they must have, to produce something as wacked as this record. Austin Grasmere, Brian Elliot, and their mysterious 'Connecticut Tribe' spewed forth 50 minutes of primitive dada-ist folk psych.
Chanting, tribal percussion, short wave radio, maniacal, almost black metal vocals, hysterical laughter, bagpipes all coalesce into something ridiculous and amazing.
Track one "Caledonia" sounds like a strange hybrid of Comus and In Extremo, with bagpipes, jaw harp, crickets, raspy chants and teutonic percussion ("Caledonia" was even covered later by industrialists Test Department, and more recently by Japan's Ghost!). Later on in the record is an alternate version of "Caledonia" from the b-side of the original lp, slowed down to a third of the speed, producing an impenetratable swampy murk. "Ritual Feast of The Libido" features a groaning and moaning vocal over whirring and rumbling machinery. Then comes "Fantasy", where a faux Beach Boys intro almost convinces us that Grasmere and Elliot have returned to their bubblegum roots, that is until it devolves into a messy seven minutes of garbled laughter and clattering percussion. Today this all still seems pretty damn crazy, so back in 1968 when it was recorded it must have really freaked people out, even despite the pervasive drug culture of the time...
So for those of you who aren't already veterans of the Cromagnon experience, and definitely for those of you who were blown away by the Comus, and for everyone who is in need of a new favorite fucked record, this is it. Now, and always, a unanimous AQ fave.
As always, gotta give it up for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. We mention that fecund scene upon occasion, usually in context of saying some current metal band has NWOBHM influences. So it's nice now and then to get a reissue of an actual NWOBHM cult classic to review. In this case, from 1981, the debut album by Dark Star, a band best known for their track "Lady Of Mars", which appears here. That's how we got into Dark Star, hearing that song, it's been on a lot of comps (starting with Metal For Muthas Vol. II), really a brilliant example of anthemic, super catchy, fists-clenched, heavy metal grandeur - and it's a love song too. A few years back Andee took a trip to Japan, the land where albums like this get reissued on compact disc long before they do over here, if ever, and scored copies of this for both himself and Allan (as you can imagine, there was a BIG and potentially expensive list of '80s metal rarities he had to look for, this was towards the top though). Turns out, while "Lady Of Mars" is an obvious stand out, the whole record is a killer piece of melodic hard rockin' British metal, with '70s influences (not so strange considering it was barely the '80s), notably UFO and Thin Lizzy - the majestic "Lady Love", another stand out, certainly has some of the bright galloping glory of classic Lizzy.
With heavy guitar riffs, strong soaring vocals, and plenty of hooks, Dark Star deliver the NWOBHM goods. It's mostly mid paced, and there's some mellow moments... it seems they've got a romantic side, they even have a number called "Rock 'n' Romancin'" (not included here, sadly) and we mentioned that "Lady Of Mars" is a love song already, right? But, as on the Riot-ish "Rock 'n' Romancin'", the rock comes first, and Dark Star rocks out as only a band who would also do an appropriately kickass song called "Rock Bringer" can (which IS included here).
So, now this album has at last been reissued here in the States, so of course we had to list it. Unfortunately, this version omits the bonus tracks from singles that were on that Japanese reish.
Dunno how deep you want your NWOBHM collection to go, but this is a good 'un to get. Worth it for "Lady Of Mars" but also worth it for more than just "Lady Of Mars"!
From the same label that brought us the amazing reissue of Lloyd Miller's A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz comes another killer collection, this one from Nathan Davis, a frustratingly under appreciated musician in the US, whose records for the most part remain out of print, but who in Europe was quite a sensation, performing with Eric Dolphy, Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Johnny Griffin, Sonny Stitt and loads more. This relative obscurity was due in part to Davis' avoidance of the limelight, as well as his early flight to Europe. But he would later return to the US and become a pioneer in Jazz education.
This collection gathers up some of Davis' best tunes, sonically varied, from bop to modal, spiritual jazz, seventies funk, even some ethnic Turkish jazz (which will for sure appeal to fans of that Lloyd Miller), which makes sense as he would become a professor of Ethnomusicology. The first half of the record is totally classic sounding, inspired and emotional, with cool passages of dark mystery butted up against soaring ebullience, as the record progresses, the sounds become more exotic, "A5" is a brooding moody drifter, very haunting and mysterious, with a distinctly 'exotica' feel, "Mandingo's Pad" offers up some gorgeous flute, over languid piano and slippery bass, "Uschimaus" is another flute driven number that sounds like an abstract version of "My Favorite Things", all shuffle-y and serene, "Cecen Kizi" sounds like it could have been taken from a Sublime Frequencies collection, funky and soulful and very Eastern sounding, while "Atlanta Walk" sounds like the soundtrack to a chase scene in a seventies cop show, and the last few tracks follow a similar path, dark and smoldery and funky, barring the record closer, an alternate version of "A5" that's way more raw and dirty, and a bit more sweaty and sultry. Killer stuff for sure. And like the Lloyd Miller, and incredible booklet packed with tons of liner notes, about the tracks, and Davis' life, photos as well, all part of a fantastic, and long overdue introduction to this unsung jazz legend.
Most folks know Jimmy Tamborello as one half of electro poppers The Postal Service, with Ben Gibbard from Death Cab For Cutie, others might remember his electropop outfit Figurine, and a few folks might even recall an emo rock band called Strictly Ballroom, that also featured Mr. Tamborello, but we were first introduced to him via his experimental electronic outfit Dntel, who released a handful of records on the Pthalo label back in the late nineties.
This triple disc collection gathers up two of the long out of print Pthalo releases, as well as a whole other disc of song sketches and unreleased tracks.
Something Always Goes Wrong was originally slated to be released on some Japanese boutique techno label in 1994 as a concept record about "our hero and his arduous journey." (?) The presence of swords, damsels, and an evil king kept this concept album outside of the realm of Sci-Fi - the genre of choice for techno boffins doing concept albums. Something... was a blatantly romantic piece of electronic abstraction which nuzzled itself right in between early '90s legends of electronica in Reload, Biosphere, and chill-out king, The Orb. Lots of processed skitter, stuttering big beats, and warm washes of dreamlike sound. Hard not to also hear plenty of Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin, as well as hints of what Tamborello would be doing later with the Postal Service, although this stuff is obviously more homebrewed and a bit more low fidelity, which is in no way a bad thing. The original release tacked on two remixes, both present here, as well as two totally unreleased tracks exclusive to this collection.
When it was first released, back in 1998, we described Early Works For Me If It Works For You as "one of the catchiest IDM-based electronica records in the last long while, bringing pop hooks full of tinkling little melodies to the digital swoop and skitter of deconstructed Amen breaks, spasmodic algorithms, and powerbooking electrocrunch." We also recommended it to fans of Lesser, Reload and Aphex Twin and it still pretty much holds true. This stuff still sounds vibrant and crucial, and only a little bit dated, but not at all in a bad way, in fact, we've really missed this era of electronic music, and this is totally hitting the spot.
