Most of us were big fans of the Major Lazer full length from last year, but even those of us who didn't totally fall in love with with it are going crazy about this new ep of remixes especially the banging new track with M.I.A. that leads it all off. Major Lazer is the blasting, dance inducing, dancehall influenced project of master producers Diplo and Switch and with folks like Buraka Som Sistema and Thom Yorke giving them the remix treatment this is start to finish adrenaline pumping, body moving blasts of ecstasy. If we were hired as party planners for someone looking to put on a rager that we would want to lose our minds at we would urge them to blast this so loud loud followed by other smoking new releases from M.I.A., Omar Souleyman, and maybe that Shangaan Electro compilation of killer new South African dance jams. Maybe part of the magic is that it's an ep which makes this so perfect, there is no overkill or filler or duds. Every single second hits so damn right. And as cheap as it's priced this one is a no brainer!
The Boss is on the cover, as is a bonus cd comp of some of Springsteen's favorite songs (by the likes of Calexico, Neko Case, Jimmy Reed, Alan Vega, and others). Also, inside: Joanna Newsom, Devo, Ozzy, Ian Hunter, and lots more including the usual news, reviews, etc. that makes this British magazine a must for most music fans...
Latest from these French ultra doom sludgelords and sludgelady, a single song spread out over two lp sides, a sprawling, lugubrious, blackened slow motion tarpit crawl, and if it was even possible, Sabbat Noir sounds and feels even more abstract and spaced out than any of the other Monarchs, which is saying a lot. Sabbat Noir is also the band's first proper full length to feature their new drummer, Robert from the Grey Daturas, who makes himself right at home, his spare hard hitting style perfectly suited to Monarch's weirdly dreamy doomic drift.
The record/song begins with a dense cloud of rumbles and whirs, a slow motion sub-SUNN guitar crawl, wrapped in shimmery cymbal sizzle, an epic, smoldering, slow building low end creep. Thick, almost liquid guitars ooze beneath abstract drumming, the hits ages apart, long stretches of layered guitardrone, a nearly stalled doom, that hovers and floats more than crushes or pummels. The vocals exist way off in the distance, haunting and spectral, just another layer of slow shifting sound, which gives way here and there to hushed ambience, it's not so much a song as a sound, drifty and shimmery, and nearly ambient, it's not until near the end of the first side that things get a little mathy and metal, the riffs coalescing into black hole crunch, the drums pounding out an almost-rhythm. The side ends, and the song picks right back up on the flipside a la Lynyrd Skynyrd, more tarpit creep, streaked with feedback, the vocals moving gradually to the fore, their presence more intense, the riffs coalescing into a more traditional doom, mournful and melancholy, like Paradise Lost or My Dying Bride, but slowed waaaaaay down, the now shrieked vox drifting over this lumbering swoonsome dour doomic miserablism, a gorgeous, desolate, somber dronedoom, that slowly sheds the doom, eventually blissing back out into some more blackened guitardrone dreaminess.
The packaging is incredible, super glossy, metallic prismatic jackets, you have to see them to believe them, easily one of the coolest looking covers ever, the front cover the Monarch logo all shiny and metallic over what appears to be hair, but follow that hair to the other side of the sleeve where you'll find a sexy evil pic of Monarch's vocalist Emilie all corpsepainted and hoTT, the records are pressed on 180 gram vinyl, and of course LIMITED TO ONLY 400 COPIES!!!
Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (1885-1941) is one of the most important musical figures of the twentieth century, a jazz pioneer and a gifted composer during the days of Vaudeville and one of the first musicians to take part in the new revolution in recorded music. A jack of all trades, Morton began his career in show business as a teenager in New Orleans, playing brothels and touring the American South, with later stints in major cities like New York, Chicago, Vancouver, and Washington DC. Along the way, he also racked up experience as a comedian and supposedly even as a pimp. He was also apparently pretty handy with a gun. But moreso with a piano!
These recordings were captured in Chicago in 1926 and 1927, showcasing Morton's staggering talents as a pianist, composer, and bandleader. The songs show off a style of "Hot" jazz that will be instantly familiar to many of you, with lots of blaring reed instruments and Morton's rhythmic piano serving as the anchor. The songs are fun, easy going romps with lots of humor thrown in and the occasional raspy Morton vocal. Things flow with a nice drunken sort of feel while still maintaining a high level of energy, with the instruments loping about constantly within the busy arrangements. Fortunately, Morton was given access to recording facilities that had the fidelity to match the complexity of his songs, and things sound great here. A few songs even make use of sound effects like old klaxon horns, which is certainly interesting considering that these may represent some of the earliest uses of non-musical sounds incorporated into commercial recordings. This winner comes to us courtesy of the good folks at Monk and serves as a great introduction to Morton's vast catalog.
First record in more than 4 years from these Romanian black metallers, and longtime aQ faves, Negura Bunget. We had almost given up hope at one point of ever hearing new music from NB, as the band had broken up, only to recently reform with just one original member, and yet instead of recording a new record, they chose to RE-record some of their old music with the new lineup. But this, this IS in fact the first new music from the newly reformed Negura Bunget, and considering such a dramatic personnel shift, the sound is relatively consistent with recent NB records, although in many ways, Virstele Pamintului is in fact quite different than OM, the last proper full length.
The band do continue to move further away from their early sound which was a very Weakling-like blasting black Norwegian style metal, growing more and more atmospheric, more folky, more proggy, and at the same time somehow more simple. This is most definitely the folkiest record yet, as the first half of the record is mostly not metal, and the folk element definitely takes center stage here.
The record begins with a nearly 6 minute intro, performed on all traditional Romanian folk instruments, flutes and hand drums, wooden percussion, and buzzing strings, creating a lush, mysterious, foresty feel, until finally the band launch into some proper metal, but it's not blasting or fierce, instead, it's washed out and almost atmospheric, with thick swaths of synthesizer underpinning the melancholy buzz, soaring majestic guitar melodies, the vocals bellowed dramatically, and after less than two minutes, the band shifts back, and unveils a shimmery landscape of long glimmering tones, layered soft focus drones, choir like vocals, acoustic guitars weaving crystalline lattices of subtly tense melody, that had they been swathed in buzz, would make for some serious blackness, but instead here, they just help evoke a haunting dreamscape, finally the drums thunder in, the vocals too, spoken dramatically, but still, it's mostly folky and acoustic, until finally the metal erupts again, and instead of blackness, it's almost a sort of depressive doom pop, very melodic, and emotional and intense, still heavy, just more moody, and it suits them for sure.
After another stretch of dark Romanian folk flecked ambience, track four, again beginning with a dark folk intro, slowly mutates and intensifies, until it too explodes into some black metal, but even here, about as fierce and heavy as the record has gotten, the blackness is rife with acoustic guitars, fluttering flutes, swirling synths, all wrapped around a very Maiden-y melody, woozy serpentine guitars, chugging riffage, all still softened by those folk underpinnings.
And while there are indeed moments of blackened aggression, and bits of blasting fury, that doesn't seem to be what NB are really about anymore, the group seem to be more concerned with evoking emotion, creating a landscape of sound that reflects their philosophy and mythology, the black metal more just an element of the whole, and really not even that prominent of one at this point, instead the modern sound of Negura Bunget is some sort of blackened dark folk prog metal, epic and sprawling, intricate and intimate, not concerned with heaviness or kvltness or any false scene idea of 'true', because when it gets right down to it, the music of Negura Bunget is indeed as true as it gets, true to the self, and to their vision, and that sort of truth is the only thing that can create musical art like Virstele Pamintului.
One of the more eccentric acts to emerge from the Belgian EMB scene in the late '80s, The Neon Judgement developed a stylized sound of electronics melded to an Americana swagger with patinas of country-fried twang working into leather-clad industrialisms. At times, Neon Judgement were brilliant in this approach, other times it was a contrived dud. Yet, this sound was one that was developed over time, as their earliest recordings took on the more of synth punk idioms that were held by contemporaries in Cabaret Voltaire, Absolute Body Control, Siglo XX, Suicide, and even bits of Gary Numan. This LP contains all the tracks from the two cassettes that Neon Judgement released in 1981-1982 (TV Treated and Suffering), and it makes perfect sense that the exceptional ears at Dark Entries would seek out the finest moments from Neon Judgement's beginnings. At this time, the band was considerably more raw, with jagged guitar riffs coupled to the overdriven synth chords and jabbing arppegiations. It sounds like Neon Judgement had been listening to that first Suicide record, and wanted to try to figure out how to reinterpret the zombified rockabilly through electronics as well, without resorting to a pure homage. The minimalist spiralling of Neon Judgement's electronics holds some of Suicide's simplicity, although Neon Judgement's rock sensibility is purely showcased through the guitar and not the songwriting, which is much more tuned (at least here) to the European approaches of coldwave detachment. A couple of the tracks (e.g. "Factory Walk" and "TV Treated") had made appearances on later albums with more polish on the production, but there's something better suited to the stilted gait and agitated guitar pluckings on "Factory Walk" that make these recordings more expressive. As with all Dark Entries titles, limited to 500 copies.
