A necessary resurfacing of the NF Orchest. This was an East Bay post-noise project spearheaded by Jim Kaiser, Angela Hsu, and A.C. Way many years ago, marked by leaden electronics and acoustic dinscraping. The group found themselves with the rather trite problem of having too much on their plate - Kaiser performing almost constantly with Hsu, Thomas Carnacki, and irr.app.(ext.) amongst others; and Way taking up the cause of Maleficia, Carrion, and probably a few other blackened projects festering in Oakland warehouses. After five years since the last time we heard from the NF Orchest, the three found themselves plugged into the same PA at the Luggage Store in early 2010, where Kaiser bowed his trusted bicycle wheel, Hsu slashed across her violin, and Way produced all sorts of dread-inspiring, subterranean noises. The resulting sounds have the feel of being recorded way deep underground, with a molten snarl of hellish drone bubbling about atonal plucks and scrapes spiralling through phased delay patterns. Yeah, the violin improvisations in abandoned buildings do resonate with the Hsu / Kaiser end of the NF Orchest spectrum, but Way's heavy, black drones put this into an entire other catagory of spectral dark ambience.
Full length number two from one of the most revered US black metal bands around. And for good reason. Their Death And The Black Work record was near flawless, a swirling epic, spaced our psychedelic blackness, with insane insectoid riffing, inhumanly blazing drumming, filthy demonic vox, and some of the most tangled, gnarled and complex arrangements ever. Especially the guitars. Strip the guitars away, and you'd still be looking as a practically perfect BM framework, blasting, chaotic, dense, ultra heavy, to that you could add some generically grim and frosty riffage and have a decent slab of black metal, or you could add some warped and dizzyingly fractured Nightbringer style riffing, and suddenly, we're in a whole 'nother dimension. In some ways the sound is more death metal than black metal, in structure at least, furious and relentless, so fast, but cloaked in a filthy patina of grim ambient buzz, shot through with spidery mournful melodies, and those guitars, soaring and howling and tangly and layered and totally epic and relentless, as close to manic blackened riffing can get to non stop shredding without losing cohesion, instead it makes every track seem more epic, more spacey out, as if the band were trying to craft some impossible black metal ur-drone raga, a constant build, getting more and more and more frantic, the energy spilling forth it huge gouts of incendiary buzz and blast, totally exhausting, but also utterly exhilarating, one track feels like a whole record by other, less ambitious bands, like some strange hybrid of Deathspell Omega, Leviathan and Liturgy, the last especially in the way Nightbringer seem to transcend black metal, taking the traditional tropes and stretching them into something almost more akin to 20th century composition, black metal rendered in sprawling expansive soundscapes of light and dark, buzz and blast, grind and crunch, howl and shimmer, occasionally slipping into gorgeous swirling guitar drones, other times, pounding majestic doomlike lumber, and still other times face melting bursts of white noise blasts of grinding black crunch.
Nightbringer are easily one of the best USBM bands, and Apocalypse Sun is just latest in their ever expanding black world of sound, and is most definitely a contender for black metal record of the year. As if we were expecting anything less...
Very limited stock on this one. Defeat looks back to Nilsen's earlier recordings as Hazard, when his frigid dronescapes engineered from field recordings of the Swedish hinterlands to articulate the desolation and cold of that region. Of course, this isn't to say that Nilsen's current collaboration with Stilluppsteypa or the new output for Touch isn't dark, cold, and barren. Defeat is an recording laced with horror-film minor-key melodies that repeat the sparse two or three notes overlapping his trademarked bleak washes of drone, hiss, and shadow. This ominous bit of sound design doesn't seem to rely all that much on the laptop trickery (unlike say Silent Night or This Invisible City), rather the sources of synth and guitars hold their own in producing these black sounds. 40 minutes long and limited to 100 copies. Already out of print from the label.
We've never really been that into Canadian director Bruce LaBruce, but if any movie was gonna change our mind, it just might be Otto; Or, Up With Dead People. It looks pretty awesome just based on the pictures in the booklet. A super stylish gay punk zombie called Otto wanders the streets of Berlin, eventually finding himself cast in a low budget film. And then there's the soundtrack, brought to us by the ever awesome, always eclectic Crippled Dick Hot Wax!, a super varied collection, of almost entirely unknown to us groups, whose disparate sounds are somehow woven into a surprisingly cohesive collection. The names probably won't mean much to must folks, but the sounds, that's a different story. Haunting dramatic strings, cinematic (obviously) and ominous, gives way to some creepy chamber folk, all thumps and rumbles and deep dark guitar strum, dreamy, but mysterious. After some crackle encrusted strings, sounding a bit like a snippet of William Basinski, in come some skittery downtempo beats and some deep crooned vox, which transitions into some almost sunshiney psychedelic jangle, playful and poppy, you can almost envision Otto wandering through town, not a care in the world. OK, maybe not. But then up next is the awesomely titled Pandas Of Black Metal, with a sort of metal / electro hybrid, all frantic techno beats, grinding chugging guitars, warped 808's, bursts of static, strange samples, cool stuff, which eventually fades out, introducing some syrupy Scott Walker style balladry.
The other awesome proper band is up next, The Living Dead Boys, with some crunchy metallic guitars, wrapped around more techno beats and some super dramatic vocals, sounding a bit like a metallic Interpol, or a way more electronic Deadsy. After a bit of lilting twee music box pop, comes the sprawling 13 minute "On The Cusp Of Infinity" from Brittle Stars, which totally sounds like a band we would freak out over here, a blackened blown out, slow motion shoegazey doom sludge, Nadja, Tim Hecker, SUNNO))), massive metallic slowcore, dreamlike and glacial, and definitely worth further investigation. The rest of the record plays out as a dizzying assemblage of sample laced dream pop shimmer, skittery electronic weirdness, dramatic neo-classical, almost operatic black ambience, twisted free jazz 20th century soundscapes, Oval-like skip and glitch shimmer, finishing off with some cute playful folk pop, acoustic guitars and chiming bells, a brief little ditty, appropriately titled "Everyone's Dead".