The bonus disc here, Early Works For Me If It Works For You II, as mentioned above, is a collection of sketches and unfinished works, and is way more raw than the other two discs, but that doesn't mean it's not super cool, skittery and bloopy, woozy melodies, drifty and droney, plenty of glitch and crunch, but also some acoustic guitar (definitely foreshadowing the Postal Service again), processed vox, intense drones, dreamy washed out synth drifts, all of it very warm and muted and sun dappled and dreamy, gorgeous stuff, even in their unfinished state.
Fans of that era, of Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, who somehow missed out on Dntel, will be in for a surprise, and folks who love the Postal Service, might be excited to hear what came before. Us, we're just digging these sounds, this retro, stuttery, swoonsome, electronic dream pop, amazed that it still sounds so goddamn good. Killer packaging too, a massive 8 panel digipak, full color on black, with some fancy reflective spot varnish filigree.
Eccentric outsider doom metal from the '80s, from waaaaaay down underground. Now hold up, if the words "doom" or "metal" make you think, not for me, think again (maybe). This isn't like any metal you've ever heard, really. More like spaced out '60s heavy psychedelic guitar rock (one song's called "Heavy Vibrations", man), overloaded also with shrill synth symphonics and trippy effects... That's where the "outsider" tag comes in, Dwarr being a one-man band, all the work of South Carolina multi-instrumentalist (but especially guitar!) Duane Warr (hence the name Dwarr), whom we get the impression is quite a character. It's so DIY that the cds have his phone number on 'em, in case you want to get in touch. His privately pressed music comes off like a cough-syrup dosed mixture of Black Sabbath and Todd Tamanend Clark (whom you should know from the double cd anthology we raved about a few years ago). Or, The Happy Dragon Band playing Pink Floyd, from beyond the grave. Maybe a lo-fi Captain Beyond, on even more drugs than Captain Beyond were ever on. Or imagine if Bobb Trimble was an '80s metaller, perhaps (and worked out in the gym a lot more?). Sorry to use so many almost equally obscure references, but it's hard to compare this confusional beast to anything else.
Look at that insane cover painting, a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape (that's a malevolent-looking Statue of Liberty sunken in polluted looking water next to a cave populated by long-haired, skull-faced cannibalistic mutants, with an avatar of Dwarr himself, we're guessing, striking a heroic he-man pose in the upper right hand corner). The music itself is as surreal and apocalyptic and ridiculous as that image, matching up to it much more than most other "metal" albums ever match up to their cover art, both in subject matter and, ah, execution.
Just from the cover painting, let alone the music, this Dwarr album is SO perfectly Aquarius, you'd almost think we made it up. But no, Dwarr's for real, something we'd vaguely heard tell of and been curious about for years, and finally went to the trouble of tracking down (not so hard, thanks to the Internet, now that everybody and their grandmother's bands are on MySpace). And lo and behold, it turned out Dwarr had issued ALL four of his albums (two from the '80s, two from the '00s, believe it or not!) on compact disc. So we had to get a bunch of this one, his second, from 1986, probably his best and "heaviest". A Record Of The Week, easy.
There's 13 tracks, each one incredible (or incredibly strange). There's nothing that's NOT freaked out about this. Even the poppiest songs (like the title track "Animals") are full of sluggish grooves, druggy lyrics, buzzing electronics, melodic stoned vocals, acid rock guitar (and acid WTF synth). Elsewhere it gets away from rock/metal song structure entirely, with interludes of eerie atmospherics, spacey soundscapes overlaid with ominous whispered declamations, and weirdass instrumentals, like the squirrelly, proggy bombast of "Chocolate Mescalyne", a track that if you sped it up a lot would almost fit in on a Orthrelm album.
And then there's the DOOM. Oh yeah, while it's not "normal" doom it IS doom. Sludgy, Sabbath-riffed doom indeed, despite the trebly production. "Ghost Lover", for instance, gives us the feel of both the Sabs' "Iron Man" and "Electric Funeral", and Duane's vocals are particularly Ozzy-ish on the uber-heavy "Evil Lures" too... Great stuff if you really really appreciate the stranger, more psychedelic aspects of true doom artistry, the spirit is HERE.
Three cheers for avant garde new wave downer rock hippie heavy metal weirdness! That gives special thanks "to the Columbia High School Band for the use of their percussion instruments". We are so pleased to play a role in sharing this culter than cult classic with you, which by the way comes in fairly no-frills packaging, the cd in a thin cardboard sleeve with full-color album art front and back but no lyrics, liner notes, nothin' like that. It's pretty cheap though. Not that you should need any further incentive to pick this up, after reading our ravings above...
This one pretty much floored us when we first put it on. Track one, "Tourniquet", begins quietly, with a droning sound swelling up slowly, so we didn't expect the shocking outburst of sick fuzz that then erupts, the rest of the song alternating between distorted, disjointed riffs and gentler melodic parts. Its unhinged freakiness immediately made us think of Michael Yonkers' similarly crazed Microminiature Love album, a total genius AQ fave. So what the heck is this? The mysterious trio of Damin Eih, A.L.K. and Brother Clark (from Minneapolis, just like Yonkers) made this wonderfully twisted psychedelic rock record in 1973, privately releasing it into almost total obscurity and eventual psych-rock collector dreams. But thank the reissue gods, it's been deservedly rescued from oblivion and boy howdy is it ever something that we're happy to hear and we think you'll be happy about it too.
The eleven tracks feature fragile vocal melodies, delicate 12-string strum, weird trippy lyrics (telling you to "take off your eyes, lie down in your head" or chanting "world is ridiculous" over and over), and a few further doses of that aforementioned totally sick fuzz guitar (which doesn't really return in full force until the final track). Most of the album is fairly spaced out, the many mellower songs all delightfully druggy, dreamy, drifty... there's really some quite lovely stuff on here, in keeping with the trio's obvious interest in Eastern mysticism and inner mind trips. Furthermore, for an apparently underground DIY production, it's actually rather ambitious and accomplished, with effective vocal harmonies, electronic embellishments, ethnic instruments, and other interesting orchestration. Stuff like the Beatles' "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" sounds like an influence... as does that song's obvious inspiration too.
Along with Yonkers, another AQ fave we could compare this to would be the Alice Cooper Band's psychedelic debut Pretties For You... but more surreal and subversive. Alice, even in his later shock-rock showman guise, would have shied away from lyrics like "rape and kill your parents or the blacks, and if you're one of those you can rape and kill the others back", a line found here in the deviant blues rocker "Return Naked" that ends this album with tour-de-force of really warped hippie-punk attitude and ultra-distorted, rubbery megafuzz riffage (the idea behind the song, we think, being about how the war is over in Vietnam, so now what?).
Never Mind is an album that's also possessed of the same lost and lysgeric vibe we got from another early '70s private press rarity reissued a while back, Stone Harbour's Emerges. And '80s psych savant Bobb Trimble could be another good comparison in parts ("Thundermice" in particular). Oh, and if you're gonna get the Dwarr reissue we made record of the week, this would make a good companion purchase, though despite some heavy moments it's not in any way metal, it still seems to share some of the same outsider DNA, this is possibly what Dwarr would have sounded like in '73 instead of '86...
