'60s beat music gettin' crazy and psychedelic, but not too flower-powery psych, more hard and frenzied, that's "freakbeat", music that took throbbing distortion and unhinged vocals to outta control heights never before heard on this planet, and rarely since with this much swinging sixties style. The early Who, maybe The Sonics in the USA, that's freakbeat: rockin' stuff to which terms like "deranged" and "psychotic" can be applied with abandon. Supposedly most authentic freakbeat dates from 1966, certainly many of the 21 tracks here do, on this killer comp of bands from the UK and elsewhere doing the freakbeat thing. You've heard of the Troggs, they're on there doing "Lost Girl", maybe also you know Syndicat ("Crawdaddy Simone") and Wimple Witch ("Save My Soul"), if you do you'll be curious to hear the other acts you maybe haven't heard of, and if you DON'T know those songs, you're in for a treat, they're classics indeed. Sinister grooves, sneering vox, this stuff was about as punk as it got back then, catchy and chaotic. The besides the three we mentioned, the lineup here includes Elois, Red Squares, Truth, Lee Kings, Crying Shames, Southern Sound, Missing Links, Mark Four, Wheels, Game, Mascots, Fairies, Motions, Thor's Hammer, Allen Pound's Get Rich, Primitives, and Ricketts. Originally released about 10 years ago, now back in print thanks to Past & Present, who appreciate a good compilation (see their own Maximum Prog highlighted this list for an example).
Those industrious diggers over at the Past & Present label bring us another cool comp of vintage jams, subtitled "16 Rare Gems From The Golden Age Of British Progressive Rock", though the title itself pretty much tells you all you need to know: MAXIMUM PROG! Which is a bit of a bold claim, given just how "maximum" much prog can be by definition, the prog genre all about indulgence, excess, and bombast, that is if you take the likes of ELP as a prime example. And we do (bow down to ELP!). So at any rate, even if you believe as we do that too much progginess is never enough, this disc certainly will provide plenty more than the recommended MINIMUM daily dose of the stuff!!
There's well over an hour of music here, but squeezing 16 bands on means that the compliers necessarily could NOT pick the most epic-length songs, so there's no 20+ minute side long suites here, in fact, nothing even in the double digits, some songs even as short as (gasp) 3 minutes, like "normal" pop music.
But aside from the relatively reined-in track lengths, this stuff is definitely the proggermost of the poppermost! If not the toppermost of the proggermost, in terms of renown - while we consider ourselves pretty "into" prog, the some of these acts being well off our radar, we'd heard of only maybe a third of 'em previously (though perusal of the informative liner notes reveal many connections to other bands and artists we do know). Here's the whole lineup: Aardvark, Abacus, Big Sleep, Brainchild, Czar, Don Shinn, Goliath, Heaven, 9:30 Fly, Quicksand, Quiet World, Rock Workshop, Samurai, Second Hand, Sweet Slag, and Titus Groan. All tracks circa 1969-'73, most from right around '70 and '71. And as you'd expect, the music here is rather more complexified than just plain ol' psych pop or hard rock, variously employing classical-sounding keyboards or fluttering flutes or jazzy horns, but not forgetting the acid rock guitar action either, with instrumental flurries and ambitious arrangements and (yup) plenty of bombast... but also some killer grooves and catchy melodies.
A few of our faves have got to be the heavy, distorted keyboard riffage of Aardvark's still rather lovely "Copper Sunset", the urgently freaked out "Wade In The Water" from Rock Workshop (a group featuring cult jazz/rock guitarist Ray Russell, playing a wild solo here) and Sweet Slag's rollicking n' riffy "Specific", amongst non-specific others. There's lots of nifty prog treats here, we're guessing the compliers probably cherrypicked some of the best tracks even from what might prove to be somewhat dodgy full-lengths...
Basically an unofficial, overachieving volume 5 in Past & Present's popular Electric Asylum series, as far as we're concerned, so if you liked those check this out too! Booklet includes notes and discographical info about each obscure band, along with vintage photos and clippings.