Still can't say if we're sold on the movie, but we've been digging the soundtrack like crazy, and like we said, hard to resist a low budget gay punk zombie flick, especially with such a badass soundtrack...
These masked mysterious weirdo death metallers just drifted through town, their show, like their sound, a grim, almost dada-esque twist on classic death metal, a swirling chaos of gnarled buzzing riffage, blasting loose limbed drumming, and the creepy grunts and growls of hooded front man 'The Curator', the whole band masked and draped in black, spewing huge swells of twisted sonic malevolence.
All three Portal full lengths were huge favorites around here, every one a dizzying assemblage of warped blackness and fractured death metal fury, murky and muddy and washed out, frenzied and freaky and gloriously fucked up. Visually and sonically like a metal Faxed Head, Portal's death metal bears only a slight resemblance to regular death metal, which is precisely why it's so appealing.
This super limited picture disc 7" compiles 2 of the 3 songs from Portal's 2006 demo tape Lurker At The Threshold, and while re-recorded versions of both these songs found their way on to the Outre full length, these older, more raw (believe it or not) versions are well worth checking out. "Omnipresent Crawling Chaos" explodes in a blast of murky metallic grind, frenzied and frantic, but so blurred and smeared as to render it a strange shadowing deathmetalscape, all lurching and lumbering and blasting, a swirling black sonic cloud. "13 Globes" is another chunk of blown out grinding metal crush, but with some cool woozy warbly minor key melodies, stuttering start stop rhythms, and insane tangled riffage, all wrapped in a melted murky lo-fi blacknoize gauze.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pressed on super thick 70 gram vinyl, super striking picture disc adorned with creepy Lovecraftian artwork, either already out of print or darn close, so get one while you can...
These shitgazers from Ohio started their recording career by just dubbing tapes at home and leaving them in local record stores, an endearingly haphazard way to spread the word about your band, and for a band like this, it seemed pretty perfect. Ramshackle and chaotic, DIY and constantly on the verge of collapse, no reason the format and the distribution shouldn't be representative of the music itself. Acid Tape finds PHS returning to the format where it all began, and thankfully even after all the hubbub and hype, after records on Siltbreeze and Woodsist, magazine articles and ridiculous blog love, these guys (and gal) still sound pretty much the same, and Acid Tape sounds like it could have come straight out of the free box on the floor by the front door of your favorite record store, but like those early tapes, it's the sort of 'holy shit' surprise that sometimes lurks in the free box or the bargain bin, part of the record shopping experience that ca never be replicated online. Acid Tape starts off with one of our favorite PHS jams yet, "Unseen Voids", a big swirling cloud of super distorted fuzzed out guitars, simple scattershot percussion, drawled sad boy vocals, tangled melodies, a gorgeous squall of home brewed bedroom psych, definitely worth the price of admittance.
After that, it's a meandering wander through a drugged out busted 4-track shoegaze FX pedal popscape, gnarled wah guitars, skeletal rhythms, woozy almost dubby bass (especially on "Hard As It Gets (Chill Sax Mix)"), super reverbed vox, detuned acoustic guitars, lots of tape hiss, tripped out electronic drums, gnarled riffs, finishing off with a pretty mighty two-fer, the brief but hooky "Gliderz", with it's melted lysergic fuzz guitar, warbly tape speed, and twisted melodies, and he 7+ minute "Bleak Vacations", a Velvets style blues jangle hypno jam, mesmerizing and spaced out, stripped down and dreamily druggy.
What's in a name? Well, with Puffy Areolas, pretty much everything. Or nothing. All we know is a google search offers up many interesting results, very few of them related to the band. Regardless, it's definitely an attention grabber. We missed them at South By Southwest, but listening to this now, we are kicking ourselves big time. These noiseniks from Ohio sound right at home on Siltbreeze, a sort of fiery feral punk infused with just the right amount of in-the-red noise, and chaotic about to collapse heavy rock, maybe if the Stooges existed now, and were signed to Amphetamine Reptile, the PA's offer up a crowd baiting explosion of noise punk, wild riffing buried in a sea of reverb and distortion, the drums a barely there chaotic crash and crunch, the vocals a wild yowl, frantic and frenetic, pounding and propulsive, this is the sort of record that just oozes sweat and blood and stale beer and cigarette butts, and invokes the sort of next day bruised and battered hangover that there shows must produce in spades. Not sure what else to say, if you like it heavy and noisy and chaotic, you probably can't do much better than the Puffy Areolas.
Comes with a download code so the damage can be digital as well. Fuck yeah.
One of the coolest things about the dubstep scene in the last couple years is how many different, new and exciting directions that sound has been stretched and twisted and expanded into. There has been everything from rave-step to tech-step to dark-step and even drone-step!
Roska use dubstep as an undercurrent to their totally upbeat, dancey and housey soulful sound. Sitting somewhere pretty exciting between the all out party sounds of Zomby and the more soulful and hypnotic elements of Burial. Or imagine any of our dubstep favorites infusing a touch of Lil' Louis and C+C Music Factory energy into their grooves (and we mean that in a good way!). Not sure if this will be dubbed house-step but we got to say it's a pretty awesome and refreshing sound. While so much dubstep has a very menacing, tough, ultra ominous bent, we love the feminine and R&B fueled perspective that Roska brings to the sound, all the while still having incredible beat making skills that can't be denied. In some of the more squeeching and swirling tracks we even think of what would happen if Mouse On Mars dipped their toes into the world of dubstep. A few tracks feature vocals including "I Need Love" which is one of the best, hypnotic dance tracks we've heard in ages. We think this is one of those records that not only dubstep fans will enjoy but a whole lot of other folks into the more soulful and free side of dance music as well. So damn good!