Sadly, this digipack contains no liner notes to speak of, just recording credits, too bad 'cause we're sure there's quite a story behind and beyond this album, from what we've been able to glean from other sources about main member Damin Eih vanishing to India not long after this was originally released.
One of two new Tapeworm cassettes on this week's list, the other being the truly strange Autodigest recording of 40 years of bootleg recordings, and then there's this, the latest from Swedish artist Leif Elggren, who has consistently delighted and baffled us with recordings that ranged from totally confusional high concept ultra minimalism, to gorgeous dark dronemuic, to full on NOISE, not to mention lots of writings and art projects, the most infamous being the creation of the 'imaginary' country, he dubbed the Kingdoms Of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV), a country which just so happens to have Elggren as its king!
All Animals Are Saints is a collection of live recordings, the first of which is called "The Life Of The Plants" which features Elggren discussing experiments that found scientists placing electrodes and various recording devices on plants to record their electrical fields, resulting in, a series of strange glitched out minimal soundscapes, which pepper Elggren's talk. A staticky sound field of muted grinding rumbles, stuttery clicks and scrapes, fluttery bits of low end, a distinct drone component, lots of hiss and shimmer, and subtly swooping effects and glitches. As Elggren's story about the experiments continue, the scientists introduce stress into the plants' lives resulting in sounds that are much more abrasive, more rhythmic, a dense cloud of skittery streaks of high end and crackling sheets of skree. Hard to say if we're meant to believe the veracity of Elggren's storytelling, there are plenty of sound artists who have explored the electrical output of plants, or if it's just another high concept art piece, either way it's quite entertaining, and the sounds are definitely fantastic.
The piece on the B-side is called "Swedenborg's Organ", and again begins as a talk, about a man called Swedenborg, from the 1700's, a musician, a writer, Elggren 'plays' a recording of someone playing Swedenborg's organ, the sound of creaking floorboards, squeaks and moans, thumps and rumbles, precedes a truly haunting, seriously fucked up stretch of slowly unfurling, totally abstract, sort-of-organ music, it's hard to describe, notes moan and wheeze, partial melodies crumble in slow motion, a stumbling, lurching, slow motion, minor key lament, very reminiscent of the recordings of Gurdjieff, but with the addition of those never ending creaks and groans, it's very much like a busted organ being played on a rickety old pirate ship, and sounds very much like something Nurse With Wound could have conjured up!
Like all Tapeworm stuff, extremely limited, this one TO JUST 250 COPIES!!!
Owen Pallett (aka Final Fantasy) has a musical resume that's pretty mind-blowing. Besides several of his own albums he's also provided strings and arrangements for an incredible and varied list of bands including: Beirut, The Hidden Cameras, The Pet Shop Boys, Arctic Monkeys, Immaculate Machine, Grizzly Bear, Fucked Up, Holy Fuck, Stars, The Mountain Goats and Mika. Among others! It's no wonder everyone wants Pallett to play on their records as he's really one of the most sophisticated arrangers and string players of the modern pop world. Someone who is able to bring such rich depth and warmth to the songs he works on.
So busy collaborating and guesting on other people's records its been almost four years since he's released a full length of his own, and while he has offered up a few ep's since then, the release of Heartland really marks a defining moment in his own musical output. By far his most assured, ambitious and cohesive album yet. Heartland is fully realized nuanced orchestral pop. You can hear the influence of 20th century composers, film scores, Arthur Russell, and even David Sylvian. This is what a darker and more brooding Hidden Cameras would sound like, or Sufjan Stevens arranged by Nico Muhly. With the success and acclaim that Grizzly Bear received last year for their great album Veckatimest we hope and think that Pallett has created an album worthy of those same accolades. Wonderful!
Sometimes we need to hear the kind of music that just lets us float away. Away from our stress, problems, thoughts, anxiety, etc. Fuqugi have made the perfect record for those times, when you just need to be lifted off, freed to drift and daydream, with a breeze of sound that feels like it's drifting down from the sky and lifting you up to hover in soft comforting clouds.
Hailing from southern Japan, Fuqugi is the work of Daiki Sakae, who uses his guitar with elegance and patience, to create majestic sounds that conjure images of soft waves, gray skies and and that special moment in-between being awake and asleep. At times running his guitar through delay and layers of effects but always with such a tender touch. We're reminded a lot of early Durutti Column as well as Robin Guthrie and the moods created by Harold Budd. In face Gransofa + Nightingale reminds us quite a bit of the amazing collaboration that Budd and Guthrie created on their score to the excellent film, Mysterious Skin. These songs have such an amazing languid quality, never beating you over the head with an emotion yet always slowly taking you to such comforting and mournful states of being. We also hear a kindred spirit evoked by Fuqugi's sounds in the new solo outing by Danny Paul Grody, as they both conjure up such a blissed out state, infused with a patience and restraint that pays off in the form of an ever shifting cloud of hushed dreamlike sound. If Kompakt were ever to make a Pop Ambient record dedicated to folks who use guitar more then electronics then we think Fuqugi could be the star of that album. Highly recommended!
We first heard about these guys via the awesome Hammer Smashed Sound blog, described as "black rituals for the vastness-appreciative", the band listing their influences as "Movement of woods, rocks, plants & nature as such - plus the vastness of it all. Abyssal fear, fire, wholeness, monolithic things, megaliths, human insignificance, occult systems of cosmology & meaning, open systems of cosmology & meaning, clean violence, swift violence, enlightenment..." PLUS there's the fact that this, their debut record, came housed in a hand crafted leaf encrusted wooden sleeve, so we were pretty much already sold. Thankfully, their blackened sonic rituals more than live up to those obtuse and abstract descriptors, and the stunning packaging.
Black ambience might be too reductive when trying to describe Hadewych's mysterious soundworld, but it's a start. Occultic, ritualistic, grim, mysterious, haunting, all of the tracks here exist in some sort of moonlit nether region, the whole record some sort of fantastic journey, rendered in abstract sound, huge heaving swells of dense drone, muted pits of abstract percussion, softly crumbling bits of ambient whir, the sounds clipped and layered and assembled into lumbering skeletal rhythms, deep processed vocals, intoning some strange prayer, while a bleak black melody plays out in the background, and some super freaky demonic vocals surface, belch out some wordless filth, before splintering and collapsing back into the swirling blackness below.
Dense walls of SUNNO)))-ish rumble dissolve into some skittery almost-electronica, wrapped around more of those freaky belchy vocals, and some shimmery choral vocals overhead, before the record switches gears, and sprawls into some softly glitched pop ambience, all shimmer and drift and hover, laced with haunting strings and whispered vox buried in the mix, chimes ring out, voices are stretched out into warm whirling sun dappled streaks of sound, layered acoustic guitars explode into squalls of blown out psychedelia, infused with intercepted radio broadcasts, a woozy washed out cloud of lumbering crunch and majestic soft noise, only to dissipate into another sprawling bit of rhythmic ambience, with warm soft focus guitars drifting over skittery electronics, and more hushed vox, giving way to a blown out, muffled in-the-red black folk drone, the notes and chords so saturated they sound almost percussive, and the more you listen, the more the various sounds ooze and blend and bleed into one.