Soundway has been building quite the amazing catalog with their brilliant Nigeria Special series. A collection of sounds that truly demonstrates that there is an endless wealth of amazing music made in Nigeria during the 1970's. This is volume two in the Modern Highlife, Afro Sounds & Nigerian Blues series and somehow it manages to meet or even beat the excellence of the first outing. What makes the collection so cool is how while still sharing a similar sound and pedigree, there is so much diversity in the sounds and instrumentation. Worth it all alone is the mind blowing track by Twins Seven, complete with otherworldly vibraphones and entrancing call and response vocals. We love how these comps turn us on to specific artists that then send us off on crazy hunts to try to find more songs and records by those artists. But then, that's exactly what a great mix is meant to do.
As a whole, Nigeria Special: Volume 2 has such a perfect sunshiny, laid back yet triumphant spirit. It's been our go-to record on Sunday afternoons when people are relaxing on a beautiful day, visiting the store, carefree after a leisurely stroll though the Mission, and the second we throw this on, we always see people casually swaying and tapping their feet as they make their away around the store, and they inevitably ask what's playing so they can grab a copy and hold on to that unbeatable feeling for the rest of the day, and for every weekend to come...
While there has been no shortage of awesome collections of sounds from West Africa in the '70s, this collection somehow steps ahead of the crowd as it fantastically focuses on the much overlooked sounds coming from Burkina Faso, between the years 1974-1978. Combining heavy psych grooves, Afro-funk, rich orchestration and rock, into a sound that is warm, warbly and infectious. The recordings sound quite lo-fi, not an aesthetic decision as is the style these days, instead, a result of resources in the region during this era being extremely limited. But luckily it suits the music perfectly, as the songs jump out on their own without the need for fancy studio polish. And the echo, reverb and understated production really would make so many of today's lo-fi hipsters drool in envy. Another strength of the compilation is how well it works from start to finish, really feeling like a unified album and not just a random mix of songs from a singular time and place. Some tracks burn while others melt, some smolder, and others swing. With an overall vibe and sound that falls somewhere between The Psych-Funk 101 compilation we've been digging so much, and some of the recent comps from labels like Soundway and Honest Jons that have also done much to shed light on so many of the amazing sounds coming out of Africa in the '70s.
Contour Editions is a new label curated by New York based sound artist Richard Garet, whose tense grey drones had marked his very impressive Four Malleable 2cd set on And/OAR as well as an exceptional collaboration with Brendan Murray released back in 2009. The same technical rigor that Garet employs in his own compositions extends to this compilation of various artists working around the globe, including i8u (Canada), Christopher DeLaurenti (Seattle), Gil Sanson (Venezuela), and Brian Mackern & Gabriel Galli (Uruguay). Aside from DeLaurenti, whose phonography collection of orchestral intermissions has long been a favorite of ours, this compilation is an introduction to all of the artists present. Not a bad thing at all, considering how strong each contribution is.
Garet had charged these sound artists to consider the "evocation of the in-between immaterial spaces" - not quite the existential pursuit into nothingness, silence, or the void; but rather, the faintest of sounds brought close to the event horizon, the ghosts that tickle at the edge of perception, etc. Fortunately, none of the artists employ the clicks and cuts techniques which emerged from the Max/MSP crowd from the nascent days of the millennium. Sure, things are quiet and undoubtedly processed and/or produced by digital means.
i8u is the work of Canadian composer France Jobim, who's actually been around quite a while, producing all sorts of electronica-laced computer-driven compositions. Her track eschews all of the mid-range frequencies, instead splitting her attention between a deep rumbling low-end of a slightest pierced tones at the high-end. Despite the extremes of tonality, there's something rather lulling and enveloping about this piece almost achieving the same generative stasis that Thomas Koner produces. Christopher DeLaurenti presents two tracks of stone-faced slabs of grey noises looped and snapped into a darkened ambience. Gil Sanson's eight vignettes are open ended by design, with the composer encouraging the listener to hit shuffle on the cd player. These buzzes, drones, and smeared field recordings connect through a muted aesthetic of dreamy discomfort. The Mackern & Galli piece bristles with electrical static cracked upon a shortwave radio with Morse code blips streaming into the foreground and peculiar gestures of feedback sneaking throughout. Bits of radio transmission break through these disembodied elements, giving the piece the detached aesthetic which was endemic to The Conet Project and The Ghost Orchid, despite the very-hands on approach to this piece. All together, the album seamlessly flows from one track to the other, almost making it difficult to discern where one composition begins and another ends.