Skweee! Skweee! Skweee! (That's our onomatopoeic skweee alert siren, of course.) Daniel Savio is one of those peculiar Scandinavian skweee producers, making tracks in that funky, fun (and pun) filled '80s arcade-y, chiptune-y, instrumental electro genre we dig so much, you've heard his stuff on the Museum Of Future Sound comps, on the Skweee Tooth comp too, and he's got several 7"s and a full-length lp out as well... Here's his latest, released by an American label, actually a sub-label of Portland dubstep imprint Lo Dubs (who also brought us the killer new Clubroot set also highlighted this week), it's a 2-song 45 featuring skweee that maybe leans towards the darkness of dubstep a bit!
"Nightmare Food" is slinky-slunky skweee, jammin' the blip-blurp, with vaguely Middle Eastern motifs. "Sleeping Wit' Fish" is maybe even moodier, building up into whipcracks of suspenseful grooviness. If John Carpenter made skweee, it might sound like this. Apparently this single is the forerunner for a new full-length from Savio, of what he terms "apocalyptic skweee", eventually to be released on Losonofono, can't wait!
While Ty Segall may be as prolific as they come when it comes to 7"s, splits, and collaborations, a new one seemingly coming out monthly, weekly even, faster then we can keep up with, there's still something so special, thought out, and so damn satisfying about Segall's full-length albums proper.
Especially this new one. No longer can you just reduce a summarization of his music as 'way blown out lo-fi garage radness.' Although that's definitely some of it, but Segall has begun to widen his scope in such thrilling ways. Melted finds his sound more punchy, a dizzying mix of psychedelic, pop, surf, gritty rhythm & blues, punk rock, in fact the album opener is a perfect example, it begins all fey and jangly, but then the guitar kicks in, surprisingly heavy and crunchy, swaggery and sorta bad ass, big loud drums, and then suddenly, a super tripped out squiggly synth solo! The second track too, begins all acoustic guitar, until in comes a groovy walking bassline, and it's total sixties jangle pop that finishes off in a flurry of fluttery flutes....
From the very beginning of the record, the whole thing takes such awesome twists and turns, getting all tweaked and super far out right when you might expect straight ahead jangle, and getting all poppy and heartfelt, right when it sounds like it was gonna explode into chaotic whatthefuckness. Alongside influences like The Gories, Thee Headcoats, and The Sonics, you can even hear some Led Zeppelin, albeit stripped of its excess and indulgence and boiled down to its primitive and riveting core, kind of what it felt like when we heard The White Stripes for the first time. Not reinventing the wheel for sure, but instead pressing the pedal to the metal and spinning all four wheels in a frenzy of unfettered creativity, OWNING these sounds, making totally original music out of borrowed bits, and blowing away so many of the bands around him in the process. Along with that intensity, Segall has a crazy knack for incredible hooks, deep rooted melodies, crafting perfect pop all wrapped up in fiery, fierce rocking crunch.
"Girlfriend" may just be song of the year! It's impossible not to listen to it over and over from the beginning with Ty growling and then it bursting into one of the most catchy, sweat inducing, body shaking songs ever, the sort of jam you would want to put on every mix tape you make. As always, Segall writes and plays just about every note of music himself on the album, but there are some nice moments where his friends lend a helping hand, like John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees laying down some FLUTE on "Caesar", and Mike Donovan from Sic Alps adding vox, as well as some guitar on a couple tracks, including the absurd blown out brilliance of the simple yet so totally addictive "Mike D's Coke". And on tracks like "Imaginary Person" it's like this awesome blend of early Adam & The Ants crossed with The Misfits for an all out sonic showdown.
Segall has a found a way to bring together primitive and powerful stripped down Bo Diddley-like energy and a very honest and sincere emotional undercurrent in his songs that convinces us that once this latest lo-fi garage revival dies down, Segall will still be making engaging, moving and truthful sounds. He is for real!
In the handful of exceptional records from concrete/drone composer Matt Shoemaker, the field recording has been central to his work. Take the aggregate tumblings of minerals from Groundless or the woozy humidity from Spots In The Sun, Shoemaker's use of the field recording in his pieces is miles apart from the pastoral use of bird songs or a gentle rainstorm to offer something 'natural' for an electronic ambient record. No, Shoemaker amplifies the more threatening aspects of nature with insects emitting nightmarish chorales, beetles aggressively scurrying towards hapless prey, and the air of a landscape so heavy and pungent with decay as to be impossible to breathe. For Shoemaker, the world may be nasty, brutish, and short; but he's discovering a weird beauty way out there amidst the grotesqueries of the world.
On the last two records from Shoemaker, a greater emphasis on synthesized psychedelia shot through his tense drone constructs; so with Tropical Amnesia One, Shoemaker has built an album that's just field recordings, without much of the atypical filtering, gizmos, and effects that turn Shoemaker's studio into a scientific laboratory. All of these recordings came from a two week residency Shoemaker spent deep in the Amazon forest, where silence was never afforded amidst the constant buzz of insects, torrential cloudbursts, and burbling streams all teaming with life. Watery sounds introduce the first 20 minutes to this album with all sorts of sodden creaks, slurping movements, and mud-sucking events amassed together. It's as if the vantage point to Shoemaker's sounds were just below the surface of a stagnant body of water next to a muddy embankment, crawling with leeches, skin-breaching worms, and any other parasitic creature that could come to mind. Shoemaker then shifts his attention for the remaining 44 minutes upward to the tops of the trees, where the insects have conspired to broadcast an ominous nocturnal hiss worthy of horror film sound design. A few insects and birds puncture the swarming noise, making the environment seem a lot less threatening that Shoemaker has contextualized it to be. A powerful, sublime recording, and what looks like to the be first in a series of recordings from the Amazon.