Lilting echo drenched folk leads us toward the end of our journey, atonal and buzzy, the steel strings soon fade out, leaving a gorgeous low end stretch of looped and layered tones, a sort of murky minimal pulse, haunting and ominous, and totally hypnotic, a quick burst of clatter and crunch leads us into a field of dense harmonium drone, hissing and wheezing, a gloriously textured expanse of warm whirs, peppered with strange field recordings, the crunch of footsteps, the panting of panicked breathing, which finally leads us to the black path, leading to an emptiness in the center of the black forest, the sound emanating from that void a deep rib cage rattling rumble, shot through with bits of glitch and hiss, and long streaks of some mysterious reverbed rasp, tendrils of feedback, fragments of melody, the shimmer of vibrating steel strings, tolling bells, all gradually blurred into blackness. So intense. Epic and cinematic, like the score to a life lived beneath the looming shadows of the great black oaks, or the soundtrack to a doomed expedition to the underworld, mysterious and evocative, and so so hauntingly beautiful.
LIMITED TO ONLY 165 COPIES, housed in a red felt lined handmade wooden case, with four double-sided cards, the whole thing packed in incense-dried Norway maple leaves. Wow.
Prepare yourself to to melt! This is one of our all time favorite records. Dripping with sensual seduction and a slow burn that always whisks us away, up into the clouds in such a stunning lush and wonderful way. La Question displays a side of Francoise Hardy that is often overlooked. While she is best known for the super fun and catchy ye-ye hits she delivered in the '60s, it's records like La Question (1971) that really show off the enchanting presence and mysterious qualities that truly make her one of the most enigmatic songstresses of all time.
With very stripped down yet haunting arrangements created by the mysterious artist only known as Tuca who also plays some seriously mesmerizing guitar on the record, its of course the breathy warm and ethereal vocals of Hardy that take the songs into another dimension. This is one of those records that truly takes a hold of you from start to finish. Causing goosebumps, hair standing on end, feelings of longing, desire and seduction, all with such stunning class.
La Question is the blueprint for so many of today's warm and woozy and dazed and dreamy music makers. It's a record that foreshadows the sounds of folks like Beach House, El Perro Del Mar, Taken By Trees, Tenniscoats, Air, Sebastien Tellier, Devendra Banhart, Tara Jane O'Neil, American Analog Set, Isobel Campbell, Brightblack Morning Light, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Samara Lubelski. One of the most breathtaking and beautiful records of all time perhaps, and beyond recommended!
Eccentric British dronescapists Ian Holloway and Darren Tate (formerly of Ora, currently of Monos) have collaborated in the past on a very sublime album called Summerland which also featured the field recordings of Banks Bailey. This one is more in keeping with Tate's progressive-leaning explorations of cosmic synthesis and guitar meanderings; although it has to be said that we've never heard either Banks or Holloway venture closer to the guttural psychedelic splotches of guitar (with Keiji Haino and Casper Brotzmann being those who immediately come to mind). Low thrumming drones with sawtooth, pink noises sliding into the mix open the Wet Rat Year with periodic punctuations of amp feedback and splattered noises from guitar strings scraped by pieces of metal. Spooky, expressionist stuff. On one of the later untitled tracks, throbbing distorted loops undulate below a cascade of synthetic tones, caught in a perpetual descent as if tumbling out of the sky; and the very next track takes a similar compositional approach with darker results brought on by grizzled guitar, modulated shortwave and a more pronounced rhythm to the underlying loops.
This is one of those micro-editions jointly released by Holloway through his Quiet World imprint and by Tate through Fungal. Only 75 copies made, and they're already out of print at both sources... meaning these copies are all that we will get!
Here we go again. Maybe you remember our review a year or so ago of an ep by a psychedelic doom band from Wisconsin called Totem, related to "New Weird America" folkies Wooden Wand? We thought it was great, EXCEPT for one, possibly deal-breaking catch: the female lead singer's soaring vocals, which put it in the love 'em or hate 'em category, with most of us at AQ unfortunately forced to select the latter option, or at least do our best to live with 'em since we liked the music.
Well, as if to challenge us, Totem have changed their name to Jex Thoth (after the "stage name" of that selfsame singer!), and are back with their debut full-length album, again released by the doom metal purveyors at Sweden's I Hate Records, who previously have brought us music from Burning Saviours, The Puritan, Fall Of The Idols, Lord Vicar, Gates Of Slumber, and lots of other awesome heaviness.
That we have to have any reservations about this album at all is too bad, 'cause on the face of it, you probably couldn't deliberately design anything more likely to appeal to us at AQ, really! Not only is it psychedelic pagan DIY doom metal, to begin with, but check it out: Jex Thoth's guitar player Silas Paine is actually Jewelled Antler linchpin Glenn Donaldson (Thuja, Skygreen Leopards, Blithe Sons, etc. etc.). Also in the band, another AQ friend, Clay Ruby (Davenport, Burial Hex). The cover art is by our Finnish pal Albert Witchfinder from doomlords Reverend Bizarre. And the album itself is dedicated to the memory of Cayce Lindner, from Flying Canyon, whom we too miss very much.
Also, Jex Thoth's "thanks list" is very much up our alley: they give props to Circle, Slough Feg, Silvester Anfang, Bobb Trimble, and Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, among others. And why are they thanking Bobb Trimble, whom hopefully you know as the '80s psych singer-songwriter outsider genius whose at-long-last reissued albums we made Records Of The Week last year? Because they do a cover of his apocalyptic song "When The Raven Calls" from Iron Curtain Innocence on here!! Yep, a Bobb Trimble cover! Brilliant. (And actually, we'll admit, a good choice for Jex Thoth's vocal style.)
So... plenty of indications that this is going to be something we'd LOVE. The music here is great, kind of an acid-folky New Weird Doom, all about ye olde '70s Sabbathy guitar riffage and Purplish organ jamming, fuzzed out and dirgey and druggy, full of spaced out fx, droning synth, lumbering distorted wah-wah riffs. It's not always so heavy, sometimes more of a melancholic moodiness, as much trippily atmospheric freek-folk psych and prog as it is doom (especially on the epic four-part "Equinox Suite"), their style of "metal" not solid steel or iron, but softer precious metals unearthed from an ancient treasure trove, like gold, silver and mythic mithril. We WANT to love this, and it shouldn't be hard... except for Jex Thoth's singing (again), which for most of us is just too high in the mix, too dramatic in a "thespian" sort of way, too sleek and clean and earnest, drawing out each word, each syllable with forced emotion... we're reminded of Grace Slick, with a side of Geddy Lee. But such things are subjective, your mileage may vary, and certainly Jex Thoth (the band) consider Jex Thoth (the vocalist) to be their major focal point, for better or worse. Her vocals ARE distinctive, and do give this band quite a unique vibe all right. And maybe they'll grow on us, actually they already have on Allan here, he'll admit, who while he still cringes a bit at some of her delivery, finds this working for him more often than not. So although we can't give this an unqualified recommendation, we're gonna highlight it anyway, and you can listen to the sound clips and see what you think. (We DO know some peeps who love her singing, actually, so maybe it's just us.) After all, in a lot of ways, this is the Jewelled Antler meets Jacula doom trip we've always dreamed of! A "New Weird Witchcraft" isn't far off the mark either. Acid folk classic doom, we approve of that!