This out of print cassette, now available on vinyl!
At the end of the 'alcohol trilogy' that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa released via Helen Scarsdale, the dark isolationist rumble which dominated the previous two and half records was shattered by a robotic sequence of bleeping analog synth tones which spiralled deep into the void of the arctic night sky. Such a dramatic juxtaposition is not uncommon within the realm of Stilluppsteypa, but less so for Mr. Nilsen. And those Derbyshire / Dockstader / Oneohtrix like tones found on Passing Out (the finale mentioned above) is clearly the jumping off point for Space Finale - an epic 90 minute double lp of analog synthesis, captured, spliced, and cut, all on a Revox 2-channel tape machine. Amidst the vintage synth blips and sustained tones, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa offer another narrative composition that moves from the vacant space station overrun by some unknown alien virus into the lair of the mad scientist who meanders dabbles on his Wurlizter (or some kind of organ, if it's not an actual Wurlizter) in minor key melancholy when not toiling away on an abomination that will somehow destroy the world. Shadowy ambience, fuzzed out tape hiss aggregation, weird dropouts and glitches on the tape that would make Leif Elggren proud, and much much more.
As mentioned above, Space Finale originally came out as a limited edition cassette earlier in 2010, but it was pretty clear that Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa intended this to be a 2lp, as both sides of the cassette were neatly broken into two suites a piece, perfectly suited for vinyl! This too is limited - just 500 - and highly recommend, as with all from this ongoing collaborative project.
It's been a while since we've listed any UNblack metal, the twisted Christian variant of the more traditionally heathen black strain of metal that we hold so near and dear to our black withered hearts. But as longtime readers of the aQ list no doubt know by now, we LOVE unblack metal, not necessarily for the message (we don't love black metal for its message either), but instead, the sound of unblack metal is so far out, so far removed from the tired tropes of BM, not sure if it's divine inspiration, or just the particular group of unblack metallers we tend to be drawn to, but it seems like the unblack tends to be weirder and more warped than the black in most cases, and thus, we've found ourselves looking to the UNdark side for that which our musical soul yearns for.
This latest slab of abstract experimental UNblackness, comes courtesy of aQ faves Njiqahdda, which just so happens to be the work of the man behind a bunch of other aQ unblack faves including Light Shall Prevail, Agathothodion, Glaciial and others. Which already meant this was gonna be some seriously experimental, evocative buzzing brilliance. Which it is, we're happy to report, but much has changed, the sound here is much prettier, much more stripped down, with less of an emphasis on buzz and blast, and more on mood and texture, ambience and emotion.
The epic 15 minute opener, is all jangly clean guitar, and wild drumming, at least in the beginning, the song soon explodes into something much more black, but after the initial burst, it sort of smoothes out, and instead of being crushing and punishing, it's hypnotic and mesmerizing, there are still harsh vocals, but the buzz is smoothed out, and the melody is lilting and melancholic, not hard to imagine this song could be stripped down to a gorgeous hazy drone, without losing to much of it's actual form and structure. The follow up skips the buzz entirely, and offers up a bit of dreamy, slightly gothic indie jangle, a sort of sweetly minor key post rock, wrapped in a light haze of shimmery ambience.
The next two tracks look back to the opener, both lengthy drone drenched black metal jams, with that muted buzz, tangled guitar harmonies, and super catchy melodies, both, even at their heaviest, manage to remain poppy and melodic, that blend, and the push and pull between light and dark, is what makes those tracks so emotional and powerful.
The closing track is an extended dronescape of whirling haze, shimmering high end, and deep cavernous rumbles, it almost sounds like a field recording set to music, one can almost visualize, the epic forests, the moon reflecting off the water, the glimmer of starlight on the frost covered branches, quite beautiful, and a fitting finish to a strangely beautiful batch of buzzing washed out unblack post metal.
Four more short sharp blasts of grinding, cyclical, mesmerizing, crusty, repetitive blown out, in the red hypnorock heaviness from No Balls, a minimally maximalist offshoot of the mighty Brainbombs, taking single parts, and locking them and looping them into (im)proper songs, pounding away relentlessly, total caveman headbanger post punk sludge rock, and some of the raddest shit we've ever heard. Obviously if you love the Brainbombs, you're probably gonna dig this too. The same gnarled filthy riffage, the same sort of Neanderthal drum pound, but No Balls are definitely their own demented beast, howled vocals buried in the mix, occasional damaged psychedelic guitar leads, the sound thick and dense and powerful, heavy and punk as fuck, but also weirdly metallic, and super trancelike, most songs a single riff, pounded out over and over, while all around it guitar lines tangle, the low end throbs and pulses, vocals yelp, this record is more songy than the rest of the Brainbombs catalog, but only just barely. Like old school Finnish punk rock, super charged and stripped down, furious and fierce and frantic, but dirgey and doomy and sludgey at the same time, a tangled superfuzz blowout, tightly wound, and unravelling before your ears, glorious ramshackle, totally loose and swaggery and druggy, but tight in that way only bands on the verge of total collapse are capable of. It's way too short, these are the kinds of songs that could go on forever, stretch any of these jams into double digits and you'd have some seriously transcendental ur-dirge drone bliss crust wave nirvana, but if you're like us, you'll find yourself playing this over and over and over and over anyway...
LIMITED TO 306 COPIES. In hand screened sleeves, each one hand numbered. We got a bunch, but most likely these are the last copies we'll ever get...
On this 7", the title track from the most recent Oneohtrix Point Never full length gets two radically different reworkings, one from Antony (of & The Johnsons), the other by Christian Fennesz.
The original "Returnal" was a dizzying slab of robotic future funk, all pulsing synths, processed machinelike vox, a tripped out hybrid of Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and M83, all fuzzy, and swirly and psychedelic and spaced out, but these two reimaginings couldn't be further from the original. First up, Antony strips away all the synths, and reinterprets it as a torch song, played entirely on an acoustic piano (by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix, himself), the sound lush and elegiac, Antony's vocals moving and emotional, intense and so dramatic, the new version a haunting dark ballad, that even to fans of the Oneohtrix original, will most likely sound like a completely different beast.
Fennesz takes the Antony version from the A-side, and pulls it apart, blurs and softens the sounds into softly spinning clouds, taking various tones and stretching them way out, letting the piano drift in and out, the vocals slipping from gently reverbed to layered heavily effected, looped and repeated mantra like, occasionally disappearing into a squall of dubbed out effects, other times suspended in a field of pixilated piano and thick streaks of chordal clusters, eventually building to a warm lush psychedelic climax, before settling back to earth, fading out completely, leaving just shadowy traces and slowly decaying sonic contrails...
Probably quite limited, as these things most often are, features some sleek minimal Mego style cover art/design by none other than Stephen O'Malley.
We were super psyched how crazy people went for the Ovens, whose debut full length (which crammed together 44 songs and THREE actual albums onto one disc) released earlier this year on tUMULt was easily the pop record of the year, if not EVER. These guys are total geniuses, spitting out song after song, usually a minute or less, often MUCH less, each jammed with hooks and melodies and goofy lyrics and shredding leads and pounding drums that most bands would kill for. We compared them to some impossible mix of Weezer, the Beatles, the Melvins, the Fucking Champs and Guided By Voices, and while that might capture their essence, what they do is so much more than the sum of their influences.
This 10 song 15 minute ep, recorded way back in 2003 (when they were still called the Peels), is raw and rough around the edges, much punker, but is still rife with incredible songwriting, some kick ass guitar shreddery, ridiculously catchy hooks, and those same gorgeous instrumental interludes, lyrics about how the songs sound better in their heads, getting wasted, sleeping, dying, puking and all sorts of gloriously mundane stuff. They're definitely still a pop band, but back then, their punkishness really shone through, with some of the punkest jams reminding us of the Dwarves at their poppiest, balancing their more strummy Beatles-esque moments, the two sides of the band constantly battling for supremacy, neither winning, more often than not resulting in a wild ultra chaotic falling apart draw.
The band hate this record, but fuck it, there are some awesome jams here, and anyone who bought the tUMULt full length will most likely dig this one too.
We can definitely get all hyperbolic and gushing when we're super into something, nothing wrong with that, so with that disclaimer out of the way, we can once again proclaim that these guys just might be one of our favorite local bands. Here's hoping the rest of the country, the world and the universe catch on soon.