This is so absolutely brilliant and bonkers, that when we first heard it, we thought it must be fake, some modern day Rephlex artist putting everyone on, taking the piss, with a "raga-techno" album supposedly from the early '80s. But, no joke, this is the real thing! In 1982, Charanjit Singh, a famous Bollywood composer (he was featured on Sublime Frequencies amazing Bollywood Steel Guitar compilation), had a plan to translate ancient traditional Indian classical ragas to the synthesizer. Using the very synths that would later define Acid House (Rolands TB-303 and TR-808!), Singh unwittingly created a proto-acid masterpiece, before the techno genre ever existed. Since only a hundred or less copies were made originally, this release was mostly a rumor since its creation. We vaguely remember Drew Daniel from Matmos talking about it on Pitchfork, a couple of years back, saying someone should reissue it, but we weren't ready for how incredible and ahead of its time it sounds. Imagine if Kraftwerk (or even Oneohtrix Point Never) started composing music for a Bollywood Rave. Or imagine a more raga-inspired take on another proto-acid classic, Manuel Gottsching's epic E2-E4. While the "disco" rhythms are fast and frenetic and don't really vary that much between tracks (they're not really disco beats per se, but more akin to acid's trancey bounce), the synth flourishes and squelches of the raga over the top are soaring and floaty, making the tracks deliriously hypnotic. Capturing acid house's lysergic transcendence but with an outsider's economy that refuses to date it specifically to the era. While we only have the double lp, there will be a cd release sometime in the next month or so. But don't sleep on the vinyl too long as it's highly limited, and we guarantee there is not another release quite like this one in your collection. Highest Recommendation!
The return of one of our favorite instrumental post rock combos finds the band exploring and expanding. Their old sound, one we already dug pretty heavily, has gotten revamped and supercharged, and we're liking this new version even more, but fear not, the change is not that dramatic, and yeah, the harmonica is still present, and definitely adds a distinct and unique vibe. Plus this new cdep tacks on the long out of print September Songs release, first time ever on cd. But first let's talk about The Name Of The Snake...
Right our of the gate, the band explode into some seriously heavy metallic post rock heaviness, chugging riffs, big drums, soaring guitars, but before long they slip back into their more contemplative drift, getting all minimal and spacey, but here's where it gets interesting, the song shifts into a strangely chuggy chunk of doom, laced with some mournful harmonica, a strange juxtaposition, but what's precisely why it sounds so good. The track flits back and forth between the chug and drift, a slowly unfurling sonic tangle. The second track is more classic SYA, mathy and meandery, busy drumming, muted guitar crunch, some woozy melodies, big chiming melodies, and long stretches of cool backwards ambience.
After a short-ish track, of harmonic laced dark Appalachia, with strange percussion and haunting almost Western styled ambience, comes the records finale, the 10+ minute closer, a classic sounding super sprawling post rock epic, all slow builds and explosive choruses, thick pealing guitars and thick rumbling bass, and that harmonica, one of the few times we find ourselves wondering why more bands don't have harmonica. Heavy and melodic, moody and mysterious, fucking awesome!
As a bonus, the cd tacks on the out of print, super limited tour only tape / 12" September Songs, a post rock record, a math rock record, dark and tangled instrumental rock, moody and epic, massive and emotional. And of course, HARMONICA!! And not just in the background. It's the one of the main melodic elements. And it sounds killer. Once you hear the opening track on September Songs, you'll wonder why the hell more bands don't have a harmonica player. But beyond the kick ass harmonica, this band just rules, huge convoluted riffing, strange mathy rhythms, thick swells of sound, killer complex emotional and heavy. Long stretches of dark brooding ambience, blissed out rhythmic shimmer, warm guitars over martial drums, slow building guitar jangle over mesmerizingly propulsive drumming, slippery slide and minor key melodic finger picking, there's really nothing not to love. The guys take a sound that's becoming more and more tired and turn it inside out and upside down, making their own sort of POST post rock, intense and alive and vibrant and super exciting.
And fucking harmonica!
The first we heard from Greek one man ambient black metal horde was on a split with Swedish psychedelic black metallers Underjordiska, then offering a washed out black ambient counterpoint to Underjordiska's furious spaced out black buzz, so when we finally got this cd in, a digital reissue of a long out of print cassette, we were expecting another disc of washed out ambient blackness, and while there is a bit of that present, Spectral Lore knocked our blocks off with this collection of totally intense, outsider avant black metal buzz.
After a two minute intro of delicate acoustic guitar, SL explode into a 24 minute epic, all stumbling crunch and grind in the beginning, before slipping seamlessly into soaring majestic epic buzzing black metal. The drums and vocals mostly buried beneath the frenzied riffage, weirdly minor key, haunting and space-y but thrashing and black and grim, until the sound shifts, getting muddy and murky, a loping midtempo pound that quickly shifts again, and stretches out into some woozy psychedelic folkiness, all warm buzzing guitars and crystalline melody, soaring strings, totally tranquil and dreamlike, before exploding in another frenzy of tangled and gnarled blackness, and so it goes, slipping back and forth, until finally the guitars coalesce into some classic metal sounding melody, then a weirdly Viking sounding blow out, before fading out completely, leaving a long stretch of hushed gauzey ambience. Heck that track alone would be worth $13, there's more packed into that 24 minutes than most bands manage in records twice that long, but there's so much more.
The rest of the record is a balance between woozy melodic drift, and warped black heaviness, often the line between the two heavily blurred. Black buzz grows more and more indistinct until it sounds more like Nadja, a sort of shoegazey black drift, guitars unfurl, chords unfolding slowly one at a time, moody synthesizer strings drift over hushed minimal swirls of soft focus sound, guitars rumble and bombinate, building to soaring lysergic ur-drones, long stretches of muddy murk give way to crystalline sonic whispers, black metal roils and churns and explodes in streaks of near white noise, the sound and production constantly shifting, blistering and in-the-red one second, mumbled and washed out the next, the sound as much a part of the music as the music itself.
Far out and epic, psychedelic and spaced out, ambient and black, and so goddamn good...
As we've mentioned in some of our other dubstep reviews, dubstep as a genre has gone through a crazy amount of permutations, constantly shifting and twisting into new shapes and sounds, hell, even the folks we already dig will kick out a new record and they'll have gotten inspired and totally mixed it up. Which is what seems to have happened to Starkey, already a long time favorite, based on just a handful of 12"s and a couple DJ mixes. Not sure if his style did dramatically shift, or if it's just that since this is Starkey's first full length, it just so happens to be the record he always wanted to make. Whatever the reason, we're digging this big time. A weirdo hybrid of classic dubstep, glitchy 8-bit electronica, and that sort of Zomby style rave-step.