Oh, and if you are already a Totem/Jex Thoth fan, you might be interested to know that we also have just a couple copies left of Jex Thoth's limited edition split 7" with '80s UK doom legends Pagan Altar (!), featuring the track "Stone Evil" from this album, we weren't able to get enough to list, but you might get lucky if you ask us quick, they're $12.98.
We've had plenty of compilations that featured excerpts of Balinese Kecak performances, but never a recording of the complete Ramayana Monkey Chant, and it's pretty phenomenal! Recorded in 1987 by David Lewiston, who recorded most of the music featured on Nonesuch releases of Indonesian music, this release is not new but it's definitely a classic and totally worth checking out. An old fave indeed, Allan here first heard this 'round about the same time he first got into the Boredoms, and they're somehow linked in his mind, makes sense, 'cause we'd imagine Kecak like this could in fact have been an inspiration for some of the Boredoms' wilder stuff!
Those new to the sights and sounds of "Balinese Monkey Chants" might think that these performances and pieces are long passed on oral traditions and rituals from centuries ago, but in truth they are a modern cultural invention. They were created with the help of a Russian-born German artist named Walter Spies living in Bali between the World Wars, who was a strong advocate for the advancement of Balinese arts in order to appeal to the tourists who visited the island. Spies saw potential in the traditional Balinese trance rituals such as Sanghyang, a spirit communication usually during troubled times. One of the main features of these rituals was the Cak (pronounced chak) chorus, a group of males who chant in highly syncopated and precise rhythms. Spies thought that the Cak chorus would appeal to tourists if it could be made into an entertainment involving a story. So working with a Sanghyang group in the early nineteen thirties, they fashioned a drama from the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, a story well known to the Balinese people and to many of the foreigners who frequented the island. Using dancers and performers to act out the main parts of dramatic adventures of Prince Rama and his wife Sita, her abduction by the evil Rawana and her rescue with the help of Hanuman and the King of The Monkeys, the role of the Cak Chorus became greatly transformed by not only expanding their variety of sounds by exploring the Balinese language abundant use of onomatopoeia to mimic gamelan rhythms, but also by integrating themselves into the action through choreographed waves of dramatically intense synchronized movements. Sitting in a large group of 5-6 semi-circles, the male chorus use their arms in unison to great effect, sometimes waving up or to the sides or forward while at other moments of the drama, the chorus representing the advancing armies of Rawana, half of the group will stand and lurch forward to display aggression while the other half lies back in surrender (James Cameron borrowed heavily from this for the Na'vi rituals in Avatar). While it is amazing to watch, it's also quite incredible to listen to as the waves of chanting hover between chaos and control in precise furies of sound. You'll hear what we mean about maybe influencing the Boredoms... If you don't have any Kecak in your collection, you don't know what you're missing!
We've been waiting for this one for ages, since we first heard rumors about a new Bay Area black metal band featuring P. Helmkamp (Angelcorpse, Revenge, Order From Chaos), J. Read (Cremation, Revenge, Axis Of Advance) and local shredder B. Wolaniuk, formerly of local black metal horde Horn Of Dagoth. And this 4 track chunk of frenzied filth definitely does not disappoint. A crushing, atmospheric, blasting occultic black metal blowout, the riffs lurching from frantic insectoid buzz to angular woozy tangle, the drums pounding and chaotic, effortlessly shifting from caveman pound to lighting fast blast, the record begins super creepy and ominous, militaristic and doomy, but explodes into a frantic black thrash, that twists and turns, stops and starts, the arrangements super dense and complex, it's easy to hear the band's pedigree, but we also hear plenty of more modern influences, like Deathspell and Katharsis. It's a churning, roiling black abyss, rife with jagged shards of black riffery, glass gargling demonic hell-vox, and the drums, holy shit is Read a monster behind the kit.
The sound of Kerasphorus is like a massive black force, enveloping everything in its path, lumbering demonic crush gives way to frenetic blur, a dizzying, exhausting, punishing brutal black cloven hoof to the soul, but it's not all blast and buzz, the melodies are serpentine, and wind their way through even the most fractured and fucked up parts, the riffs are strangely gnarled and occasionally transform into loping, almost seasick sounding slithery stretches, the drums locked in tight following right along, with Read's weird hissing high hat black waltz rhythm leading the way, the band always eventually returning to the grim black blast, furiously pounding away, a relentless, dynamic, unstoppable blackness. Fucking awesome.
With all the recent reissues of lost '70s West African musical gems, it's important to remember that there is amazing music being made RIGHT NOW over there, of course. And with so many of today's indie bands like Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend borrowing so much from African music its nice to go right to the source and hear some brand new sounds from that region, that are overflowing with such beauty and the rich tradition of storytelling through song that has long been a part of Ngoni culture.
Bassekou Kouyate has been a major player in the West African music scene for years, from back in his days playing in a trio with Keletigui Diabate and Toumani Diabati and then branching out to form his own ensemble, where he has invented and perfected his own instrument known as the bass ngoni, which has the ability to reach such rich harmonic states of sound. On I Speak Fula, the first release on Sub Pop's new international imprint Next Ambiance, Kouyate and his band show how rich, peaceful yet trance inducing the music they create can be. With guest spots from his former musical partner Toumani Diabate as well as vocals from Vieux Farka Toure on a few tracks, this is such an amazing display of some of the most talented musicians in West Africa today. So much on the record reminds us of some of our favorite releases on Terp, like Lanaya or Djibril Diabate, only with the addition of some seriously enchanting vocals. The first, fantastic release from a new label that definitely seems poised to bring us more great unfiltered sounds from across the globe. So good!
This actually came out last year, and we'd been wanting to review it (and confer upon it Record Of The Week status) ever since, but held off until we were able to do an order directly with the PSF label in Japan and thus get a bunch of 'em for a better price ($16.98 being not that bad for a Japanese import these days, eh?). Finally, they're here, and this is the Week it gets to be a Record Of, though really it's a timeless piece of work that we've been enjoying for a while now, as we said.