Hopefully, one of many good things to come from Mr. Garet's label. Oh yes, it's limited to 150 copies, too!
Hot on the heels of the first volume, Subliminal Sounds has released this second collection of Thai garage beat pop go-go madness. And we have to say it's better than the first. Much better (and cheaper too). Like the first volume the tracks here are all distinct replicas of popular music from the Occident of the late sixties. Some notable covers include the King's "All Shook Up", Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'aime Moi Non Plus" and The Beatles' "Lady Madonna". What makes this collection stand out for us though is both the inclusion of a wider range of severely demented production aesthetics and a great deal more songs that, vocally, sound more Thai. The album starts off with a bang to Viparat Piengsuwan's "YoK YoK" with chipper plosive vocals that could only come from Thailand. So cute it'll make you barf. Not skipping a beat we're led into Surapon's "Ding Dong", which sounds like a seriously fucked up deconstruction of the "Surfing Bird". A little later Waipot Petsuwan's "Mia Chaa" throws a monkey wrench into our expectations with a dreamy ellyptical vocal line -- that sounds reminiscent of Mo Lam -- over an otherwise standard garage beat tune, instantly transforming it into a classic. Then, of course, there's some demented production like excessive reverb in the oddest places and a strange Thai version of the Chipmonks that'll have you spitting your lunch out your nose. Highly recommended!
There's no shortage of incredible reissue labels, and depending on our mood, or what record just came out, we could go any way if forced to pick, but honestly, we find ourselves always coming back to Omni, not only are their reissues incredibly and meticulously researched and curated, with extensive liner notes, rare photos, all that jazz, but the sounds are bizarre and beautiful, balancing precariously between unsung country classics, and the demented dark underbelly of country music, we love both, but definitely lean toward the latter, and thankfully, so does Omni it seems. As if to prove that point, along comes Troubled Troubadours, another collection of sick twisted country sounds, which on the surface, aren't so obviously twisted, but dig a little deeper and these songs blossom into far out tales of misery and woe, murder and mayhem, even one about shooting God! Weird indeed.
There are some musical moments of madness, the bizarre looped vocal / Theremin sounding main melody on Homer And Jethro's "Monster Mash" sounding "A Crept Into The Crypt And Cried" for example, but then there's intense dark musical gems like Waylon Jennings' "Delia's Gone", a brooding dark creep complete with haunting sitar buzz. Dolly Parton contributes two tracks, one a haunting tale of an abandoned mother, the other, a harrowing tale of a women committed, and longing for her Daddy to come set her free. And then there's the aforementioned "Are They Gonna Shoot God", a weepy melodramatic soft focus hippy country ballad, where a little boy asks his daddy if they're gonna shoot God, while an angelic chorus echoes the question. Weird. Porter Wagoner is present of course, Omni has already done two Wagoner collections, and here Wagoner tells the tale of "Waldo The Weirdo". Cargill Henson makes an appearance too, after two of his own Omni collections, with the reverbed jangle of "Daddy, What's A Tree?". There's Bobby Bare's "Your Credit Card Won't Get You Into Heaven", a cautionary tale, all gospel organ and baritone croon, and Lester Flatt's "I Can't Tell The Boys From The Girls", another cautionary tale of sorts, about dating in the big city, and so it goes. Every song, no matter how traditional sounding on the surface, hiding something sick or sinister, hilarious or goofy underneath.
If you dug any of the other Omni records, Porter Wagoner, Dee Mullins, Johnny Paycheck, Lorne Greene or the Plantation Gold collection, which was a former Record Of The Week, then odds are you're gonna dig this too. And most definitely recommended to any fans of incredibly strange music. Country or otherwise...