The first track sums up the Starkey sound pretty perfectly, some 8-bit bloops and beeps, some washed out eighties style synths, and then BANG, some thick fuzzed out bass warble, some glitchy warble lo-tech melody, and some woozy super dramatic, soundtracky melodies.
A bunch of the tracks have guest MC's and thus get all grimey, with stuttery beats, tangled fuzz bass, and mush mouthed flows, and yeah, more of that retro (borderline cheesy) synth, that when incorporated into the griminess sounds almost more ominous than cheesy. Some of the jams are super lo-fi, all glitchy and fuzzy, but eventually explode into something more block rocking and groovy.
The thing with this Starkey joint and lots of the newer dubstep records coming out, is that instead of stringing a bunch of beats together and calling it day, folks are concerning themselves more with actually writing songs, coming up with melodies, crafting actual music instead of just trying to get asses moving. But in the process, they're managing to do both.
Lots of Ear Drums And Black Holes veers way off the dubstep beaten path, getting all electro, dipping toes into electronic pop, fuzzy chill out techno, abstract jungle, with a little thread of dubstep running through them all, making this super varied record, impossibly cohesive. Anyone who's been digging Zomby, Ikonika, Rosko and any of the more melodic dubsteppers might just have found a new favorite...
The Strangulated Beatoffs are a weird weird band. But then what did you expect from a band called the Strangulated Beatoffs? Or from a band that features members of infamous noise punks Drunks With Guns?
This demented duo sometimes use samplers and loops to make fucked up hypnotic grooves and seriously demented electronic weirdness, but as is evidenced by Greatest Hits, they're also puerile purveyors of sick sludgey noise rock and filthy drunkrock dirges. Greatest Hits is mostly a collection of seven inches, the earliest recordings of the Beatoffs circa 1988-1992 or so and thus are maybe the closest sonically to the late great Drunks With Guns. Some tracks like "Porky The Pig And Bess" and "Heeby Jeeby/Practicing To Be A Doctor" are heavy dirgey space rock drug jams that sound like they could have been yanked from a Butthole Surfers set, while others, like "Lick My Butthole" musically sound like Dutch post metallers Gore, but with the addition of some goofy fucked up lyrics, and some damaged shards of buzz and crunch.
"It's A Vile, Vile, Vile, Vile World" is a super lengthy collage of looped eighties Carpenter-ish soundtracks, that sounds like it could be James Ferraro, but it's from at least a decade before Ferraro delved into lysergic pop music, so the Beatoffs are unsung musical pioneers! Fuck yeah! There's a Troggs cover too, but you'd never know it, a murky field recording that sounds like it was captured in the bar around the corner from the show, there's a dorky acoustic ditty, some strange carnivalesque child molesting weirdness, some Mentors like punk rock, but the finest moments are when the band do their best Butthole Surfers, crafting longform drone dirge drug rock, all swirling spacey effects, gnarled looped guitars, and mesmerizingly motorik beats...
If you're not sold by now, maybe this will sway you: Strangulated Beatoffs are one of Andee's all time favorite bands. EVER. So much so that he contacted them about reissuing all of their records, maybe even a box set, but all they wanted to release on tUMULt was their record of Genesis covers! (And then he never heard from them again.) How rad is that???
Been hearing lots about Portland's Stunned records, and we're happy to finally have one of their beautifully packaged tapes for your listening/viewing pleasure. This one comes from San Francisco's own sax and guitar duo Sudden Oak. Matt Erickson, who also rips it up solo under the name Radiant Husk, sends soaring sax tones up through the atmosphere while John Ward's guitar feedback freak-outs lay bubbling below. Together the duo travel through strange noise-jazz lands, up and over urban creep zones that move and flow into fluid rhythms and fucked up loops. Picture an old Pharaoh Sanders tape echoing through a blown out amp in a water tank, so weird and so rad. Limited to an edition of 111, each with pro-printed j-cards plus insert, these are already sold out at the source, so act fast if you want one of these beauties.
Summons Of Shining Ruins is the nom de plume of Japanese post-shoegazing guitarist Shinobu Nemoto, who had released a rather exceptional piece of cinematic ambience for Experimedia in 2009 that came and went rather quickly. This is another one that will disappear in the blink of an eye as well, given the tiny edition of this pressing. There's only 53 copies around, probably due to the inclusion in the packaging of an antique chemists label culled from chain of British drug stores that at one time sold such things as 'liquid extract cascara sagrada' and 'camphorated oil.' A nifty piece of esoterica to go along with this tape of woozy, muffled drones from Nemoto. The tracks are much less dramatic than the album he did for Experimedia, instead these sullen ambient movements slowly waver along grey streamlined tones with upwelling melodies moving to the foreground from time to time. Certainly on par with the murky cassette work that Maeror Tri and Troum produced way back when, or maybe even some of the Lovesliescrushing driftworks but given a tape hiss makeover. Nice.
The UK label Soundway pretty much kills it every time, concentrating on reissues and compilations of super groovy stuff from West Africa and Latin America in the '70s, especially wowing us with the material they've dug up from Nigeria and Ghana... that's what we have here, one of two new Soundway reissues on this week's list, both of bands from Ghana, the other being Hedzoleh Sounds, highlighted nearby. Sweet Talks (great name!) knock out six energetic, get up and dance numbers on this 1974 album, their second, originally a hit release for them in their native country, where they were one of the top acts of the day, mixing up Afrobeat, highlife, and Western JB's styled funk in a fresh and exciting manner. This music's always in motion, relentlessly rhythmic, the exuberant, expressive vocals vying with frenetic percussion and tooting horns. Catchy little melodies are also a big part of the Sweet Talks equation, with tasty electric organ licks galore...