Another fantastic reissue from Omni, focusing on one of our favorite country singer songwriters, the legendary Dolly Parton. But c'mon, this is Omni, so this isn't just some sort of greatest hits, this is some waaaay more obscure stuff, including one of the best, and strangest Parton records you've never heard, The Fairest Of Them All, recorded in the lates sixties during the height of her popularity, yet inexplicably never reissued until now. The sound is classic country, classic Parton in fact, slippery lap steel, stately piano, lush minor key melodies, weeping fiddles, soaring strings and Parton's voice, so distinctive, and the songs are incredible, the opener, "Daddy Come And Get Me" (also heard on Omni's Troubled Troubadours comp) is sung from the perspective of a young girl in a mental institution begging for her Daddy to come and rescue her. "Chas" is all about forbidden love, but a twisted take, a sister caring for her invalid brother and longing for her husband. "Down From Dover" is the tale of an unwed pregnant teen waiting for the father of her child to return as promised. Strange stuff for sure. It's not all that far out though, but it is all fantastic.
As if that weren't enough, this 2-on-1 collection includes a second album, one we were even more excited about, My Favorite Songwriter, where Parton covers a collection of tracks by the incomparable Porter Wagoner, who besides being an incredible songwriter, played a huge part in Parton's career, having produced her, written songs for her, given her a big break by hiring her for his television show, there were even rumors that they were romantically involved, regardless, theirs was a long running partnership, and the combination of Parton's voice, and Wagoner's songs and arrangements are pretty tough to beat. That said, this is definitely not Wagoner at his weirdest, no "Rubber Room" here, instead, it's simply some of his best songwriting, classic country, heartfelt and emotional, the arrangements beautiful, Parton's voice perfect. SO recommended.
And as with all Omni reissues, this includes a massive booklet, packed with extensive liner notes and tons of photos.
A brand new, sprawling collection of celestial darkness and buzzing black ambient drift from this black metal / black ambient master. As we've mentioned in the past, more often than not, PV will dedicate a whole record to either side of his sonic personality, sometimes it's a disc of swirling and dense blackened black metal buzz, other times it's gorgeously bleak and minimal ambient dronemusic, but in both cases, the man behind Procer Veneficus is able to conjure up gorgeously sinister sounds and nightmarish atmospheres, be they buzz or drift, blast or shimmer.
How The Heather Moonlit Shivers, is, as the legend on the back of the record makes clear, "Dedicated to Her", and judging from the black sonic mystery within, the 'Her' in question either broke his heart, or is the object of a seriously grim obsession, or both. Extended stretches of layered black drift, Philip Jeck style crackly loopscapes, muted subterranean pulses, thick swaths of distorted crumble, processed ghostly vox, swirling soft focus effects, minor key steel string folk dirges, keening streaks of fragmented melody underpinning slowed down voices, haunting reverb drenched avant Appalachia gives way to abject post industrial black ambience, which gives way to dense clouds of low end bellow, laced with melancholic finger picked acoustic guitars.
Elsewhere thick walls of guitarbuzz dirge lumber and throb, but are infused with subtle bits of melody, transformed from brute force crush into something moody and soothing and beautiful, while spidery guitars wrap their tendrils around long stretches of layered voices and alien harmonies, while here and there, fragments of voice, or a bit of guitar, will be doused in reverb and echo and delay and sent spinning into the aether, creating a dizzying looped out dronescape.
The record closes with a 10+ minute interpretation of an Amber Asylum song, complete with strings, the strings along with languid steel string guitars, and swirling ambient background shimmer create a sort of droney, depressive otherworldly chamber music. There's also an Espers cover (a cover of a cover oddly enough), which is equally beautiful, but a bit more tripped out, a sort of druggy heavily effected space folk, but both covers fit perfectly amidst the equally evocative and hauntingly beautiful PV originals.
Folks who ONLY like the black metal side of Procer Veneficus, may be disappointed, but anyone into mysterious dark soundscapes, cinematic blackened drone music, and creepy sinister black folk, will be immediately and inexorably ensorcelled.
Packaged in a super swank and thick matte finish gatefold jacket, pressed on thick red vinyl, LIMITED TO 406 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Are you feeling doomed? Play some Procession and you will! And you'll dig the doomed feeling too, if you're like us. Hailing from South America, Chile to be precise, this obscure trio dish out the ever-lovin' doom metal on this their debut full-length (technically, they call it an ep, 'cause three of its six songs are taken from an earlier demo tape, but it's 48 minutes long and works as one coherent album). The band's logo and the cover art may make this look like a black metal release, and IS quite dark and serious and Satanic, but it's definitely slo-mo true doom in the old school vein of Reverend Bizarre and The Gates Of Slumber and of course Saint Vitus and Black Sabbath, with lyrics about such abysmal subjects as plagues, gravegardens, and dying ancient empires. The inevitability of disease, death and decay, and loss of faith, are what Procession acknowledge and embrace. They do so sincerely, with much grace and majesty - and sheer heaviness, the guitars dragging you down with their lugubrious riffs and insalubrious tones. There's weird atmospheres, occasional uptempo surges, and no lack of morose melody. Freakin' EPIC. The band's guitarist/vocalist Felipe Plaza Kutzbach sings with all the grandiose power of classic Candlemass, but in a lower register, and with more of a rough, anguished edge. He's definitely Procession's biggest draw, both his vocals and guitar playing - not just churning riffage, there's also some really interestingly effected leads heard here, strangely psychedelic and melancholically beautiful, and his doomy talents are ably supported by the solid bass and drums. Procession (great name, by the way, we imagine doomed souls marching into the underworld, or cloaked monks in some ceremonial, uh, procession) prove themselves a force to be reckoned with. We've listed some excellent doom debuts lately, Garden Of Worm, Crowned In Earth, Griftegard, but THIS one is possibly the best. Certainly the troo doom minded here have been listening to this A LOT. And considering how much cool new music (doom and otherwise) we are inundated with here every week at AQ, that's saying something. Can't wait for the new one we hear is in the works...
Along with the Sleep Over split, we managed to pick up a few copies of Pure Ecstasy's latest tape which shows off the bands more experimental side, a side we haven't seen as much on their pop singles. The bands slow motion grooves are in tact, but the overall effect is more collage-like, chopped in a blender style. Sometimes veering into hazy dub experimentations a la Sun Araw, or lo-fi distortion squalls, murmured voices, and pretty ambiance. Two ten minute sides. Super limited!
Welcome to dream pop heaven! The boys of Austin, TX trio Pure Ecstasy come together with their all-female equivalent Sleep Over (featuring Stephanie from Silver Pines) on this exquisite split single. We managed to get some of the last copies while they were both here on tour, so don't miss out on this one as once they're gone, they're gone!
The Pure Ecstasy track "Dream Over" is like Galaxie 500 on cough syrup, a super slow and hazy lament, waking up to the painful realization that your love is gone for good. The rhythm plods along with melancholic Beach Boys harmonies and distorted guitar swells panging with heartbreak and regret. These guys nail that sound so perfectly.
This is the first time we've heard all female trio, Sleep Over and hopefully it won't be the last. Two girl harmonies with organ, guitar, bass and drum machine, their track "Your World Is Night" is a blurry wash of woozy organ pop, hazy and pretty like Kate Bush on downers. So gooood!
We don't want to talk it up too much, because we only have a few of these. Amazing!
We've been lucky, with the resurgence of vinyl, there's been lots of "essentials" reissued on lp lately, and this is one of 'em!! As we've noted before (we're cribbing a bit from our own review of their 'best of' cd on Sub Pop), Radio Birdman were the mid-'70s Australian re-incarnation of the MC5 and The Stooges, lead by Detroit-transplant Deniz Tek (guitarist, songwriter, and later a fighter pilot and doctor!), and damn were they good. Being half a world away and several years removed from Detroit ground zero, Birdman's homage to their proto-punk Grande Ballroom heroes was no rip-off, their penchant for surf-guitar licks being but one point of departure. Other influences include VU, BOC, and Alice Cooper. Legends in Australia, they're more like an obscure rock footnote over here, but once you're into 'em, you'll be really into 'em!
This 1977 album was their first full-length, and a total classic (whichever edition you get, there were actually two with slightly different tracklists, this is the '78 overseas one). It includes their cover version of The 13th Floor Elevators' "You're Gonna Miss Me" along with Birdman classics like "Aloha Steve & Danno", "Murder City Nights", "Do The Pop", "New Race", and "Man With The Golden Helmet". Apparently the 4 Men With Beards who put this out like a little rock action now and then, not just beard-stroking jazz, folk and kraut...
Not many musicians and composers are able to create music as beautiful and elegant as Max Richter. Whether it be his stunning albums, soundtracks or arrangements for folks like Vashti Bunyan, Richter has proven to be one of the most restrained and versatile composers of the last decade. Infra was a work originally created as a score for a Ballet called The Waste Land. These fragile, subdued miniatures create such a dislocated and gray musical mood. Allowing your mind to wander or stay frozen in a numbing disbelief. Our only complaint regarding some of his previous work was the incorporation of unneeded and heavy handed spoken word/voices which tended to ruin the flow of the music, but luckily on Infra he smartly keeps that out of the mix and allows the haunting, cloudy sounds he's created to speak for themselves. While this may have been made for a ballet we are finding it the perfect soundtrack to those foggy/cold days we've been having in July (oh San Francisco summer) and those early mornings you find yourself awake but bleary headed and needing a musical companion to your clouded vision and foggy mind. So nice!