The original Wicker Man movie has got to be one of our all time favorite films as well as pretty much one of our all time favorite soundtracks. The movie falls into an elusive subgenre of psych-folk films like The Ballad of Tam-Lin, or Herzog's Heart of Glass, that mix pre-Christian folkloric musical elements and themes with a modern or counter-cultural revivalism often with darkly beautiful and sometimes terrifying results. There is no doubt that the Wicker Man as both a film and soundtrack was a key touchstone in the recent freak-folk movement. That the songs featured on that soundtrack with all their barely concealed bawdyness and lyrical waxing of the cycles of nature, sexuality and death were actually based on traditional British folk music is at this point no surprise either. Finder's Keepers does a lovely job here collecting much of the traditional material that formed the basis for the songs performed in the Wicker Man movie. Although the most remembered song from that movie, "Willow's Song" was not traditionally based, it's the song that let us into the perverse mysticism of the movie's characters and made us pay attention to the duplicitous meanings found in the traditional material. Here, that song is represented by a beautiful instrumental version taken from the original soundtrack recordings but not featured on the actual soundtrack release. The cd also features traditional versions of "Corn Rigs", based on a Robert Burns poem, "Gently, Johnny", the Maypole song "Rattlin' Bog", and "Highland Lament", as well as children's songs and instrumental jigs.
Brand new ultra limited full length from Warmth, who really couldn't have chosen a more appropriate monicker, as the sounds here are indeed warm, dark, swirly, humid, shimmery, a drifting blackened dronescape of elongated tones, blurred melody, and smoldering low end. Not really dense or heavy or blown out, instead, the sounds are hushed, muted, dense and deep, barely there, a whirring whispery smear of sound, industrial but only slightly, machinelike, but simultaneously organic, a haunting otherworld of looped rumbles and layered clouds and swirls of melodic fragments, and constantly shifting textures, a warm, lush, soft noise, rife with what sound like field recordings, but could also be mechanical detritus, creaks, groans, clicks, even those sounds dialed way back, just another bit of hazy grit added to the already washed out sprawl of dreamlike ambient dronedrift.
Privacy From God is a strange hybrid of sounds that in other hands would be cranked up, doused in distortion and spewed from massive speakers, but Warmth take those same sounds and pull them apart into microscopic clusters of dreamy ambient minutae, soothing, surreal, softly undulating, hushed and looped expanses of near static, frozen in time, dreamdrone minimalism. So nice.
Packaged in a clear plastic oversized clam shell case, with silver offset printing on black vellum paper. Hi-bias chrome tapes with silver labels. And... LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Hell yeah! We knew just a short time ago when we heard their 7" on Captured Tracks, that these females from the UK were going to be a band we were gonna end up digging BIG TIME. With a full length hot on the heels of that 7", we are indeed digging this like crazy, as Frauhaus! is some totally immediate and addicting off-kilter post punk. Taking their love of greats like the Raincoats and The Slits and infusing so much of their own energy, vision and charisma into the songs giving them a very unique sound. In so many ways they feel like the perfect band to carry the torch for the great Erase Errata who sadly seem to have broken up (though we would be thrilled if that wasn't the case!). Herky jerky rhythms, songs that cut out all the fat, yet are full of such melodicism and incredible songwriting chops, something that so many groups who usually pull from similar sources of inspiration seem to be lacking. In fact there are some totally rad moments here that make us think of a scrappy DIY version of The Breeders or a way punkier Electrelane.
It's been so cool to play this record and then figure out what would be so perfect to play afterwards, as you can go in so many directions. We've rocked Chin Chin, Kleenex/Liliput and early Bow Wow Wow right after playing Wetdog and it seems to keep the same energy and spirit going pretty much perfectly. Short but sweet these fourteen tracks clock in at just under a half hour, but every single moment is filled with such energy and exhilaration!
A big bag of songs indeed! 28 of them as a matter of fact, and all pretty incredible from a singer/songwriter we weren't familiar with, though we did know his two most famous songs, "High Flying Bird" and "Jackson", as performed by others such as Johnny Cash, Jefferson Airplane, Judy Henske and Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. Billy Edd Wheeler was smack in the middle of the crossroads where country, folk, pop and rock meet. Mentored by famed songwriting team Leiber & Stoller, Wheeler penned many great tunes for Cab Calloway, Lonnie Donnegan, Hank Snow and The Kingston Trio as well. Wheeler had a very folksy style using the big classic sixties country-pop production (the kind you've heard on plenty of other Omni reissues from Dee Mullins, Porter Wagoner, Hoyt Axton, Johnny Paycheck and Henson Cargill), but underneath the wholesome exterior of the songs lie pointed messages about the environment, taxes, falling out of love, the desperation of the hard working poor, and the soul-killing culture of the white-collar worker. Highly skilled with language and a turn of phrase, Wheeler was a master at weaving an epic story into a three minute pop song, whether it be a coal miner yearning to fly away like a bird, a mushroom taking elevator operator, a badass cowboy preacher, or the emotional wreckage of a marriage on the skids. So good!