Even though it's from a quite different part of Africa, we'd venture that this should appeal to folks into the funkier entries in the Ethiopiques series!
For this facsimile reissue, the compact disc comes packaged in a nice miniature lp style sleeve, and of course the lp format is packaged in a nice regular sized lp sleeve. Another great Soundway release, big thanks to them for performing such a service, since otherwise we'd probably never know about, nor be able to find or afford, the original records by these groups that so very much deserve lasting exposure and a wide audience.
Imagine if you can, some sort of modern electronica dubstep / traditional East African folk music hybrid. Sounds pretty amazing for sure. Definitely kind of difficult to conjure up, but Wireless, the final recording from techno producer T++, has taken these two sonically disparate elements and created something truly spellbinding.
T++ is just one of the many pseudonyms producer Torsten Profrock has used over the years, loosely affiliated with the Skull Disco collective, exploring various permutations of dub and techno, but this is the first we've heard from him in any guise, and we have to say it's pretty killer.
Combining super skeletal skittery beats with archival recordings from EMI's archive of historical music (the same one Honest Jon's as has been working through to compile its various reissues), Profrock takes various recordings of vocals and ndingidi (a one string fiddle like instrument) from old 78s and chops and cuts and reassembles and reinterprets, creating a super haunting minimal abstract techno that is ghostly and otherworldly but also very human and organic sounding. "Cropped" loops a simple 2 step rhythm around a gorgeous hummed melody, a refrain that gives the listener chills every time, while beneath the beat, various bits of buzz and shimmer, and fragments of melody drift and swirl. "Anyi" starts out thick and squelchy, only to splinter into some super abstract dub, peppered with shards of hiss and fuzz. Soft swells of intense vocalizing and mournful minor key melody undulate just below the surface, along side thick streaks of buzzy bass. "Voices No Bodies" is another stretch of skeletal skitter, wreathed in woozy spectral loops, the African elements barely audible beneath the hypnotic clipped shuffle. And finally "Dig", which is the most traditionally 'dubstep' sounding of the bunch, with bigger beats, and that lurching two step stutter, laced again with mysterious fragmented voices, bits of buzz, clouds of soft focus effects, all woven into a gorgeously rhythmic and hypnotic whole.
What can we say? We love these Southern sludgelords, every record another fantastically grim pit of fetid sonic despair, crushing and pummeling and punishing heaviness, but still strangely catchy, few can really touch Thou, they're probably the most likely heirs to the Eyehategod throne, not that those guys would ever give it up, but still, that should give you an idea of what these guys are capable of.
Baton Rouge is 4 loooong, sloooooow, looooow tracks of extreme doom sludge, the opener, "Baton Rouge, Louisiana", an insanely downtuned ultralow, barely moving expanse of amp buzz and chordal stasis, like SUNNO))) only SLOWER. Long streaks of squealing feedback pepper the glacial creep, it's almost like an ambient intro, but stretched out into a whole songs, a whole gloriously sludgey song! Up next is something a bit more propulsive, but only a bit. "By Every Hand Betrayed" is a grinding chugging beast, with a killer main melody, and some super dynamic riffage, the vocals thoughout, harsh and hellish, but buried within all this crunch and rumble are some awesomely melodic, nearly poppy bits, that sound a bit like Torche oddly enough. "Out of the Mouth of a Fool" is almost groovy, like Southern rock, melted down and dipped in black tar, woozy and hypnotic, downright speedy by Thou standards, that is until about 4 minutes in when it downshifts to ULTRAslow.
But the final track is the deal sealer, a cover of Nirvana's "Sifting", which takes the already pretty sludgey original and totally transforms it into something even filthier and grimier and slower, but it sounds soooooooo rad, like playing the 45 at 16rpm, the combination of pop hooks and downtuned tarpit dirge is pretty tough to beat, and once again has us wishing their was actually a band that always sounded like that sort of extreme ultra sludge pop. But for now, we're perfectly happy playing this over and over and over and over.
Killer packaging too!!!
Yay! Put on your favorite monster mask and pour a big bowl of sugary breakfast cereal, Black Moth Super Rainbow's possibly groovier, more "hip-hop" alterego is back! Tobacco in the house!! And when we say possibly groovier, what we mean is that this is VERY groovy, about as groovy as it is distorted, and 'delic. Thick, fuzzy, flangey synths colorfully pulsate everywhere, amidst handclap-laced "Unholy Demon Rhythms" (as one song title here puts it)... and it seemingly never ends, hypnotic, head nodding, foot tapping, one track after the next, grooving out with laidback sunshiney good vibes and DayGlo exploding weird noize-energy, all at the same time. A lot of it's instrumental, and when vocals do appear, they're dreamily delivered, heavily treated with spacey electronic effects, the stoned flow far more like blissed out chant than regular "rap", although Tobacco's debut Fucked Up Friends did feature a cameo from rapper Aesop Rock, and this new one boasts guest rhyming on a couple cuts by none other than Beck, who is the godfather of druggy indie-tronic hiphop, right?
The lyrics, when there are lyrics, are usually brief (if not to-the-point), containing cryptic poetry and good advice (?), for instance from "Constellation Dirtbike Head", the lead-off track: "Feel the day, the hottest day / Don't eat the berries around you / Don't eat the berries around you / Burn all your things". Them's all the words. Tobacco returns to the themes of burning and eating later in the disc, but you'll grok just as much sense from the song titles (several of which sound like they'd fit nicely on a NWOFHM album by Steel Mammoth or somebody, e.g. "Lick The Witch", "Motorlicker", "Nuclear Waste Aerobics", etc.).
Basically, if you liked Fucked Up Friends (and why wouldn't you?), you'll like Tobacco's sophomore effort too, it's cut from the same cloth, another sixteen tracks of his friendly, freaky soundz. And same thing goes, if you like BMSR, Tobacco's for you too, but we explained that already when we reviewed the first one (which we made a Record Of The Week by the way, and maybe shoulda done the same this time too). Compared to BMSR, this is pretty similar, Tobacco just steps a little harder, funkier, totally rockin' the bells, with the ever-present, almost skweee-ish synths being even woozier and soooooo wonderfully distorted! Along w/ BMSR, this makes us think of what it might sound like if Fuck Buttons got Daft Punk'd...