Not to be confused with the similarly-minded Roska, Rusko, aka Christopher Mercer, seems destined to be the next hardest working producer in dubstep. Taking the dark serious side of the genre into more uproarious and exuberant blends of house, soul, rave and dancehall, Rusko strives to fit so many genre-busting ideas in one record that it makes for a rather head-spinning listen. But each delirious track stands out on its own. Much like the Major Lazer debut, they're a lot of guests including Gucci Mane and The Dirty Projector's Amber Coffman (whose track "Hold On" is one of our favorite tracks this year!) There's lots of hip hop autotune vocal hooks, eighties synth washes, rave sirens, donks, sped-up yelps, 8-bit woots, but Rusko weaves them into sublimely energetic and soulful motifs. It's more than a pastiche of previously explored sounds, Rusko creates a winning dance combination that we'll be listening to all summer long!
Not to be confused with the similarly-minded Roska, Rusko, aka Christopher Mercer, seems destined to be the next hardest working producer in dubstep. Taking the dark serious side of the genre into more uproarious and exuberant blends of house, soul, rave and dancehall, Rusko strives to fit so many genre-busting ideas in one record that it makes for a rather head-spinning listen. But each delirious track stands out on its own. Much like the Major Lazer debut, they're a lot of guests including Gucci Mane and The Dirty Projector's Amber Coffman (whose track "Hold On" is one of our favorite tracks this year!) There's lots of hip hop autotune vocal hooks, eighties synth washes, rave sirens, donks, sped-up yelps, 8-bit woots, but Rusko weaves them into sublimely energetic and soulful motifs. It's more than a pastiche of previously explored sounds, Rusko creates a winning dance combination that we'll be listening to all summer long!
We can't remember a movie we've wanted to see this bad in ages. Sure we're a little sick of Michael Cera, and his one dimensional / one character bag of tricks, but somehow he seemed MADE to be in this movie. More importantly, it's directed by Edgar Wright, the man responsible for not only the amazing RomZomCom Shaun Of The Dead, but the equally awesome buddy cop parody Hot Fuzz, not to mention the fake grind house trailer for Don't (and hey, if they can make a real movie out of one of the OTHER fake Grindhouse trailers, Machete, then come on, why not an actual movie of Don't?). Plus if you've seen the trailer, it's total eye candy, like a tween rock band version of Fight Club, with all sorts of random CGI filligree, not to mention some awesome over the top battles, and the whole concept of this indie rock nebbish having to battle a league of super evil exboyfriends (AND girlfriends) to win the punk rock love of his life, c'mon! We haven't seen it, but we KNOW it's gonna rule. And the soundtrack is pretty bad ass too. People are psyched about it for new music from Beck, but what some might not realize is that while he wrote the music for the 'fake' band in the movie Sex Bob-Omb, he doesn't actually perform those tracks, instead, the band, including Cera, actually tackle Beck's songs, which are fuzzy and garage-y and snotty and GREAT. Broken Social Scene show up too, as the fictional band Crash And The Boys, whose sound is fast and furious and hardcore, one of the tracks, "I'm So Sad, So Very Very Sad" clocking in at about all of 5 seconds! But fear not, there's a new Beck song proper, a new Broken Social Scene song, new music from Metric, as well as some classic jams from Frank Black, T-Rex, The Rolling Stones, and some others. The soundtrack finishes off with a rad 8-bit jam, that's all Nintendo-y and groovy and pretty much sounds like it should be the theme for the movie. Killer soundtrack, and we're betting killer movie too (we'll know for sure this weekend!!!)...
Like the best of improv musicians, Matmos have proven to be such mindful and masterful collaborators over the years. Teaming up with everyone from The Kronos Quarter to J Lesser, David Pajo to Marshal Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Wobbly to Rachel's, Terry Riley to Bjork, the list goes on and on! What's always exciting about these collaborations is that Matmos really do shed their skin and mutate into something totally different as they play off the blueprints of the folks they are collaborating with, and help bring that sound to entirely new places, stretching the bounds of outer sound possibilities. This time they're working with So Percussion, the percussive based collective whose sound exists somewhere between Steve Reich and Tortoise, but with Matmos thrown into the mix the sound becomes much more stretched out with unexpected twists, turns and nuanced vibrations. From a Penguin Cafe Orchestra vibe to postmodern gamelan rhythms, this is a record that really encapsulates what it means to be sound artists feeding off of each other. These are all musicians who you can tell are stretching way out, using their imaginations and having fun while they create something together that they wouldn't have come up with on their own. Highly recommended!
Sonny Smith is one of those tireless local songwriters and musicians that afters years of dedicated self-promotion is finally getting his due. This year alone saw the culmination of his ambitious project, 100 Records, where he recorded 200 songs in multiple genres (reggae, soul, country, punk, power-pop, etc.) for singles by fictitious bands with record cover art provided by 100 local artists. When it showed at Gallery 16 in the Spring, the opening was a packed house of local luminaries cheering Sonny on as his band performed a raucous set of the best songs he made. We quickly sold out of his latest band's debut, Tomorrow Is Alright, but we managed to get this 4 song 7" to tide us over between pressings of that lp.
Sounding like Jonathan Richman recording an ep for the Woodsist label, the songs here are on the lo-fi folky side, sometimes with girl group back-up singers, a bit of jangle-pop, or some retro cool balladry. His lyrics discernible without his voice being too in the front of the mix like some of Jonathan Richman's work can be. All in all a very nice capsule of what Smith is exploring at the moment. The first few we had of these sold out in an instant, and it took us awhile to get more. The batch we have now is on yellow and blue swirl vinyl, but after these are gone, we'll probably only be able to get black vinyl so act fast!
Sniffin & Snortin (parts 1 and 2!), Run & Hide, Bad Woman, Don't Say No, Wanna Take You Home...sound good? Those are some of the song titles on this classic women-and-drugs obsessed dumbo-rock Japanese psych album. It stars guitar whiz and massive stoner Shinki Chen (also of Foodbrain and oodles of other obscure Japanese psych outfits), bassist Masayoshi Kabe (from Foodbrain too), and singing drummer Joey 'Pepe' Smith -- a Vietnam vet whom you might know from the Filipino band Juan De La Cruz, whose album "Shake Your Brains" is one of the few that tops this for sheer truly stoned rock retardation (a good thing). Too bad we can't get those in anymore. But you'll hear at least one of their tunes on this, the second SG&S album, originally released as a double LP in 1972, which we happen to like even better than their 1971 LP "Eve" though Mr. Julian Cope made that one a "record of the month" on his website Head Heritage. Anyway we have this one, not that one.
Speed, Glue & Shinki, as you might imagine from their name, were a goddamn weird, messed up, completely wacked heavy psych/blues/prog band. So messed up that this time out, guest musicans wrote (and performed?) most of it! But it doesn't matter. And even when Joey plugs in a Moog synth to do a whole LP side devoted to the Sun, Planets, Life, Moon, and Angels, this never ever remotely gets pretentious and proggy (not that we don't like proggy). It just can't. Speed Glue & Shinki are primal, so primal, too primal. At least one track hints at the Stooges, some others Zeppelin, while the rest approximates a brain-damaged James Gang. Record collector types might recall the fancy, expensive Shadoks LP reissue that was available a couple years ago for about two seconds. We were enthralled with the lovely tiger cover art and the ridiculous rock and have been hoping ever since to bring in a cd version, and at last we tracked down a few copies that we had to order from Sweden, so act fast for your Speed, Glue & Shinki fix if you think you want it.
MPEG Download: "Red Doll" [/audio/speedgluered.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Red Doll" [/audio/speedgluered.m3u]
MPEG Download: "Song For An Angel" [/audio/speedgluesong.mp3]
Eminem on the cover, inside everything from M.I.A. to The Sword, Die Antwoord to Wavves, and more including "The Secret History Of Devo".
We're so happy that Light in The Attic reissued this, a stellar, newly remastered entry from 1967 in the amazing back catalog of one of our all-time favorite jazz guitarists from the sixties and seventies, Gabor Szabo. As a matter of fact, he was the first true guitar hero for Scott here at AQ, the reason Scott started playing guitar - thus Szabo is indirectly responsible for The Alps!