Why the high honors? Well, we know there are those of you (and of us) who love guitar, loud GUITAR. Y'know, who just bow down to sheer, untrammeled outward bound electric six string axe action. This is for YOU. Another amplifier worshipping guitar god for you, in turn, to worship, one we can readily place in that eternal electric guitar pantheon that includes among noisy others Jimi Hendrix, Randy Holden, Ax Genrich, Masayuki Takayanagi, Uli Jon Roth, Caspar Brotzmann, Keiji Haino, J. Mascis, Thurston Moore, Matthew Bower, Campbell Kneale, and, well, Li Jianhong! Perhaps you've heard of him already, after all, we've reviewed at least one of his previous solo releases (on aRCHIVE), and also his noise guitar/drums duo D!O!D!O!D! (also on PSF), and drone guitar/laptop duo VagusNerve (on Utech). This, though, definitely the best thing from him we've heard yet, and is his first solo album for PSF, where he most definitely belongs, alongside the likes of Haino, Takayanagi, and High Rise's Munehiro Narita. Though, he's not Japanese, he's Chinese and as PSF says, is "China's hottest, loudest and most psychedelic avant-noise guitarist". Dunno why you wouldn't just believe that but if you want definite proof, here it is, take a listen!
It's mindbending, utterly mesmerizing stuff, pushing into the red at all times almost, but also supremely controlled, like an elemental under command, lotsa "static" but not static, instead always moving forward into searing, cosmic white light oblivion... The disc is seventy minutes long, comprising two longer-than-side-long tracks (32:47 and 37:15), but it pretty much stops time when you're listening. Ultra droney deep distorted sheets of amped up sound, howling wah wah fuzz fuzz to the extreme, cranked to 11 (though we dare you to dial it up half that high at home), but what's got us is that he's definitely playing, we mean SOLOING, melodically, the whole time pretty much. So it's got that Earthless, endlessly jamming guitar solo vibe to it, but imagine Earthless that sounds more like Earth (the band), and it's JUST guitar too, though it sounds like more than one of 'em. Jianhong never lets it turn into unrecognizably guitar-generated skronky noise, it's not like Metal Machine Music or Solmania or Merzbow, though they're on the horizon perhaps. Even at its most abstract, when it sounds like a jet airplane engine drone or an ecstatic chorus of angelic screams, wavering and echoing, you can still picture him wielding his axe in a classic guitar hero pose, conjuring all sounds with his fingers, strings, amp, and intervening pedals.
Of the two tracks, the 1st is more active and "shreddy", 2nd is calmer, but still full of energy and motion. Both are beautiful... if you think sounds like grinding whale calls having close encounters with UFOs and swarms of bees in a hurricane can be beautiful. Pretty much a must-have for fans of such artists as Urthona, Ulaan Khol, Keiji Haino, Earth, Boris (in their Absolutego / Feedbacker / Cloud Chamber mode), Skullflower, Makoto Kawabata & Acid Mothers Temple, Neil Young (on Arc anyway), etc. Bow down!!
Ooh! A hyperlimited LP from Robert Lowe, better known now for his work as Lichens and with Om, better known than for being in nineties indie noise rockers 90 Day Men. Recently, those Lichens recordings have oozed a cosmic vibe of enveloping transcendence through looping vocals and shimmering guitars; and through Om, he's been instrumental in furthering the Middle Eastern dervish vibe in Om's live sets (as of this writing, it's unclear if he'll join the band in the studio). That said, it's all electronics for Lowe on this LP-only, micro-edition pressing. The first side sinks into a side-long excursion that glides along a sedate hypnotic groove of downer electronic bass pulses, which almost has a hyper stripped down Tricky-meets-Conrad Schnitzler slinkiness to the rhythm. Filter swept tonal bendings and pixie-dusted melodies float about the laid back rhythms. Chill-out music, indeed. The second side contains five shorter cuts of library music redux with spiralling arpeggiations and weird-science bloopiness that fits perfectly into the Oneohtrix Point Never / Pulse Emitter camp of electronic meditations. The titles all give you a chance to bone up on your Esperanto! Only 300 copies!
A new record from Sic Alps is always cause for celebration, especially if you dig washed out, reverb drenched, stumbling noise pop, which is precisely what you get on these three new tracks, the first, an abstract drift of angular clang, murky crooning, barely-there rhythm, dark and a little dirge-y, but with a gorgeous streak of melancholy melody. The second track is way less abstract, still tweaked and a bit off kilter, with some tangly Eastern sounding guitar melodies WAY up in the mix, but right below, a simple drum part, some sad boy singing, mumbly one second, and belting out a little falsetto the next, a pretty pop song subverted, and transformed into a gorgeous staggering lo-fi sprawl. The last of the three is maybe the prettiest, total classic fuzzy pop, lilting and catchy, but again wrapped in a warped woozy haze, that makes the song sound like it's subtly changing speed throughout. Tweaked and twisted, but still so goddamn catchy.
Magik Markers Counter with three tracks of their own, forgoing most of the pop for something much more tripped out and psychedelic, clouds of swirling psych guitar over almost krautlike drumming, the vocals formless and all tangled up with flurries of wah guitar, everything looped and stretched out and blurred into a full-on unhinged, reverb drenched, washed out, dreamy and druggy space rock trip out, some of our favorite MM stuff for sure.
Super swank, thick glossy jackets, and most likely limited...
We wanted so much to like this new Massive Attack record. It had all the right ingredients (vocals by Horace Andy, Hope Sandoval, Damon Albern, etc.) but damn if it doesn't just fall a little bit flat. There are a few nice moments but as an album it feels a bit dated and really underwhelming. Some consolation can be found in the fact that another record came out not long ago, reviewed last list: King Midas Sound's record Waiting For You, which sounded exactly how we were had hoped the new Massive Attack would, warped and dark and dreamy, hypnotic and otherworldly, washed out and so divine. So if you love how Massive Attack sounded way back when they were great, maybe pass on this one and get King Midas Sound instead!
The Andromeda Strain was Michael Crichton's first book published under his own name, and told the story of a military probe returning to Earth bearing a lethal, microscopic virus, that proceeds to wiped out an entire New Mexico town, as scientists frantically try to devise a way to destroy the ever mutating virus, eventually considering detonating a nuclear bomb, sacrificing their lives to destroy this insidious interloper. The book was a huge success, as was the movie that followed, retaining the book's documentary-like vibe, hiring unknown actors as well as using graphic footage of virus victims dying. Long a cult favorite, the movie was most notable to music geeks for two reasons, its trippy electronic musique concrete score, and that score's original lp release, which found the record housed in a cool octagonal sleeve, mirroring a recurring shape in the film.
The music, composed by Gil Melle, is incredible, minimal and abstract, but haunting and ominous, even removed from the visuals, it's a harrowing listen, much of it performed on an instrument called the Percussotron III, the FIRST instrument ever designed and built specifically for a film score, some sort of primitive synthesizer we'd assume, percussive as well judging by the name, but details and history aside, this is just a simply fantastic piece of music. Strange electronic chirps, ominous low end thrums, helicopter like whirs, deep swirling drones, spidery squiggly high end melodies, blooping and bleeping glitch skitter, some mechanical percussion, plucked strings, crunchy buzzing swells, haunting bell like tones, militaristic snares, clipped and truncated scrapes and bleats, moaning strings, shimmering synth buzz, tinkling piano, clouds of music box like chirps and whistles, blurred and smeared into a whirling cloud of intertwined sine wave tones, grinding rumbles over swirling streaks of hiss, chromatic melodies unfolding into atonal shards of jagged crumbling sound, cool stuttery machine like rhythms over tangles of bass warble and clouds of glitch, and huge psychedelic swirls of interlocking prismatic tones, all the various elements woven into a truly otherworldly soundtrack. One that sounds like some legendary lost musique concrete artifact, as much as it does a chunk of kitschy sci-fi weirdness, when in fact it's most definitely both.