One last thing to say, obvious, but we're on a deadline: Tobacco IS addictive! But that's ok, while this might get a Surgeon General's warning, it gets our recommendation!
And fyi, for the next two weeks, we've got this on a special $2 off sale deal, so it's $11.98 instead of the regular $13.98, until 7/4/10!
You know a record is gonna rule when even the amp buzz that precedes the record proper, sounds bad ass, but that's exactly how this heaving slab of noise rock begins, with a thick squelch of muddy glitchy buzz, which is soon joined by some caveman pounding, blurred and distorted, the sort of hypno thud sludge we could listen to FOREVER. But then more drums stumble into action, and we're in some sort of Cop Shoot Cop junkyard noise punk / Crash Worship tribal freakout territory, until the song kicks in proper, with super distorted howled vox, tangled detuned guitar crunch, squealing feedback, the whole song a lurching tangled of woozy off kilter riffage, crumbling distortion, constantly shifting recording quality, glitch and hiss and dropouts galore, a grinding monstrous slab of Neanderthal sludges that totally RULES.
As we mentioned in our review of TS's self titled debut, these guys seem to have a keen pop sense, one they seem dead set on obscuring behind walls of ugly, head caving, amp shredding noise. But thankfully that pop sense seems to leech into everything they do, the result sounding more like Jesus Lizard or Halo Of Flies, but does with some seriously bad acid, and let loose in a room full of busted amps, broken guitars and falling to pieces drum kits. Recorded on handheld tape recorded, broadcast by holding it up to a megaphone, holding the megaphone up to a cell phone, and then plugging the phone on the other end into a fucking MASSIVE amp, hooked up to a bunch of distortion pedals, all with batteries in various stages of running out of juice. A lurching noise rock, that not only seems on the verge of collapse, but seems to gradually melt and crumble and collapse before your very ears, as if every song is a desperate attempt to keep it going, before collapsing in a heap, only to explode into the next song and try again. And while this all does sound punishing and pummeling and brutal and chaotic and harsh, which it most definitely is, it's also weirdly catchy, and sorta groovy, repetitive and hypnotic, maybe like a pop flecked, slightly shoegazey, blurred and blackened, noise rock Butthole Surfers. Or something like that. Needless to say, this is some fucking crushing catchy, ruling shit, but only for those of you who have worked up a tolerance for stuff this bad ass and brutal, past exposure to Brainbombs, Whitehouse, Burmese, Rusted Shut, Billy Bao, Shit And Shine, Clockcleaner, Ancestors, White Mice, Liquorball, Strangulated Beatoffs, Violent Students perhaps not required, but definitely suggested...
All right! We managed to acquire a few more copies of this limited edition Record Store Day vinyl item from a Finders Keepers connection of ours, so we're now able to list it. Only a handful in stock, though, and we won't be getting any more. It's a 10" compilation featuring six female songbirds (as it were), or flocks of songbirds, from around the world, in the feminine freak/folk/funk fashion you'd expect, some of these lovely ladies hailing from the '70s, some happenin' now but still sounding like they belong on vintage vinyl...
From the modern day, there's samplings of the Vashti Bunyan inspired fairy tale folk of Magpahi (aka Alison Cooper), Italian troubadour Emma Tricca, and Misty Dixon's Jane Weaver, all of whom you might know from the B-Music Bearded Ladies comp.
Dug up from way back when, rare tracks from Iron Curtain era Polish girl group Ali Babki, Welsh teens Sidan, and the lovely Soledad Miranda, best known as an actress from the sexy cult horror flick Vampyros Lesbos! That one's a real standout, can't wait for the B-Music full-length Soledad anthology coming up!
Limited to 1000 copies, a 2010 RSD special.
The Sublime Frequencies label is really on a roll lately, as always it seems, a flurry of new releases, all of them fantastic, including a recent Record Of The Week (Omar Souleyman), not one but two releases on this week's list (this, and one of our current Records Of The Week, Dara Puspita!), and new stuff upcoming soon as well. And as always, every time we get a new SF release, we can't help but think 'best one yet!', every single one is a thrilling earful of some remarkable sounds. This one is of particular note, as it's related to a past Sublime Frequencies release, the Musical Brotherhoods From The Trans-Saharan Highway dvd, which after watching repeatedly, we couldn't help but hope for a soundtrack, and well, this is about as close as we're gonna get. A handful of these tracks were in fact featured in that film, and in addition to those tracks, there are twice as many more, to let us experience the magic and mystery of the Jemaa El Fna, aka Rendezvous Of The Dead, aka a central square in the Marrakesh, Morocco, which during the day is a place for locals and tourists alike to gather, food and music and magicians and entertainers and story tellers, but at night, when the tourists are tucked away safely in bed, these musicians create some of the most intense and passionate music we've heard. Explosive and expressive and distorted and super blown out. Amps powered by car batteries, broadcast through beat up old megaphone speakers, hand built instruments, wild percussion, soulful ecstatic vocals, it's probably worth revisiting our review of the dvd, as the setting is as much a part of the music as the sounds:
"Ancient mystical brotherhoods', small groups of stringed instruments and drums, players managing to create intense and intensely emotional sounds and songs, that range from dark and simple, sweetly contemplative, to fierce and fiery and jubilant, explosive and over the top._Performing in bustling street markets, lit by fires and lamplight, a huge after dark celebration, story telling, eating, socializing but most importantly making music... Small lantern lit clusters of people gather around old record players, home made amplifiers, rusty old speakers, strange (to our eyes) stringed instruments, all manner of drums and percussion, the crowd eager to bask in this amazing music, and just as often to participate, whether it be as another drummer, a singer, a dancer or even just as an onlooker. The music, is a stripped down blues, the buzzing strings, the gorgeous hypnotic melodies, looped and cyclical, so hypnotic and catchy, the vocals soulful and impassioned, from solo crooning to strange harmonies, to chanting, and lots of festive sing alongs. The focus is the buzzing strings and the pounding drums, and there are plenty of both, but there are also buzzing snake charmer style horns, and of course the usual outdoor crowd sounds, folks talking and laughing, cars driving past. It's so much like wandering through Morocco, it's amazing. The rhythms and the melodies, a constant barrage of groove and drone, simple percussive thumps and shuffles, haunting melodies, huge tribal drum jams and of course some incredible riffing. Our favorite jams feature what appears to be a traditional banjo, but electrified and plugged into a rusty old handmade amplifier, turning the banjo into an awesome buzzing sitar like beast, emitting intense almost metallic chunks of incendiary riffing, raw and emotional, super distorted and intense, underpinning the wailing vocals and dense drumming.
