One of our favorite purveyors of what we've taken to calling FLOORcore (short for crouched-on-the-floor-core), the constantly evolving genre, which is marked by live shows featuring performers on their knees, surrounded by a kitchen junk drawer's worth of equipment, coaxing all sorts of noises from a battered assemblage of broken effects pedals, old synths, and homemade noisemaking devices.
Acre tends to weave all of his random noisemakers into gorgeous undulating walls of slow shifting drone, and on this two track 7", he does just that, but in dramatically different ways.
The A side is a creeping, thick, gnarled, grinding, looped, hypnotic, crumbling and superdistorted glacial riff, not sure if it's guitar or synth, but either way it sounds like sonic tar, it oozes and shifts and grinds and creeps, a thick black mass, a deep filthy doom-ed drone. It's the kind of sound we could listen to forever. Pretty sure that if we had this on cd, we'd just set it to repeat and listen to nothing else for a month!
The flipside is a dense slab of that sort of vacuum cleaner / hair dryer high end drone, upper register tones drifting in a field of ringing feedback and blurred white noise. The intensity builds and builds as if one at a time, some new appliance was being added to the mix, like a department store gone haywire, the result though is a very dreamy Sunroof!-like mighty high end ur-drone. Super minimal but with close listening strangely ultra maximal, with all sorts of stuff going on within the layered skree.
Packaged in cool white on yellow hand screened sleeves. Pressed on thick white vinyl with yellow labels, and of course VERY VERY LIMITED, ONLY 300 COPIES...
Four new songs for '09 from this poptastic Placerville quartet, courtesy of the Acuarela singles club.
Lal Lal Lal sent us these, though technically it's private release not on that tiny Finnish label, the reason they had 'em being that Nuslux is a project of Roope from Lal Lal Lal, who's also in Maniacs Dream, Pylon, and Avarus. Meanwhile the Amon Dude (haha) is Arttu, also from Avarus, Anaksimandros, etc. It's limited, it's weird, it's vinyl, and it's Finnish. We only have a handful. What else need we say? Oh, what's it sound like? Well the Dude's side, "In Full Flight", is a live recording of their distorted, danceable (?) electronic shenanigans, while Nuslux jam on the flip, using mostly self-built analog instruments to make their "good-humored and chilled out" electronic minimalism. Basically if you liked that Lal Lal Lal festival cassette we listed not long ago, this is for you too.
Is it us, or is UK noise rock outfit Aufgehoben continually getting noisier and noisier? Is that even possible? We're beginning to think it is, even after the recent Messidor full length seemed to have reached a noise ceiling.
But here we are, two splattery, speaker frying blasts of no wave, free jazz noise rock. Or something. Not sure what to call it, but we like it. A lot. It does require a strong stomach and some iron clad earholes, but if you think you've got the stuff, that hop right in.
Two drummers, electronics, and very little else, are all these guys need to DESTROY. Side A begins with some rhythmic free jazz splatter before being swallowed alive by white hot bursts of crumbling distortion and swells of Merzbowian fury. The sheets of noise stuttering and almost 'skipping' into strange speaker shredding almost-rhythms, some otherworldly white noise pulse that bathes the rest of the song in a blinding and painfully loud glow.
Side B is cut from the same cloth, beginning with some Derek Bailey-ish guitar scrabble before the band launch into a full-on free jazz noise rock assault, loads of buzzing feedback, charged sheets of skree, all blown out and super distorted and in the red, interrupted by brief bits of tranquility, peppered with moments of grinding guitar scrape and spastic drum sputter, always quickly obliterated by a massive super nova of pure noise. Fucking brutal and massively intense!
Packaged in a plain black sleeve with some simple paste on art. Pressed on super thick vinyl, a gorgeous picture disc adorned with strange branch like patterns, like a fossil or some blurred winterscape. Nice!!
LIMITED TO 524 COPIES!!!
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Found a little stash of these. Already out of print so these are the last copies...
Another strange (but then again, maybe not so strange) collaboration. Karl from Axolotl and Elisa from Magic Markers get together to make some beautiful and slightly noisy music together.
Elisa's guitar seems to be taking center stage on the A side, scrabbly and angular, chaotic and scarping and grinding, dense tangles of high end squiggle and scrape laid over a distant hum of tape hiss and other abstract ambience.
The flipside is more bluesy, kind of. A sort of ghostlike disembodied folk, a bit of twang, lots of clunk and clatter, stumbly and spacious, the notes and melodies gnarled and twisted into strange atonal shapes, deep rumbling swells here and there, clouds of high end shimmer, soft washed out buzz, a dreamy creaky blissed out noiseflecked abstract guitarscape. Haunting and strangely pretty.
Chicago's formation Flying V pilots Bible Of The Devil fight in the skies on this split 7" with another band of metal maniacs, Louisville's Blade Of The Ripper (featuring one of the dudes from Nashville Pussy and The Hookers, letting his Venom fandom come to the fore). The 33 rpm Side A is BOTD's "Hot Deth", and it harks back a bit to their more Hellacopters-ish garagey rawk early stylings while staying as metal as their spelling of "deth" would suggest. On the flip (which is supposed to spin at 45, 'cause they're fucking with you or something), BOTR offer up "Cast Me In The Fire", maybe even more vicious and raw and metallically evil than the A-side, though you do have the option of speeding "Hot Deth" up to 45 if you want to hear something faster (and more ridiculous), to which "Cast Me In The Fire" can't respond unless you've got a turntable that plays at 78 too. We're big BOTD fans already, but this makes us want to check out more BOTR also. Limited edition, Italian import, we have but a fistful.