Unfortunately this reissue doesn't replicate the awesome octagonal packaging, but it makes up for it with a massive booklet, featuring tons of photos, liner notes about the movie, the soundtrack, the composer, each individual song, as well as all of the original lp liner notes. So awesome. We'd been waiting for a proper reissue of this FOREVER. So totally recommended.
Jimmy Page is the cover star. Inside, everything from Shane Macgowan to Midlake to Slayer! (The latter article specifically being about their signature speed metal album Reign In Blood). Plus there's the usual ton of reviews and news and "this month back then" features... Also this issue, Mojo's 2010 releases preview.
Oh, and there's a free cd on the cover, compiled by The Amorphous Androgynous (the psychedelic DJ alter ego of members of FSOL), a pretty killer mix including cuts by Comus, Can, Shogun Kunitoki, Can, July, Dungen, Jean-Claude Vannier, and others.
Long out of print cassette from 2006, available again, but now on vinyl, by Heather Leigh Murray, who is probably better known as the woman behind Scorces, and as one of the folks who runs the great Volcanic Tongue mailorder.
On Jailhouse Rock, Murray offers up two gorgeous sidelong slowburns, all processed slide guitar and murky disembodied vox, washed out and smeared, blurred beyond recognition into slow motion avalanches of sound, swirling streaks of feedback, heaving swells of crumbling rumble and muted buzz, a gorgeously sprawling ebb and flow, slipping from murky muddy meander, to coruscating psychedelic meltdown, on the B-side the vocals are almost recognizable, a warped woozy moan, all tangled up with the strangely lysergic sounding distorted guitar melt, the whole of the second side sounding like someone has their finger held down on the record as it spins, a Japanese psych guitar style freakout chopped and screwed, the various bits of guitar and voice, constantly mutating and shifting, heaving and roiling, but always under a patina of shimmery drugged out buzz, a totally mesmerizing ur-drone jam, that manages to be dense and dark, but also mesmerizing and meditative. Free guitar soft noise oozes into floorcore dreamdrone expanding into blown out in-the-red spacedrift warp and warble, all dizzyingly psychedelic.
So goddamn good. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!
The return of Australian black mental noizemonger Nekrasov, with another ultra limited, beautifully packaged disc of buzzing blackness and grim blacknoize. And this time we do mean LIMITED. Only 50 copies made, already sold out, we have 20 copies, and that's it, which as always is a shame, cuz this stuff is killer, and WELL deserving of more ears...
But for the lucky 20 of you who are quick on the trigger and who have an ear for this sort of furious filth, On Certainty definitely does not disappoint, Taking the black metal / white noise hybrid we were already so into, and pushing it even further out, making it more psychedelic, more space-y, the opening track sets the stage, a gorgeous post industrial noisecape, all warped muted melodies, grinding metallic textures, a churning, looped sounding corrosive drone infused with a weird melodiousness, which is quickly obliterated by the second track, and incendiary white hot speaker shredding black noise blow out, there seem to be riffs and blasting drums, and howled vocals, but they are so over saturated, so in the red, that they seem to be coming apart and bleeding into the sounds around them, the result a blast of Merzbowian blackness, like an even more abrasive and harshly heavy Wold, but like Wold, there's tons of stuff going on below the caustic surface, strange little melodies surface occasionally riffs coalesce only to split apart into shards of crunch and buzz, the vocals seem to be set on constant howl, a thick layer of anguished blur. The cool thing is that the tone and timbre is super varied, one track will be brittle and blasty, a swirling sea of high end skree, while the next will be a churning chunk of low end, or all drums, so heavily effected they crumble and crunch and stop sounding like drums at all.
Maybe too harsh for the unadventurous metalhead, but for those who like their heavy noisy, and their noise heavy, this should totally hit the spot. And be sure to stick around for the closer, maybe the prettiest song on the disc, still plenty noisy, but underneath it all a woozy washed out bit of mournful melancholia, which infuses all sorts of intense emotion into the crumble and crunch and rrrooooaaar around it.
Gorgeous packaging too, a full color oversized 6 panel fold over sleeve, lots of stark shots of landscapes and wastelands, and a super cool logo / diagram adorning the front.
Less immediate than her striking debut Milk Eyed Mender and not as epic sounding as her last album Ys, the new triple album from Joanna Newsom finds her as visionary, intimate and extraordinary as ever! She has earned and deserved the right to require her listeners to luxuriate in her sounds, to have the patience and to focus their full attention on her record while listening. This isn't the sort of record you just casually throw on in a room full of people and quickly make a judgment about, it's a nuanced, dense and meticulously crafted sprawling work that requires a little dedication. It's the kind of record that when played in the store, its hard to focus on and really become immersed in, but once we brought it home with us and listened in the solitude of our bedrooms and in our wanderings through the city, especially on headphones, the songs began to blossom and expand and move us in such thrilling ways.
While she will always be known for her extraordinary harp playing, Have One On Me shows her integrating the harp more seamlessly with other instrumentation. There's plenty of piano and moments of sweeping soundscapery and commanding drums, but not to fear, the majestic harp still shines through. While initial reviews we've read of the record keep throwing around Joni Mitchell comparisons, we don't feel that at all; instead we do feel a HUGE Kate Bush influence at work, much, much more so than any of her previous releases. The way in which the songs are crafted in such an intimate manner, and the surprise moments of a song when an eruption of sound comes when least expected. Being that many of us here at AQ are huge Kate Bush admirers we love seeing someone follow in her footsteps with equal intelligence, sophisticated word play and deep running emotion.
In a day and age when our culture is more ADD than ever and we are constantly scrambling for instant gratification, it's so refreshing and rewarding to encounter a collection of songs that requires patience, and one's full attention, that fulfills and enriches and offers so much, with more secrets and musical nuances revealed with every spin, a glorious reward in sound, given to only those pure of heart and open of ear. Another striking achievement from one of the most talented songwriters of our generation!
Well, ok, we should mention that there's a few grumpy nay-sayers here at AQ, who think maybe it's just a bit TOO much Kate Bush, lacking some originality there, but then again, some of those folks were never that into Newsom in the first place, but do in fact like Kate Bush, so they ought to count their blessings 'cause they're gonna be hearing this playing in the store A LOT.