And that pretty much is a perfect description of this whole record, a jubilant, celebratory, wild and exultant musical get together, the sound is fierce and vibrant and raw and in-the-red, super distorted and LOUD, like you were really there, the stringed instruments buzz and howl, the drums pound and thump and utterly mesmerize, the singers croon and wail, usually with the crowd joining in, the sound is just so intense and alive, really incredible. The pure joy of music making is rarely so palpable. Which makes this, yeah, we're gonna say it again, maybe one of our favorite Sublime Frequencies yet!
Comes in a thick full color gatefold, includes extensive liner notes. And like all the Sublime Frequencies vinyl, these are super limited, we order as many as we can, but once they're gone, we're not able to get more. You know what that means...
Ok, so it's taken us a little while to list this, since it got reissued on cd domestically last year (originally this came out as a cassette release in 1982). But, doesn't matter, it's called Time Vaults after all, it's super old already, being an odds and sods collection of unreleased (at the time) material recorded in the early '70s by British progressive rock weirdos Van Der Graaf Generator, one of our fave prog acts ever, when the band was officially on hiatus (between their Pawn Hearts and Godbluff albums). So, these tracks are of varying production quality, some sound like they could have been on either of those two actual albums, while others have more bootleggy sonics. Likewise, while a few are fully realized songs (e.g. dramatic, melodic opener "The Liquidator", and the quite jagged and intense "Rift Valley"), many others are more improv/experimental/instrumental type things, like the bizarre collage style title track (shades of Faust), but still interesting though, and not just to VDGG buffs, though of course that's who we'd mostly expect to pick this up. If you like VDGG, and aren't uptight about "perfect sound quality" then it's quite recommended. With wonderfully distorted rehearsal space jams like "Drift (I Hope It Won't)" complete with background chatter and feedback, this is vintage VDGG with their hair down, their trademark sound (bombastic vocals, with sax-and-keys instead of guitar) gone all lo-fi, like a lot of bands in the current underground. It's almost like a shitgaze VDGG, a VDGG that you could put on a mix tape with Sic Alps or Ducktails or something like that! Heck, they should/could have reissued it on cassette, again...
The hazy and washed out cover art caught our eye but the sounds that came pouring out of the speakers is what won us over right away. Shoegaze blissed out electronics that seem to float in the clouds but also have a keen sense of melody. Walls definitely remind us a lot of that cool Morr music compilation of Slowdive covers that came out years ago, as it really does sound like our dreamy electronic based favorites tapping into the mesmerizing world of shoegaze greats like Slowdive, or the more celestial moments of Flying Saucer Attack's masterpiece Further.
Blissy blurry guitars and smeared murky vox buried in the mix on a few tracks, it all makes for such a perfect sun soaked sound. These songs swirl and flow with such ease yet it never turns into wallpaper as there is an understanding of creating actual songs and nice moments of subtle tension that give the record a rounded and utterly satisfying feel. Like an even more blissed out Infinite Body or our favorite outings by Ulrich Schnauss, or even what could happen if Panda Bear let go of his Beach Boys leanings and set his sights to a more soaring shimmery sound. This is turning into a major candidate for dreamiest record of the year!
The Monk label strikes again with another killer release, this one from legendary Memphis bluesman Robert Wilkins, whose contributions some of you may remember from the Mississippi compilations I Woke Up One Morning In May (the song "I'll Go With Her", unfortunately not included here) and Last Kind Words (the amazing "That's No Way To Get Along", which, true to the title of this record, is featured here). Wilkins ran in the same circle as Furry Lewis (whose "I Will Turn Your Money Green" Monk put out not too long ago), Son House, and Memphis Minnie. Like Lewis, Wilkins enjoyed a resurgence in the '60s when he was rediscovered by the folk scene, making appearances at Newport and other festivals. During the time after his initial run, he found time to become an ordained minister, playing music all the while, even going so far as to change the more evil lyrics of songs to suit higher powers. Of course, the stuff featured here is classic Memphis blues, with many of the songs including such time worn topics as rambling about ("Rolling Stone" pts. 1 and 2), solitary wondering, and serving time in the pen. The songs on Side A were recorded during 1928 and 1929, featuring Wilkins solo with guitar. His voice is a slow drawl, weary sounding but also wise to the realities of the world, sometimes distorting the speakers with its power. Side B contains songs from a session in 1930 as well as some later tunes from 1935 featuring accompaniment from Little Son Joe on guitar and Kid Spoons on, you guessed it, the spoons. Wilkins would outlive many of his contemporaries before passing away in 1987 at the ripe old age of 91. That's No Way To Get Along serves as a great compilation from one of Memphis' greats and will undoubtedly appeal to all you blues obsessives. ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Another issue of the magazine we can't live without. Cover model: "Hamburg cosmonaut" Felix Kubin, interviewed by Momus. Also: Demdike Stare, Rangers, Hudson Mohawke (doing the Invisible Jukebox), Carsten "Alva Noto" Nicolai, Actress, and plenty more. Plus the usual helpful reviews, news, charts, scene reports (Fukuoka, Japan), etc.