What might you expect from a group featuring members of doomdrone heavyweights Trees and Tecumseh? Something slow and low and lumbering... Probably, us too, but City Of Churches is anything but. Not slow, or low, or lumbering, instead, Memelust is 63 tracks (yep 63 tracks on a 7") of super hyper spastic tech-grind insanity. Some songs are literally one second long, a single harsh guitar-drums-shriek burst, others sprawl to 5 or 6 seconds, a few even longer, those 'extended' tracks jam way too many parts into way too little space, so each blast is a bursting at the seams micro-blowout of chaotic screamo grind fury.
The sound is so short and sharp, the songs so jagged and fragmented, that at times, when there are 5 or 6 2 second long tracks in a row, it almost sounds like someone is just fucking around with the volume knob, turning it down, then up, then down, and up again, creating the briefest of shards from a larger grinding whole. But that is not the case, these are all actual tracks, songs even... some improvised, others composed using an invented system of musical notation! City Of Churhes has been described as 'brutal prog', we might alter it a bit to GRIND-prog, equal parts Harry Pussy, Naked City, Napalm Death, Anal Cunt, Brutal Truth... we could go on, but you get the drift, this is about as UN-easy as un-easy listening gets. A dizzying onslaught of total grinding metallic fuck-you-up.
Packaged in gorgeous hand screened black and white and yellow on heavy cardstock sleeves, with a printed insert. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
Since his old band The Passionistas called it quits, it seems like Myles Cooper has really come into his own, finding his voice and expressing himself in a wide range of mediums from his confessional/performative YouTube page, to his DJing and presence at the super fun High Fantasy night at Aunt Charlies (one of our favorite bars in the Tenderloin), and his live solo performances. "Gonna Find Boyfriends Today" is a super sugary beyond catchy, fairy tale of a song, kind of like Sesame Street merging into a campy night at a gay bar filled with smiles, rainbows, cotton candy, and an endless stream of sweet and cute boys. The B-side "Lord Love Music" is way more stripped down and raw sound reminding us a lot of a young Calvin Johnson or Ian Svenonius, stylized and super sassy. In some ways Cooper is like the version of Hunx & His Punx that you could take home to your mom, with a beguilingly preppy and wholesome demeanor, but what makes him intriguing is that you know under that surface something warped and more nuanced is going on.
And here is the link to Skye Thorstenson's crazy video of the track to check out, ought to give you a better idea if this is for you or not:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaObXRFg5y8
This 7" has only been released overseas and is limited to 300 copies so best grab it super fast if you want one.
How can you not love a band called Schnauzer? You can't. Not. Love them! We discovered a super fucked up looking cd in a bargain bin somewhere and bought it just cuz the band was called Schnauzer, and of course it was awesome and of course we were immediately obsessed. So here's a brand new disc from these miscreants, and just so you now what we're talking about here, the cover features a mugshot of some shifty looking dude with a wicked devillock, the songs are called "Total Lunatic" and "Blasted Beyond Belief", and here's a message for the listener in the liner notes: "Do NOT attempt top contact this band. Any efforts to do so will further agitate the members of Schnauzer. If you don't like us now, you CERTAINLY won't like us should we become angry. LEAVE US ALONE." Fuck yeah! And the sound? A furious pounding metallic hardcore, a howling vocalist that sounds a bit like Fozzy The Bear from the Muppets, filthy, cruty, blown out, heavy and MEAN as a Schnauzer!
It's a split with some Cleveland band called Crossface, who are cool, NY style hardcore, short pounding and brutal, two tracks, but it hardly matters really, it's ALL ABOUT SCHNAUZER!!!!!!!!
Two tracks each from SF's own Experimental Dental School and Limited Express (Has Gone?) from Kyoto, Japan, whose Tzadik release from last year we likened to Melt Banana and Deerhoof. It's like an exchange program for avant-rock zaniness. Limited stock.
This is not brand new, we somehow missed out on this when it first came out, but seeing as we're such huge fans of North Carolina's Horseback, we figured we'd get a handful of these, and holy shit, it's good. Two tracks, perfectly straddling the two sides of the group, the gorgeous blackened ambient drift, and the buzzing abstract avant black metal crush. Which makes sense as it came out right before their full length on Utech.
The A-side is a gorgeous cloud of mournful melodic drift, a haunting slow motion melody, played out in a haze of shimmering distortion and strange sonic grit, wreathed by streaks of cascading feedback, while buried vox howl in the ether. Some serious dreamlike black ambience, softly propulsive, definitely intense and caustic, but simultaneously languid and lovely.
The flipside takes the same sonic template, but blurs the sounds even further into a continuous black buzz, adding some murky blasting rhythms, a heaving, churning stretch of abstract black hole heaviness. LIMITED TO ONLY 250 COPIES! Comes with a Horseback sticker, quite possibly the last copies we'll be able to get.
LAST COPIES EVER! We had thought they were gone already, but Jabladav just sent us a final handful of this 2009 release...
Three new songs from one man black metal band Jabladav, limited to only 100 copies, so grab one while you can. Jabladav explores some different sounds on here, the opener "Coldest Last Winter" begins with just keyboards, and clean guitar before the distortion kicks in, but instead of exploding into a frenzy of black buzz, the song lopes drearily, the keyboard remaining, plinking out a sorrowful minor key melody, while the drums pound out a doomic tempo, and the guitar buzz all washed out and Striborg like. It's heavy but more sort of dreamy and ethereal, near the end things get a little more mathy and convoluted with some cool stop starts, but for the most part it's all drift and haunting and doomy.