It's been a while since we've heard from Australian label Hidden Shoal, and just as long since we've heard from SF sound sculptor and dreamdronedrift composer Wes Willenbring, but now that we're all reunited, we can go ahead and gush over yet another fantastic Hidden Shoal release, and another gorgeous disc of ethereal ambience from Mr. Willenbring.
Willenbring is an accomplished pianist and guitarist, and those instruments form the basis of these songs, in some places that's obvious, but in others, the piano and the guitar, or any semblance of either, are blurred, or smeared, or pixelated into hazy clouds of sound, of softly shifting streaks of crystalline shimmer, the guitar often transformed into a buried pulse, the piano into soft focus flurries of barely there melody, at its most diffused and abstract, this is total bleary eyed starlight pop ambience, the sort of hushed orchestral drift that would appeal to fans of other sonic abstractionists like Stars Of The Lid or Tim Hecker or Fennesz. But Willenbring doesn't rely entirely on effects or processing, much of the music here is darkly delicate chamber music, shimmering strings, over pointillist piano, buzzing steel strings unfurling melancholic melodies in slow motion, one note at a time, a sound that's lush and haunting, cinematic and subtly epic.
Totally sublime moody minimalism, a late night moonlit, slip-into-the-ether sort of dreamdrift dronemusic, equal parts gauzy abstraction and languid whispery post rock drift, that is as divine as it is dreamy.
Yay! Konono No.1 and their "Congotronics" on the cover! And also stuck to the cover, "The Wire Tapper 23" cd sampler w/ Han Bennink, Clogs, The A Band, Raymond Dijkstra, Rolf Julius, Aaron Martin, and a whole bunch of others we haven't ever heard of. Inside, interviews and stuff about Joanna Newsom, Giacinto Scelsi, Eleh, Edgard Varese, Stefan Goldmann, The Gaslamp Killer, and more. Plus all the usual interesting reviews and columns and charts and all. ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
Few bands around these parts are received with such a fanatical devotion as local heroes Wooden Shjips. Everything they touch turns to gold, and when the band puts out a single, you'd better hop on that shit PRONTO, or else you miss out... until the band graciously collects everything in one essential package. Vol. 2 puts together their most recent, already out of print singles, and like everything on Vol. 1, these songs are just as good, sometimes even BETTER than what you get on their proper full lengths. More than likely most of you probably haven't been able to obtain these songs, so what you get here is as follows: the Sub Pop 7", side 1 of the "Vampire Blues" European tour 7", a live track from yet another Euro tour 7" with the Heads, the Contact 12" on Mexican Summer, and a live track from a Yeti magazine sampler. Everyone of these songs is absolutely amazing and will no doubt bring on tears of joy.
The Sub Pop 7" kicks off with the awesome "Loose Lips", a song that would shoot off way beyond the clouds if the rhythm section didn't keep things perfectly grounded like it does. The song swirls about in classic Shjips fashion with a nice melodic organ lead driving things forward and awesome submerged vocals. Next up is "Start To Dreaming", proving once again that a Wooden Shjips B-side is nothing to be taken lightly. It's by far one of the band's most beautiful songs, starting life with a slow but steady bassline and a mournful guitar lead before the pace picks up and pretty much knocks you out with its unbelievable beauty. Goddamn.
The band's cover of Neil Young's "Vampire Blues" is next, an upbeat rocker reconfigured perfectly for the Shjips' psychedelic approach. "Death's Not Your Friend" is from the split 7" with the Heads, and the band proves they can deliver in a live setting. The song is super rhythmic and dense as hell, a total joy to listen to for both long car rides through god knows where OR solitary walks in the woods, take your pick.