Releasing an amazing string of albums on Impulse, Skye, Blue Thumb and CTI, Szabo's masterful blending of eastern raga, gypsy and flamenco influences from his native Hungary with western jazz, mod, pop and rock influences created some of the most psych-inflected jazz grooves of the sixties. We suppose if you were only to get one of his records, Jazz Raga is arguably the best albeit strangest of the bunch. Featuring eight originals and three covers (including a version of the Rolling Stones "Paint It Black"), Szabo recorded the whole album with a group, including the funkiest of session drummers, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, then overdubbed sitar on all but two of the tracks. Of course by this time, the sitar was becoming THE instrument of choice in western popular music to channel a mystical spellbinding sound, but the manner in which Szabo employs it in the overall compositions of the tracks here is at times, lyrical, dizzying and truly wacked out. For one thing, the sitar is never quite in tune with the actual songs, making some of the melodies seem a bit warped in a way which is difficult to pinpoint. It's not an off-putting effect, quite the opposite. The slightly off interweaving of tonal shades and melody lines actually enhances the otherwordly mystical vibe on what might otherwise be perceived as a psychsploitative gimmick. Of course Szabo's meticulously intricate but seemingly simple guitar phrasings don't need much help from the sitar (he wasn't called The Spellbinder for nothing!). The sitar just provides an elemental coloring allowing a deeper immersion into whatever Szabo is seeking out, whether it be a quiet call to focus ("Walking on Nails"), a monster mod groover ("Sophisticated Wheels"), or the introduction of one of his signature tunes ("Mizrab"), a driving mantra-like tune of tablas and hypnotic droning open-tuned guitars that never tires. It's a song he would return to a few more times in his relatively short career (he died in 1982). Hopefully, more of his great records will be reissued as lovingly as this. Includes a 40 page booklet with lots of notes and pictures. Highest Recommendation!
The first in a series of ultra limited lathe cut 7"s from obscure black metal bands, this first installment comes from the mysterious Taarma, who hails from the equally mysterious Balochistan (which is in Pakistan), not exactly a hotbed of black metal, which is perhaps what makes Taarma's music so wonderfully strange and unlike most of the other black metal we hear.
Taarma's music is less about buzz and blast, and more about creep and rumble, the sounds warped and warbly, twisted and lugubrious, that sound enhanced by the medium, lathe cuts are inherently noisy, and degrade with every play, so after about 50 plays we can only assume, Taarma will sound even more fucked up and otherworldly.
The A-side begins with a weird, creeping, buzzy ambient intro, that slowly builds to a woozy midtempo lumber, the buzz muted and muddy, the drums distant thud, the whole thing washed out and weirdly melodic, almost like some sort of Jeckian black metal, everything wreathed in a strange echo-y swirl, the riffs gnarled and tangled, the vox a reverb drenched shriek.
The B-side is even creepier and slower and more dismal and depressive, like Striborg crossed with Abruptum, warped melodies, melting in thick black rivulets over a funereal plod, the vocals a swirling black fog, the riffs soporific and blurred, almost like someone spinning a black metal 45 manually with their finger as slow as they possibly can.
Weirdly psychedelic, tripped out, lysergic, a totally abstract chunk of outsider depressive blackness.
LIMITED TO ONLY 45 COPIES!! Each one cut in real time BY HAND on a record lathe, in New Zealand, by Peter King, the master of the lathe cut. And as mentioned above, with every play, the record degrades just a little, so it sounds slightly different every time, and grows more and more noisy and twisted, which is pretty much ideal for already noisy and twisted blackness like this.
Packaged in nice printed thick cardstock sleeves, these are the only copies we'll have, so grab one before they're gone.
Tectonic, Teutonic, yeah Tekhton is a good name for this heavy dirge/doom metal plus post rock (?) band from the Netherlands. This is their second opus, and it's a doozy of FUZZ laden riffage slamming repeatedly into your head, alternating now and again with much quieter, prettier parts, even acoustic strum and spacey synth. There's gruff, emotive singing, sometimes verging on melody, that works with both sides of the loud/soft equation. Tekhton make some allusions to geologic processes, and while a lot of this is subterreanean and slow-mo (and thus massively heavy) they speed up too for the occasional earthquake... their songwriting full of interesting complexities that keep the listener's ear engaged, along with one's emotions, that are already probably firmly in the grip of this intensely doomful music.
We mentioned pretty parts, well the prettiest here might be the indeed glorious "All Is Glory", that track being a mostly gentle, sorta spaced out psychedelic ramble, that's mesmerically mathy too, repetitive in a nicely Circle-ular way. Didn't Om and Six Organs do a record together? Did it sound like this song? Probably not but maybe it should have! (Oh, right, that was a split not a collaboration.)
Call it post-rock or not (maybe doom-prog would work as well?) this does remind us of post-rock stuff, but keeps it doooooooooom too, old school even, with any tendencies towards fancypants artsy-fartsiness utterly bludgeoned by the likes of, ferinstance, the crushing creepycrawl that is the appropriately titled "Tectonic Mass".
Super recommended, in particular to fans of a specific variety of AQ-beloved bands from Harvey Milk to Khanate to Pharoah Overlord to The Body to Boris. And we're detecting a definite Melvins influence on tracks like "Tooth And Nail", also a good thing.
Ed Ball, the mastermind behind the headfuck shoegaze genius that is Teenage Filmstars, is not just a master of sonic manipulation and avant audio alchemy, no he's also a POP genius, which in some ways is precisely why Teenage Filmstars was so compelling, for every whatthefuck collage of bizarre sounds, or the dizzying spinout of backwards drums and warped reverse guitars, was some perfect melody, some kernel of absolute classic pop tunesmithery, even at its most obtuse and impenetrable, it was always weirdly poppy, or subtly melodic.
The long running classic British pop combo The Times is the groop in which Ball let his otherwise sublimated pop demons loose, gobbling up every trope of classic pop music from the sixties, seventies, and especially the eighties and the nineties, and spitting them back out as his own brand of primo pop, which sounds quite a bit like some ever shifting, and slightly tweaked fusion of Oasis, Ride, the Happy Mondays, the Style Council, Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears, Pop Will Eat Itself, and the like. But only slightly tweaked. Don't be expecting any freaked out sonic fuckery, or some fractured meta-pop, the Times were never meant to be experimental, they're more like a musical time capsule, for Ball and his cohorts to go skipping through the history of pop music. And to bring back bits and bobs that he then assembles into the Times museum of classic pop. And classic it is. From mod jangle, to new wave synthy groove, to big guitar power pop, to strummy slow jam, to string soaked balladry, to glimmering soft focus shoegaze, no quirky prog-pop, and pretty much every stop in between. And it's not just the sounds, it's the songs, lush and jangly and melodic, hooks galore, catchy as all get out, total retro pop bliss, every song a gem. Another glorious chapter in Ball's long and storied sonic history, or chapters, this double disc reissue consisting of 3 different The Times records, originally released in 1989 and 1990...
Like all Artpop! releases, comes with a huge, somewhat confusional booklet, packed with liner notes and pics, and also includes a bunch of killer bonus tracks!
Everybody went crazy for Tonstartssbandht band's recent cassette, titled Parson Sounds, which was in fact covers of legendary Swedish psychfolk jams from Parson Sounds, Harvester and International Harvester, it was the first we had heard from these guys, but it's tough to go wrong, covering stone cold classics like that. Of course when we got this 7" in, we realized that because that first tape was all covers, and pretty faithful ones at that, we didn't actually know what these guys sounded like. And the weird thing was, we didn't actually imagine they'd sound like THIS, but we're digging it anyway, big time.
A bit of that Swedish psychfolk from the tape makes its way onto this here 7", but it's woven into a sort of heavy blown out psych pop, big booming drums, echo drenched vocals, thick, muddy, murky riffs, super catchy and still pretty psychedelic, totally ramshackle, super distorted, fuzzy, warped and lysergic, big hooky choruses, a little bit Animal Collective, a little bit Japandroids, a little bit Lightning Bolt (especially in the frantic tangled bass harmony breakdowns) all tangled up into a heavy, hooky freaked out blast of in-the-red mini noise pop gems, the sort of stuff that sounds like it would be amazing live, a heaving sweaty crowd spilling onto the stage, the band loose and on the edge of collapse, loud as fuck and totally on fire. And the 7" does a pretty great job of capturing that normally-quite-difficult-to-capture rock energy!
Don't know too much about these guys, they've had a bunch of records out, but somehow this is the first one we've heard, and it didn't take long for us to realize we had really missing out. Haunting, creepy, dirge-y psychedelia, thick undulating bass buzz, effects drenched guitar shimmer, spidery sitar like melodies, abstract bits of drum skitter and sizzle, processed ghostlike vox, all wrapped in a muddy murky production, blurred into a swirling cloud of dronepsych bliss out. The flipside is even dirgier, with the bass run through a wah wah pedal, the spectral voices wilder and more witchy, a lurching, lumbering dirge, a washed out and woozy soft noise lysergic drift, the guitars jagged and fragmented, notes and bits of melody draped over that grinding buzzing groove, totally dark and ominous and hypnotic.
LIMITED TO 345 COPIES!!!
Also on vinyl!