The second track is another keyboards and guitar jam, the guitars tangled and folky, intricate and lush, the keyboards set on some strange human voice setting, so it sounds like a stuttering choir, and again, the 'band' kicks in, a trudging plod, harsh vokills over angular distorted chug, before things build to a full on black blast, the keyboards drifting creepily below the surface the whole time.
The final track is way more classic Jabladav, the guitars sharp and jagged and buzzy, the drums frenetic and blasting, the melody epic and haunting, with some cool stumbling, lurching gnarled arrangements and a cool black ambient outro. Rad stuff as always. A bit different, but still shot through with that same twisted Jabladav vibe.
Comes in a printed color sleeve, the 7"s are each numbered, there's an insert too, also numbered and signed and each with a little drawing, ALSO comes with a cd-r featuring the tracks from the 7", that too is hand numbered.
It's been a while since we've heard from UK experimental drone/noise duo Jazzfinger, but that just means we probably missed about 20 super limited cassette and cd-r releases. This here is the very first 7" from JF, and offers yet another side to their sound, this one a gorgeously minimal buzz drenched lo-fi raga.
The A side is all warbly guitar scrape and scrabble, over some wheezing lo-fi buzz, the sound warped and woozy, bits of electronic grit and glitch, very hypnotic, like some alien Appalachia, but minus the twang, and way more whir and buzz.
The B side opens with a keening high end drone that sounds like a feeding back bagpipe, unfurling a strange stately raga over a buzzing static drenched melody, the sound like some crumbling tape being played back on a dictaphone, everything wreathed in glorious grit, buried beneath a lo-fi hum, very reminiscent of the more rag-like recordings of Dan Higgs, but much more minimal and abstract. Really cool.
Gorgeous full color artwork, hand assembled, pressed on clear vinyl, and of course SUPER LIMITED!!!
There are three types of folks who will want one of these. Fans of the Brainbombs, which makes sense, considering the fact that Krig I Hudik includes two of Brainbombs amongst their ranks. Or fans of classic Finnish punk, as in anyone who bought that rad Finnish Punk boxset we listed a while back, or anyone super into bands like Totalitar (who coincidentally also count some Brainbombs as members), and of course, the folks who are both. Which we would guess is a lot of you.
Krig I Hudak jam 10 tracks onto this 7", a head caving, ear splitting barrage of snarling, crusty, pounding, thrashing, late seventies / early eighties style Finnish punk rock, blown out and heavy, practice space drums buried in a haze of crunchy riffs and bellowed vocals (even some strange chant-like backup vox now and again), super hooky and anthemic, raw and intense and totally kick ass, from midtempo grind, to frenzied chaotic thrashing, the majority of these tracks are in fact covers of super obscure punk rock bands from back in the day, who hail from the same hometown as Krig I Hudik, although two are originals, but you might not ever know it.
Folks looking for purely misanthropic dirgey sludge, a la the Brainbombs, might be a bit disappointed, but for the rest of you, in the market for some bad ass blasting punk rock, and filthy furious Finnish crush, this shit is unbeatable.
Super swank sleeves, printed inserts with lyrics, LIMITED TO 500 copies, seemingly already out of print at the label!
Heads up! Here's three new songs from these Japanese spazz-art-poppers. This bright opaque blue 7" record is comin' atcha by way of Australian record label Phono-Statique! Churningly angular and dizzyingly rambunctious, it sounds like they loosened all the strings on their guitars for this one. The b-side "Halation" features lyrics that are primarily a male singer chanting "one two three four" in Japanese. Count along with him! We've said it before and we'll say it again: definitely for fans of Deerhoof and Melt-Banana... and of course Limited Express (Has Gone?)!
Calling all skweee-jays! Or would-be skweee-jays. We've got four new 7" singles of fresh skweee straight from the source, imported from Flogsta Danshall in Finland. They're in plain white sleeves, the only art to be found here on the labels. If you've followed our other skweee recommendations (both Museum Of Future Sound comps, the more recent Skweee Tooth collection) then you know all about this Scandinavian DIY electro b-boy instrumental 8-bit phenomenon, and you'll also already be familiar with the strange names of the artists on these four singles.
Flogsta boss Limonious' slinky "Swedish Pommak" already wormed its way into our ears via the Museum Of Future Sound Vol. 2, though the jittery yet spacey b-side "Hurri Up!" we hadn't heard before. And all the tracks by Mangrove, Mrs. Queda, and Joxaren (all three artists hailing from Sweden) are new to us as well. Suffice to say, if you like skweee, you'll like these cuts, presented here in skweee's ideal format.
Joxaren's "Ritam Bluz" is a chiming, exotic, slightly sinister groove. Mrs Queda's laidback "Post-Pubertal" bleeps and bloops nicely along aided by robotic handclaps and digital hisses (oddly, her MySpace page lists Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum as her only influence). Maybe our fave of the batch, Mangrove's "Angry Animals", is a bit of a fractured funky banger, bringing down some rigid buzzin' beats. The flip is pretty solidly crunchy / catchy too. The various other A- and B- sides on these 7"s are all pretty darn skweelicious as well! Seriously, if you're a DJ, just throw one of these on in your set for instant skweee cred. Listening at home is fun too.