"Contact" is a Shjips' styled cover of a Serge Gainsbourg song, and it moves along at a steady midtempo groove. The song is anchored by a hypnotic bassline, allowing the submerged wah guitar and French sung vocals to do their thing. Side 2 features "I Hear The Vibrations" in its superior form, the "E-Z Version". The song first appeared in a truncated version on the Vampire Blues single, which was wisely left off in favor of this take. Maybe you recall that we put it all out on the table in our original review and pretty much declared this to be the band's best song to date, a claim we still stand by. It's the kind of song that would go on forever if we had our way.
The album closes with another live tune, "Outta My Head", from the Yeti sampler. The burly bass/guitar attack is impossible to ignore while the simple drumming incorporates a jangly tambourine into its nonstop pound. The organ spits out awesome hazy melodies as the guitar blissfully distorts all over the place, and it's a great way to end the album, making you want to see these guys level some small club.
So yeah, this is not at all a hard sell, we probably didn't even have to bother with a review, but we love this band so much that we just felt like throwing in our two cents. For everyone who missed out the first time along, this is a no brainer. And if you've been living under a rock, Vol. 2 also serves as a highly worthy introduction to one of our fine city's flagshjip bands.
Recorded back around the time of Subliminal Genocide, Xasthur's debut on Hydra Head, which was a momentous occasion in the BM underground for sure at the time, with many of the troo grim hordes crying foul, an underground black metal icon signing to a very UN-underground label, but it worked, SG was incredible, murky and intense and epic and grim as fuck and no one could really argue with the Xasthur / Hydra Head union at that point. Things quickly changed though, the next few records found Xasthur mixing it up, once again to the chagrin of the same haters whose feathers were ruffled before. Personally, we loved those records too, we even dug the eventual switch to real drums, we've yet to really hate a Xasthur disc. Although as far as we're concerned, nothing will ever touch Nocturnal Poisoning, the first and still maybe best Xasthur record, and the 3 records that preceded the Hydra Head debut are nearly as good, The Funeral Of Being, Telepathic With The Deceased and To Violate The Oblivious. So this demo comes right after those records, and just before Subliminal Genocide, and sounds like it, it may be designated a 'demo' (although with Xasthur, it's hard to really imagine there's much sonic polishing that goes on from the demo stage to the record proper stage), but essentially it's a couple unreleased Xasthur jams, vintage Xasthur, and that's all we need to know.
The first track is a pounding, super distorted murkscape, the buzzing riffage laced with arpeggiated clean guitar melodies, those anguished howls, drums BURIED in the mix, a seasick ebb and flow, woozy and warped, and gloriously low fidelity, lumbering through thick fields of haze and buzz, a weirdly washed out ambient vibe, even at it's fiercest moments. The second track is way more mellow, a dreamy blurred doomic plod, the guitars muddy and WAY out of tune, which only makes the music that much more twisted and atonal and grim, this finds Xasthur at his most Striborg, creating mournful blackened dirges behind a constant wall of smeared fuzz, lo-fi hiss, and tangled gnarled riffage, occasionally slipping into weirdly melodic interludes, only to stumble back into the buzzy fray. There are some awesome sort-of-leads, flanged and seriously psychedelic, totally druggy doomy bleak buzz. So good. Fans will want this for sure, maybe not the place to start necessarily (that would be Nocturnal Poisoning or Subliminal Genocide) although this does make a pretty tempting two song teaser of muddy murky grim black genius. If we weren't already fans, this might lure us to the dark side for sure...
One wonders how many new discoveries will be unearthed from legendary outsider rocker Michael Yonkers. But man, we don't want it to stop. Whether he's putting out new stuff or digging through the vaults, Yonkers' strange story just keeps getting better and better, and to think that the man has retained such an amazing vision for almost 50 years is truly astounding. Lovely Gold collects songs from a period in Yonkers' career that many of us had yet to hear: the late '70s. 1977, in fact, you know, the year of punk and all that shit. But Lovely Gold is something else, and like most of this guy's stuff, it defies simple categorization. The strangest aspect of Yonkers' music is how it manages to recall things we all know and love, mostly from a garage rock template, but things are warped into beautiful creations that only Yonkers could produce.