The thing about being a modern-day "psych" or "prog" rock band, is that you have 40+ years of rock n' roll (and other) musical history to draw upon, you don't need to just pretend it's 1969 or 1971 or 1978 all over again (though that can be cool too). French band Turzi are definitely open to mixing things up in interesting ways, with no regard to whether it sounds "authentic" or not for the duration, their kitchen sink psych aesthetic pushing many and various buttons for us here in ways that maybe no single other band manages to do! At one moment bringing us blissed-out Frippertronics, at another heavy stoner riffage, sometimes in combination. If we didn't know they were a band, we'd think they were an excellent psych-digging DJ! We thought the mantric synth-rock of their debut, entitled A, was pretty Awesome and now here's their second album, B, and it's even Better (with more of what we liked about A, and nice surprises too). It follows the same track-titling convention of A, where on that album all the songs started with the letter A, here they all start with the letter B, and now for some reason they're all place names as well. Also as with A, much of B is instrumental, but when there are vocals, they've got some famous friends helping out.
We said they mix a lot of different elements into their music - for example, to pick a sequence of songs in near the middle of the disc, "Bombay" begins like a Bomb Squad cut, with a sample from a civil rights era speech, that's mashed up into a hard charging, distorted metallic gallop with urgent organ chords, over which they then crank a killer 'exotic' Eastern sounding riff like something by the Flower Travellin Band, or from the most intense Turkish psych single ever, Turzi really kicking out the jams on this one! But that soon mellows out into the next track, "Bethlehem", a hushed mystic ceremonial trudge akin to The Stooges' most John Cale inspired moment, "We Will Fall" or something by Acid Mothers Temple. But then the next thing you know, next up is "Baltimore", a techno-delic ravey raver, kinda '70s glam too, which we were already gonna say reminded us of Primal Scream, before we realized yes indeed it features guest vocalist Bobby Gillespie, of Primal Scream. Elsewhere, a lot of the songs pulsate immensely with kosmische synth delights, 'cause Turzi are French of course making us think of their countrymen Heldon (and also Air), but also naturally Harmonia and other '70s electronic krautrock brigades...
Wow. Whatever this is, psych or prog or whatever, looking forwards futuristically or backwards retrowise, or sideways even, Turzi has succeeded in synthesizing (with synthesizers!) a whole lot of what we like about both similiar -and- dissimilar artists such as Heldon and Zombi and Diagonal and Astra and AMT and Maserati and Etienne Jaumet and Witch and Circle and Oneohtrix Point Never and Itavayla and GR & The Full Blown Expansion... the icing on the cake is the nearly 10-minute finale "Bamako", all dreamy and droney, made all the more Beautiful by another guest vocalist - Brigitte Fontaine! Sweet.
The latest criminally limited release from this Natural Snow Buildings offshoot, the work of one half of the NSB duo, Mehdi Amaziane, he of the impossibly high and surprisingly feminine voice, which is in full effect here, soaring and lovely, sounding like some lost seventies folk songstress, while the music underneath definitely touches on classic folk and Appalachia, but quickly moves beyond, culminating in the 25 minute folkdrone epic that takes up all of side two, but more on that in a second.
The first half is a collection of shorter songs, beginning with a smoldering prismatic buzz, a layered raga like drone, slow building and subtly epic, which gives way to something much more stripped down, tinkling folk melodies and Amaziane's sweetly crooned vocals. The sound so dreamy and sun dappled and washed out. The record switches gears and suddenly our ears are treated to thick swaths of soft noise drift, swirling voices, a little bit noisy, but it gradually grows more and more orchestral and melodic, before settling down into some tranquil new age shimmer, eventually slipping into delicate Appalachian dreamfolk, crystalline guitar figures, and that voice again, so dreamy and divine.
Then the flipside, and the aforementioned epic 25 minute sidelong dreamdrone, a constantly shifting dronescape rife with swirls of warm whirring buzz, shimmery streaks of fuzzed out melody, soft focus chordal smears, layers and overtones, woozy and softly psychedelic, flecked with fragments of steel string guitar, disembodied voices, a gloriously dense and ultra lovely ur-drone that sounds like a folkier, prettier, more delicate Birchville Cat Motel, droney and dreamy and divine.
Pressed on incredibly heavy vinyl, in a tip on style sleeve so thick, it's almost impossible to get the vinyl out, LIMITED TO 979 COPIES this time around, we got a whole bunch, but 979 is still apparently not nearly enough as once our copies go, this record will most likely be sold out at the label...
We've said it before and we'll say it again. It never ceases to amaze us how there can be such an endless supply of killer '60s garage-psych songs to fill up compilation after compilation. Sure, once in a while there's some overlap, but really, it's incredible how many obscure bands managed to release a completely charming 7" single or two and then vanished - but their music lives on, thanks to comps like this one! The appropriately named High All The Time features a whole bunch of turned-on, drugged-out sounds circa 1966-69, all of it fuzzy and freaky and sometimes beautifully melodic.
14 tracks, 11 bands, mostly from the US of A, though two bands are Dutch and one Swedish (The Shakers, doing "Who Will Buy (These Wonderful Evils)", a classic acid-guitar drenched track we know from another comp that took that for its title. But that Shakers song is the only thing here we'd heard before.
Opening the proceedings, Mammoth takes a Kinks "You Really Got Me" type riff and fuzzes it up big time, hinting at Blue Cheer style heaviness. Then, getting even freakier, The Hobbit tosses some musique concrete sound FX into their exotic "Author's Message". Next up, Dragonfly's "Celestial Dream" is indeed pretty dreamy, coming from a band who wore wild dragonfly-wing facepaint.... so, we won't describe all the tracks, but suffice to say they're all quite groovy, and varied, and definitely high all the time, yeah! No bummers here. Bad trips, yes, well, there's The Darelyck's track "Bad Trip", a propulsive sorta-rockabilly garage beat number with the vocalist mainly chanting "It was a bad trip, it was a bad trip" over and over, way cool... From start to finish, this is comp is our idea of a good trip. And the finish is a strong one, tracks 13 and 14 being both sides of The Beautiful Daze's "City Jungle Parts 1 & 2", with Part 2 being a particularly dense, droning, throbbing piece of work.
This compact disc edition (the comp itself is a reissue, apparently originally released on LP back in the late '70s or '80s we'd guess) includes in its booklet what meager information they were able to dig up about each band, with discographical information and sometimes graphics from the original 45's.
Three little words guaranteed to get us all excited: Turkish psych comp. That's all it takes. (A fourth word, used in the title here, "Freakout", doesn't hurt either.) Compilations like Turkish Delights, Hava Narghile, and the Turkish installment of Love Peace & Poetry have all been staples here at AQ, and have turned us on to so many amazing bands like Mogollar, Ersen, and 3 Hur-el. Our only worry with a new Turkish psych comp is that it will redundantly duplicate tracks we've already got, but fortunately that's not the case with this one, only a few of the 18 tracks here had we heard before, with some of the artists being completely new to us. And, also, awesome!
Focusing solely on selected rare 45 rpm 7" singles releases, dating from the late '60s to 1980, this comp is evidence that it was a groovy decade in Istanbul for sure. Funky -and- folky (yes, often at the same time), these tracks incorporate all the fuzz guitar, ethnic instrumentation, percolating percussion, exciting rhythms, and soulful vocals we've come to expect from the Turkish psych scene. It's a mesmerizing mix, there's a lot of highlights here, we can't really mention 'em all, but just to give you an idea, the first track, by Okay Temiz, sounds almost like it could come from that soundtrack by Rockford Kabine we made Record Of The Week recently, a sultry and "exotic" instrumental groove with some wild whoopin' elements that remind us of a Jean-Claude Vannier production. Then there's the cinematic strings and quasi doomy-riffing of Erkin Koray's dramatic "Sev Digim". And Alpay's "Seni Dilenyorum" is one we'd play for a friend wondering what all the vintage Turkish psych fuss is about. If they didn't dig that, we'd feel real sorry for them.
In addition to those, the line-up of artists here includes Kardaslar, Cem Karaka, Apaslar, Beyaz Kelebekler, Ajda Pekkan, Sevil & Ayla, Baris Manco, Rifat Oncel, Ersen, Onder Bali, and Arif Sag. And fortunately, the deluxe digipack includes a thick 40 page booklet, full of liner notes about 'em all, along with original 45 sleeve art. Nicely done, as comps/reissues go. And on top of that, most of the other Turkish psych collections we mentioned at the top of this review are now out of print, so this will become a go-to comp for us in one of our favorite genres.
A few of us were very lucky to catch Jozef Van Wissem's recent AQ instore where he played his new 13 Course Swan Neck Baroque Lute, a super long and intricately exquisite variation of the lute we've never seen before, that he wielded mightily, rocking out heavy metal guitar style, and also played whilst walking around the store like a medieval troubadour (check our blog for pictures!). While unfortunately it wasn't our best attended instore, Van Wissem played like it was, and we were graciously rewarded with an intimate and beautifully hypnotizing performance. NEXT time, don't miss him!