Go here: http://skweee.com/ for a lot more interesting skweee info, including interviews with some of the folks we just mentioned.
Killer tag team from two of Chicago's finest, Locrian and Harpoon. We've long been fans of Locrian's grim dark drift, infusing their ritualistic black ambience with plenty of black metal, but here, they go full on black, spitting out a slab of dirgey, muted, murky, howled hate. After a rumbling intro, the track explodes into a swirling cloud of frenzied riffing, loping demonic pound, and shrieked anguished vokills, with the drummer from Velnias driving them in their dirgey blackened plod, grim and atmospheric and surprisingly metal. We dig. Ambient drone fanciers might be a bit... overpowered, but everyone else will definitely dig.
The flipside comes from Harpoon, who we've yet to list, which is a bummer as it features ex members of LONG time aQ faves (and tUMULt recording artists!) 7000 Dying Rats. But Harpoon is not comedy grind, no this is some serious metallic brutality, slipping from frenzied blackened thrash, to pounding downtuned doom, throat shredding vox, crushing riffage, all wound around some complex arrangements and of course some seriously brutal drum damage.
A pretty heavy seven inches for sure. And in some seriously sweet packaging. Letter pressed black on black gatefold sleeve on super thick nice cardstock, green and black swirled vinyl, a full color two sided printed insert, and a download card.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Limited to 500 copies. We still have a few though, 'cause for some reason, we never listed it back in 2007 when it came out.
"These recordings were regally made during the inauguration of The Embassy of The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland in Mexico City on August 30, 2002 in the presence of the KREV Ambassador Magal� Arriola and invited guests at Colima 244, Colonia Roma, Mexico City."
Two new songs from this local Oakland sextet who are not afraid of tight and compositionally complex pop epics. Like a mix of Aavikko's energetic synthetic pop, Grizzly Bear's vocal harmonies and Liars urgent avant leanings, Maus Haus are probably amongst the hardest working local musicians and it shows! This white vinyl 7" comes with a download card for both songs plus three other brand new tracks from their Sea Sides EP. That's a lot of bang for your bucks!
The Bros. do "Fishes With Faces", VNC do "Harm Guitar".
We should probably let the band themselves begin this review, describing what to expect from the first side of this new 7" from the (maybe not so) mysterious Finnish outfit Motorspandex:
"Listening to Motorspandex's debut 7" can be a traumatizing experience: the very moment the needle touches the vinyl, black smoke begins to fill the room. You suddenly find it very hard to breathe, and realize, that the air pouring into your lungs is made out of crusty, rusty metal. A mechanized nightmare appears, veiled in nothing but motorized tight pants. It steps out of the smoke, grabs you by the throat, and enters your life forever."
We probably couldn't do much better ourselves, but we'll give it a go. Starting with the amazing cover, which features a photo of a pale, long haired, shirtless fella who looks suspiciously like Jussi from Circle, doing his best Dio, 'invisible oranges' pose, standing on an expanse of snow in front of a mighty mountain, the music inside fits almost perfectly with that majestic and very metal image. Sort of. Imagine classic eighties metal, some Motorhead, but played on clean guitars, with almost no distortion, then add in some super distorted monstrous growling vocals, and have the songs be super damaged and weird, shifting suddenly without warning, super dynamic, stop and starts, dizzyingly complex, but somehow striped down and simple at the same time. Not heavy so much as rocking and relentless. And it should come as no big surprise that Motorspandex seems to have a similar lineup as Krypt Axeripper, and Steel Mammoth, and thus, probably includes at least one (if not more) member of Finnish hypnorockers Circle. And you can actually hear it in Motorspandex, maybe more so than in those other "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" Circle satellites. Plenty of tripped out ambience, some clean, almost Comus-y folky vocals, wailing leads, but at its core, it does sound a bit like a sped up, metalled up Circle. Even the vocals almost sound like a more metal Mika. Plus some of the best song titles ever: "Frantic Slave", "Torment Star", "Tutankhamon Uranus", "Creepy Rabbit", "Steellicker"!
As if you didn't already figure it out, Motorspandex rule! Heavy and hooky, repetitive and metallic, mesmerizing and weird weird weird.
One of four new releases from Germany's Drone records. This one from the new to us group Noise Dreams Machina. And their name does not lie, especially the Noise part, as this is definitely some noisy business, especially for the more often droney and dreamy Drone records. Right out of the gate a growling super distorted wall of crumbling feedback and blown out electronics, churning and roiling and throbbing until it finally gives way to something slightly more subdued and muted, but still managing to be subtly noisy and intense. The track transforms into a constantly shifting swirl of sonic chaos, often so in the red it seems to seize up, clog the speaker, before lurching back into skipping stuttery noise. Right near the end of the A side it gets all rhythmic like a symphony of skipping digital clicks.
The flipside is much more serene, deep and shimmery, barring a brief squall of glitched out digital damage right up front. The track drifts abstractly from whispery hiss to muted thrum to washed out buzz and back again, never getting as fierce or as fucked up as the A side, but somehow managing to imbue its dark drone with plenty of noisy menace.
Packaged in a thick, black and white sleeve, pressed on clear vinyl, with a grey cardstock insert, and a first edition LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
Brand new 7" of grim buzz from two mysterious Swiss black metal bands, neither of which had we ever heard of, and neither of which feature members of any other notable bands. Switzerland is of course the home of Paysage D'Hiver and Darkspace and Enoid among others, so we had high hopes for these two hordes.