At the end of the 'alcohol trilogy' that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa released via Helen Scarsdale, the dark isolationist rumble which dominated the previous two and half records was shattered by a robotic sequence of bleeping analog synth tones which spiralled deep into the void of the arctic night sky. Such a dramatic juxtaposition is not uncommon within the realm of Stilluppsteypa, but less so for Mr. Nilsen. And those Derbyshire / Dockstader / Oneohtrix like tones found on Passing Out (the finale mentioned above) is clearly the jumping off point for Space Finale - an epic 90 minute cassette of analog synthesis, captured, spliced, and cut, all on a Revox 2-channel tape machine. Amidst the vintage synth blips and sustained tones, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa offer another narrative composition that moves from the vacant space station overrun by some unknown alien virus into the lair of the mad scientist who meanders dabbles on his Wurlizter (or some kind of organ, if it's not an actual Wurlizter) in minor key melancholy when not toiling away on an abomination that will somehow destroy the world. Shadowy ambience, fuzzed out tape hiss aggregation, weird dropouts and glitches on the tape that would make Leif Elggren proud, and much much more. With so many cassette releases being issued as 10-15 minute programs, it's very welcome to come across a full 90 minute tape! Limited to 200 copies!!! We got 20 and they're going fast...
It'd be easy to mistake this beautiful, beautiful album for being Japanese... the title is in Japanese, the singing is in Japanese, and it's on the great Japanese psych label PSF after all, with an obi and everything! But actually, it's the work of Italian experimental chanteuse Ramona Ponzini, who is an associate of the My Cat Is An Alien collective (members of whom also being part of this project), and is obviously fluent in Japanese. Totally belongs on PSF though, worthy of being of the rare albums of Western origin appearing on that label, and we think it's one of the loveliest, regardless of where it's from. And it also lives up to its evocative name Painting Petals On The Planet Ghost, whatever that phrase might mean...
On the seven hushed tracks here, Ponzini's gentle vocals hover amidst even gentler hum and hiss, accompanied by sun-dappled, slow motion acoustic guitar melodies, minimalistic and melancholic, and droning synth. These songs are sometimes visited by chiming bells, or restrained, ceremonial-sounding percussion. There's an intimate, yet mysterious vibe to it all, one that's dreamy and drifting, Ponzini's singing at the center of these songs, the focus of the listener's attention, but at the same time, the soft-focus nature of these tracks as a whole also being the attraction, the delicate interplay of vocals, melody, and drone almost becoming a haunting, holistic oneness. Pleasantly haunting that is, a hypnotic late night listen, somnolent folkish lullabies given gorgeous drone treatment.
Doused in mild echo effects, with overdubs her sweet singing is vaguely layered and looped, or at least some ghostly suggestion is made in that direction, where she starts one vocal line, then it fades into a wordless hmmmmmm, as another one of her vocals is layered over what has become part of the warm background hum...
For fans of Fursaxa, Grouper, Valet, and other female-fronted loner psych-folk-drone stuff, as well as of course certain Japanese artists, like AQ faves Nagisa Ti Te for sure, or Ai Aso with her cooing waifish vocals. Or, remember female Japanese duo Eddie Marcon's Shining On Graveposts disc (soon to be available again, at long last, by the way!)? This reminds us a lot of that wonderful album, but 'tis even more gauzy and droned-out... Packaged in a miniature LP-style gatefold sleeve, and highly recommended!
We first heard Pantha Du Prince last year on his excellent 12" The Splendour, and we knew we had most definitely discovered a new important force in the word of electronica. With the release of his full length debut, he seals the deal, demonstrating for sure, with every song, that he's absolutely one of the most interesting, nuanced and unique modern electronic musicians today.
Bringing such warmth and emotion to his meticulously crafted songs, we're reminded a bit of early Four Tet and the first Mum record. Delicate, and brimming with layers of warm shimmer. There are a couple tracks which feature guests, including Panda Bear on vocals for one track, but to be honest we don't think Pantha Du Prince really needs vocals at all, as his songs are already so expansive, so complete, immaculately constructed, and so so evocative, allowing the listener to process the sounds in a wide range of ways. The vocal tracks are definitely nice, and do add a bit of a pop element, but its the rest of the album that really strikes such a strong chord with us. We're always so impressed when someone is able to bring such rich nuance and mood to purely instrumental music (electronic or otherwise) and Pantha Du Prince does it so well. It's also appealing that there's really not a quick electronic sub-genre to put him in, it's not dubstep, space disco, techno, etc. In some ways it reminds us a bit of that special moment in the late '90s when folks like Four Tet, Mum, Opiate, B. Fleishmann first surfaced, adding that emotional warmth to an electronic world which had been so cold for so long. We've been listening to this on constant repeat and the more we listen the deeper we get into loving what Pantha Du Prince is all about. Definite contender for electronic record of the year!
'70s semi-survivors Pentagram, one of the only truly O.G. doom metal outfits still somewhat extant, their legend only growing in recent years, more people getting into them, hordes of Witchcraft fans prominent among 'em. When Review Your Choices first came out in 1999, Pentagram were not quite as "hip" a band as they are now. So lots of folks who missed out before should be happy it's been reissued, along with its 2001 follow-up Sub-Basement, together the one-two-punch of a (temporarily) revitalized, turn-of-the-century Pentagram. Both albums now come in styley digipacks, with 2 bonus tracks each.
Here's our original review of Review Your Choices: The long-awaited new album from doom metal legend Bobby Liebling and his cult band Pentagram, one of the most ancient bands in the genre (not much younger than their lords Black Sabbath themselves). Indeed, about half of the tunes on this album were originally recorded as demo tracks back in the mid-'70s when Gene Simmons and KISS took an interest in the Pentagram boys and were trying, unsuccessfully, to get them signed to their Casablanca label. Both the old stuff (recently rerecorded of course) and the newly-written stuff on here resound with an authentic '70s/Sabbath vibe (right down to Bobby's vocals, which sound like Ozzy at his most demented and troglodytic!). Imagine taking records by the heavy likes of Saint Vitus, Trouble, and Blue Cheer and mixing them in a bowl with several boxes of Count Chocula (the cereal paid homage to in the booklet photo spread!) and a quart of way-past-its-expiration-date milk. That's the curdled, dark and soggy breakfast of champions served up by Pentagram on Review Your Choices. What a way to start your day, or perhaps to end it all.
Not much more to say other than, a classic, full of Pentagram necessities old and new. The killer, slide-y main riff on "Megalania". The cheerful insanity of "Gilla?". The old, old utter classic "Forever My Queen".... all of it, really! The bonus tracks are alternative takes of album tracks, and their production or lack thereof is pretty raw, but then again the album proper has its own "gluey" production eccentricities... either way these tracks sound plenty doomy!
Now, since the release of these two albums, Pentagram fans have been exposed to more of the band's original '70s recordings via the two First Daze Here comps that Relapse put out. If you have those, you'll certainly recognize many of the songs on Review Your Choices and Sub-Basement. But not only are these recordings of 'em quite worthy in their own right (some of these versions being our preferred ones for sure), these albums also contain plenty of circa-Y2K penned Pentagram material that's equally worthy.
There's been a lot of activity lately from these semi-legendary lords of doom, surprising coming from a band that's been around for about thirty years and has dwindled down to only two members! But (thankfully for all fans of dark, doomy heavy metal)