And that is what you will find with his latest (vinyl-only) release on Important, Ex Patris. On vinyl only (for now at least), Ex Patris (The Fathers) gives us four new tracks of gorgeous plucked string majesty. Building upon his repertoire of mirrored palindromic compositions, he focuses this release on layered and repeating melodies rather than sparse reductions of past releases. At times, we wonder if he might be using overdubs, something we haven't noticed before in his recordings or if it is just that his new lute offers more depth and range than the ones he used in the past. Hard to tell, but oh so easy to become seduced by its magnificent spell!
Two weeks ago when we made Velvet Cacoon's stellar Atropine one of our Records Of The Week, we mentioned the possibility of yet ANOTHER VC release in the not too distant future. Well here it is, way sooner than we had initially predicted.
While Atropine may have baffled some fans of this already baffling band with its total ambience and a complete absence of the blown out black metal they made their name on, it also managed to perfectly convey the drugged out isolation and dissociative bliss that has always been central to their music. Atropine is an intense piece of work, very rewarding when listened to with patience, BUT... we'd be lying if we said we didn't miss the metal. Thankfully, P aa opal poere pr.33 (good grief, what a title!) arrives right on the heels of Atropine, and more than anything, it seems to be the perfect companion piece to that previous album, delivering almost 40 minutes of murky, blissful as fuck METAL, heavy on the nautical themes that have commonly been part of Velvet Cacoon's M.O. Yet even as we write the word "METAL," we are faced with the already obvious realization that Velvet Cacoon pretty much defies any simple classification. Call it shoegaze, ambient, metal, hell, even pop... their sound is unique, and even though scores of imitators have popped up in recent years, the second we put this on we knew who we were listening to (unless they completely stole these recordings like some of their other albums supposedly...) While it does share some certain sonic similarities to the band's previous work, it would be lazy to write off P aa opal poere pr.33 as merely the successor to the band's now classic Genevieve, and here Velvet Cacoon seem to have arrived at the most realized encapsulation of their sound to date. So yes, it's REALLY fucking good. And thus also a Record Of The Week!
According to the notes, vocals here are handled by one Cain of a band called Snowfall. His style falls into a more traditional style of black metal shrieking, acting as the perfect foil to Velvet Cacoon's melodic fuzzed out dirges, but we are also fairly certain that VC mainman SGL (or "Josh" if you want to demystify things) is handling a lot of the vocal duties here. What the fuck? Whatever. The album opens with "2.", with the trademark Velvet Cacoon "dieselharp" guitar sound accompanied by a lumbering drum machine rhythm and a sound that gains momentum as it appears to bubble up from the bottom of the sea. "Claverie" is huge sounding with a nice lazy groove and a hazy narcotic feel, sort of like sleepwalking. As distant drones swirl about, the riff remains steady until changing at the 6 minute mark, with a guitar that is so sustained it almost sounds like a keyboard. The standout track here is "Marylux", with an awesome and unique riff that pretty much sounds like a psychedelic black metal sea shanty. At the same time, it gives off a sort of a '90s indie vibe. What doesn't make sense on paper, however, KILLS in reality. It's catchy, amazing, and dreamy in the sense that a band like, say, Windy and Carl is dreamy... but also "dreamy" in the way that being fucked out of your mind of psychotropic drugs is dreamy, so you really get the best of all kinds of different worlds with this song. With "Grevona", the melodies lie hidden below layers of murky guitar fuzz, everything is so hazy and distant sounding, like a slow moving ship going nowhere while the vocals float around helplessly. On "Oviamoire," a soothing riff wraps you up in its fuzzy majesty while the abject vocals croak below the surface. There is a certain spectral quality to it, all gauzy and whatnot, with krauty keyboard drones adding even more ambience to the affair. The last song on the album, "Sovarine" sways rhythmically back and forth with the vocals sounding like some sort of nefarious bottom dwelling ocean minion. Or something. While the guitars are all warm and fuzzy, the overall vibe here is of coldness and isolation. Not to belabor the point, but it's kind of like being lost at sea, though no one could have predicted it would sound this awesome. The album closes with a brief piece entitled "Flouvonne," with two voices, one male and the other female, speaking in French as the wind blows amid crackling sounds, a weird and somehow totally appropriate end to the journey.
In a music world where few mysteries truly exist, it's always nice to know that Velvet Cacoon will never be making things easy for us. Whether or not they are "true", some sort of pseudo-intellectual performance art, or maybe even a complete fucking joke, their music is never anything less than amazing. If you hated them before, it's unlikely that this album will change any of that. But for those of us who have patiently waited for the last five years wondering if P aa opal poere pr.33 would ever become a reality, you will find much to look forward to.
For a few years, we'd frequently see our pal, Versus guitarist Richard Balayut, across the street at Lost Weekend Video where he worked with his then-Whysall Lane bandmate Adam Pfahler (also of Jawbreaker). Great guy, great bands. We were super sad when he decided to move back East to New York about a year or so ago, but we were overjoyed to hear that it brought him back into the fold of this beloved NYC band. Yes, after a long long hiatus they got back together last year, and we couldn't be happier. They were one of the best purveyors of that '90s college radio classic indie rock sound because they not only nailed the driving loud/quiet/loud dynamics, but also delivered fantastic pop hooks and intelligent lyrics... not to mention many a heartstring was plucked by Ms Fontaine Toups' lovely voice.
It's been a decade since they've released an album, but On The Ones And Threes makes it feel like it was just yesterday, as their classic sound is still so vibrant and fresh sounding. The record really shows all the great sides of the band from the more rocking moments to the bittersweet melancholy they've always been able to capture so perfectly. We're reminded a bit of the Low record, The Great Destroyer as it has a similar punchy and up front feel, and there are even some moments that make us think of The Breeders doing X covers. While we tend to be a bit reticent about bands we loved from the past reforming after so many years, there is something so organic, unforced and free flowing about this new Versus record that just makes us so happy they are back!
Some freaked out acid prog, experimental home recorded garage psych avant art rock weirdness from seventies Ohio outsider noisemaker Jim Shepard, who would go on to front the group V-3, before killing himself in 1988.
Slit And Pre-Slit is the very earliest documentation of Shepard's primordial sonic madness, falling somewhere between fellow sonic outsiders Destroy All Monsters and classic Pere Ubu, a dizzying swirl of thumping garage rock, spaced out kraut prog, and audio collages and tape experiments, a free flowing stream of consciousness jam veering wildly from crunchy Stooges style buzz to proggy classic rock, to bar band blues, all tangled up with looped answering machine messages, squalls of processed and layered psychguitar freakout, buzzing siren like analog synths, mangled cut up tape experiments, loads of primitive effects, delay and echo and reverb, little bits of classical steel string fingerpicking, short stretches of dreamy droney fuzz guitar, stumbling detuned anti-folk digressions, whistled melodies, dark brooding sort of ballads (sounding quite a bit like old home recorded Sebadoh/Sentridoh), very fragmented and ADD, barring the occasional jam, where the songs could finally sprawl, the band locked in and spaced out, unfurling multiple variations on the late night / early morning, drug addled psychedelic drift, with some of the tracks randomly truncated, others transforming into garbled sonic weirdness, and still others seeming to stretch out endlessly.
The original vanity pressing was limited to a mere 100 copies, with many of those, rumor has it, ending up in the collections of folks like Todd Rundgren, John Cale, Robert Fripp and Peter Hamill! This version is limited to 350 copies! And should most definitely end up in YOUR collection.
Listening to Virulence, you'd never guess that these guys would eventually become the stoner rock outfit Fu Manchu, cuz this stuff is pretty far removed from what we think of as stoner rock, twisted furious metallic punk rock, equal parts Melvins sludge, Black Flag gnarl and old school hardcore punk. Not to mention other varied heaviness like Swans, Bl'ast, Neurosis, Posion Idea... The riffs are Greg Ginn-ish for sure, tangled and angular, the songs lurching and lumbering, the bass fuzzy and distorted, vocalist Ken Pucci howling and yowling over start stop churning metallic crunch, shrieking feedback, sludgey grungy low slung punkmetal thud, with the band occasionally digressing into those awesome sort of late period Black Flag jazzy metal dirge meanders, the stuff that alienated the punks, but totally hit the spot for a lot of us. Serpentine melodies, wrapped around grinding angular riffage and chaotic drummage, bursts of old school punk pound butted up against woozy dirgey heaviness, fucking awesome stuff for sure.
This disc collects their debut album, along with a handful of live tracks, and their original demo, which is way more punk, but sounds as heavy and kick ass as ever.
Includes a massive booklet with tons of liner notes, reflections for the various band members, photos, old flyers and more...