Wacht begin the proceedings with what almost sounds like a metal Star Spangled Banner, a sort of twisted guitar intro that soon gives way to a furious murky raw buzz, the drums and bass (if there is any) lost in a storm of relentless riffing and howled anguished vokills. Some killer riffs lurking in that roiling blackness, and the drums do leap out here and there, but for the most part it's like a heaving black cloud of sound, dense and hypnotic.
The much less simply monickered Ordo Infandorum Rituum Occultus (or OIRO for short), offer up their own bit of frosty grimness, a much more stripped down buzzing blast, pounding almost D-beat style rhythm, grunted vocals, raw and old school, but with some strange stuff lurking in the details, maniacal screams, some cool gnarled riffage, layered guitars, that seem to drop in and out, giving the track a sort of dizzying vibe, at times almost like a more stripped down straight ahead Deathspell Omega.
Definitely laves us dying for more from both bands, and as is always a good sing with a single, we've found ourselves flipping this over constantly and listening to both sides over and over again...
We've long championed the works of David Jackman's Organum, a long running drone project, whose modern take on classic minimalism, a gorgeous assemblage of bowed metals and collaged layered dronescapes, has managed to far surpass any of his/their contemporaries in terms of quality, originality, and sheer vision.
While most of the Organum records do in fact share sonic similarities, each one is most definitely its own sonic universe, a fantastic(al) piece of musical art, that manages to soothe and entrance, yet still challenge and engage, as is the case with Valentin, the first Organum vinyl release in 7 years, a single track spread out over two sides of a 7", at 45 rpm of course, so like past Organum 7"s, this is about quality more than quantity, a bit pricey perhaps for just a brief glimpse into Jackman's unique soundworld, but as always well worth it.
Valentin begins with a whir of what sounds like rainfall, a soft sheen of hushed white noise, punctuated by the occasional piano chord, minor key, ringing out mysteriously, soon joined by the clatter of crashing metals and shattering glass, those sounds are spaced out, letting that swirling hissing ambience drift and hover, before voices surface, a choir, a lovely chorale buried in the blurred background. There are some rumbling scrapes, some distant creaks, and while the sound seems to evolve over the course of the two sides, it also sounds looped, cyclical and mesmeric, the various sounds, recurring, perhaps subtly altered each time, perhaps not, the result though, how ever brief, is a gorgeous sprawl of haunting, elegiac, abstract minimalism. So fantastic.
LIMITED TO 233 COPIES, pressed on ultra thick vinyl, housed in a heavy matte picture sleeve, with a printed cardstock insert, each one hand numbered.
The handful of folks who recently experienced the blown out rhythmic dronebliss joy that is Our Love Will Destroy the World (aka Campbell Kneale formerly of Birchville Cat Motel) when he was in SF recently performing on THE BUS, will not soon forget that show: a diminutive, bearded New Zealander, on his knees, cradling his guitar in front of a bank of effects, eyes closed, swaying back and forth in a trance, unleashing some of the heaviest, most mesmerizing freenoise we've heard. A neverending avalanche of layered sound, pulsing and throbbing and churning, rhythms surfacing, splintering and then disappearing, a monstrous, yet totally warm and inviting cloud of sound, a sound which is perfectly captured on this two track slab of buzz and crunch and hum and hiss.
Guitars gurgle and grind, riffs pulled apart, a heaving swirl of constantly shifting layers, a chaotic cacophony that seems to slowly take shape, what was once noise becomes a sculpted soundscape, what was once a cloud of glitches and stutters, turns into rhythm, and the track sucks you in, totally entrancing, heavy, noisy, yeah, but completely and utterly hypnotic, little bits of melody pop up now and again, but are quickly subsumed by the moaning peals of downtuned crush, and once the rhythm locks in, you are powerless to resist.
The B-side is a little less intense, a constantly shifting and evolving cloud of hiss, barely obscuring a symphony of mechanical creaks which slowly coalesce into a strange sort of rickety rhythm, while all around voices hover, melodies tinkle, and finally a wash of buzzing guitar drone cloaks the all the other elements in a patina of blurred shimmer. So nice.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Remember the good old days? And by old days, we mean the nineties. When there were regular bands, who wrote real songs. Just sort of indie rock, punk rock, rock and roll, whatever? At the risk of sounding like old fogies, we miss those days now and then. The sort of college rock heyday. Soul Asylum (when they were awesome), the Replacements, Husker Du, Pavement, Skunk, Guided By Voices, the Grifters, the Swirlies, the Volcano Suns, the Lemonheads, you know exactly what we're talking about.
Regular old rock bands that write real songs and play guitars and basses and drums, are becoming more and more rare, amidst the dudes crouched on the floor with a garage sale of equipment, nerds hunched over laptops, scary guys in corpsepaint. As much as we love all that stuff, we sometimes miss a bunch of drunk dudes in jeans and t-shirts playing awesome catchy indie rock.
One of those bands was Prisonshake. They never hit it big, like some of their indie brethren, but they made a handful of kick ass records back in the day. We thought they were long gone, but all of a sudden here comes a brand new single, and man if it doesn't have us flashing back to those days, smoky dingy clubs, bands sweating up a storm on stage and just rocking out.