Take a look at this cover. Michael Yonkers sitting in front of a wall of recording devices. That's really all he needs, and the man is going it alone on this one. Actual percussion is sparse, with guitars providing most of the rhythm. There is a welcome abundance of multilayered vocals here, which combine for amazingly ethereal sounds. The songs "I Knew You'd Remember" and "Will It Be" show off this effect best of all. These songs are unbelievable, the kind that will stop you in your tracks. Mutant gospel? Experimental Gregorian chanting? What the fuck IS this stuff? Totally amazing for one thing, but trying to describe it is no easy task. You might think of Silver Apples or Peter Grudzien, but if you look at the back cover with the photo of the jumpsuited Yonkers holding the Fender Jaguar he whittled into a plank, that should really tell you that you're in strange territory indeed (Minneapolis to be exact). The song "Drifting Off" actually sounds like the work of a band, it rides out with a nice spooky feeling and sounds a bit more like the material on Microminiature Love. "Gone Down Old Sun" uses guitar strumming as percussion while the layered voices moan in unison, the end result sounding like your favorite pop song stretched and warped beyond anything you could have prepared for. "Nevermore" (listed, for some reason, as a "bonus track"), ends things on a very high note, sounding a bit like the song "Puppetting" from MML, only with vocals delivered from beyond the grave by Edith Piaf. At the end of the record, you realize you have just had access to someone's strange and fantastic private world. We can only wonder what else is out there waiting to see the light of day. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! ----* ----* AQ x WFMU x SXSW 2010 POSTERS : ----*
This is one of those reviews that's both so exciting yet daunting to write. Trying to describe in mere words how a record has totally taken over our ears and left us in awe of its power, intensity, not to mention its incredible sound. We have always loved what we've heard from Zola Jesus in the past. But something has changed and the bar has been raised seriously high with this new ep. Without a doubt, one of the most mesmerizing and entrancing records we've heard all year. Zola Jesus has left behind the layers, noisiness and muddled sound of her past efforts and found her way to something much more clear, emotional, epic, haunting and so precisely focused.
There is definitely something to be said for quality control. The six songs on Stridulum are all practically perfect, not a wasted note, not a throw away line, each and every one has already seemed to seep into our subconscious, to get stuck in our head, and to resonate at such a deep level. With a sound like classic '80s Siouxsie revamped for the oughts, dark and ominous with soaring and strong vocal that leave no room for doubt. She means every single note, every single word, every single sentiment , that she expresses with such undying spirit on this record.
In lots of ways this transition to a new more focused and intense sound reminds us a lot of the leap that John Maus made when he released Love Is Real. While his past outings were eccentric, cool and weird, Love Is Real felt like a statement, a totally unique vision that had the ability to capture your attention right away and keep you coming back for more. That's what Stridulum is like, Zola Jesus demonstrates that her music doesn't rely on some sort of noise / FX aesthetic or trendy sound (lo-fi, washed out, layered drones, etc.) but that she is an artist with a truly unique and special vision. Don't get us wrong, we loved her past records and we love so much of the music that has come out in the last few years that is aligned with many of the aforementioned musical trends but there comes a time when you want to hear something that really feels like it has weight, strength and something true to say. More songs than sound, more music, than art.
There is no other way to say it, we have been totally intoxicated by this record. It's under our skin, on the tip of our tongues. It's made its way into our heads and every part of our body. It's both so physically moving and emotionally present. We also think its one of those records that could appeal to so many different folks. People who dig all sorts of sounds: Kate Bush, Fever Ray, Chromatics, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Bat For Lashes, Nico, PJ Harvey, The Creatures, Diamanda Galas, John Maus, Joy Division, Blessure Grave, Jarboe, Bjork, White Magic, Cold Cave, Bauhaus, Patti Smith, etc. With Stridulum, Zola Jesus has really carved out her own unique niche, positioning herself as one of the most interesting, original and exciting music makers in the underground these days. What makes it even more impressive is that she is barely twenty one years old and somehow manages to find time to go to school when not creating these sublime sounds. We're almost scared (in a good way) of what her future holds. This is the sound of someone truly coming into their own and owning their moment with such fierce clarity and hypnotic power. Absolutely stunning!