We were pretty into Vertical Ascent, the debut release from the trio Moritz Von Oswald, a sort of abstract electronic dub minimal techno super group, featuring the group's namesake Moritz Von Oswald, he of Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound, Vladislav Delay and Max Loderbauer of Sun Electric. And it sounds basically how you might imagine. Dubbed out, abstract, a pulsing minimalism, and while the full length was intriguing, it wasn't until this live record that we were totally smitten. Not sure if it's more loose, or if the vibe that night was just right on, but it manages to be dark and hypnotic, but also strangely effervescent and dreamy. The beats are total Chain Reaction, muted, wreathed in effects, suspended in spacious fields of hushed shimmer, of distant rumbles, that would be enough, but here, the beats drift through hazy landscapes of dubbed out ripples, drifting clouds of abstract effects, brief sonic squalls, swaths of synthy shimmer, streaks of glitch and skree, all of which makes the music sound more improvised, more 'jammed' and more LIVE, you can also hear low level conversation once in a while, when the music is at its most skeletal, but instead of distracting, it sounds almost like just another sound one of the players is adding to the mix, a mumbly textural low end rumble. The tracks are long, and all 4 seem to flow into one another (at least on the accompanying cd, not on the 4 sided vinyl of course). Unlike the more abstract leanings of the record proper, the trio keep things beat oriented here, letting the sound and sounds get seriously far out, but always anchored by some gorgeously hypnotic beat. The 15 minute opener is the most Chain Reaction of the bunch, while the closer is the funkiest, managing to create some sort of impossible minimal abstract funk out of crunchy synths, swirling buzz, stuttering skeletal beats, thick swaths of noisy psychedelic electronics, the crowd reacts in kind, whooping and going a little bit nuts, while the two songs in between, sound a bit more Kompakt, ultra minimal, cool and late night, still laced with unlikely sounds and twisted arrangements (again, some of the weirdest parts getting big reactions from the crowd), but all wrapped around super stripped down muted thumps and skitters.
This is the rare electronica / electronic music that works both on the dancefloor and in the headphones, a mesmerizing after hours body moving slow burn groove, or a blissed out, come down, late night chill soundtrack for drifting off and dropping out...
Incredible packaging. Insanely thick gatefold jacket, with super stunning cover art, includes a cd version (NOT a cd-r, an actual cd) in a hand screened sleeve. Already out of print, these are the last copies EVER!
The cover feature, "Retro-activity", is about "how the past percolates through the music of now", a collection of pieces by various writers about such things as the cold wave of the Wierd label, Mississippi's vinyl reissues, Creel Pone's musique concrete cd-r series, hiphop in the current crop of "hypnagogic pop", and much more. Also this ish: LA Vampires, Mordant Music, Roxy Music's Graham Simpson, Cindytalk, and plenty more, including the usual plethora of reviews and news, and a scene report on experimental music in Boise Idaho!
After the dour affair that was 2008's At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade seem to have gotten a shot of adrenaline for their peculiarly titled latest full length. Much more immediately engaging, the first song grabs you by the scruff of the neck and fires up the pop engines! It bristles with an almost punky rawness. The loopy whoopy warbled vocals are still present, and continue to be an acquired taste around the aQ camp. Some find it to be grating, others find it to be impassioned. What do you think? S'pose it sorta depends on your feelings about the throaty pipes of veterans David Byrne and Adrian Belew, as well as Interpol's Paul Banks to which WP's Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug bear more than a passing resemblance. As for the head-scratcher album title, we're really puzzled as to what these songs have to do with the world's fair which took place in Vancouver a quarter decade ago, but there's definitely an '80s feel goin' on. Lots of gooey new wave synthiness and rubbery energy drive Expo 86, plus simple 1-2-3-4 beats that are super easy to dance or nod your head to. A no-brainer for popping in the car stereo for a sunny summer day!
Sometimes records get lumped in the "New Age" category because they just don't quite fit anywhere else, even if they have noting to do with meditation, relaxation or spiritual transcendence. Many times it's because the music inside is so out of step with what's happening at the current moment, not necessarily ahead of its time but rather a seemingly latent arrival to a currently unfashionable style that no one knows quite what to make of it. Medieval electronic folk music from the mid-eighties? Sounds awful on paper, but we'd most likely feel differently if it was say, from the early seventies and from Germany, right? Well then, thank goodness for the cyclical nature of musical taste to see this unusual record see the light of day again, sounding better than ever. And thanks to Yoga records who in a bold move over the years have bought up the rights to many private pressings of leftfield "new age folk" music (they brought us the Collie Ryan reissues a while back), foreseeing that these eccentric gems would soon have a new much more appreciative audience.
Matthew Young's Traveler's Advisory hails from 1986 and its opening track, "Objects In Mirror", of delayed hammer dulcimer, casio and drum machine with hazy lyrics taken from found phrases and instruction manuals may sound like a song you might hear from any one of the current crop of bedroom pop practitioners such as Ariel Pink or Washed Out. Except Young's mellow voice, inspired more by Michael Hurley (Young covers Hurley's "Werewolf") and Medieval folksong, than OMD and New Order, speaks to a much more world-weary experience than any sincere/ironic hybridizing of past and present styles. Recorded at home, Young only sings on a few cuts here, most of the tracks are long atmospheric instrumentals of delayed dulcimer and banjo, sounding closer to that Edward Larry Gordon (aka Laraaji) reissue we listed awhile back. Beautifully dreamy, hypnotic and strange, we think folks who dug the past few Drag City reissues from Gary Higgins to The George-Edwards Group, or other latent new-agers like J. D. Emmanuel and Iasos will really dig this. Recommended!
Alphabetically, at the back of the pack, but in fact Zuul is definitely high up on our list of new n' true heavy metal bands that totally kick ass. Hailing from the very metal middle American town of Carbondale, Illinois, the young (but old school) heshers of Zuul deliver the goods with soaring melodic vocals (that sound rough n' ready too), raging riffing, and fleet-fingered leads. The album cover artwork features an axewielding headsman, which is always a sign of quality metal (and quality artwork). Or, at the very least, it'll give you an idea of the '80s inspired metal on offer here, making us think of Omen, although musically they probably owe the most to Iron Maiden, and various other NWOBHM greats, big and small. While death and warfare are Zuul's typical lyrical themes, they're really all about rockin' and having a good time, Zuul's heavy and speedy songwriting also possessing a definite "pop" edge, with "whoah-ohh-ohh-ohh!" bits, catchy choruses that stick in your head, and so forth (though they stay far away from ballads). And at least once on this album, they even sing about girls, that'd be the song "Ride Ride", with lines like "lipstick and lightning / standing there by the record machine / so enticing / know what I mean", that's classic, the term "record machine" probably ONLY ever used in song lyrics, are we right?
So if you're into the current crop of retro headbangers a la Enforcer, Cauldron, Wolf, Hot Fog, and these dudes' labelmates Harbinger, Zuul get the horns up from us. Good fun. And while they play it shreddingly straight (non-ironic) in their songs, it's not like they don't have a sense of humor. We like how the credits in the cd booklet helpfully note that "this album was recorded", full stop. And heck their name Zuul comes from the demon in the movie Ghostbusters!! Another nod to the '80s we guess. We want you on our team on trivia night if you already knew that. (By the way, while our website scripting doesn't support umlauts, Zuul of course have got 'em above each u in their name, depicted in their logo as little skulls.)
BACK IN STOCK!
We tend to check out most new stuff on Planet Mu, and we dig most of it, our recent Record Of The Week from Vex'd was on Planet Mu, the recent Starkey, Milanese, Distance, Legion Of Two, another Record Of The Week, there's also Boxcutter, Shitmat, Venetian Snares, Pinch, Virus Syndicate, we could go on, but the last thing we would have expected on Planet Mu was a POP record, but that's pretty much what this is. Sort of. It's definitely poppy, with hooks, and verses and choruses, vocals, the whole pop song nine yards, but it's all wrapped up in stuttery synths, thick warbling bass buzz, streaks of squelch and glitch, the opening track has all the makings of a killer dubstep jam, but then the vocals come in, and BAM, it's some sort of glorious new wave prismatic synth pop.
And that's pretty much how the whole record works, stripped of vocals, this would be some kick ass avant electro dubstep record, but the vocals transform it, allowing for strange arrangements, long stretches of tinkling piano and hushed vox, bumped up against, thick dubstep bass warble and lurching stuttering fuzz synth grooves, the vocals too are all over the map, pitched up into weird helium-ed falsettos, unfurled in dramatic breathy croons, or totally belted out, and the music reacts, slipping from slithery minimal drift to angular jagged electro crunch, to lumbering lowslung bass groove, to strangely orchestral abstract weirdness, to total eighties synth rock, to twisted lysergic synth-psych pop, and beyond.
And it's not just a case of throwing in some vocals, these are SONGS, POP songs, vocal driven in most cases, composed to be POP music, just strangely assembled into unlikely shapes and sounds, the hooks impossible to resist, the catchiness impossible to deny, this is easily one of the weirdest and coolest electronic pop records we've heard, a dizzying mishmash of various tropes from genres we love, dubstep, new wave, electro, synth pop, woven into a twisted sort of quirky dub-buzz-electro-synth-stutter-fuzz-pop that we just can't stop listening to...