They may be older and a bit less brash, but they still sound pretty great. A stumbling chaotic mix of all the above mentioned bands, lots of indie jangle, distorted crunch, angular riffing, even some handclaps, the vocals are not entirely tuneful, but suit the music. The A side has some wicked funny and snarky lyrics (it's called "The Cut Out Bin" after all) and a weird coda, a randomly recorded conversation and some backwards guitar. The flipside is all over the place, more of a collage than a song, bits of studio stuff, lo-fi live action, more backwards guitars, all tangled up into a stumbling indie blues jam.
The single comes with a bonus cd, including the tracks from the 7" as well as two extra numbers, a groovy, downtuned jangle rock jam, and a shorter poppier one, both instrumental, and both sounding like they could be unfinished tracks from the last proper Prisonshake record. We like!
We got a handful of the SUPER limited version, only 200 made, a blue vinyl 7" housed in a cardstock fold over obi instead of a sleeve, with the cd, and each one hand numbered.
Just as the last two Pure Ecstasy 7"s (Easy and Future Nostalgia) went sadly out of print, we are fortunately blessed with this brand new single on the new-to-us Acephale label. "Voices" is the perfect lo-fi chillwave jam of the summer. Equally laidback and exuberant, a catchy love song that has a sort of eighties /sixties walking-with-my-girl-on-the-beach vibe to it, but covered in a fine layer of distorted wah'd guitar. The B-side, "Alexandria", is not so much of a song but an extended slow-jam, with loping bass, and strummed guitar accents with falsetto background vocals before the proper song meanders in, in typical dream pop fashion. We like how with so many bands trying to fit in fast pop and tight hooks to their garage-y sound, these guys just take their time and let the dreaminess and noise coalesce gradually like hazy smoke rings drifting across a shaft of light in a darkened room. Limited!
We love Drone records. And their series of ultra limited, hand assembled 7"s. There's even a forthcoming 2cd on Andee's tUMULt label collecting a handful of the early long out of print 7"s. We can only ever manage to get a tiny handful of these singles since they're so limited, but when we do we try to list them, and it's definitely lucky for the tiny handful of you who are quick on the buy-it-now trigger. Some of the best drone and dark ambient music around.
R.Y.N. deliver a thick machinelike whir, like a slightly more industrial Sunroof!, a mighty metallic drone, buzzing and reverberating like an army of metallic resonators, close listening reveals all sorts of sonic color and hidden melody. The flipside takes the industrial drone from the first side and submerges it in thick dark water, a glimmering, murky and gauzy underwater sonic journey. Nice.
First Edition. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Clear purple vinyl. Multicolored kaleidoscopic full color cover, with a black and metallic silver ink insert.
Er, when it Reigns it pours... as you should remember, last list we reviewed the new full-length cd from one of our favorite UK post rock acts, Reigns. We're waiting for a restock of those now, but in the meantime we've got *another* new Reigns release, a limited edition 2-song 7" single. Two new tracks of their lovely, so lovely and evocative instrumental music. Shimmering and mesmeric. That would be reason enough to pick this up, but, there's more: this comes packaged with a twelve-page booklet full of text in a tiny tiny font, detailing more of the adventures of Reigns Operative B, a diary of a field recording investigation into the English countryside. Of course things get a bit fantastical and weird, and in the end it's a bit like something by Thomas Ligotti. This is totally what we think makes Reigns extra-special, that added dash of imagination and mystery, presented in a confusional, supposedly scientific yet tongue-in-cheek manner. Neat!
Beloved Scottish troubadour Alasdair Roberts teams up with fiddle playing English lass Jackie Oates for these four tunes - three instrumentals and one with vocals - all with a reverential nod towards British and Scottish folk traditions. The interplay between Roberts' deftly fingerpicked guitar and Oates' fiddle is light, graceful and utterly at ease. The rather coldly clinical title of this record really doesn't do the sprightly passionate music justice. Sure to please Roberts' followers and offers Oates a fine introduction to those on this side of the pond! We only got 3 copies btw...
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!
Band names are tough. Coming up with the right one, one that captures the sound, the idea, the meaning of the music you're making. Some start out stupid, Flaming Lips? But soon becomes so inseparable from the music, that the name virtually becomes the music. Some are so weird, they can't help but be brilliant, Fuck I'm Dead, Bathtub Shitter, and a whole host of others come to mind.
When we first hear Pelican way back when, and were listening to the record, the name just didn't comput, it wasn't heavy or intense, it was just, a bird, but now we're sort of used to it, so Pelican does actually sound sort of intense, like the music. SO maybe the same thing will happen to Seagull, this one man band who's responsible for this here super limited one sided single. Weren't sure what to expect with a name like Seagull, the cover is appropriately black and white and cryptic, the name huge in a killer, almost unreadable olde English font....
Well, no matter what we were expecting from Seagull, it wasn't this, although we were pleasantly surprised. If one can use the word 'pleasant' to describe a disc of grinding growling low end and crumbling hissy noise. But for some of us, yeah, we can use the word pleasant. Although dirge-y and droney and gristly might all work a bit better. A single track, monochromatic and subtly shifting, strangely hypnotic but harsh in a not entirely harsh way. The sound is tough to describe, it sounds a bit like the run off of a record, when the needle slips onto the label and skids to the center of the turntable, a little like that, but mixed with the sounds of a roaring fire, industrial machinery, shifting tectonic plates, grinding glaciers, distant avalanches, or those weirdly fuzzed out spaces between stations on the radio, all sort of woven into one throbbing thick crumble, a garbled muted black noise, but the more you listen, the more melodies and strange textures reveal themselves, hidden rhythms, layers of sound overlapping and shifting slightly. this is definitely 'noise', but some strange almost 'soft' sort of noise...
Continuing their eastward migration, former Victoria, BC natives Shapes And Sizes make a bigger leap from Vancouver to Montreal, and have a new split 7" with their Austin, TX buddies Weird Weeds to boot. The charming Canadian foursome offer up the peculiarly titled, mildly eccentric and invigorating "Junker / That Fat Hand", while WW presents a more low-key, stripped down and subtly uneasy art-folk number "Hold In The Light". Kewl!
Another surprisingly noisy missive in the latest salve of 7"s from the always impressive Drone Records. This one comes from a one man outfit called Shrine, and as with all Drone discs is gorgeously packaged in a full color sleeve, pressed on thick black vinyl, with a printed cardstock insert printed with metallic ink, and as with the others, first edition, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
The record begins all glimmering and glistening, a slowburn of keening feedback and grinding metallic shimmer, the sounds thick and corrosive an caustic, fuzzy, blurred and distorted, with what sounds like filed recordings underneath, dark and dense but still quite lovely. The flipside is the big surprise though, a creepy soundtracky drift, deep pulsing bass notes, and fuzzy Goblin like synths, all ominous and mysterious, plenty of whirring ambience beneath, but over the top those sweeping epic minor key melodies and those haunted house synth swells keep the mood foreboding and a little bit frightening. The track gets more and more intense and distorted as it goes, but never loses its grim chill.
Every Silentist review always requires a quick recap of the band's back story. Or at least the story of how we were introduced to the band. We were told they were a duo, a classical piano player, and a grindcore drummer (when in fact the same guy handles both drums and piano!!), and thus it was some sort of classical grind hybrid, and while perhaps there are elements of both in the music of Silentist, it's way weirder and harder to describe.
The sound here is similar to the last record, the A side begins with pounding low end piano, forceful and almost violent sounding, beneath it, super mathy and complex drumming, lots of rumbling bass buzz, the result is a sort of classical metal cabaret if that makes any sense, the howled vocals adding a strange punkish element to the weirdly complicated sort-of-groove.
The B side opens with swirly clouds of piano a la Lubomyr Melnyk, over rubbery rumbling bass and muted crunchy percussion, the vocals this time are heavily effected and crooned, and again, the cabaret vibe is heavy, albeit more evil and demonic. The rums explode and get super heavy, the piano becomes more frenzied, the bass thick and distorted almost like a metal guitar, all the elements tangled up and clashing wildly.
Plus at the end of the A side, there's a super brief track, a 26 second long burst of super lo-fi power violence, just insane drumming and shouted vocals, like Drop Dead or Man Is The Bastard but stripped WAY down.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
What else do you need to know besides this: SUPER LIMITED SKULLFLOWER 7". Not much we'd imagine, but heck, just in case, it might be good to know that this chunk of Skullflower guitarnoise, veers dramatically away from the spate of recent releases, that focused on a more harsh, speaker shredding, ear wrecking intensity, and slips back to something a bit more warm and washed out, definite Sunroof! territory for sure, albeit less upper register skree and more wall of thrum low end crush. Blissed out and melodic, think Jesu, Nadja, SUNNO))), but totally and distinctly Skullflower, heavy, and harsh, dense and intense, but shot through with pretty melodies and constantly shifting layers and textures, a dizzying drift of soft focus muted Merzbowian buzz. So good. Had this been stretched out into a full length record we'd be talking serious Record Of The Week contender for sure.
The flipside comes from UK one man black metal horde White Medal, who counters with his own murky slab of downtuned distortion drenched doomic black buzz, a heaving sea of muddy low end and swirling muted chaos, the drums blasting away, but buried in the mix, the vocals a howling demonic inhuman wail, the sound so blurred and blackened, that it sounds almost static, even though beneath the surface, the drums are blasting, the riffs grinding, a glorious smear of woozy melancholic buzzing blackness, dense and ferocious, but washed out and weirdly melodic. Both sides rank up there with some of the best stuff we've heard from either outfit. But act fast, only 400 COPIES!
A brand new record from the Starving Weirdos, two old old tracks, resurrected and pressed onto what we're pretty sure is the SW's very first 7". The group's sound changes so much, that these two archival tracks, while entirely different from anything we've heard from them, still sound very much at home in their constantly shifting body of work. And unlike the more recent material, is much more lo-fi and looped, giving the sound a very rough, lo-fi, sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker vibe, which obviously we love!
The A side begins with a murky processed pulse, with propulsive krautrock drumming but before it gets more than 10 seconds in, there's a strange backwards swoop, and the track seems to skip back to the beginning, which takes up almost the whole side, a gorgeously fragmented tribal drone krauty loop, until right near the end, when the track shifts, the guitar builds to a chaotic squall, the drums blown out, the cymbals sizzling distortedly, a serious freaked out psych jam, with strange spoken word vocals, bits of feedback, and tons of distorted murk.
The flipside is also loop based (or sounds like it), a militaristic snare, rat-a-tat-tat's out an insistent beat, over which a cool shimmery loop, cycles over and over, while in the background deep rumbles pulse and swell, until the drums drop out and the track finishes off with some moody washed out Jeckian ambience.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pro printed black and white covers, with printed inserts.
Latest slab of guitar based whir and drift from these masters of the drone (they do in fact run the DRONE record label after all). Formerly Maeror Tri, Troum�embody the drone, they live, breathe, eat and sleep drones. And it shows. Their records are gorgeous and epic, but seem so effortless, as if the sounds they create are simply channeled through their corporeal forms, but have been created in some fiery forge at the center of an alien planet.�
The first half of this single still sounds like Troum, but is unlike anything we've heard from them, strange looped high end guitar, what sounds like backwards chords, almost choral vocals, dramatic and haunting and cinematic, very much like some super stylized horror movie music almost, warbled and wavery, over a distant grinding low end tone drifting way off in the background, washed over by epic sweeping swells..
The other side is a bit more raw and intense, a seriously corrosive guitarscape, distorted and crumbling chordal buzz, looped and layered into a strange glacial riff, strewn over deep dark swirls of slow shifting sound and haunting minor key melodies. It manages to be intense and fierce but also gloriously washed out and blissful.�
Super�swank, full color covers, full color inserts, and pressed on nice thick vinyl. And of course limited, just not sure -how- limited...
Just one glance at the cover of this 7" should send most doom obsessives into an involuntary frenzy, the weird black and white washed out image, the twisted barely legible writing, so distinctive and immediately recognizable, but this is not in fact a lost record or weird reissue from New York doom legends Winter, but is in fact, the next best thing, two contemporary outfits, tackling their favorite Winter tunes, an homage / tribute to a criminally under appreciated band, especially considering that their sound predicted pretty much all the slow and low heaviness going on these days, and that the sound, and most of the bands that practice it, would sound a whole lot different if it wasn't for these guys, whether they know it or not.
Up first are long time aQ faves Unearthly Trance, who add their own twist but don't drift too far from the original, lumbering, lurching, plodding crusty doom sludge bliss, a filthy midtempo plod, peppered with bursts of double kick drumming, guttural vox, and of course twisted tarpit guitar buzz. UK sludge beasts Volition also don't mess with Winter's sound all that much, unfurling a blackened and dense bit of sprawling doom, that more than classic ultra doom, sounds more like a grindcore record played at 16rpm. Both sides rule, essential modern megadoom, and if you've yet to discover the dismal joy of Winter, maybe these two tracks will convince you to track some of that shit down. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
Killer black metal / black ambient match up, featuring one of our favorite mysterious ritualistic drone combos, Uno Actu. But let's start with Maledicere, a duo from Minnesota of all places, and whose sound is a sort of raw pounding black metal, with a bit of a post rock vibe. After an intro of tinkling tones and dreamy ambience, the band launch into a loping Burzumic pound, but with strange howled vocals, very melodic, but still plenty buzz drenched. Mostly midtempo, but the band do explode into bursts of frenzied buzz with soaring majestic melodies, before slipping back into something more pounding and primitive. Definitely be psyched to hear more from these guys.
But no matter how good Maledicere is, Uno Actu are the reason we're so excited about this record. With only a handful of demos over the last few years (a couple of which we've raved about on past lists), a new record from these guys (or this guy), is like an (un)holy message sent from another realm, a rare occurrence that produces much rejoicing, and much huddling around the stereo late and night by candlelight.
A cloud of muted feedback and textured buzz, swirls and pulses, over delicate acoustic guitar, some sort of dreamy blackened noisefolk, slipping from corrosive and caustic to washed out and meditative. Demonic vocals gurgle over smears of fracture melody, and distant guitar strum, eventually spiraling into a looped bit of minor key droneguitar mesmer. So fantastic.
Someone needs to collect all the demos and release them on cd, or vinyl, or something, but until then, we'll just have to make do with these little offerings, everyone a black joy to behold.
2006 release from this surreal British experimental rock outfit, limited to 150 copies - we've still got 3 'cause we never listed it!
Warmth seem to exist only in the realm of split 7"s. We're sure they probably have a handful of cd-r's or cassette tape releases (actually at least one cd too), but this is the third split we've gotten from these guys, and this will probably be the third time we talk about how we want o hear more than one song!
The Warmth track here is indeed warm, beginning as a slow smoldering, barely there shimmer, but over the course of the side, the sound intensifies, getting more abrasive, more caustic and crunchy, eventually building to a sort of Wolf Eyes rumble, which is soon streaked with jagged shards of feedback, and swooping upper register tones, all smeared across the roiling buzzing crunch of the background drone. We can only imagine what might have happened if this were an lp instead of a 7" and the track was allowed to sprawl and spread and mutate for another 15 or 20 minutes.
The flipside comes from a band with the tongue twisting monicker Medroxy Progesterone Acetate, which a quick internet search revealed as a drug to decrease the production of Testosterone and to reduce the sex drive in males, aka "Chemical Castration" sometimes given to convicted rapists and sex offenders. Hmmm...
So what would something like MPA sound like? Maybe like this, a murky, fuzzy, muddy sprawl of rumbles and whirs, haunting melodic swells, squalls of glitch and buzz, teapot whistle melodies, disembodied voices, woozy, stuttering loops, tape hiss and sea sick warble, all beneath a gauzy lo-fi haze. Quite nice actually, if not a bit creepy.
Both tracks, and both bands are quite recommended, this 7"s is definitely a good taster, and yeah, we still want to hear more Warmth, and now we, ummm, want more Medroxy Progesterone Acetate...
Beautiful die cut silkscreened sleeve, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! most likely already out of print, we have a handful...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES
Weirdo black metal (?) from 2004, long out of print. How can you resist a song called "Black Narcotic Obfuscation"? The flip is "Birth, Sex, Death" so this pretty much covers it all. On Vendlus, also for fans of the left-field stuff on Garm's Jester label.
